What would Sarik have done when she was Jeht’s age if she had been thrown out and offered a chance in SingleEarth?
Cori had been four. She had been lively and cheerful, a little quiet, but she had adored her older sister. She had also been just old enough for their father to emotionally disown her when it became obvious that she lacked the ability to shapeshift and for Sarik’s mother to storm out in a fury when she discovered that her mate had been fooling around with a human. His having another woman on the side had been forgivable in her eyes, but she had been disgusted that her mate had sullied the pure Mistari blood by mixing it with what she saw as a lesser creature’s.
And Sarik … where had Sarik been? She hadn’t had any idea what life was like for Cori. She lived in a rough world; even at nine years old, she had understood that. Her father had been proud that she had been able to hold her own.
Eventually, his pride hadn’t mattered enough. Eventually, the fights had become too much. Sarik had tried so hard to seem strong, but she’d started to hate the bloodshed more and more. The weakness showed, until her enemies became bold enough to go after Cori.
When Cori had died, it had killed who Sarik had been. But at Jeht’s age? Sarik hadn’t known any way to live besides the one she’d grown up with. She probably would have killed someone, if doing so had been the only way to get her home.
As if it had been cued by her thoughts, she heard Alysia’s voice. Looking up, she saw the human with Lynzi and—
Christian.
She turned toward Jeht, trying to conceal the way her heart was pounding and her mouth had just gone dry. What was he doing here?
He was across the room. He hadn’t seen her. He hadn’t seen Jeht. She couldn’t afford for him to see either of them, so she hastily led Jeht back outside, toward his own territory.
The leader of Onyx is a tiger. An old-school heavy hitter with ties back to the Mistari high queen, if rumors are to be believed.
She remembered Jason’s warnings. She had also considered something he had not: if Jeht had known what Jason had said earlier, he would have run to Christian. By protecting herself, Sarik was denying him that chance.
“Give me a little more time,” she said to Jeht. “If you want to return to the Mistari camps, you know that you need a king to accept you as part of his tribe. I haven’t entirely exhausted my contacts.”
The words were bitter in her mouth. Could she do this?
By Mistari law, she had left her father long enough ago that she could declare herself a free woman. He had no claim to her unless she allowed it. On the other hand, she had no authority in the Mistari main camps unless he acknowledged her.
With her father’s blessing, she would be able to contact the leaders of the Mistari and try to find a tribe that would take in Jeht and Quean. A tribe that didn’t revolve around bloodshed and brute force. At the same time, if she could find the courage to face him, she could remove the looming ax of terror that threatened to fall on her at the simplest mention of someone like Christian Denmark.
“I will wait, if you think it best,” Jeht said.
He did not say how long.
Bolstering her courage by telling herself she was doing the right thing, Sarik left Jeht with his brother, and then returned to the administration building and picked up one of the disposable cell phones kept on hand for residents who did not want to be found. She wasn’t going to give her father a chance to track her down until she was sure he was going to follow the laws.
It has been six years. You were sixteen when you saw him last, she told herself as she punched in the numbers with trembling hands. She never wanted to see him again, never wanted him in her life. But was she so much of a coward that she couldn’t call him, even if it meant Jeht and Quean would someday have a home again?
She sat in her car to make the phone call so she would not risk anyone walking up and greeting her or saying anything that might tip her father off about where she was. She wrapped herself in noble motives and precautions, but the instant she heard his voice on the phone, she felt like she was standing before him again, looking up at him, powerless and frightened.
“Divai, Father,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
There was a pause before he replied to the greeting. “La’he’gen-ne’rai.” The response was as formal as her own words. He greeted her as daughter, though his tone was cautious. And immediately, he asked, “Where are you?”
“I won’t tell you that yet.” It was so hard to say those words. “I need you to—”
“Is someone holding you against your will?” he interrupted. She tried to answer, to tell him no, but he spoke over her. “If they are, if anyone has put a hand on you to hurt you, I will—”
“I need you to listen to me!” she shouted, barely able to hear her voice over her own pulse.
“I need you to tell me where you are,” he replied.
She hung up, her heart pounding in her throat.
She was crazy to have tried.
Stupid.
She dismantled the phone with shaking fingers and crushed the delicate machinery, leaving nothing for him to trace. He might have cared about the cubs in other circumstances, but he wouldn’t listen to anything Sarik had to say until he had her back in his possession. Was it her responsibility to sacrifice her own life and freedom just to explore the possibility that her father might be willing to help?
Not wanting to risk running into Christian, she returned to her room instead of going to the children with yet more frustrating news. Jeht needed some time to process what she had told him, and she needed to wait until she had shut her panic down before she faced him again.
When Jason found her, she was calmly checking messages and emails. She had been networking for days, trying to make contact with someone who might have ties to the Mistari main camps. Her mailbox was full of apologies and dismissals.
“How’s it going with the cubs?” Jason asked, looking over her shoulder at the latest email, with its hostile message: How could you want to send children back to that barbaric culture?
