by SM Reine
“I don’t think I’ll have use for it.”
“No?” She set the vial aside. “Focus the magic into my womb. Imagine the baby calming inside.”
As awful as James found the task, he couldn’t help but fall under the sway of her words. His eyes slid shut. He could almost see the fetus curled in warm, perfect darkness and hear the beating of its heart.
He had missed doing such magic with Hannah. It filled him with sadness to feel Ariane’s baby and know that he had never held his own. Nathaniel wouldn’t even speak to him now.
Ariane whispered words of magic, and the energy flowed between their hands.
The contractions slowed.
She turned in his arms, smiling up at him with a faint, mischievous smile. Almost close enough to kiss. But despite the smile, there was anger in her eyes. “I told you to stay away from my first daughter,” she said.
“You did,” James said, his mouth dry.
“Tell me what you’ve done to her,” Ariane said.
James pushed her away. She didn’t fight back. She simply sat up, rubbing the remaining oil into her hands like lotion.
He took off his glasses. Pinched the bridge of his nose. “Many years ago, Landon sent me there. He sent me to…” It was impossible to say the name aloud, as though it was trapped inside the cage of his clenched teeth.
“Araboth,” Ariane filled in softly. “The garden.”
James let out a breath. “I went there. There was a woman, an ancient woman, who called herself Eve. She had been expecting me.”
Ariane’s eyes glimmered. “And you swore an oath.”
“I swore an oath,” he repeated, barely above a whisper. “I swore to carry on the White Ash Coven’s line. I swore that if something were to happen to Elise…”
“You would take her back.”
James rubbed a hand over his eyes. He couldn’t face Ariane. “I told Elise that we had to run because He would find us if we didn’t. I told her that I was on her side. I lied, Ariane.”
“But it took you more than ten years to send her there.”
“She wasn’t ready to go back.” He dropped his head into his hands. “I wasn’t ready.”
“You love her.” It wasn’t a question.
James peered up at Ariane through his fingers. The scar on his left shoulder was hurting again, and he rubbed it with two fingers. “I didn’t just swear oaths, Ariane. The garden changed me. Yes, I love her—but worse than that…I am fascinated with her.”
Rain drizzled outside, rapping softly on the roof of the van, filling it with the sound of gentle drumming. The windows were fogged from their breathing, and the light outside was beginning to lighten to a velvety gray. The air was too warm and close.
“Your eyes used to be brown,” Ariane said.
He considered denying it. But there was no point, not anymore.
“Yes,” James sighed. “My eyes used to be brown.”
The back door of the van opened. Hannah stood on the other side, and James was relieved to see Nathaniel at her back.
“Are you ready to find the outpost?” she asked.
James wiped his oily hands off on his slacks, then crawled to the door, jumping to the mud outside. “More than ready.”
“I’ll wait here,” Ariane said. She wasn’t smiling anymore.
XI
James half-expected Nathaniel to make a break for it as they hiked up the service road toward the Haven. He certainly looked like he was thinking about it. He hung back from his mother with his hood over his head and his hands jammed in his pockets, eyeing the tree line as if searching for an escape route.
But whatever urge he may have had to flee seemed to be overpowered by the urge to stay close to his mother. He hovered at Hannah’s shoulder like a very tall bulldog.
Whether Nathaniel was guarding her from the Union or from James, he wasn’t sure.
James could tell when they were entering Union territory because of the “No Trespassing” signs. Although the UKA logo wasn’t on them, they were painted black with bold white lettering—creative, as always.
Halfway up the hill, they came to an iron gate. The accompanying sign was much less innocuous than the others. It said, “Photography is Prohibited,” and “Use of Deadly Force Authorized.”
The gate was only intended to stop cars, not pedestrians, so James simply stepped around the posts.
Hannah didn’t follow.
“What’s wrong?” James asked.
“We’re being watched.” Her eyes flicked to the trees above them.
James looked up. He didn’t see the little black boxes until a red LED caught his eye. Once he spotted one, he could see them everywhere: cameras aimed at the trail and surrounding forest.
He took Allyson’s disruptor from his pocket and punched the button. Nothing obvious happened. Maybe the batteries were dead.
Frowning, he hit the button again, and again. The red glowing LEDs stayed on.
James slid the device back into his pocket. “If they’ve already seen us, it’s too late anyway. They’re probably expecting us by now.”
“Great,” Hannah said.
They continued to climb.
“Lethal force won’t be their first action,” James said. “We’ll have at least a few seconds to attack.”
“Oh, a few seconds,” she said. “I can’t believe that I was worried.”
Nathaniel didn’t seem happy with that evaluation of the situation. “I’m going to look ahead.”
Before either of them could stop him, he jogged up the trail and disappeared into the gray, drizzly morning.
“Should we stop him?” James asked.
Hannah gave a short laugh. “Go ahead and try.”
Neither of them got the opportunity. Almost as soon as he disappeared, Nathaniel returned at a run.
“There’s a car up there,” he said, pink-cheeked and breathless.
The Union must have been coming to investigate. “Good,” James said, trying to inject some confidence into his voice. “I’ll take a look.”
