by Apollo Blake
TWENTY-NINE
RUNAWAY
An amused looking Jackson greeted us back in the club. The few employees behind the bar had multiplied, and I wasn’t surprised to see Dreadlocks—Lucie—among them. The club lights had been shut off again, replaced by the harsh overheads, illuminating the scratches in the leather couches, the spiderweb cracks in the concrete sections of the floor—all of the ugliness that was normally hidden behind a mask of chemicals and sex and neon lights.
“So,” Jackson said as we approached, clapping his hands together loudly. “You’ve returned from the war! Lover’s quarrel over?”
I said, “We’re not lovers,” at the same time Hunter said, “We aren’t fighting.”
He beamed at us. “Sure, sure. So what’s our plan boys?”
“I’m going to head down to my grandmother’s shop and ask her if she knows anything about Crayton’s current whereabouts,” Hunter said. “While I’m gone I suggest you get some of your crew to try and track him again.”
“And while they do that, you’re going to arrange for a car to take Riley home.” Things were about to get increasingly dangerous, and I didn’t need another person to worry about shoving herself into the crossfire.
Jackson looked puzzled. “What on earth makes you think you can make her get in it once it pulls up?” he asked. Clearly he was a quick learner.
“No clue,” I admitted, wincing at the thought of explaining to Riley that I thought she needed to be ushered to safety like a damsel in distress. “Leave it to me, though. I’m gonna go check on her now.” I faced Hunter. “Try not to get yourself killed the second you step outside.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
I twisted my hand at my side, a whiplash of telekinetic force rustling his black hair, caressing his face, and walked away.
That was as close to a good luck, be safe as he was getting, and he could be grateful I had somehow managed not to run for the hills yet. When I strode off I was kind of afraid that might be the last thing I ever said to him, but I didn’t know how to turn around and replace it with anything kinder.
Riley and Penn were camped out on one of the couches in the far corner, away from all the noise. It looked like they were in the middle of something—and hating every minute of it. Penn sat on the edge of the couch, facing away from her younger cousin, arms folded in her lap. For all of her strength, she looked like a wilting flower, petals closing in as she tried to hide herself from the world. Riley was a striking contrast, emotion burning bright on her face as she sat with her back to Penn, knees folded beneath her. They were polar opposites who managed to be mirror images—the athlete and the scholar, one withdrawn and thoughtful with a resilient strength, the other brimming with words and electric energy, too hot to touch.
Suddenly an image came to me of Riley, submerged in water. Her head tilted back, eyes closed, lips pursed. I stared at her as if from a distance, and her eyes broke open, dancing with blue light. I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it before, but there was something about it akin to the feel of a memory, that feeling like I couldn’t remember a word on the tip of my tongue.
In reality, Riley and Penn looked the way people who wanted to be interrupted tend to look, each of them staring at the floor, Penn’s face flushed with colour, so I started over. Behind me, Jackson and Hunter’s voices lowered. Their tones turned solemn, and I knew they were discussing strategy and planning and all the ways this could go wrong.
We were really going to do this. Try, at least.
“—don’t want to talk about it,” Penn was saying. “What about you? Are you okay? This is all a big shock, I know.”
“It wouldn’t have been if you’d given me a heads up,” Riley snapped. She drew her phone out of her pocket and swiped it to life, the glow of the screen reflected in her glossy eyes. She always cried when she was angry or frustrated.
“Riley. . .” Penn drew in a shaky breath. “I—” She caught sight of me and cut herself off. I couldn’t tell if the look that crossed her face was surprise or relief, but she latched onto it either way. “I am going to get another drink.”
“Huh?” Riley looked up and saw me. “Oh. Hey.”
“Hey,” I sighed.
How long could I get away with napping for when this was over?
Penn was forgotten instantly as she slid off the sofa and strode past me—steps confident and steady even under stress. Riley tucked her knees beneath her legs and pulled me onto the couch, and I sank into the cushions like melting gold.
God, that was good.
I kept thinking that once this was all over, I would finally have time to sort everything out. There was still so much to say—to Riley, to Hunter. . . .
So much I’d put off I had to finally sort through, shifting away all the sand until I could see the shape of my life again, digging my identity out of the dirt like an archaeologist uncovering the ruins of a lost city.
“Any new powers yet?” Riley asked, shoving her phone back into her hoodie. “You know, once you level up you could be like a gay Superman.”
“Because Superman isn’t already super gay.”
“Kent says all Kryptonians are pansexual.”
I snorted. “Wait until he meets Hunter.” Well, officially.
“Hunter is pan?” Riley looked dubious. “See, when I hear pansexual witch, I think stylish goth girl, not mystery jock.”
“Mystery jock.” I repeated, a manic grin tugging at the corners of my mouth. “Like any minute Scooby-Doo is just gonna step out of the shadows behind him and ask for a fucking snack.”