Unfortunately, individuals who had willingly left the Mistari tended not to have a high opinion of their ways.
“Not well,” she admitted. “Jeht and Quean don’t understand why someone would willingly leave, or why I would choose not to go back, so it’s hard to explain why I haven’t found a way to get them home yet.”
“Yeah,” Jason said, his gaze distant. “I remember what that’s like.”
Jason had saved Sarik’s life, after she had stupidly walked into his master’s territory when she was sixteen. After they first ran away, they had clung together not out of any affection, but because neither of them knew how to survive without someone to fight—and they had fought, brutally, physically, and verbally, time and again, until they realized they were echoing everything they had been taught and wanted to get away from. They had joined SingleEarth with no real expectation of finding anything there for them, but they hadn’t known anywhere else to go.
Sarik hadn’t spoken to her father since, before today. He wasn’t the type who would be proud of her work at SingleEarth. He would be disgusted and order her home immediately, and if she refused, he would exert his significant physical and political power to get what he wanted. There was no relationship she could maintain with him in which she was not a terrified subject under his rule—which meant it was better if he never knew where she was.
CHAPTER 9
THOUGH CHRISTIAN WORE his detached-and-bored expression during most of Lynzi’s “tour,” Alysia could tell he was intrigued by the shooting. Had it been intended to warn Alysia, scare her, draw her out, or drive her away? Given that her own weapons had been used, someone was probably planning to frame her, but who would hate her enough to want to implicate her, have the talent to make the shots, and yet care enough to avoid any kills? And where was the follow-through, the pointed finger directing blame her way?
She wished she could discuss all the possibilities
with Christian.
They found Ben camped out in the cafeteria, swearing at a laptop.
“I thought you were heading home,” Alysia said.
“I am. Will be,” Ben answered. “I’m waiting for the IT monkeys to show up so I can tell them what’s going on. We’ve got a root kit to clean up, and probably about a dozen computers that need to be quarantined, formatted, and reimaged. Maybe more. They’re going to have to rebuild the entire network.”
“Glad I’m not on that job,” Alysia admitted. “How did you get out of doing it?”
“I offered to nuke it from orbit,” Ben answered. “Central said they’d send in a cleanup crew. I got shot, remember? Hey, is this the big, bad mercenary the guards are all on edge about?” he asked, looking up at Christian. “Did you want to know more about this critter? As best as I can tell, it came in as a fraudulent update. Added itself to the security suite’s whitelist and then downloaded a handful of patches so it could—”
Christian shook his head, cutting Ben off with a, “Thanks. I already have the information I need.”
Alysia had explained that a computer virus had been planted and how it had an impact on everyone’s movements that morning; that was as much as Christian wanted to know. His eyes had glazed over when Ben started talking root kits and patches.
“You’re really leader of Frost now?” Alysia found herself asking as they moved on.
She didn’t care if Lynzi heard the question. Watching Christian with Ben had offended her in a visceral way.
Of the three Bruja guilds, Frost had traditionally been the stereotypical redneck cousin, specializing in hand-to-hand combat and brute force without the finesse or standards of Crimson or Onyx. Alysia, however, had spent most of her time in Bruja trying to convince the guilds that they needed to move into the twenty-first century, a notion that had terrified most of the old-guard leadership. As a result, Frost was now the most technologically advanced of the guilds—or had been before she left, before a hunter who didn’t know a monitor from a microwave took over.
She was appropriately chastised as Christian replied, “Someone needed to take it after Sarta left.” He didn’t say the rest aloud, which was And you weren’t there.
“What does leadership mean in a group like Bruja?” Lynzi asked. “Would the leader of Onyx have the authority to order members to stay away from us, if we could make it worth his while to do so?”
Christian shook his head. “Kral wouldn’t make that deal, and he wouldn’t be able to enforce it if he did. Leaders are responsible for intervening if the guild’s reputation is threatened or if we are exposed to the wrong people, not for policing the actions of individual members. Not so different from a Haven mediator, in a way,” he added, with a pointed look to Alysia.
“I think SingleEarth’s response to a threat is probably subtler than Bruja’s,” Lynzi observed.
There was little further conversation as Lynzi showed them around the area and then led them back to Christian’s car, where she asked, “Do you have any thoughts?”
“Not yet,” Christian answered, “but I know how to contact you if I need to.”
Lynzi nodded. “This Haven has been my home for forty years. I have three circles of power around it, and you do not have nearly the control to veil yourself sufficiently to cross those circles without my feeling it. Are we clear?”
“Clear,” he answered.
Alysia asked, “Can you feel him because he’s another Triste, or can you sense everyone who comes and goes?”
“I can sense everyone,” Lynzi answered, understanding why Alysia asked, “but I don’t normally pay attention unless I feel another Triste or someone unusually powerful. I didn’t feel anything noteworthy before the attack.”
“Interesting,” Christian commented, then turned to Alysia. “I’ll stay in town today. If there’s another attack, or if you just want to talk without a babysitter around, you’ll be able to find me.” He looked back at the other Triste. “Lynzi,” he said, and offered his hand, which she shook. “Happy hunting.”
