“Trev! Holy shit!! Is it really you?”
I pushed back, still holding his shoulders, and looked into the bright golden eyes that looked so much like mine, except for the color. His eyes looked darker, in a way, like they’d seen a lot of suffering in the past ten years, but… well, they probably matched mine in that respect. So many things about him reminded me of what I saw in the mirror every day. Hell, he even wore his black hair long like mine. I hadn’t seen him in 10 years, and he’d changed just as much as I had in that time, but… I would have known him anywhere.
I wrapped him in another hug, and this time, he actually wrapped his arms around me in return.
“I missed you too, Vic,” he whispered into my hair.
I held onto him for another minute. I couldn’t help myself. It was like the longer I held him, the more real he became. He even smelled right. Eventually, I pulled back again and smiled at him.
“You should come inside,” I said, gesturing to the door that still hung open behind me. “This is your house too.”
Trev shrugged and followed me inside.
I couldn’t let go of him completely, so I kept his hand in mine. It was warm, dry, and lightly calloused.
“Trev, this is Seamus, he’s… a werewolf from my English class,” I said, wondering when my life had turned into a fucking J.K. Rowling novel. “And this is Soledad, a werepanther from… well, I’m not entirely sure where, but I think she was about to explain.”
Trev’s grip on my hand tightened, and he drew me behind him.
“She doesn’t need to explain,” Trev said, his voice dropping. “I know exactly where she’s from.”
And then my brother burst into flames and threw himself at Sol.
“NO, TREV, WAIT!” I called out, as Sol shifted deftly into her sleek black panther form, all the while dodging and weaving against my brother’s fiery attacks.
As my eyes adjusted to the scene, I saw that he hadn’t actually burst into flames so much as turned into a phoenix. Which I supposed amounted to the same thing, since a phoenix was basically just a big bird that caught fire.
“TREV! Seriously! She was just about to explain how she knew where you were before you knocked on the door. Can you just give her a chance to talk before you burn her to death?!”
The show that Trev and Sol were putting on was a good one, and it was nice to see that my brother had some impressive weapons at his disposal, but Sol had clearly been trained to fight by someone who knew what they were doing, and she was doing an excellent job of dodging Trev’s attacks, countering just enough to give herself space without doing any damage to him.
Seamus took a few steps back from the fiery kitchen drama and stood next to me.
“I really need to learn how to fight,” he admitted, as we watched Trev and Sol go after each other. “You and Sol didn’t need me in the fight against Edik. I only made things worse.”
I nodded. “Yeah, but your heart was in the right place.” I sighed. “And anyway, there are lots of ways to be useful without learning to fight. The only reason I’ve been training for the past ten years is because of what happened to Trev… even though my parents pretended it was because of the ‘attempt’ to kidnap me…. I can teach you a few things if you want, though. My sensei in Colorado had me helping to teach some of the beginner classes before I left.”
Seamus nodded. We both watched the teakettle get knocked off the stove top and go crashing to the floor.
“It’s a good thing that’s stainless steel,” I mused.
Seamus raised an eyebrow at me.
“Are you… going to stop them?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Trevor hasn’t killed her, and if he had been planning a fatal attack I think she would be dead by now. Moreover, Sol has clearly been going out of her way not to hurt him. That can’t have escaped his notice. Whatever beef he has with Sol will probably be out of his system in another minute or two.”
“You sound pretty confident for someone who hasn’t seen her brother in ten years,” he said.
I smiled.
“He’s still my twin,” I said. “The only person I know better is me.”
“But if he’s been held captive that whole time…” Seamus took a deep breath and ran his hand along the back of his neck. “Don’t you think it’s possible he’s changed in ways you can’t understand?”
I nodded, the smile falling from my face.
“I’m sure he has, Seamus, but… I still know that if he were trying to hurt her, this fight would have been over a long time ago. I don’t know who the better fighter is, but…” I gestured vaguely at the two figures dodging and weaving in front of us, “they’re both clearly good. Which means if they were trying to harm one another, it would be over by now. Instead… no one has even drawn blood.”
