Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  “La Paz isn’t even that big,” Sol said, walking over to stand between me and yet another nondescript stretch of concrete wall. “It’s about the same size as where you lived in Colorado, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s got more people than where I’m from, but even if it doesn’t… the Front Range is more like a giant suburb. There isn’t much urban center. The population is all spread out. This is different,” I explained, gesturing at the narrow alley that contained us, a dumpster, and too many pools of urine. Seeing Sol start to look defensive, I quickly added, “Don’t get me wrong, La Paz is beautiful. What little I’ve seen of it outside this alley is charming, and I’m really looking forward to seeing more of it, but… I’m not a fan of dark, stank alleys, I guess.”

  Sol ran her hand along my arm, or the black leather that covered it, anyway. I wasn’t always in agreement with the style choices of whatever Gwen-granted magic was in charge of supplying new clothes to me (and all the shifters in my immediate vicinity) every time I shifted, but at least it had taken into account that spring in the Andes was no time to leave me in less than a thick leather biker jacket, a pair of lined jeans, and some sturdy boots. The outfit struck me as fairly cliché given that I was standing in a dark alley, could turn into an animal, and occasionally fought vampires, but at least it was warm. All thoughts of my wardrobe fled when Sol leaned in to purr at my ear, though.

  “There’s a lot that can be accomplished in a dark alley,” she whispered, licking my neck and making my skin ignite.

  The heat was quickly quelled by the stench of human feces and urine that permeated the place, but it was a testament to how attractive I found Sol that she was able to turn me on even for a moment in those conditions.

  “I’m afraid my nose is entirely too sensitive for that to be a pleasant prospect,” I replied, disappointed that it was true. “But once we get out of this place I’d be keen to take you up on the offer.”

  She bit my earlobe playfully.

  “Excellent. We haven’t had nearly enough time alone for my liking,” she purred.

  I took a deep breath and tried to swallow. The stench of the alley was becoming less and less of a deterrent the more Sol’s breath caressed my neck, and for a moment I was oddly glad that Seamus had decided to go check on his Moms today.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want Seamus with us on this mission. It was just that I was glad he would be safe for once. He wasn’t much of a fighter, after all, and well… at this exact moment… I was ok with Sol having me all to herself.

  “Yeah, saving the world is a real buzz kill,” I muttered, as I felt my back push up against the concrete wall behind me.

  “Yet one more reason that Rebecca Dryer deserves to die,” Sol replied, the corner of her lush mouth turning up on one side.

  I laughed, because the alternative was to have a full-on panic attack triggered by thinking about how close we were to losing everything.

  A few hours ago, when Sol and I had been getting briefed by Trev on what little he could tell us about Rhelia’s mission—basically that Torrence was a potential contact and that she had gone dark earlier after her morning check in—we’d been interrupted by a series of newsflashes about demands being made from the “unknown terrorist organization in Sucre.”

  Apparently, Rebecca Dryer wasn’t feeling patient, and she was already making demands that the U.N. cede power to her, along with all the nations that weren’t members of the U.N. She was threatening to set off more “weapons of mass destruction” if her demands weren’t met in the next 48 hours. That had been eight hours ago, and, unfortunately, Dryer wasn’t saying where she was planning to do her mass destruction. Con-sequently, we were left without any leads, despite Trev and Rhelia having gone sleepless hacking and monitoring every bit of MOME security footage they could get their code on for the past two days. None of the backup footage they’d managed to access had turned up anything useful regarding our two missing weredragons yet.

  The people we loved, our homes, the Earth… maybe even the whole universe were at stake here, and we were out of time for anything but drastic measures. To top it off, Rhelia had been following a desperate lead when she’d suddenly gone dark.

  Which had me swallowing for an entirely different reason, trying to keep the emotion at bay. Everyone I had left, which was a pretty short list these days, had come far too close to death already in the past three weeks for my liking.