Alysia waited until Christian’s taillights faded in the distance before saying to Lynzi, “So what now?”
Lynzi gave her a long, measured look, before asking, “Are you still in Bruja?”
“No.” No matter what doubts and questions Christian had put into her head, Alysia found herself thoroughly glad to be able to answer the question honestly. She suspected that Lynzi would know if she were lying.
“Do you know who shot us?”
“No.”
“As long as you’re living here peacefully and honestly, you are welcome to stay,” Lynzi said. “You are also free to leave, if you want. But if you choose to stay here and you bring bloodshed into my home, then I will need to respond. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” Alysia answered around the hitch in her throat.
“Let me know if you and Christian come up with any theories. But you should probably let him sleep a couple hours before you visit him. He’s exhausted.”
“Remind me never to underestimate you,” Alysia said, resisting the urge to step back from the witch.
Lynzi smiled and said, “I think I just did. Now, I’m going to go back to bed until a decent hour of the day. Take care, Alysia.”
“Yeah. Take care.”
Unsure what else to do, Alysia returned to her room. What next? Did she want to track Christian down? She needed to, if she wanted to solve the riddle of this attack before someone else was hurt, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to face him without her so-called babysitter.
A knock pulled her from her spinning thoughts.
“Yeah?” She approached the door to peer through the peephole, and saw Ben leaning against the far wall.
“Do you have a minute?” he asked. “I’m trying to get this virus cleaned up so I can get the hell out of here, but I could use a second opinion on the code.”
She reached for the doorknob and then hesitated, feeling some old instinct kick her in the shins. “I can probably help you out, but how did you know to come to me?”
Through the peephole, she watched Ben’s face fall. His tone stayed mostly upbeat, but his expression was crestfallen as he said, “We worked together on the Mahoney issue a few months back. Just that once, though, so no big deal you don’t remember me.”
She remembered the job, which had been ten times as difficult as it should have been because SingleEarth seemed to think it would go faster if they assigned as many techs as possible. She had been too busy being angry at everyone else working with her to bother to remember their names or faces.
“Right, of course,” she said as she opened the door. “Come on in. You can set your computer up anywhere,” she added when she realized he was carrying a laptop bag.
As he reached into it, she hesitated again; her body tensed for no obvious reason except that some part of her brain was expecting something more dangerous than a computer to come out of the beat-up black bag.
Ben wasn’t a threat; he was even still limping, as the muscles in his thigh continued to knit themselves together. And Christian had looked right at him without recognition.
“It’ll just take me a minute to load this,” Ben said. “Don’t suppose you have a Coke or something I can steal?”
Geeks and caffeine, Alysia thought, with some humor. “I wish,” she answered. “I haven’t had a chance to stock the fridge since I got here.”
“I wonder what got in the way,” Ben said, so dryly she wasn’t completely sure he had intended sarcasm. He looked back at the computer screen and opened a file. “Here, come look at this.”
She had put half the room between them, but now she leaned in to check out the code he had brought up in a text file. At first glance, it seemed like a nasty little computer virus.
“Here, sit,” Ben said. “It’s a beast, complicated as hell. Mind if I get myself some water?”
“Go ahead.” Some people could recognize handwriting; Alysia could recognize a programmer by his
code, and she was sure she had seen this style before. She scrolled through, trying to get a sense of what the virus had been intended to do, and why the style seemed so familiar.
“I have a couple questions,” Ben said as he stepped into the kitchen.
“Yeah?” she asked, without looking up from the screen.
A jolt made her nearly jump out of her skin at the same time that her chair toppled backward. Her effort to catch herself was sabotaged by a sneakered foot knocking her arm out of the way, so she landed awkwardly, at the same time that Ben asked, “Question one is, why’d you shoot me?”
Strangely, the first emotion she felt once her vision cleared and she could focus on Ben standing above her with a punch-dagger in his hand was relief. Her instincts weren’t completely dead.
She might be, though.
“I didn’t shoot you,” she said. “What were you doing here that I should have shot you for?”
“I’m willing to believe you, but only because you let me get behind you just now,” Ben said. “But seriously, don’t get up,” he added when she started to shift position to do just that. “Question two is, why is someone offering a half-million dollars for the delivery of your still-breathing body?”
“News to me,” she answered. She had been debating how it would go if she tried to cut his legs out from under him, but if he was hoping to take her alive, she could take more time considering her strategy. She was out of shape, which meant that any way she fought back had to be fast and dirty. “Are you Crimson?”
Onyx members rarely went undercover, but Christian hadn’t even blinked to see this guy in the hall, which meant he wasn’t from Frost.
“That’s your gig, babe,” Ben answered. He knelt down near her, close enough that he was either very stupid or very certain of his ability to defend himself. “Within the history of the Bruja guilds, maybe a dozen members have gone multi-class. I can count on one hand the number of members who have reached third rank in all three guilds. I can count on one finger the number of folks who reached third rank and then had the spine to tell the leadership to go to hell.”
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