“The fireballs are kinda tacky,” Riley said.
“I like them.”
“There’s no substance to them. They’re just showy, you know? They’re like that red scarf Kent always wears, even when its not cold. It’s just to seem hipster. It’s embellishment. Window dressing.”
“I also like that red scarf. It matches his hair. He looks dapper.”
“He looks like Mr. Tumnus.”
I frowned. “Are you implying those are mutually exclusive? Mr. Tumnus was pretty fucking dapper, Riley.”
She laughed. “Planning to chat up a Faun sometime soon, Sky? I didn’t really think that would be your type.”
“You caught me.”
I closed my eyes and leaned back against the sofa, just breathing in, enjoying a minute of calm. In a few seconds I would have to tell Riley about the ride I’d arranged for her—like I was a soccer mom setting up a play date—and then she’d be about as mad at me as she was at Penn. But for now I was just a normal nineteen year-old talking to his best friend after the wildest few days he’d ever had, and it was nice. Simple. Like so many things weren’t lately.
Riley sobered a bit. “If you like him, I like him.”
“I want to murder him most of the time.”
“When you aren’t sleeping with him.”
“That,” I said, “would be a very fair and true assessment of our relationship. Insomuch as we have one. Which we don’t.”
She ignored that. “How are you holding up? I mean, whatever you saw down there must have freaked you out, right?” She was talking about the cathedral—the vision.
I sat up, suddenly stiff. I wasn’t ready to tell any of the others about who I’d seen, but Riley? I knew she would keep her mouth shut until I was ready to talk. “Don’t tell anyone about this,” I said, and she leaned forward, eager, “but I saw someone in the vision. Someone I know. As in, this life, not the last—but that’s where the vision was from. I mean, I was a different person then, different body and everything.”
How else had I changed between lives? I’d always accepted that things like gender and sexuality were fluid, but it was another thing to see myself living an entirely different existence in another life, another time, another body.
I didn’t know what my name had been, but I remembered what it felt like to be her, the ways in which we held ourselves a bit different, the flash of her bewitching g
reen eyes in the mirror.
She was me, and I was her, but she was also dead, and the flashes of memory came and went, unruly and hard to hold on to. Like a film separated us, blurring the details.
“Who was it?” she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as she spoke.
“This chick named Dezba. I have no clue what her last name is, but she’s this badass Skinwalker I met down in the bazaar the other day. I don’t really know her, but she was in my vision. How is that possible? I mean, how old is she?”
She looked like she was in her early twenties, but that couldn’t be true if she’d been someone I knew in a past life. Hunter had said some beings—even some charmers—were immortal, but seeing that in action was different than hearing about it, too. Like legends and fairy tales reaching off of the page to pull me in with them.
“What were you wearing?” Riley asked. “What time period did it look like?”
I thought back to the piece of the past I’d been given. Dezba was in high-waisted jeans an a pair of scruffy white sneakers, a plain, baggy black hoodie clinging to her frame, drenched with sweat. Me—or not me (whatever her name was), had had bandages wrapped around her—my—fingers, and a ring on her left hand with a chunk of onyx in it. Her nails were perfectly manicured, although one of them had gotten chipped at some point.
That was all there was. Hmmm.
“Seventies?” I guessed. “Maybe the early eighties?”
It could be possible—I’d been born, in this life at least, in the early summer of ninety-seven. Which would mean I’d probably gotten a flash of the life just before this one.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, seeming worried. She knew me well.
“I’m thinking that my next move when Crayton’s dealt with is to learn more about this Skinwalker.”
“What is a Skinwalker?” She tapped the outline of her phone in her pocket. “Should I Google?”
“Nah," I rolled my shoulders back and tried to wake up a bit. “It’s a type of Charmer—some breed of magik created by the Navajo. They’re a kind of shifter”
“Sounds intense.”
Across the room Penn was talking to Dreadlocks over the bar, and between us and them, Hunter and Jackson seemed to be wrapping things up. I should get this out of the way.
“Change of subject.” I said, and Riley raised her defined eyebrows. “I need you to do me a favour.”
“If you need me to kill someone, I have a knife in my purse.”
“What? Where did you—” I shook my head. “No, never mind. I—”
“I’m not helping you raid the bar just before you head off to fight Voldemort.”
“I was picturing him as more of a super villain than a dark lord.”
“Whatever. You can’t murder him if you’re drunk.”
“I like to think of it as pest extermination,” I said. “Christ, that’s not even what I want anyway, stop distracting me. I asked Jackson to get a car to bring you home, and I don’t want you to argue with me.” I could tell she meant to protest, but I sped on, not giving her an opening. “I know you think you’re tough and you can handle yourself, and you’ve taken all of this like a fucking rock star—but I can’t go out and do this if I don’t know you’re safe.”
