by LJ Rivers
“It wasn’t at first. Lately, I see your point, but you guys never really got to see the side of Gemma I see when it’s just the two of us.”
“Doesn’t hurt that she’s pretty, either, does it?” Jen said, striding into the kitchen and taking a seat by the table.
“She is that.” Duncan gave her a lopsided grin.
Something was off. Gemma might act differently with Duncan around, but I didn’t think she was that different. They really had nothing in common. “So, when you guys first met, you talked about me. Anything in particular?”
“Mostly about your studies. Once she revealed to me she was a Mag, I sort of let it slip that I knew a couple. Apparently, she mostly knew her own kin and hadn’t been able to make a lot of Mag friends, so—”
“Figures,” Jen mumbled.
I kicked her gently on her shin under the table.
Duncan finally took a large swig of his coffee and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “None of that matters at this point. I’m sure she’s already dumped my cute little tushy.”
“It is cute,” Jen concurred.
“Cheers, Jen, I needed that.” He finished his coffee and put the cup in the dishwasher. “I’ll go listen to sad songs and pine for my girlfriend—or ex—for a while.”
He left us in the kitchen, and I stared after him.
“What?” Jen asked.
“Don’t you think it’s kind of odd?”
“Odd?”
“Duncan and Gemma. He said they met in the hallway outside one of his MM meetings. She was pretty quick to reveal to him she’s a Mag, and apparently they found they had lots in common.”
Jen flapped her hands in the air. “I never liked that fox.”
“Which you’ve made painstakingly clear,” I said. “She has her moments, though.” Like when she saved Auberon. Twice. Come to think of it, she practically kissed his buckled shoes every chance she got.
“In here,” Jen called at the same time as the front door opened.
“Hey, Nick,” I said. “You look good. Much better than a couple of days ago.”
He gave Jen a kiss and smiled at me as he sat where Duncan had just been. “I feel invigorated, that’s for sure. If it wasn’t for you, I would likely be dead by now. Thank you!”
“Happy to help,” I said. “You had us all worried for a while.”
“I thought I was about to lose you,” Jen said and rested her hand on his forearm.
His arm twitched a little at her touch. “Being in the hospital gave me some time to think.” He folded his hand carefully over Jen’s. “I know that with you being a Mag and all, there are strings attached to that, and I’m cool with it. Or at least I have been. But I don’t understand why you have to place yourself in a position where you might be exposed, or worse. That lorry took me down—a human—but it was meant to be a message to your kind. And then there’s the bombing in The Forge. The lot of you just had to rush into that mess, exposing yourselves to all kinds of ugly, and—”
“Hold up,” I said. “We went in there to see if anyone needed our help.”
Jen withdrew her hand. “Yeah, what Ru said. When you know people are suffering, and that you might be able to help, you don’t just walk the other way.”
Nick lowered his head, speaking to the table. “Perhaps, sometimes, you should.”
“What?” Jen gaped.
“Walk away. You don’t have to work for Glover. That’s a choice. Working for that campaign is like standing next to a bullseye as the arrows come flying, just hoping no one misses.”
“What I do there is important.” Jen’s voice was sharp, and there was a deep rumble at the back of her throat. “Glover is trying to earn us equal rights, you dumbass. I want to support the right side here.”
“You could simply vote for her. That’s supportive enough, isn’t it?”
I sank into my chair, looking between them. I should have stepped away, but I didn’t dare move.
“I’m not quitting my job,” Jen said. “You can’t ask that of me.”
He gave her a sideways glance. “It’s not like you’re getting paid. Please, Jen. If anything were to happen to you, I—”
“I’m a bloody wolf. I’ll be fine.” She flashed her teeth in a feral snarl.
“I might not be. Why put yourself at risk if there’s no need for it?”
“If no one ever did that, the bad guys would always win. JC would be a world class dictator, and Mags would be put away or put down like lambs to the slaughter. We have to stand up for ourselves, for what’s right. I’m sorry, Nick, but this is important to me.”
