by Emily Mckay
I crouch down beside him and wedge my shoulder under his to help him to his feet.
“By the way, can you drive? Because I think we’ll probably want to go pretty fast.”
Excerpt from
Book Five of The Traveler Chronicles:
The Traveler Undone
Some days, it feels like half my job is figuring out who I can trust and who I can’t.
The other half is betraying them before they betray me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I assume it goes without saying that Kane is a better driver than I am.
We are heading off down Le Mare before we even glimpse the hellhounds. Once we are in the well-insulated car and the engine is thrumming, we can barely even hear their howls.
All of which should make me feel better. Only it doesn’t.
Squishy, chocolate pudding feelings aside, I still have too many unanswered questions.
Maybe I should have known that the hellhounds would catch my scent that quickly. Maybe I should have.
Kane definitely should have. So why didn’t he warn me?
Why did he leave me unprotected and defenseless?
I’m so lost in my fuming, I don’t notice Kane isn’t driving straight back to Morgan’s until he pulls over.
Outside the window, buildings tower by the shores of Lake Austin. “Where are we?”
“Get out,” Kane says instead of answering.
“Why? Because if you’re going to leave me here—”
“He is not planning on leaving you here, child.” Kendal’s answer is surprisingly gentle. “He is trying to make it harder for the hellhounds to track us back to Morgan’s. Spreading your scent around town will accomplish this goal.”
“Oh.” I reach for the door handle.
“It would be beneficial if you could find a tree to rub against,” Kendal adds as I climb out of the car.
“I am not marking a tree!” I say before slamming the door behind me.
Not that I could anyway. There are no trees in sight. Instead, I take off my shoes and walk around barefoot for a minute.
Then I climb back in the car. Kane rolls down the windows and drives again. We stop twice more. I repeat the whole barefoot in the grass thing without comment. Finally, Kane rolls up the windows and heads back to Morgan’s.
I’m silent the whole time, feeling confused and overwhelmed. I don’t want him to care for me, not when he’s supposed to be falling for the princess. But I liked it when he at least didn’t want me dead.
Kane doesn’t let us out of the car in front of the house but pulls straight into the garage and doesn’t open the car door until the garage door is back down.
Ro is waiting for us on the steps that lead into the house. She’s sitting on the top one, with her head bowed, twisting a sheaf of papers in her hands.
“Oh, thank the Thread,” she says when Kane climbs out of the car.
She practically runs down the stairs to him and I expect her to throw her arms around him. Instead, she smacks his shoulder with the rolled-up papers.
“Where,”—she smacks him again—“have you”—Another smack. She must not be putting much force behind it, because he doesn’t even flinch. —“been?”
“You done?” he asks.
“No!” She smacks him one more time. Then she drops the papers and throws her arms around him, burying her face against his shoulder. “You should have been back an hour ago.”
“It took longer to create the loop than we thought. You know that. You were here.”
He glances at Kendal as he says it and they exchange a brief look. Does he know what Kendal told me? I don’t think so, because his gaze doesn’t even flicker in my direction.
“So what?” Ro asks. “Once you got through the loop, it should have taken you only another fifteen or twenty minutes to drive back here. I thought you’d gotten lost in the loop. Or that you’d made it through but then—”
She pulls herself off Kane, wiping tears from her eyes, then turns and practically runs from the garage.
Before Ro makes it through the door into the house, Morgan and Crab show up. “What took so long?” Morgan asks.
“Cupcake here was out on the street longer than anyone anticipated.”
Morgan studies me. “You okay?”
Kane takes a step closer to me. “Yeah, she’s fine. But the hellhounds had caught her scent.”
“Got it,” Morgan says. “I assume we should get out of here quickly?”
“Definitely,” Kane says.
Morgan heads for the garage door. “Okay everybody, grab your stuff. We’ll meet in the kitchen in five minutes.”
Everyone heads for the door, but Kane stops me with a hand on my arm as I walk past him.
“What?” I ask.
“Can I have a minute?”
“We only have five,” I say.
“Then I’ll be brief.” He glances toward the door and waits until we’re alone in the garage before he says, “You wanna tell me what’s wrong?”
“Who says anything’s wrong?”
“Well, you’ve barely spoken since I picked you up on Le Mare.”
“So?”
“You haven’t spoken,” he says again more slowly. “At all. And this is you we’re talking about. So I figure either something’s wrong, or hellhounds are the least of our worries, because the apocalypse is starting.”
“Oh,” I snap. “Because I talk so much, that if I’m quiet for five minutes it must be a sign of the apocalypse. Very funny.”
I’m about to storm off, but then I realize I left my messenger bag in the back seat of the car.
“So?”
“So what?” I reach in the car, grab the handle and tug, putting the full force of my anger in that action. But the door must have locked automatically, because the handle slips from my grasp. I tug again. No luck.
“So are you going to tell me why you’re so pissed off?”
I glare at Kane. “Can you open the door?”
“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?”
That’s when I see them. The car keys dangling from his finger.
“Open the damn car.”
He jangles the keys. “Tell me.”
