Poison Tree dos-8

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  Poison Tree

  ( Den of Shadows - 8 )

  Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  The rich stew of the author's creations—SingleEarth, vampires, shapeshifters, Tristes, the Bruja Guilds—are at full boil here in the story of two 20-ish young women trying to out run their very different pasts, and figure out where they fit in and who they might become. Each has landed in a more "normal" place, and each wonders if, like a tattoo that can't be covered up, they can ever really fit into "normal."

  Poison Tree

  Den of Shadows 8

  Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  Poison Tree is dedicated to my wife, Mandi. Her love and support helped me through many revision-related rants and breakdowns, while her feedback and insight helped me untangle several snarls in the story itself. As I write this, we have just celebrated our one-year anniversary. She hasn’t given up on me yet.

  As always, I owe profuse thanks to my writing group: Shauna, Bri, Zim, Ria, and last but far from least, Mason. Mason has been one of my strongest supporters—and greatest critics—throughout Poison Tree ’s editing process, constantly needling me to reexamine the characters and the story line.

  Like most of my books, Poison Tree required research into a bizarre variety of topics. Though this list is by no means complete, I would like to thank Karl for his weapons support, Bri for her archery instruction, and Devon for his technological expertise.

  Final y, I must go back to 2002 and thank the cast and crew of Tiger Eyes, especial y Ol ie, who instigated that project, and Sam Kruger, who prodded me to develop a story I might otherwise have given up on long ago. You al helped me see and hear these characters in a way I had never expected.

  I was angry with my friend:

  I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

  I was angry with my foe:

  I told it not, my wrath did grow.

  And I watered it in fears,

  Night and morning with my tears;

  And I sunned it with smiles,

  And with soft deceitful wiles.

  And it grew both day and night,

  Til it bore an apple bright.

  And my foe beheld it shine.

  And he knew that it was mine,

  And into my garden stole

  When the night had veiled the pole;

  In the morning glad I see

  My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

  Wil iam Blake, “A Poison Tree”

  PROLOGUE

  SIX YEARS AGO

  THERE WAS BLOOD on her hands, congealing slowly. The body in her arms was cold, its once-

  vibrant cheer forever vanished from the world.

  The dead girl had a thick rope around her throat, attached to a chain hooked into the wall. Sisal bonds held her wrists behind her back. If she had been able to shapeshift, that rope would have burst or blended into her form, but the innocent eleven-year-old girl who had been bound, beaten, and murdered had been human, nothing more.

  I failed you. I’m so sorry.

  The survivor looked up at the sound of a sti ed gasp of pain; someone was moving across the room, through a pile of what she had thought were dead bodies. She couldn’t summon fear, not with a corpse in her arms that had once been a little girl she had sworn to protect.

  The vampire pushed himself to his hands and knees slowly, painfully. Though bones broke the bloodied surface of his skin, he still moved toward her and said, “We have to get out of here.”

  She remembered this one now. He had spoken up against his leader and refused to help torture the human girl.

  If he had been anything more fragile than a vampire, he wouldn’t have survived his leader’s response, but now his bones were knitting back together. She knew how that felt; as a pure-blooded shapeshifter, she healed almost as quickly. She could have survived everything they had done to Cori’s poor human body. But Cori … Cori was just dead.

  “What’s your name?” the vampire asked as he crawled toward her.

  “Sa-Sarik,” she stammered, a jolt of fear going through her at last. She was harder to kill than a human, but that didn’t mean she wanted anyone to try.

  “I’m Jason,” he said. “Help me and I can help you. There’s another door, but I can’t get there on my own like this, and I don’t have time to heal before they get back.”

  She looked around. Once this had been a wine cellar, but now it was just dry and cold, and reeked of blood, fear, and pain. How could she abandon her sister here?

  “It’s too late to help her,” Jason said. “Come on. We need to go.”

  There was blood on Alysia’s hands. Some of it was slick red—which meant it was probably hers—and some was swiftly drying, caking, and turning to dust, which meant it belonged to her prey.

  Alysia didn’t know exactly who this nest of vampires had pissed o , but she did know that it was someone with enough money to o er a good price. Given what she had been told about this group’s behavior, Alysia might have done the job for pennies. Then again, she did have a reputation to maintain—and important toys to buy. There was no need to make a charity case out of some rich vengeance-seeker’s problem.

  Sneaking up on a creature who could hear her human heartbeat and smell her blood would normally have been tricky, but this group had spilled a great deal of blood lately, sating their hunger and dulling their senses. They were also distracted by their own concerns and were whispering among themselves about their most recent assignment, which clearly had shaken up a few of them.

  Alysia waited until one had walked away from the others, and then she stepped up behind him and drove a slender steel stake hardly larger than a pencil into his back, beneath his shoulder blade. The tip found his heart unerringly. When she twisted the implement and removed it swiftly, the barbs on the tip shredded the once-vital organ and the vampire dropped without a sound.

  Three down. Five to go, she thought. Eventually, they would realize she was there, but each one she took out before they did was one fewer face-to-face fight.

  “You!”