He banged his fist on the table, making me suck in a breath. “What, and I’m not?”
Jen shook her head, bewildered. “Of course you are.”
“Just not as important as your ambitions. I get it. I was only hit by a lorry where you ‘work’.” He airquoted the word. “And I almost died because of it. Jen, I thought I was dead. And if I hadn’t been at the campaign office, neither of us would have been at risk in the first place.”
“I’m a Mag.” She waved a hand between herself and me, including me into what was looking more and more like a serious fight. “We’re at risk all the time.”
Nick drew in a long, hard breath. “Please, Jen. I beg you. Quit your job.”
“I can’t, I’m sorry.” She bit her lower lip. “And I won’t.”
He shook his head, leaned in and kissed Jen softly on her cheek. “Then you’ll have to quit me, because I’m out.”
Jen whimpered. She edged closer to Nick, but retreated. “I—I can’t choose someone over my beliefs. If you can’t support me in this, then—” A tear fell from her eye.
I looked between them, tears pressing behind my own eyes. Was this happening? I shouldn’t be here for this, but I couldn’t exactly get up and leave now. Instead, I reached under the table and offered my hand to Jen. She took it and held on tight. A little too tight, but I could handle it. Maybe.
“So that’s it, then?” Nick asked Jen. “You’ve made your choice?”
Jen’s hand slipped out of mine as she leaned forward and cupped her palms around Nick’s cheeks. Their foreheads rested against each other and tears dropped from all of us. “Thank you, Nick, for everything. For teaching me that people can be kind, and that first impressions aren’t everything.” She gave him a gentle kiss. “If you can find it in you to support me, then I don’t want you to leave, but this is something I can’t back out of.”
“And I love you for it. I just—I can’t.” He stroked back a lock of her hair. “Goodbye, Jeannine Lune. It’s been a wild ride.” He stood, lingered for a breath, staring at Jen, who held her head in her palms, sobbing. He shifted his gaze to mine and gave a small shake of his head, then turned and walked out.
Chapter Thirteen
I was soaked from inside to out, and my lungs were screaming for air, but I was not about to hand the victory to Jen. She had passed me on the Teddington bridge and was five yards in front, with the campus gates only half a mile away. I leaned forward and tried to gain on her. My legs begged for mercy, but I ignored them. However hard I pushed, Jen slowly drifted away. Her wolf stamina was simply too much for me to handle.
When I finally stopped outside Craydon Court, she had already released the laces on her Nikes. My Fitbit congratulated me with a new personal best for the route around Bushy Park, but I was shaking so hard that I couldn’t discern the exact numbers. It took me a minute to regain my composure. On any given day I would be happy with my performance and maybe demand a high five from Jen, but her expression told me this wasn’t the time.
“The old cliché about crying in the rain is a joke,” she muttered. “It doesn’t hide the tears at all, and my make-up is running like the Amazon. I bet I look like that dude in Kiss.”
I waved her off. “Far from it, babes. You look like all of them.”
She tried to smile. “Tell me what happened, Red. I don’t understand it.”
“I really don
’t either. I mean, I get that he’s worried about you. And himself, for that matter. But mostly for you.” Having seen how Nick would risk his life to save others’—including mine—I knew he was no coward. “He loves you so much that he can’t stand to see you get hurt.”
“So instead, he ripped my heart in two?”
“I didn’t mean—it’s just—” I shook my head. “Oh, sweet Nimue, I suck at this.”
“You think?” She locked eyes with me, her ice blue pupils radiating through the mess of running mascara and strands of soaking wet hair. Tears mixed with rain washed down her cheeks, leaving big droplets on her trembling lower lip. She abruptly broke into a wide smile and started laughing. The kind of hysterical, crying laughter that comes when you’re on the brink of a breakdown.