He’s holding them out of reach, so far above my head there’s no damn way I can grab them. Goddamn it! I am so tired of being at a disadvantage here!
I lunge for the keys, but Kane grabs me, slinging an arm around my waist. He pulls my back against his chest, lifting me clear off my feet.
I kick at his shins. “Open the car!”
“Tell me what I did to piss you off.”
“You want to know what you did?” I yell. “You sent me out there, without protection, when you knew hellhounds would come for me.”
Kane’s arms loosen around me, and my feet slide to the floor.
“I could have died,” I whisper. “You knew and you didn’t say anything.”
He doesn’t let me go, though, but pulls me gently to him. Slowly. Testing me to see if I’ll pull away. I don’t. My anger isn’t gone so much as it’s swallowed up by my fear.
And then I feel him rest his chin on top of my head. “I didn’t know.”
The anguish in his voice flows over me, washing away the blunt edges of my anger. And then he presses the keys into my hand and lets me go.
I click the door open without looking at him and grab my bag from the back seat.
I’m most of the way to the door to the house when he says again, “I really didn’t know they would come for you. The lotion usually lasts for days, even if you shower. When Morgan had your clothes and shoes repaired, he had the isotopic frequency of your world wiped clean from them.”
“Isotopic frequency?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s what the hellhounds track. It’s stron
gest in metals. That’s how they follow the iron in your blood. You should have been safe.” His voice cracks. When I glance back, he’s standing with his hands on his hips, his head bowed in defeat. “And I don’t know what else to do to protect you from them.”
Shame burns through me at seeing him like this. I should say something. Forgive him or apologize. Something. But I’m embarrassed. I have never acted like that before. I have never thrown a temper tantrum. I’ve never—
My thoughts stutter as it hits me. I squeeze my eyes closed, wincing, before I turn on my heel.
Kane is standing right where I left him, his head bowed, his hands hanging limply by his side.
I skid to halt a few feet away. “I’m sorry.”
He looks up, relief crinkling the corners of his eyes. “It’s okay. You’ve had a hell of a day.”
“No, I mean, not about that. I mean, yes, obviously, I’m sorry. I acted like a brat. And that was inexcusable. But—” I let the messenger bag drop to my feet so I can use my hands to dig around in my pockets. I find what I’m looking for and pull them out. “But mostly I’m sorry about this.”
I hold out my hand and open it, so Kane can see the nuts and bolts.
He looks from me to the bolts and back up again.
“What?” he asks.
“I didn’t know that thing about the isotopic frequency in metals. If this is what the hellhounds chased…”
His head is tipped to the side, like he’s considering. “No, if those are the ones from the Faraday Cage, I’d had them wiped when I brought them over. Do you have anything else metal on you? Anything at all?”
I drop down to my knees and pull my messenger bag over my shoulder, quickly dumping the contents out onto the ground. I quickly separate out a few likely offenders. My cell phone. My keys to the apartment in Austin. My MAC lipstick. My Leatherman. He bends down to watch.
He scoops up the lipstick, the keys, and the Leatherman. “I’ll have Cricket wipe these clean and bring them back.”
“What about the cell phone?” I ask.
“Nah. We import those all the time. Most have only about one percent iron and the circuits are too delicate to be wiped.”
I shove everything else back into the bag, then stand. “There’s one more thing. Something that won’t be as easy to wipe.”
“What?”
And this part? This is where it gets awkward.
My hands are shaking as I reach up to the neck of my Hello, Cupcake! shirt and pull down the neck to reveal the spot, about an inch above my bra, where my scar is. And where, when I turned sixteen, I had a rune tattooed.
For a long moment, he just stares at the tattoo. Then he swallows. “That’s my rune.”
“Yeah.”
The symbol—a spiral of three interlocking J shapes—is a rune of deception or disguise. It’s embossed on the cover of the every one of the Traveler books. It’s printed beneath every chapter head. And it’s inked into my skin.
It’s the rune Kane’s mother marked him with, right before she died.
I let go of my shirt, letting the neckline shift back into place.
But Kane reaches out and pulls my shirt down again.
The backs of his fingers are rough against my chest, and my skin flushes. I can hardly suck in enough air to breathe. Even the most innocent of touches makes it hard for me to concentrate, but, somehow, there’s nothing innocent about this touch. Not with his hand where it is. Not when he’s staring at me like this. Not when it’s his mark that’s on my chest.
He swallows visibly, and his voice sounds rough when he asks, “Why is my rune on your chest?”
“I got the tattoo to cover a scar.”
Staring at the rune, he traces the tattoo with his fingers, feeling for the raised tissue of my scar beneath the ink.
It’s barely visible anymore, but I know its shape as well as the shape of my mother’s face. I used to spend hours staring at it in the mirror, trying to wrap my brain around how it had happened. Trying to sort through the jumbled memories. The scar itself is an almost perfect oval in the center with jagged flared edges. Like a sunburst. It would almost be pretty, except it isn’t.
“It’s a bullet wound,” I tell him. “I was shot.”