  Five on one, not the best odds, she thought, spinning toward the voice, only to discover that the vampire who had shouted was not talking to her.

  Poacher, she thought indignantly. This was her job. What was worse, the jerk who had cut in was obviously an Onyx boy: brash, bold, with no concept of stealth. The black crossbow he had slung over his shoulder was an Onyx trademark; that guild tended to favor long-

  distance weapons and rarely jumped into an up-close fight when they could avoid it.

  As one of the vampires noticed her and cut into her path, though, she decided she was magnanimous enough to share. Let this Onyx newcomer distract some of them while she picked the others off, one by one.

  There was blood on the girl’s hands and face, but that didn’t seem to distract her as she crept up behind the vampire Christian had been ghting and, with one swift backstab, took the creature down.

  “Thanks,” Christian said, the only word they exchanged as they instinctively moved back to back. They didn’t know each other, but they knew their common enemy.

  The girl obviously favored stealth, but she held her own as the three last vampires surrounded them. Christian fought with a long dagger in his right hand; the girl he had stumbled across fought with two weapons: in her left hand, a stiletto, and in her right, a steel stake with rings near the end that served as brass knuckles. He and the girl each dispatched one target, then turned together toward the last.

  The vampire put his back to the wall, trying to keep them both in sight, but he didn’t ee. He had to know running was his only chance of survival when faced with two Bruja mercenaries, but his fear of his employer apparently outweighed his instinct for self-

  preservation.


  Behind his impromptu partner, Christian noticed a blood-slicked pair making their way quietly across the back of the room. The girl was letting the guy lean on her. She wasn’t his prisoner, and more importantly, they were both obviously too injured to ght even if they hadn’t been trying to sneak away.

  Christian almost called out to them but then decided to let the battered and bruised runaways limp to freedom thinking they had never been spotted. If they spared a backward glance, it was only after he had returned his attention to his fight.

  “Nice work,” he said as the girl he had been fighting with landed the final, killing blow.

  She looked up at him, almost an eye-roll, as if unsure whether he was patronizing her.

  “You didn’t do too badly yourself, for an Onyx brat,” she answered, the words paired with a challenging grin.

  He glanced past her, but the prisoners had already made their exit.

  “Want to get a coffee?” he asked, on impulse.

  She lifted a brow, considered giving a snarky answer, and then said, “O er chocolate and

  I’ll say yes. I always want chocolate after a hunt.”

  There was blood on Sarik’s hands, and it was driving Jason crazy. He had refused to feed from the tiny human girl they had been ordered to kidnap, which meant he hadn’t fed in days. Healing the injuries left by Maya’s displeasure had weakened him even more. Maybe, if Sarik was grateful …

  “I need to get this off me,” the shapeshifter said, her voice trembling.

  They had holed up in a run-down motel that was the rst place they reached that didn’t seem like it would also be the rst place Maya looked. Now Sarik pushed past him and ed to the bathroom. He heard water running as she washed blood—hers, the dead girl’s, and his—from her hands, face, and hair. The water stopped, and he thought she might emerge, but instead he heard the door lock, and then the shower running again. With a vampire’s sense of hearing, he could easily make out the sound of sobs beneath the hissing of the water.

  It’s a good thing I don’t mind cold water, he thought, looking at the blood on his own hands.

  An hour passed before Sarik emerged dripping wet, wrapped in a towel, and announced, “My clothes are covered in blood.”

  “What do you expect me to do about that?” he demanded.

  She inched, but then re rose in her eyes, and she snapped, “I saved your life. Is it too much to ask for you to hit a gift shop?”

  “I thought I saved your life.”

  “You couldn’t even walk.”

  So he went to the touristy store down the road, wondering why he was even still with her. She was no one, a shapeshifter running away from home who had crossed into the wrong territory and gotten herself in trouble. Maya liked shapeshifter blood, called it sweet and spicy, so she had grabbed this one without hesitation.

  The nearest gift shop had closed hours ago, but snapping the lock wasn’t hard. He picked clothes up indiscriminately, deciding that a large T-shirt and some sweatpants would be good enough for her to go out and find her own stuff.

  She didn’t complain when he returned and handed her the bundle, but instead disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes before emerging in blue sweatpants that read SALEM STATE COLLEGE in large orange letters and a pink T-shirt emblazoned with a huge black lobster. Both were far too large, dwarfing her in their folds.

  Jason couldn’t help it. He started laughing.

  A lip quiver, a half smile, and a few seconds later, so did she.

  CHAPTER 1

  NOW

  SARIK LOOKED UP at Jason with a grateful smile when he placed a cup of hazelnut co ee with a dollop of heavy cream next to her, and was startled by his brief kiss. She had been so absorbed in the papers she had been drowning in for the past hour that she hadn’t noticed he had left.

  Next, he handed a steaming black co ee to a petite Asian girl who looked fourteen but in reality was the oldest person in the room. Lynzi was a Triste, a type of witch with the same physical agelessness as the vampires. She liked her co ee so strong Sarik couldn’t take a whiff of it without her eyes watering.