“Then why are they still fighting?” Seamus asked.
“Because Trev is fucking furious, though I’m not sure why.”
When Sol batted at Trevor hard enough that he backed into my cupboard and set my coffee stash on fire, I drew the line.
“THAT’S ENOUGH!” I shouted, running forward to put out the flames. “Damn it, Trev! If I’d wanted it to taste like burnt asshole I'd have bought dark roast!”
Sol and Trevor backed away from each other and looked at me with similar expressions of amusement, even though it was kind of difficult to read flaming bird face.
“Do you two want to explain what the fuck is going on now that you’ve had your little sparring match? Do you know each other?”
Trev resumed his human form, and I realized that eight years of shared bath time had not prepared me for seeing my eighteen-year-old brother naked. I took a deep breath and stared him in the eyes.
“Do you want to borrow some sweatpants?” I asked, glancing at the charred remains of the jeans and t-shirt Trev had been wearing when he walked in.
He nodded, and I pointed upstairs.
“I’m not going anywhere while she’s here to spread lies,” he hissed.
I shrugged.
“I promise not to believe a single word she says until you come back downstairs.”
Trev glared at me.
Sol shifted to human and smiled. The gesture was decidedly feline, even though she no longer had whiskers. “I promise not to speak until you return, Avito.”
“First door on the left,” I said.
By the time he came back down, wearing a pair of sweatpants with my old high school’s mascot on the leg, Sol had once more donned the clothes I’d given her earlier.
“So, please enlighten me as to why you two couldn’t resist pretending to fight the second you saw each other.”
Trev scoffed.
“I wasn’t pretending… but when I noticed she was going out of her way not to hurt me… I laid off my more devastating attacks.”
“And I didn’t come here to kill anyone,” Sol said. “Although if that damned vampire shows up again, I may change my mind.”
I chuckled.
“Only after I kill him first.”
Trev glanced between us.
“What vampire is this?” he asked.
I shook my head. “One who isn’t even worth the time to discuss right now. Focus power, people. What the hell is going on between you two?”
Trev sighed.
“It’s nothing personal… with, Soledad, did you say?”
I nodded.
“We’ve never met before, but… she smells like MOME.”
“She smells like what?” I asked.
“MOME,” Trevor said, saying a word that rhymed with "home" and looking at me like I’d said the sky was orange.
“The Ministry of Magical Entities,” Sol clarified.
Trev kept looking at me as though I were growing a second head.
“How do you not know what MOME is?” he asked. “That’s like never having heard of Congress.”
I sighed.
“Yeah, so about that…. After you were taken, Mom, Dad, and I
had our memories messed with, and they pretended we weren’t…” I gestured between us futilely, “whatever the fuck we are.”
“Huh?”
“Vic had never heard of anything from our world until I told her I was a werewolf last night,” Seamus said.
“This morning,” I corrected. “It was late enough that it was technically this morning.”
Trev looked stunned beyond words.
“I have never heard of MOME, and, until about 30 minutes ago, I thought that you didn’t exist and that I was a normal human.”
Then I smiled, as a single happy thought struck me.
“But I just turned into a SNOW LEOPARD for the first time ever! So, I’m pretty stoked about that.”
Trev smiled too.
“Well, that’s fun. I had wondered what animal you’d wind up with. Our family has lots to choose from.”
“Choose?” I asked.
Trev ignored me and turned to glare at Sol, even though she hadn’t made a sound.
“We can talk about that later. She should explain why she knew where I was and why she’s even here.”
I would have argued, because every damned thing that came out of Trev’s mouth spawned about 500 new questions in my mind, but I also wanted to know what Sol had to do with all of this, and why Trev had wanted to kill her because she ‘smelled like MOME.’”
