by D. N. Hoxa
“I felt him. He was not a Pyro,” he said. “His energy wasn’t elemental. It was…something else.”
“I’m telling you, I know what I saw. Even a week later, the runes burned on the floor in Nana’s Enclave were hot,” I said, for some reason finding it important that I convinced him. “And how do you feel someone’s magic? You said you felt Nana’s magic in me. How?”
“I’ve been tracking Tanana through her magic, and all elementals recognize one another,” he said. “You said she was taken a week ago. I never stopped tracking her magic. It led me here, to Richmond.”
I shook my head. “She’s not dead, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Gwendolyn Love was dead.” He sounded confused.
“Nana’s alive. And Gwendolyn probably is, too. She was just unconscious when she was taken.”
“It makes no sense. Why take a high priestess? Why not just kill them?” he asked, and I had absolutely no answer for him. You didn’t just take people who could kill you with a whisper as hostages.
“It doesn’t matter why. I’m going to find Nana and the person responsible for this. If you don’t try to stop me, I won’t kill you.” I’d have liked to, but I wouldn’t.
But Logan shook his head. “The why always matters. Why isn’t the Ministry onto this? What have they found about the runes burned on the floor?”
“The Ministry isn’t doing shit. They knew Nana was taken, but they pretended like they didn’t. It took me coming back here for them to get interested.” I didn’t try to mask the bitterness in my voice. The Magian Ministry was full of shit, and everybody needed to know it. “And the runes aren’t Futhark. They’re Egyptian.”
“Egyptian runes?” His voice had a hint of mock in it. Good thing he’d brought my phone with. I took it from the table and showed him the picture of the floor in Nana’s Enclave.
“The next is from Gwendolyn’s,” I said as I handed him the phone. He took it without hesitation and stepped closer to me, leaving his mug on the table. I stepped to the side just to be cautious, then slowly reached for it. I was dying to take a sip, and if he saw me, he didn’t care. “Jesus, have you heard of sugar?” I muttered when I finally tasted what was supposed to be the coffee of my dreams but turned out to be a mess more bitter than my current emotional situation.
“These are Egyptian Runes,” Logan said breathlessly.
I snorted. “You don’t say.”
He handed me my phone back. “You weren’t lying.”
Wow. So subtle.
“Nope. And as soon as I find out what these babies mean, I’m going to find Nana, and when she’s back in her home, you can go pay her a visit so she can kill you herself and save me the trouble. How about that?” I put the mug back on the table. “And buy some sugar for God’s sake.”
I turned around to leave.
“I’m coming with you.” He said it like a man who genuinely believed he was sane.
“You’re not coming with me.” I pulled the door open, half expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t. Logan followed me.
“I am.”
“Believe you me, you’re not.” A hallway with apartments on both sides. Hopefully we weren’t too far away from Gwendolyn Love’s castle. I needed to get close again, to see if I could maybe sneak inside and take a look at that room one more time. There had to be some kind of a clue in there.
“Ruby, stop,” Logan demanded when I reached the stairway. I didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop him from following me. Maybe not throwing my chakri at his face hadn’t been the smartest of ideas.
It was still daylight outside, so at least there was that. The clock on my phone said it was almost two p.m. I still had time to figure out my next step. What were the odds that I could get past Gwendolyn’s Guard, and probably Ministry Guards, to investigate the crime scene again?
“I can help you,” Logan said, coming outside the building.
“Where are we?” I didn’t recognize the neighborhood. It could have been anywhere.
“Jackson Ward. I can help you find Tanana,” he said.
Great. We were much closer to Nana’s Enclave than I thought.
“I’m not going to let you help me find Nana, just so you can kill her,” I reminded him and started walking up the street.
“I know someone who can read them,” Logan called.
I stopped in my tracks and turned back, very slowly. Was he lying?
He was lying.
Was he?
“The runes? The Egyptian runes?” I asked, just to make sure we were on the same page.
He nodded. “I know someone who’ll help us.”
He looked serious enough.
So I thought about it for a long second.
“No, thanks.” I raised my hand in a wave. “See ya.”
There was a reason why I worked alone. Ever since Avery, I’d learned that it was stupid to assume you could protect someone. Half the time you couldn’t even protect yourself, let alone another person. Putting that kind of expectation on someone was just plain cruel.
But Logan wasn’t one to give up. He followed me.
“You obviously know Tanana. If she left her Guards to you, you must mean a great deal to her.”
“And that’s where you’re wrong. Nana didn’t leave the Guards to me because she cares about me. She did it because she needs me to find her.” She knew me well. She knew I could never say no to this.
“Why you specifically?” he asked.
“You should ask her that,” I mumbled and hurried my steps, hoping to somehow escape him. But that wasn’t going to happen.
The fresh air had already helped to clear my head. We were only three blocks away from Nana’s Enclave. How I wished I could just go to it, hide in the room that used to be mine, and give myself some time to figure this out.
But time was what I didn’t have. Time was what Nana didn’t have, either. Whoever the asshole who took her and Gwendolyn Love was, he was moving fast. I needed to be faster.