  For some reason—sympathy, empathy, a sudden need to remind us both that there was still some good in the world—Sol took that moment to pull me close and kiss me deeply. For the span of a few heartbeats I was consumed by the fire of that kiss and everything else was swept away; it didn’t matter that the Ministry of Magical Entities was trying to kill us, that they were holding the world hostage with a potentially Earth-annihilating weapon, that my brother was still barely talking to me after it had looked like I’d killed his mate two days ago in order to save all of our lives. Those thoughts had consumed me five seconds ago, but in that moment they ceased to exist.

  Elephant asshole and all, I really didn’t want to pull away from that kiss, but the tingling in my hands wouldn’t let up and, eventually, I pulled back just enough to say, “I think I can tell where that seam is.”

  “REMIND ME WHY we think this is a good idea, Gatita?”

  I lowered my hands from where I’d raised them to Sol’s shoulders, and stared at her as she leveled her gold-green eyes at me, the graffiti-tagged alley fading away as her eyes caught mine.

  “What in particular do you mean?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure my entire life has been one bad idea after another for the past three weeks.”

  Sol’s lips quirked up at the sides, but her gaze remained implacable.

  “I mean, why do we think that going to Unterberg is a worthwhile use of our time? I still think that we’d be better off waiting for a lead from your brother or—”

  “My brother basically admitted that he was out of leads, Sol, not to mention out of options, as soon as Rhelia didn’t check in this afternoon.” I reminded her, before she could get caught up in the same argument she’d had with Trev before we left. “If all the surveillance he’s doing isn’t getting us anywhere, then whatever long shot Rhelia is taking is the only chance we’ve got right now. He’s trying to sort through security footage from five different MOME HQs and who knows how many smaller outposts. Even if he had a whole team working for him it would take days to find anything useful. We just don’t have the time.”

  “But Dryer could use Siara as her next bomb at any moment, and we don’t even know what lead Rhelia was following when she left this morning.”

  Sol’s voice was marked by the frustration we’d all been feeling since we’d sat helplessly by and watched a whole section of Sucre get razed to the ground three days ago (or in my case, watched the news reports of it after I’d regained consciousness). That frustration had started leaning heavily towards terror as we’d watched the morning news flash headlines about demands from the mysterious terrorist organization that was responsible for the attacks. Of course, we knew exactly what the “mysterious” terrorist organization was, but that didn’t help anything. The fact that we knew that the organization was MOME, and that we knew that MOME was being led by Rebecca Dryer in this particular mission did us little good since we didn’t know where Rebecca Dryer was, or, more importantly, where she was holding the two weredragons that she was intending to use as her next weapons of mass destruction.

  “We know Rhelia thought whatever lead she had was our only chance to find Siara and Emil before they wind up turned into Hiroshima and Nagasaki times a bajillion, so I’m inclined to think that her mission, whatever it is, has become priority number one,” I said, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. I didn’t succeed.

  “But Dryer could use anyone as a bomb now. Why are we even going after Siara and Emil when Dryer could explode any of her own agents if she felt like it? S
houldn’t we just be planning to take out all of MOME now? I know the dragons supposedly make the biggest bang, but does that really mean that they won’t use someone else even if we manage to get Siara and Emil back from them? Gatita, I know you trust your brother and Rhelia, but…” her voice trailed off and she shrugged, leaving me to fill in the blanks.

  I bristled. I understood perfectly what she was getting at, and I didn’t want to hear it.

  “You think it hasn’t occurred to me more than once that Trev was in MOME custody for over a decade?” I hissed. Just because it was a possibility I’d considered myself, didn’t mean it was one that I wanted to talk about. Something Sol had assuredly picked up on when she’d brought it up while I was still recovering from my own injuries. Rhelia had still been pretending to be dead to everyone but me and Trev, and Trev had seemed oddly distant. He still did. It was disconcerting to all of us, especially me, but what did any of us expect when it had basically looked to him like his sister had killed his mate right in front of his eyes?