Sol cleared her throat and sat down on the stool she’d been perched on before Trev got here, but Seamus, Trev, and I remained standing.
“It’s reasonable that you don’t trust me right now,” she said, taking a sip from one of the tea cups that had miraculously managed to survive the kitchen brawl. “Because I do, as Trevor implied, work for MOME.”
That revelation caused Trev to hiss like an angry ostrich and Seamus to gasp, but I was still lost as to what the big deal was.
“Vic,” Sol said, as though understanding my confusion, “MOME is the organization that governs the magical community. It’s the police force, the legislative force, the bureaucratic branch, everything most governments do, all rolled into one.”
“Only where other governments are filled with elected officials, and vary from region to region, MOME is self-selected, and is the self-proclaimed governing body for magical entities all over the world,” Trev gritted out, between clenched jaws.
I took a moment to put together the few tidbits that I understood about the magical world and realization came slowly.
“And it was MOME that decided to take an eight-year-old boy from his family?” I asked, as the horror sank in. “WHY?!”
Trev snorted in derision.
“Oh, they weren’t just after me, Vic. They would have taken you too, if Mom hadn’t fought them off so well.”
My stomach turned, but I repeated the question. “Why?” I turned to Sol, who looked decidedly uncomfortable. She swallowed.
“They deem certain younglings to be… dangers, to themselves and others. Both you and your brother were on a watchlist. I don’t know why, exactly, they decided to take you then, since I’ve only been working at MOME for about two years, but last night my unit leader put me on a flight to come here and… retrieve you.”
Trev squared off, putting himself between me and Sol, but I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him behind me.
“Cool your jets, Trev, I can handle the panther.” I wasn’t entirely sure that was true. Sol seemed like a pretty accomplished fighter, especially in her panther form, but I knew I could do at least as well as Trev could, and have I mentioned how much I hate overprotective males? Twin brothers were no exception.
“So, why didn’t you just nab me back in Rebuke’s class and take me off to… wherever it is you’re supposed to drag me?”
Sol looked around the room, taking in the ceiling and the windows in particular. Then she shook her head.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
For some reason that didn’t piss Trev off the way I expected it to. He turned to me and mouthed the word "bugs."
I nodded, finally understanding Sol’s exaggerated inspection of our ceiling.
“Ok. So, what can you tell us?” I asked.
“We shouldn’t stay here very long,” Sol replied.
“Which is precisely what someone would say if they were trying to get us to accompany them back to the bad guys’ hideout,” I muttered.
At least Seamus laughed.
“Vic, where are Mom and Dad?” Trev asked, after a moment of awkward silence.
I felt like I’d been stabbed in the chest.
“They… they’re…” For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to say the word dead. So instead I copped out with, “they disappeared in the Indian Ocean.”
Trev’s eyes filled with tears, and I moved to him and wrapped him in another giant hug. This time, he didn’t hesitate before hugging me back.
I already knew that, but I had to make it sound like I didn’t have access to our file, said a voice inside my head that was not my own.
I startled, but Trev held me tight and didn’t let me back away.
We both have a lot more magic now than when we were kids, Vic. Don’t you remember when we tried to talk to each other’s minds back then?
I was about to say no, but then the memories came flooding back to me. We’d tried, over and over again for years, but the best we’d managed was to sense the other person’s emotions. Even then, we’d never been sure that it was magic and not just… knowing each other really well.
Are you telling me this really works? I asked.
Trev laugh/cried into my hair.
Hey, try not to snot me too badly. There are hot people watching us.
But of course that just made him laugh/cry harder.
What do we do to get out of this? I want to know what happened to you. Can you talk about that here? I had a million questions, and I wasn’t sure I could keep any of them back now that I could just think them at Trev.
Yeah. MOME already knows that, so their listening spells won’t tell them anything they don’t already know, but when we get to the end of the story I’m going to have to lie, or we’re going to have to go somewhere else. Sol’s right, though. They’ll have figured out that I’m here, which means we need to go somewhere else soon.