There was only one thing left to do. Find Cornelius Graneheart and hope he’d be more open to helping me after he heard that Gwendolyn was taken, too. It was obvious that the high priests were being targeted. I just hoped he wasn’t as confident in his ability to keep himself safe as Gwendolyn had been. I mean, if this guy could take Nana, even break her curse, I was pretty sure he could take Cornelius Graneheart, too. And if that didn’t work, I would have to find a way to get to Christopher Ford, the head of the Order of the Magians, the same guy who wanted my head. Easy peasy.
“You’re in no way equipped to handle the man who took Master Love from her Enclave.”
Oh, right. Logan was still following me.
“I don’t need to handle anyone.” I was just going to find Nana. And if it came to it, if the guy who took her happened to be in my way, I would try my damn hardest to bring him down.
“You need me,” Logan said, but to my surprise, when I started walking to the left, he didn’t follow. I thought he was going to be harder to escape.
“It’s the other way around, buddy!” I called but didn’t look back.
I started running. There was no use in wasting time now. The enemy didn’t rest. But I was pretty sure that he did eat. I needed to eat, too. I gave myself until dark. The darkness would help me keep under the radar, especially now that the MM was probably even more committed to finding me. I had no doubt in my mind that they thought I’d taken Gwendolyn Love. The testimony of her guard, who’d been with me while she was taken, would do nothing to change their minds.
Back to a hotel I went. I was careful to walk around the neighborhood a couple of times, in case someone had followed me. The MM, or even Logan. I needed to rest, and I could only do so if I felt safe enough to close my eyes for a bit.
As I hid in the hotel room, more paranoid than ever before, I felt like there was a noose around my neck and a chair below my feet just waiting to be kicked to the ground. I ate only because I needed energy; my taste b
uds seemed to have stopped working for now. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on in the city, something huge, something nobody was prepared for.
Except for Nana.
She’d known something was going to happen. She’d made that will two months ago. But why hadn’t she tried to reach out to me herself? What the hell was she thinking?
The picture of the Egyptian runes and of Christopher Ford’s enclave were in front of me on the bed, but I couldn’t make sense of either of them. Maybe I should have just gone with Logan. Maybe I should have let him take me to whomever he thought could help.
Or maybe I should have listened to Gwendolyn. I mean, did you see the fear in her eyes when she told me to stay out of it? She was genuinely afraid, even if just for a second. It made me more afraid, too.
When night finally fell, I left the hotel more confused than I’d been in the morning. Or the afternoon. I hated not being able to make sense of things, and this by far topped my list. Cornelius Graneheart was my last hope, and if he refused to help me, I was going to have to go back to Nana’s Enclave to look for more clues.
The darkness helped in keeping me hidden. I wore the hood of my sweatshirt up, put my auburn hair in front of my face to hide my eye patch, and kept my head down. Cornelius’s Enclave was a one-hundred-thousand square foot mansion overlooking the James River between two bridges at the edge of the city. His Enclave was surrounded by trees, which he kept alive with his own magic, never letting them wither from the magic that came from his presence. They said he had an entire wing for his harem full of girls who came straight off magazine covers. His students had to apply to be part of his Enclave, and he ran it like a college—with dorms and textbooks and exams and stuff. Whoever made it to graduation got to work for Cornelius in one of his many businesses across the world. It must have been nice to be his student. He was a very powerful guy and hopefully more rational than Gwendolyn. It was going to take me more than an hour to get to him, but I’d rather walk than take a cab. That way, I could approach his Enclave through the woods surrounding it.
He was probably going to report me to the Ministry, too, as soon as he saw me, but it was a risk I had to take. If anything, the position of his Enclave would give me a much easier exit than Gwendolyn’s.
I walked fast, raising my head only when I needed to see if someone was watching me or following me. I slipped into the woods that would lead me to the left of the mansion. I figured there would be an entrance nearby, and if there wasn’t, I could always just walk around it. I’d never been to Cornelius’s Enclave before. Nana had never sent me to him on errands, for whatever reason, but I was a bit excited to see if it was as majestic as people said it was.
I was calm. The walk and the cold October air had calmed me, and I was confident that I would be heard this time because of what had happened to Gwendolyn. I walked through the woods with a new resolve I didn’t have that morning, until I could make out the silhouette of the mansion ahead of me. And I was so wrapped up in my thoughts, in imagining how the meeting would go, what I would say to the high priest, and in trying to anticipate what he would say to me, that I didn’t even notice the lights until I was out of the woods and looking straight at the Graneheart Enclave.
I was wrong—it didn’t have any gates. Just a huge open yard with a fountain of angels in the middle of the driveway, that was completely blocked by five big cars and an ambulance van. The red and blue lights mesmerized me, and it took me a good second to realize what was going on. My feet were stuck to the ground, and I couldn’t even move as I watched a group of seven people rush outside the front doors of the mansion, holding something in their hands. A body on a stretcher.
“No,” I whispered to the dark.
It was as clear as the view in front of me. He’d done it again. As I had been hiding away in my hotel room, foolishly thinking I had more time, the kidnapper had come to Cornelius, too!