  “You worked for MOME for three years,” I said, latching on to whatever I could to avoid talking or thinking about the idea of not trusting my twin. “You could be loyal to them just as easily as Trev could.”

  Sol’s eyes flashed and her lips formed a hard line, all hints of humor vanishing in a breath.

  “They killed my mother, my aunt, and my cousin,” she said, her voice a harsh whisper. “Do you think that made me loyal?”

  I took a deep breath, but it still felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. Sol had been more than a little reluctant to talk about what MOME had done to her family, and who she had lost. This was the first time I’d heard her say who was killed. I was suddenly swamped with sadness, not just for Sol and her family, but for Trev and everything he’d been through, for all of us who MOME had fucked with and tried to destroy.

  Taking a deep breath, I reminded myself that we’d all been under a metric shit-ton of stress lately and that neither of us was in a great headspace right now.

  “And they killed Trev’s parents, abducted him as a child, and have been trying to kill him, me, and his mate, ever since he finally got away from them,” I replied. “What loyalty do you expect him to have for them?”

  I had hoped that the grief I was feeling for all of us would show through my voice enough to disarm Sol, but I should have known better. Her voice was still icy when she spoke again.

  “You said yourself he was a child when they took him,” Sol began. “He was more susceptible to—”

  “And how old were you when they took your family from you?” I was losing my patience despite everything Sol had just admitted to me.

  “That’s different!” she countered. “I wasn’t trapped with MOME after that, I didn’t have a chance to develop Stockholm Syndrome or to—”

  “Look. Even if you think that Trev would betray us, do you really think that we’re so crucial to the dragons’ resistance plans that misdirecting us is going to bring the whole thing crashing down?” I couldn’t believe I was having to have this argument for the second time today.

  “We may not be, but Rhelia is one of—”

  “Rhelia left this morning to go on this mission despite Trev’s best arguments against it, because she was convinced that she knew something the rest of us didn’t that would help us find Siara and Emil, even if she couldn’t tell us what that was. If Trev was secretly trying to help MOME, he either wouldn’t have tried to stop her, or he wouldn’t be sending us to help her now. You can’t have it both ways, Sol.”

  “It just seems dangerous to head to Unterberg right now, considering everything that happened to us the last time we went there. And the time before that.”

  That was hard to argue with, but I tried anyway.

  “Is there anywhere in the universe that’s safe for us right now?” I asked, almost ready to collapse against the brick wall behind me. I probably would have, if I hadn’t been convinced it was covered in human urine.

  Sol finally laughed, and I could only stare at her as though her head had suddenly grown horns.

  “You’re right, Gatita,” she sighed, running a hand along my arm again. It felt like a magnet pulling all the tension out of my body. “That’s probably why I’m feeling so combative. We aren’t safe anywhere, and we haven’t been for so long, I’m starting to feel a bit frayed around the edges. I kinda desperately wish we had time to spar.”

  It was difficult to keep myself from angling my head at Sol like puppy that had just seen a large hoppy bug.

  “WHY HAVEN’T WE BEEN SPARRING!?” I asked, grabbing Sol by both arms.

  She laughed again and this time I joined her.

  “Maybe because we’ve been fighting real bad guys nonstop since we met?” she suggested.

  “Yeah, good point. Fine, but when this is all over, we’re definitely sparring.”

  “Maybe once we find Rhelia and use her secret plan to retrieve our missing weredragons.”

  It was a sobering reminder that we rather desperately needed to be elsewhere, not here, making out and debating our orders, surrounded by human waste.

  I sighed.

  The last seam we had used to sneak into Unterberg had been compromised immediately after we’d used it, so we had to assume MOME was watching it. The dragons had a secondary seam that was safe enough for Seamus to sneak in and visit his Moms, but it let out in a public square and was still too public for a top-secret rescue mission—or whatever this was. We needed a new seam that wasn’t monitored by MOME, but also dropped out somewhere a bit more circumspect.