He left the others behind, heading up the hill to investigate the car.
It was a bulky black machine with a steel cowcatcher and machine gun mounted outside the passenger window. A man leaned through an open door into the driver’s seat. He wore black slacks, black hiking boots, and a black belt. Definitely Union.
He heard the kopis’s voice muffled by the SUV. “Lousy equipment… Patric? Hey, Patric, can you hear me?”
James stepped up behind the kopis. “Do you need help?”
The man straightened. His nametag said “Charles Wells”—nobody that James recognized, thankfully.
Charles reached for his sidearm. “This is a restricted area.”
James responded by punching him in the head.
He was still sore from his last few fistfights, but his aim was getting better. He managed to deliver an Elise-quality sucker punch.
Charles hit the ground, unconscious. The pistol flew from his hand.
James leaned into the SUV to check the dashboard. The engine was running, but the equipment had no signal. So Allyson’s disruptor had done its job after all.
He turned the SUV off, pocketed the keys, and waved to Hannah and Nathaniel.
It took them a minute to catch up, so James took the opportunity to search the trunk. They didn’t have ropes, but he found a box of zip ties behind the seat. He used them to restrain the kopis’s unconscious body.
With Nathaniel’s help, James tossed Charles in the trunk.
“Isn’t someone going to notice when he doesn’t report back?” Hannah asked.
“Yes,” James said. “But by the time they do, it will be too late.”
James led Hannah and Nathaniel off the road, climbing a nearby hill so that they could look down on the outpost without being spotted. By the time they reached the top, daylight had broken over the forest. The sun peeked through the clouds and vanished again.
There wasn’t much to look at fr
om above. As James had seen on the map, there were only two more SUVs, an outbuilding, and a fence to protect them. It looked like the Union had all but forgotten the Haven’s entrance.
“So what’s the plan?” Hannah asked.
James considered the two men taking a smoke break between the SUVs. One of them had a beard, which was against the Union dress code, so they must have been guarding the door for at least a couple of weeks. And neither of them looked worried. They must not have realized that Charles had gone missing yet.
“I can disable their electronics from up here,” James said. “Then we’ll have to sneak down and—”
A voice barked out from behind them. “Hands in the air!”
James lifted his hands to shoulder-level and turned slowly.
A kopis stood behind them with a gun aimed straight at James’s chest. The guard seemed to have decided that James was the main threat—he didn’t even glance at the petite blond woman or the twelve-year-old boy.
“Identify yourself,” said the kopis. He had the eyes of a man who had killed before and wouldn’t be bothered to kill again.
“We were just hiking,” James said, inching one of his hands toward the back of his neck.
The kopis stepped forward. “Don’t move!”
James froze.
But Nathaniel didn’t.
He ripped a page out of his notebook and spoke a word of power.
Nathaniel’s magic spiked through the air. It electrified the hilltop, making James’s arm hair stand on end.
A finger of energy touched the kopis. The air rippled, and with a loud suctioning noise, he vanished.
His gun bounced off of the grass where he had been standing.
James whirled on his son. “What the hell did you just do?”
“I sent him away.” Nathaniel’s cheeks were red. He was breathing hard, like he had been running.
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Away.”
Hannah clapped both of her hands over her mouth, staring at the spot that the man had vacated.
The spell had left a sparkling residue on the grass. With enough time, James could have trace that magic to find the man—but he didn’t have time.
The kopides below had heard. And they were climbing the hill.
James grabbed the gun. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“You can’t seriously be mad at me,” Nathaniel said. “He was going to shoot. I saved our lives.”
“But you don’t even know where you sent him. He could be dead!”
“James,” Hannah said warningly. “This isn’t the time.”
She was right. One of the men was already halfway up the rocks, and moving fast—just seconds away.
James’s mind whirled with adrenaline, seeking some way out of the confrontation that didn’t involve killing. But Nathaniel wasn’t thinking. He ripped another page out of his Book of Shadows and slid down the hill.
“Nathaniel, no!” Hannah cried. When her son didn’t listen, she turned to James. “Stop him!”
James ran after his son, but Nathaniel had a head start.
He threw one page, and then a second, pointing at the two nearby kopides.
The force of magic made the pressure change. James’s ears popped.
Heat waves shimmered in the air, and both guards vanished.
There was still a man remaining at the bottom of the hill. James grabbed one of the dropped guns.
This kopis didn’t ignore Nathaniel like the first one had. He had identified the real threat.
He swung his gun around to aim at Nathaniel.
James shot first.
All it took was a twitch of the finger. A rain of bullets tore through the air. James wasn’t prepared for the recoil—it nearly knocked him off of his feet. The gun pulled wide.
Bullets chewed the kopis in half and pinged against the wall of the outbuilding behind him.
James stopped shooting too late.
He stepped up beside the body. The kopis’s eyes were open, but vacant. Dead. James had killed him.
“I saw one go in there,” Nathaniel said, pointing at the outbuilding. His voice swam in and out of James’s ears.
“Stay back,” he replied. It felt like someone else was speaking.
He mounted the stairs and kicked open the door.