  A fruity herbal tea with honey went to Diana Smoke, the witch who ran their organization. Unlike Tristes, Macht witches were as mortal as any human, but despite the ne lines that had recently begun to appear at the edges of her eyes, Diana had a presence that always made Sarik feel like she could be closer to immortal than any of them.

  “Thank you, Jason,” Diana said as he set the tea in front of her.

  None of them asked if Jason wanted anything for himself. Vampires could drink or eat anything they wanted, but they didn’t need to, and Jason rarely chose to indulge just for the taste. The woman who had changed him, and claimed to own him, had set strict rules about such things. Even now, six years after he had escaped her control, he still tended to be nervous about breaking those rules.

  He also tended to anticipate and respond to the wishes of those around him, like making a beverage run and returning with everyone’s favorite without being asked. The thought that his constant consideration had been taught to him through fear made Sarik’s next sip of her coffee bittersweet.

  “Israel said you asked for this,” he explained to Diana as he handed her another bulky file from the records room.

  Diana nodded. She had been alternating between the files on the table in front of her and her phone, which periodically chirped to tell her about an email. “I may have found an applicant worth looking into,” she explained. “Central recommended her and sent over her file.”

  SingleEarth Central, located outside Burlington, Vermont, was the nexus of the international SingleEarth organization, and Sarik’s hopes rose at the notion of a recommendation from them. Surely they had found a better candidate than anyone from the endless line of people who had applied for the open mediator’s position at Haven #4 as if it were some kind of résumé-builder.

  Diana handed out copies of the new file, still warm from the machine.

  “Her name is Alysia Marks. She has been in SingleEarth for about two years now and has been in the Technology and Communications department at Central for the last eighteen months. She recently overheard a call she thought sounded suspicious, and when the sta at Central dismissed her concerns, she went to investigate on her own. She ended up spending two hours in a hostage situation with a panicked young man who had just learned about shapeshifters and decided to take drastic measures. According to witnesses, Alysia was the one who talked him down and convinced him to turn himself in to authorities. She also managed to take identifying information from all the victims so our crisis teams could follow up with them.”

  Everything Diana said about this Alysia Marks made her sound like a perfect candidate for mediator, but Sarik’s rst glance at the le made it obvious that the witch had left out a lot.“I’m sorry, but have you read the rest of this?” Sarik asked, startling even herself. “It says here that SingleEarth’s hunters forced her to resign because they viewed her as ‘a loose cannon, unpredictable, taking unnecessary risks.’ ” She looked up at the others. “Plus, she has a juvenile arrest record about a mile long.”

  Lynzi replied, “It’s common for people— especial y younger people—to act out when they learn that humans are not alone on this earth. It also isn’t unusual for people to have trouble transitioning when they do nally make it to SingleEarth.” The remark was directed at Jason and Sarik. They had caused a few waves with their quick tempers and frequent spats when they had rst joined SingleEarth four years ago. “The issue with the ghter’s guild was two years ago, when Alysia had just joined. I don’t see any disciplinary actions or other negative marks on her file since then.”

  “You’re right,” Sarik admitted. “Who we are in SingleEarth often has little or nothing to do with who we used to be. But I’m not seeing any evidence here that she even wants this job. Did she apply?”

  She had not. There was, however, a note indicating that she had applied for a promotion in the Informa
tion Technology department, which included everything from network support to document acquisition. Jason and Sarik both had birth certi cates and Social

  Security cards provided by that group—SingleEarth’s own form of witness protection.

  “Alysia has been working in IT for almost two years now,” Diana replied, “but she has previously expressed an interest in moving into a more people-centered career.”

  Jason stepped up in his own cautious way. “I share some of Sarik’s reservations,” he said, “but I see no reason not to invite her in for an interview. We all became mediators because we are better with people than with paper.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Diana said.

  Lynzi nodded her agreement, and with that, the discussion was over. Diana Smoke had made up her mind, and no twenty-two-year-old tiger hired a little over a half year ago was going to override her.

  Funny, that was exactly the reason Joseph had cited for quitting, leaving this position available: despite SingleEarth’s stated mission of equality, he had felt that witches’ voices carried more power. Sarik wasn’t sure who he thought should have nal say, given the fact that Smoke witches had founded SingleEarth, and Diana Smoke was o cially the organization’s CEO. Witch or not, someone always needed to be in charge.

  Sarik realized guiltily that she had been expecting the stereotypical tech geek, but Alysia showed up at SingleEarth Haven #4 wearing a gray suit jacket with black pants and a dark rose button-down shirt. Her brown hair was tied back and clipped up and she looked like a young professional trying to make a positive rst impression. Sarik found herself sympathizing with her, despite her earlier reservations.

  She’s nearly my age, Sarik thought as they shook hands and introduced themselves. Only a year older. Is she as nervous as I was when Diana interviewed me?

  Alysia did not look nervous as she shook hands with the others around the table. She smiled at the right moments, but the smile disappeared when Diana asked her to describe what had happened at the Café au Late co eehouse recently. She chose her words carefully, relating the story modestly but honestly.