  Luckily for us, there were a lot of seams to Unterberg. Unluckily for us, most of the ones MOME didn’t know about were little more than rumors in dark bars. It had taken us all day to find a trust-worthy(ish) source in a dingy cafe in La Paz. Then it had taken us a few more hours to find the nondescript back alley our less than sober source had described, let alone the seam itself.

  Rhelia had mentioned to Trev that she might need some backup not long after she’d arrived in Unterberg, and then she’d missed her midday check-in. Trev couldn’t go, because he was knee deep in security feeds from all of MOME’s bases of operation, trying to find our missing weredragons, and the only person qualified to do the job instead of him was Rhelia. Despite that, he’d practically begged to come with us. He’d been a wreck ever since Rhelia had failed to check in, and the only way I’d convinced him to stay behind was to remind him that if Rhelia headed back to the Dragon Realm while we were gone he’d miss her, and if he missed a chance to locate Siara and Emil while we were gone, Rhelia would tear him in two.

  So he’d stayed, and we’d left, and you, dear reader, (assuming I buy Gwen’s whole, “I’m supposed to be your narrator, you’re in a book,” line) caught up with us making out in an alley in La Paz.

  But just before we’d started arguing, the Marco Polo game my hands had been playing with whatever it was in seams that made my skin vibrate had come to an abrupt halt as I had been running them up Sol’s back. As I had reached her shoulders, I’d suddenly realized that the reason I’d been going back and forth through this urban shit funnel without finding anything was that the pull I kept feeling wasn’t coming from in front of me or behind me, as I’d initially suspected, but from directly above me, instead.

  And, indeed, when—deciding that Sol’s laughter and dropping of the topic of Trev-as-Traitor meant that she’d agreed we could move on with our mission—I finally stretched my hands into the air, I felt like I was parting a curtain.

  “If you don’t think Unterberg is too dangerous,” I said, with as much scathing sarcasm as I could muster, “grab on.”

  Then I dropped into a crouch, and Sol complied, asking no questions, but throwing me a startled look.

  Not nearly as startled as I probably looked when I fell on my ass a second later, after attempting to hop into the air with a hundred and twenty pound person on my back, and instead collapsing in a small heap of pain, embarrassment, and unfortunate bo
dily fluids.

  “What were you trying to do, exactly?” Sol asked, as we attempted to brush the dripping human excrement from our clothes.

  “The seam is above us. We need to launch ourselves upwards.”

  “And you thought you were going to launch us both six feet into the air using nothing but your human form?”

  I muttered something indecipherable and shuffled my feet, staring fixedly at a patch of filth on my jeans.

  “How about we shift first?” Sol suggested, rather politely not mentioning how idiotic my initial plan had been.

  “How will you hold onto me?”

  “You know I don’t actually have to hold you to pass through a seam, right? That’s why we’re using a seam instead of having you use your Gwen-given-power to shift us there, remember? So you don’t tire before we even know what we’re up against.”

  That was news to me. I mean, it shouldn’t have been. We’d talked about using seams instead of me shifting us to save energy, I just… had we talked about how anyone could use a seam if they already knew where it was? The more I thought about it, the more I suspected we had. Because I was now remembering Sol telling me how sometimes even non-magical folks walk through them by accident and that’s where you get your Narnia and Wonderland type scenarios. I clearly needed more sleep. It hadn’t been an easy… month.

  Not wanting to drag out what was quickly becoming a thoroughly embarrassing conversation for me, I decided to focus on shifting. I imagined what it felt like to have a tail for counterbalance, a much lower center of gravity, and whiskers wide enough to help me navigate swiftly through cracks in rock. Then, almost instantly, I felt myself take on my feline form.

  Damn, it feels good to be a snow leopard.

  At the same time, Sol took shape as a large panther beside me, and I gave her one quick nod before launching myself at the magic I had sensed with my fingers. A magic that now took on a full-body, physical sensation, as my furry form collided with what felt like a large velvet drape lined with hot taffy.