Was that him on the stretcher? Was he alive?
It took all I had not to run ahead to see if he was still breathing. There were too many people barely thirty feet from me, and if any of them turned to the woods, they would probably see me. I felt hopeless, paralyzed by indecision.
What the hell was I going to do now? How could I ever hope to find out what had happened to Nana?
I must have stood there like a fool for a while, and eventually, I felt eyes on me, like heat pouring down my face. It took me but a second to find his alien blue eyes. It was the third time I had seen Ryan Dumont in two days, and that was three times more than I needed to see him.
Or him to see me.
It dawned on me what this meant when he spun around and began to run toward me, as if he’d already expected to see me there and was prepared, his hand coming up with a gun.
“Stop right there!”
Well, fuck.
Now everybody else was looking at me. I couldn’t have been this unlucky, could I?
“Shit, shit, shit,” I spit as I ran back into the woods, just as the first gunshot reached my ears. The trees weren’t dense by any means, but they would help cover me long enough for me to reach the main street. There, I could steal a car or hide in a building or do anything to escape the MM.
So I ran, focusing on my breathing rather than on the footsteps behind me. It didn’t matter how many were chasing me—what mattered was that I was going to escape. I had to—it was that simple. I couldn’t find Nana from a jail cell, and I’d bet my good eye that nobody was going to believe me when I said I didn’t do it. I didn’t kidnap Nana or Gwendolyn or try to kidnap Cornelius, even though I had been there, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.
Yeah, they would laugh in my face if I told them I had nothing to do with it.
The dim lights of the lampposts signaling the beginning of a quiet neighborhood full of one-story houses winked at me. I’d seen cars in front of the houses, lots of them, and I was going to steal one and get the hell away from there. My muscles burned as I used up all my strength to run faster, and, boy, was I glad that I’d eaten all that food at the hotel. It hadn’t been cheap, but it had definitely been worth it.
The first car I saw was a white Chevrolet in front of the second house in my line of vision. It was going to be just perfect. I could break the window and hot-wire the car easily, if I had just a few seconds.
By the time I reached the driver’s door, I thought for sure that I was saved. Everything I’d planned to do seemed perfectly possible—right until I heard the low growl coming from much too close to me.
My chakris were in my hands, and I intended to break that window in one hit, but then I looked up.
And I saw the tiger on the other side of the car.
“Fuck me,” I whispered, once again frozen in place.
I should have known. His alien eyes hadn’t changed the way his body had. This was Ryan Dumont in all his tiger glory. He stood tall on all fours, at least four feet. His head was huge, his orange and black fur longer than an actual tiger’s, and his jaw a little less pronounced. His teeth were a little smaller, too, but all in all, he had one of the best animal shapes I’d ever seen. You could tell he’d learned to master it early on by the way he looked at me. Shifters who could shift into their animal forms all the way and maintain their consciousness were rare. It took incredible will power to pilot the mind of the animal that shared their skin with them. My respect for Dumont grew, but now was not the time to show it.
“Easy,” I whispered, slowly backing away. Forget the car—he could tear me to pieces in the time it took me to even open the damned door. I had to think of another way out.
Dumont growled again and showed me his teeth. Not as big as a real tiger’s but definitely just as scary. My heart beat in my ears. The house was right behind me. Could I reach the door?
Better yet, how much protection could a wooden door offer me from a weretiger?
None. At all.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t try.
Luckily, I didn
’t have to.
The car in between us exploded right before our eyes. I didn’t even get the chance to shield my face. The strength of the explosion threw me back, and I landed with my ass on the cold asphalt. Instinct took over, and I jumped to my feet immediately, but the blazing fire coming from the car almost pushed me back down. I stepped back with my arms in front of my face, wondering what the hell had just happened, when I saw the silhouette to the right—the silhouette of a man throwing fireballs to the other side of the street.
At the weretiger that was Ryan Dumont.
With no time to waste, I turned around and ran through the narrow passage between the two houses. If Logan was as good as he thought—and I hoped—he was, Dumont wasn’t going to catch me.
Still, I couldn’t stop, no matter what. So I ran until my muscles burned, and I could no longer put one foot in front of the other. The tall buildings, the many lights and people walking the streets said that I’d already made it to Carytown. I’d come much farther than I thought I would. All the lights and the bright, colorful murals meant that I’d made it. I’d actually escaped because if Dumont had followed me in his tiger form, I’d have found out by now. He’d have caught up with me.
With a sigh, I let go and sat on the sidewalk, half turned to the street where I’d come from. I’d see movement if someone was coming and then…what? I wasn’t going to be able to run for at least half an hour. But at least if someone came, I’d see them first.
And I did. It didn’t take long, maybe a few minutes, and Logan Haines turned the corner of the street with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, in no rush at all. I would have laughed if I’d had the energy. For the second time that night, I was really glad to see him.
9
His smug smile said it all. He’d saved my ass and he knew it, damn him.
I cleared my throat. “Thank you for blowing that car up. But you didn’t save me,” I said with a grin. He did save me. I knew it, he knew it, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t mess with him for a bit.