It sucked to say it out loud—mostly because it meant admitting I had feelings—but this girl was more than my rock: she was a part of me. We grew with each other, our movements connected like cogs and gears forcing each other to turn in tandem, work together to create something larger than all of our own tiny parts.
I needed her home safe, suffocating under the weight of her parents’ mutual adoration of her, and not here, cooped up in a nightclub run by Jackson, an easy target for anyone Crayton could send crawling to scope out the enemy. Jackson was in open conflict with him now—and I didn’t trust this place to be safe enough for her even now, let alone while everyone I trusted (for lack of a better word) was off with Hunter and I, working to take the son of a bitch down.
“Please, Ri. Do this for me and I swear I’ll—okay, I honestly don’t know. I’ll build you a castle or something. I’ll buy you a cruise ticket. I have no clue. I just don’t want to be scraping your dead body off of the floor come midnight.”
“It’s already midnight.”
“Don’t be clever right now.”
The sharp twist of her mouth as she frowned at me, the slump of her shoulders as she exhaled in something like defeat and looked away. “Fine, fuck—but I want details as soon as you’re done kicking ass out there. As in, all the gory, head-ripping off, gut-pulling-out kind of details.” Basically Riley’s way of saying don’t die, I love you.
This was why we were friends.
“Thank you,” I said. I wanted to add a lovably snarky bitch at the end to make this all less emo, but I didn’t. This was serious. This was me being serious for once.
Riley just nodded, quick jerk of her skull, still staring in the other direction.
This club smelled like sweat and leather and booze. If I wasn’t so tired it would either be making me horny or thirsty, but I was, and that was not optimal. I needed to be wide awake to pull this off, and I was ready to drop. I felt strung-out.
There was no time for exhaustion, though.
I nudged Riley’s shoulder with mine, warmth touching warmth, and then stood. “I’m gonna go grab a nap downstairs, but Jackson should have the car ready soon.” I rubbed at my eyes with my balled fists, working the weariness out of them. “See you when I’m done kicking ass?”
“Unless I see you first.”
I stopped to talk to the guys as I made my way downstairs, tapping Jackson on the shoulder. I was partly surprised Hunter hadn’t left yet. “I’m gonna go crash in your office for an hour. Riley won’t fight the ride.”
Jackson looked impressed.
“Alright, then,” Hunter said. He reached out and touched my elbow once, quickly, then let his hand drop to his side. “I should be back before you wake up—once I’ve talked to Althea we’ll at least have an idea where to start looking for Crayton.”
“And I should have gained back a bit of at least one of these new powers. Right?” I squinted at Jackson.
“Should be,” he said, shrugging.
Fantastic.
I nodded and stepped back, but I couldn’t force myself to turn away yet. I let myself scan Hunter’s imposing form, but it wasn’t enough—I didn’t think it would ever be enough for my greedy eyes. It might not even be enough if we were together—I could picture it so easily: bare bodies sinking into a soft mattress, darkness touching skin touching raw power, heat building between us like delicious friction. No, it might not be enough—it would be pretty damn close, though.
His eyes met mine, darkness rippling in his gaze, like he knew what I was thinking, like he wanted to let himself think it too, and then, slowly, he looked away.
I forced myself to do the same, and swung around to walk away, across the room. Shoved through the door into the hallway, tried not to leave my mind or my spine or my stupid, stupid heart back there on the floor in the form of a puddle.
When I was on the other side I forced myself to walk at a normal pace in case anyone else followed me through the door.
See Sky: calm, honest, heading downstairs to take a nap, nothing at all to hide.
See Sky five seconds later: cutting a sharp left through another unmarked door to retrace the same path a lethal Charmer boy with molten eyes and hands like well-worn instruments led him through just four short days ago. See him plunging out into the cold night, cursing at himself for forgetting a jacket, slipping into the shadows at the base of the black marble wall of the club.
The cold air slapped harder than my mother did, but I was glad. The frost spilling into my bones and grinding the seconds out into longer segments jolted me out of the daze of exhaustion.
No time to sleep.
Hunter passed the mouth of the alley a few seconds later, heading around the corner—he would take the route up
past blush and down King Street.
As soon as he was out of sight, I slipped out onto Union Street and headed for the same destination, but from the opposite direction.
THIRTY
DEADLY, DEADLY OPTIONS
I needed to talk to Althea for myself, and I had to do it alone. In my dream the old lady had mumbled cryptic warnings and tossed herself off the edge of the cliff. Hunter had said I should ask her if she’d sent it to me, and if so, what it had meant.
If Althea used general magik to visit me in my sleep before we’d even met, then she knew more than she was letting on, and I had to figure out what it was. It was a long shot, but it was worth it. Even if she had nothing more to tell me, nothing else to say, she could at least help me with conquering one of the powers I’d acquired from the relic. She was a consultant, and all.