I have a much smaller scar on my shoulder, the entry wound. That one doesn’t bother me as much. I don’t have to look at it. I don’t have to answer questions about it anytime someone sees it. You would be surprised how hard it is to change clothes in gym class without anyone seeing your upper body. Or worse, wear a swimsuit.
“You were shot?” Kane asks, his brow furrowing in confusion.
“Yes.”
“Did they remove the bullet?”
“Yes.” I don’t tell him about the punctured lung. The weeks in the hospital. I’m about to explain the real problem with my scar—the ink in the tattoo that covers it contains metal.
But before I can, he says, “I didn’t realize the Dark World was so dangerous. That a girl your age would be shot…” His gaze flickers back to mine. “Did you live in a war zone?”
A bubble of near hysterical laughter rises in my throat. The idea that my mother—who was protective even before the incident—would let me anywhere near a war zone is ridiculous.
“No.”
“Then how did it happen?”
Instantly, my throat closes over whatever words I might say. Tears prickle against the back of my eyelids, so hot and fierce that I have to turn aside and squeeze my eyes closed for a moment. I make a show of readjusting the items in my bag and slinging it over my shoulder, hoping he won’t notice my discomfort. “It was an accident. I was shot by accident.”
This is the part that never gets any easier. The part I will never be better at explaining. The reason I need the tattoo so that I don’t have to lie to strangers about what happened.
Except, I have to tell Kane. It would feel wrong not to. I have been unceremoniously thrust into his life. I know things about him that no stranger should know. This will not even things up. I have no illusions about that. But he deserves to know the truth about me.
Besides, there is doubt that lingers in the back of my mind. Doubt that will always linger in the back of my mind, no matter how many reassurances have been given to me by not one, but three different therapists. What if I am susceptible to the same emotional instability that plagued my father? The doctors say no. They are very good at reassuring me. But I am not very good at believing them.
If I do have the potential to…break the way my father did, doesn’t Kane deserve to know what he’s getting into?
“My father shot me.” I force my hands to still. Force a shuddering breath out of my lungs. Force myself to turn back and meet his gaze. “My father wasn’t well. Mentally.”
“He shot you on purpose?”
“No. Not…” This is the problem with never telling the story out loud. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to talk about it anymore. I’ve never had to explain it to anyone who didn’t have my medical records. So I fall back on the most technical language that I know. “He had a psychotic break, characterized by paranoid delusions and hallucinations.” That’s as far as the medical terminology gets me, but I can tell from Kane’s frown that it’s not enough information. “He imagined things. He saw monsters. Everywhere. He thought people were after him. That they were trying to hurt him. And me.”
Kane’s frown deepens, and I find myself rushing to defend my father. “He wasn’t always like that. One day, he was fine. Then, suddenly, he saw monsters everywhere. He was trying to protect me from them, trying to keep both of us safe.”
“What happened?”
“Somehow he got a gun. I don’t know where he found it, because we never had a gun in the house before. Mom and Dad both hated them. He was waving it around. I guess Mom tried to get me away from him. And he shot me
.”
Kane is frowning again, and his gaze drops back down to the tattoo, which is almost entirely covered by my Hello, Cupcake T-shirt that has crept back into place. “What do you mean, you guess?”
My thoughts stutter, because that’s not the part of the story I had expected him to question. “I…I don’t really remember everything very clearly.”
“You don’t remember what happened?”
“No. The doctor said that was normal though. That it’s common to lose memories when something very traumatic happens.”
“Who else was there when it happened?”
“Just my parents.”
“But your mother remembers? And your father? They remember the same thing?”
Why is he questioning me?
I’ve embraced my trauma-induced amnesia. I don’t want those memories. How my father, who had always been the most loving man I could imagine, who had been kind and gentle, who’d held me on his lap and read to me every night of my childhood, could somehow transform into a monster willing to shoot me? I don’t want to remember what that felt like. Or how terrified I must have been.
I don’t want to remember being afraid of the person I trusted most. “Yes. She remembered. I didn’t. I’m okay with that.”
“Is that what your father remembers, too?”
“What does this have to do with anything? It happened. I have the scars to prove it.” Defiantly, I jerk down the collar of my shirt again and gesture to the tattoo on my chest. “This definitely happened.”
His gaze drops to the tattoo again and then back up to my face. He takes a step closer to me and places his palm over my chest covering the scar. “I’m asking, because that doesn’t look like a bullet wound to me.”
“Oh, because you have so much experience identifying Dark Worlder bullet wounds?”
“No, I don’t. None. But I do have a lot of experience identifying scars left by Sleekers.”
“What? How would a Sleeker scar you?”
He drops his hand from my skin, leaving a burst of searing heat where his fingers were. Then he raises the hem of his own T-shirt. On the left side of his abdomen, an inch or two above the waistband of his jeans, is a small round wound. Almost identical to the wound on my back. Then he turns and lets me see the other side. Like my wound, there’s a round hole about an inch across, with scalloped edges. The edges of his wound are more rounded, almost like the petals of a flower. But the two wounds—mine and his—are so similar, they could have been made by identical weapons. By the same gun. Or, if Kane is to be believed, by the same Sleeker.