I pulled her close, squeezing her as tight to me as I could. “I’m so sorry, love.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Charlie and Duncan were watching TV when Jen and I joined them. Both of us had wrapped our hair in towels, and I was wearing my Pink bathrobe with ‘H2BH’ on the back, which the girls had bought me for my birthday. All three of them, including the one on the telly, behind the six o'clock news anchor.
“—de facto leader of the Mag community. Gemma Todd, a twenty-one-year-old student at White Willow University, is also a Shifter. During the aftermath of the bombings in The Forge, our crew caught this footage of her addressing the crowd.”
“Citizens of The Forge! … This is an act of war. The Lionhearts must pay for this.”
The police officer in the lower left corner is Commander Travers of the Mag-Ops task force, trying to persuade Gemma to end her impromptu speech.
“Are we still going to let Jarl Colburn and his Mag-hating politics rule England? It’s time for Mags to wake up. To rise against the tyranny of humans!”
The image froze with Gemma screaming into the megaphone. She looked every bit the predatory animal she was hiding underneath her petite human form. Her canines were clearly visible in the close-up, and they had already turned razor sharp.
Charlie scoffed. “If that isn’t speculative journalism, then nothing is.”
“Shh!” Duncan turned the volume up.
On the screen, Gemma’s face was kept in a small frame in the corner, while a reporter stood next to Jarl Colburn under the awning outside an office building. The logo on the glass doors behind them wasn’t hard to read.
“Mr Colburn, what’s your reaction to what we’ve seen in The Forge today? Is this rise of the Magical community an expected result of your political programme, as the young lady implied?”
Colburn shook his head in blatant disgust.
“First of all, let me just reiterate what I’ve said all day, and what I said after the cowardly attacks on Ms Glover’s campaign headquarters on Monday. Neither The Coalition of Purity nor The Church of Purity have ever expressed one syllable to suggest we want the Magicals hurt in any manner. I will also repeat my pledge on behalf of myself and my company, JC Pharmaceuticals, that we are at the disposal of the authorities should they require any help whatsoever.”
“Yes, but you have to agree that—”
“Furthermore, I can’t even begin to imagine the traumatic experience this must be for the families and relatives of the victims of the Forge bombings. That some of them react with anger, maybe even hatred, is just human nature.”
“Or Mag nature, you imbécile!” Jen shooed Charlie and Duncan aside and sat next to them on the sofa. I remained standing, hands crossed over my chest and breathing as calmly as possible so as not to set my robe ablaze.
“So this is a short term reaction, you mean?”
Colburn looked sternly at the reporter, and for a moment I thought he was going to slap him. I hadn’t made it a habit to agree with JC lately, but even I was annoyed by the amateur the news channel had sent.
“Young man, this Gemma Todd is dangerous, let there be no doubt about that. What you managed to phrase as a ‘short term reaction’—which should be the heading of your letter of resignation, by the way—was cold-blooded murder. She and her bloodthirsty kin brutally maimed and killed a young man on nationwide television. I’m not going to turn this into a political rally, but it would be amiss of me not to warn my fellow Brits about what is happening.”
“Wh—what are you—?”
Colburn grabbed the microphone and pushed the poor reporter out of the way. He turned to stare into the camera with the same steel-grey eyes that had mesmerised the guests when he tried to auction me off at his New Year’s Eve party.
“Listen to me. The Magicals are turning against us humans, just as I have predicted. The spawn of Satan is trying to bring our beloved Britain to her knees. But, as all others who have tried—some as recently as only eighty years ago—we shall overcome this threat. The first step is also the most important. Get the proper legislation in place. Legislation that allows our police and military to withstand this uproar!”
He dropped the microphone on the pavement and went back into his office building. The cameraman panned from the vanishing Colburn to the reporter. How the producer in the studio allowed the airing of this pathetic image of a journalist on his knees, desperately trying to save his microphone while losing all dignity, to keep rolling, was beyond me. Then again, it made for good TV, and Colburn might be right about the reporter losing his job, anyway.