Can they see us? Or only hear us? I asked.
It depends on how long they’ve been monitoring you, but based on the fact that Sol only showed up here today, she probably only had time to set up listening devices.
Wait, she’s the one that set them up? Why do we even trust her at all, then?
Well, we don’t. But, she might have useful information, and she didn’t grab you when she had an easy chance, so…
His thoughts trailed off for a moment and I decided there was nothing for it but to give it a shot.
Ok… I think I have a plan, I replied into Trev’s mind, even though I could have easily said that bit aloud, because, why the fuck not? Everything else in my life was completely insane, so why wouldn’t I be communicating telepathically with my twin brother who I thought was dead/never existed?
I backed away from Trevor and started miming to Seamus that we should go for a walk to his house. He nodded, and we all headed for the door.
Just as we got to the front step, Gwen popped into existence right in front me.
“Jesus fuck, Gwen! Don’t do that. You scared me. What are you doing here?”
Gwen frowned.
“You’re all needed elsewhere,” she said, before somehow grabbing onto all four of us and then winking us all out of existence.
“WHAT THE HELL just happened?” Trev asked, over the howling wind.
“That was Gwen,” I said, as if that explained everything. I looked at all three of my companions—Gwen, of course, was nowhere in sight—and realized that Sol and Seamus were just as confused as my brother.
“She’s… well… the short explanation is that she’s the one who first tipped me off that this was going to be a weird week.”
That was
probably the understatement of the century, but, well… the long explanation probably stretched credulity even amongst a bunch of were-creatures.
“Where are we?” Seamus asked, beginning to shiver.
I looked around. We were standing on a granite outcropping that kept us above the snow that covered the slope on which we stood, surrounded by steep, rocky peaks covered in more snow.
“The Andes?” I guessed, my teeth chattering. It could have been the Rockies, but… there was too much snow for September in the Rockies. September in the Andes, though… yeah, this looked about right.
“Everyone needs to shift,” Sol said. “There’s a place we can shelter near here, but this cold works quickly. Follow me.”
Without waiting for anyone to object, Sol shifted to her panther form and started off down the hill. As tempting as it was to make a fuss about how we were suddenly in the Andes and why the fuck were we so close to a place that only Sol knew well… it was too fucking cold.
Seamus had already shifted by the time I had wished myself warmly wrapped in the thick fur of my snow leopard fervently enough to feel it suddenly surrounding me.
Being a snow leopard was the coolest.
Seriously. I was so warm. This might be the Andes, but the Andes had nothing on the Himalayas. Suddenly, I was in no particular rush to get to shelter, but as everyone else was trotting downhill at a decent clip behind Sol, I followed.
Of course, Trev caught up to Sol immediately, since he was flying, but Seamus was only a few meters ahead of me and I couldn’t resist the temptation to race him down the hill. I nipped him playfully on the shoulder as I ran up alongside him, and then put on a surge of speed to close the distance between us and Sol. I could feel Seamus surge behind me to keep up, and he let out a competitive howl as we both hurtled over the snow-covered rocks that lay between us and our quarry.
Seamus, in wolf form, had much longer legs than I did as a snow leopard, and he would surely beat me in any long-distance race when we were on four legs, but for a short race over mountainous terrain…
He was sooo going down.
The terrain was uneven at best, with surprise boulders shooting up in front of us and small cliffs dropping away beneath us at every turn. I became hyper-focused, aware of every shift in terrain before I even had a chance to consciously process it, my body simply reacting to my surroundings in a way that I couldn’t possibly replicate as a human. Sudden shifts of weight and balance were easy, my tail gliding effortlessly behind me to act as a counterbalance whenever necessary, my legs somehow able to shift mid-fall whenever the earth disappeared beneath me, able to orient themselves to whatever surface became my next foothold.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 8