The outbuilding had two rows of bunks stacked three high. There was a shower stall in one corner and a tiny kitchenette on the other; the open cabinet held a box of Twinkies and three packets of Ramen noodles.
A trail of blood drew James’s eye to the lone terminal beside the kitchenette.
The last kopis had been trying to contact Union HQ when James’s misfire had taken off the top of his skull.
James tossed the gun to the floor, feeling nauseous.
“Did you get—” Nathaniel began as he stepped into the outbuilding behind James.
He saw the body at the desk and never finished his sentence.
James checked the terminal. Like the equipment in the SUVs, it had no signal, so it couldn’t have transmitted data. Nobody would know they had taken the outpost. James stared at the body, transfixed by the cherry-red fluid that spilled out of its cranial cavity. That was his work. He had killed this man, and hadn’t even intended to do it.
“And you yelled at me for tossing those other guys across the dimension,” Nathaniel snorted.
It was absolutely the least helpful thing he could have said in that moment.
“I never meant to kill these men,” James said.
“Isn’t that worse? Accidentally killing someone instead of purposely neutralizing them? You should have let me take care of them myself.”
“And you don’t care that you might have killed them, too?”
“Not when the bad guys are trying to kill us back!”
“These aren’t ‘bad guys,’ Nathaniel. These are men—just human men. Now every single one of them might be gone.”
“Not the one on the trail,” he said. “He’ll just be sore.”
“That’s not the point,” James said, frustration thick in his throat. “Five men may have died at our hands—”
“And we’re still alive,” Nathaniel interrupted. He peered out the door. “Mom’s coming this way.”
James took another glance around the outbuilding. The only weapon in sight was on the dead man. Although it sickened him to touch it, he took the handgun and popped the magazine. Fully loaded.
He pushed Nathaniel out of the building and shut the door behind them.
“Is that everyone?” Hannah asked, looking pale as she skirted the bisected body.
James turned to the cave, where the entrance to the Haven was hidden. It was nestled into the bottom of the hill, half-obscured by bushes.
He clenched the gun in both hands. “Let’s find out.”
Waiting with the van while everyone else risked their lives was both extremely boring and extremely refreshing. Ariane was no longer the wife of a kopis or expected to rush into battle, so she was happy to use her pregnancy as an excuse to stay behind. Boredom was infinitely better than terror.
But that meant that Ariane had nothing to occupy her attention aside from the contractions that had been progressing all morning. She paced circles around the van, lower back knotted and aching. Her hips felt like they were about to split in two.
Ariane hoped that the Haven would have good hospitals.
On what had to be her hundredth lap around the van, she heard a series of muffled pops, like the climax of fireworks on the Fourth of July. It echoed over the trees and faded away.
There were no fireworks on a rainy May morning.
It was gunfire.
Ariane leaned against the hood, taking deep breaths. There was no way to tell who had just been shot, and not knowing was almost worse than being in the battle herself. Even so, some small, angry part of her hoped that those gunshots meant that James Faulkner was dead.
A rush of wind interrupted her thoughts
, and Ariane knew before she turned around that she wasn’t alone anymore.
Metaraon looked just as impressive in ordinary human clothing as he did in the robes of a Council member. With those massive wings folded at his back, he would make the most ordinary clothing look like the robes of a king.
“Hello, Metaraon,” Ariane said.
His eyes lingered on her swollen belly. Metaraon didn’t show much emotion—nothing but wrath and occasional lust—but she thought there was an element of surprise to his silence.
Ariane lifted her chin in defiance.
“Well? What do you want?” she asked when he failed to speak.
“I had come here for James Faulkner,” he said. “I didn’t expect to find you here as well.”
“I saw you hunting us last night. I’m sure you must have noticed my presence, since you’ve been following us for hours.”
“Days,” Metaraon corrected.
He stepped closer, and she realized that the hand he had been holding behind his back wasn’t empty. Ariane stepped back quickly and bumped into the van.
Metaraon was holding a knife. It was a wicked, slender triangle the length of his forearm, with glossy white bone as the cross-guard.
He planted a hand on the side of the van next to her head, blocking all escape. His eyes never left her pregnant stomach.
There was a time when his smoldering eyes would have filled Ariane with arousal. It was the look he got before their trysts in Hell, when she was staffing the Council of Dis and he was posing as judge. It used to mean that he was about to deliver all kinds of pain and pleasure to her body.
But Ariane knew that he didn’t have sex in mind. Not anymore.
Anger flitted through his gaze as he stared at her stomach. He lifted the knife between them, pressing the flat side to Ariane’s lips to silence her. The metal was so cold.
“It seems that you and I need to talk,” Metaraon said.
The tunnel into the cave was so steep that James couldn’t walk down it; he had to climb, and then offer Hannah a hand so that she could join him. Nathaniel jumped.
A heavy door blocked the end of the tunnel. James tried the handle.
Locked.
“I’ll look for a key,” Nathaniel said, clambering up the tunnel again.
Hannah glanced around the dark passage, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. The only light came from the surface, and the cloud cover meant that there wasn’t much of that, either. But there were no cameras here. Nobody to watch them. It was as safe as it could be.