When the anchor finally appeared, Duncan muted the sound and put the remote on the table. “She couldn’t have meant for them to kill him,” he whispered. “You were there, guys. She never planned for—” His voice trailed, and he buried his face in his hands.
I glanced at Charlie, begging her to have an answer, but she stared, equally bewildered, at Jen.
“It—it looked like she wanted to scare the police,” I began, eerily aware of how similar this was to Auberon’s excuse for having my dad killed. And as with Auberon, I didn’t believe my own words. “And maybe the other two got caught in the … chaotic mood of it all?”
Jen stroked Duncan’s back. “It seems she has taken it upon herself to lead the Mags, though. And even if she didn’t mean to kill the Harvester, you have to remember what he was there for. He wouldn’t have thought twice about hurting her, or killing her.”
Duncan nodded.
Charlie sat back and pulled her knees up to her chest. Our gazes met and tears gathered in her eyes. She had always been closer to Duncan than I had, even though I had jumped into a cage fight to save him. Their emotional bond ran deeper, maybe because they were something as rare as a human minority in our little group.
“I still love her,” Duncan said into his hands. “I don’t want her to get hurt.”
Jen’s hand stopped for a second, and she drew in a long breath. “I know, mon ami. Trust me, I know.”
Tiny sobs from Charlie accompanied Duncan’s sniffling. He turned and took her hand. “Bloody hell, what a pathetic bunch of soppy weirdos we are, eh?”
She tried to smile, but kept crying. “It’s falling apart.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It is. All of this.” She waved her hand at us and the living room. “Nick’s gone. Gemma is obviously gone. And during the months since you all came into my life, I’ve allowed myself to feel safe for the first time in … forever.” She started to shiver.
I moved to the other side of the sofa to sit next to her. “You’re safe, Char.” The words sounded just as meaningless as they tasted.
“The crazy part of it is that we’re not. Not by a long shot. You could have died at that farm, Ruby. And you, too, Jen, not to mention the Mag-flu. But that’s not my point. I’ve still felt safe. With you. As my—” Her shiver completely overtook her.
Pulling her into my arms, I tried to comfort her. “It’s OK. Just let it out. I’m here.”
She pushed me away. “Don’t you see? That’s exactly it! I love you. All of you. I had even grown to like that crazy fox—no offence, Dunc.”
He sat up and shrugged. “None
taken. I believe you described her spot on.”
“And you love me. I know you do. I haven’t felt so loved—so safe—in all my life. You’re my family. And I can’t stand watching it being ripped to pieces.”
She leaned back again, her breath still ragged, but slowing.
“It’s stopped raining,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk, shall we? Sorry, Dunc. Angels only.”
“Fine by me. I just remembered I haven’t eaten all day.”
Jen stood. “Then let’s order a stack of pizzas first. I’m starving, too.”
“No, that’s all right. I kinda prefer to be alone for a bit. Thanks. All of you.”
“Can we go somewhere they have food?” Jen asked.
“Sure,” I said. “The stables over at Kew Gardens, perhaps?”
She grinned. “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver, Red.”
The air in London could never measure up to Chester, naturally, but during the first minutes after a heavy summer rain it came quite close. For a while, the dust and smog was more or less gone, and the scents of flowers, grass, and purity filled my nostrils. Jen seemed to enjoy the sensation, too, as she walked with her chin even higher than usual and inhaled what had to be a whole symphony of scents to her.
“If it’s quite all right by you, I’d prefer not to go to Brady’s,” Charlie said as we wandered along the path. “Sorry, Jen, but I fear it’s too noisy in there.”
“Think nothing of it, chéri. I’ll survive. For you.” She blew Charlie a kiss.
“That’s how it is,” I said. “We’ll all survive. For you. For each other. If you think I’d allow the three of us to split up, Char, you’re nuts.”