by Ladew, Lisa
He handed the phone back to her without saying goodbye. She looked at it, hearing the man on the other end still talking. Oh, well. She pressed the red end-call button and stared at Graeme, even though he would not look at her.
“Our time here is done. The shiften have an emergency they need my help with. I will return you to your home, but you’ll need a shiften guard, so I’ll ask you to go with me to them until they can arrange that.”
Heather barely heard his words. All she could focus on was his tone and his coldness. He’d taken himself a thousand miles away from her in his heart. She lifted her eyes to the heavens, to the starry skies above her and said a prayer for help, for knowledge, for guidance. This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be the way they ended.
The ping. The circular ping that she’d heard before from below his cottage. It started up again, insistently this time. She didn’t know if it was an answer to her prayer, but she grabbed onto it with both hands.
“Graeme, there is something… that thing at your place. I never found it down in your treasure room. I think it wants me to find it.”
He finally looked at her then, but his eyes were empty. “Aye, you can have it, I will never use it. But it will not get what it wants.”
“What it wants?”
By way of answer, he transformed and faced away from her, towards the moon, the way they would be going. She climbed on his back, feeling the weight of all his beliefs, enough to crush them both.
The trip back took only a few minutes, and she did not watch the moon or the stars because she could not stand to see their beauty.
When he landed, she climbed down and focused on the door to the rear of his cabin. It appeared, closed somehow. She walked toward it slowly, not wanting to make the trip down into the treasure room herself and convinced he would not go with her. But he stepped past her as a man and heaved on the door pull, then found the lantern and lit it, preceding her down at a quick pace.
They reached the bottom and she went about her business quickly, searching by feel. Near the back of the large room, next to the pile of mixed gold, silver, and gems, there was a stand that had one hook at the top of a tall spire. On the spire was the circlet of gold that had been calling to her. She lifted it gently. It was not what she expected and she wasn’t sure what it was. The circlet was unbroken, unmarred, unscratched, like it couldn’t really be gold. It was bigger than a crown, slightly larger around than a dinner plate, a fancy one. She put her hand through the open middle of the circlet, not sure what she was expecting, but gratified to hear a sweet, melodious tune erupt from it when she did so. Or was it only in her head?
“It’s time,” Graeme called from the other side of the room.
She tucked the gold circlet into her coat, surprised when it seemed like it would fit in her pocket that she knew was not that big. Magic? She pushed it in the pocket it could not possibly fit in, then wound her way through the stacks and piles of wealth like some nations didn’t own and met him at the bottom of the stairs.
In only a few moments, they were at the top again, with not a word passed between them.
She let her eyes wander over the forest and the cottage, wondering if she would ever see Graeme’s home again.
Chapter 28
Trevor looked around the old, unused barn they had commandeered to use as a command post from the only farmer on the edge of Blue River Bluff. Trevor had given him and his family some cash and told them they had to clear out. Spend the night at a hotel or a friend’s place. The official story had been a natural gas leak, but one look in the farmer’s eyes as he saw the SWAT vehicles and scads of armed officers roll into his driveway had told Trevor the old man had not believed a word of it. Who knew what he thought was really going on, alien landing maybe.
He wished Graeme would hurry up. Unless the bearen thought of a better plan, nothing could happen until he arrived. Trevor’s eyes rolled over his crew, who were jumping out of their skins. Some forward progress had to happen soon or there would be issues.
Harlan and Beckett were near the door, Harlan cleaning blood off his hands and Beckett pacing and touching his chest and shoulder compulsively. Mac was with Wade at the map table, eyes alternating from the terrain map of the property directly to their north, to the cameras they had set up along the edge of the red zone. Trent and Troy were outside, functioning as guards, but ready to go at a moment’s notice. They were both as amped up as the rest of them. A few felen played dice in the hay loft and the lone bearen that had been part of Ella’s guard when this call had come in was in the corner behind the front door. He’d been functioning as a liaison between Trevor and the fire department but there hadn’t been much for him to do yet. He’d taken one look at the spouts of fire streaming into the air on the edge of the property and declared any machinery that was going to fight that would have to be brought in from Chicago. That was plan B, if Graeme couldn’t go through it. They had dozens more officers on the perimeter of the northern property, all waiting to hear the word Go.
He ran over everything they knew about the situation again in his mind, looking for holes, for something they had missed that would help them. The foxen had been rallying for weeks. Somehow, they had seen the video of Boeson long before one of them had decided to send a copy of it to the police. The foxen were divided firmly into two camps; those who thought the video was an affront to their basic shiften nature and who would never dream of following Khain, and those who stood behind it 100% and thought it was a war cry. Canyon and Timber, the KSRT’s computer network experts and social media gurus, said there was a smaller, third camp who paid absolutely no attention to shiften business and lived entirely in the human world. Some of them didn’t even know they were foxen.
A few days before, a vocal minority had started demanding one true mates, and that’s when the plans for this debacle had apparently started cooking, although Mac insisted the two ringleaders were just using it as an excuse and had to have been planning something big for a while. Trevor agreed with him. There had been too much preparation into what they were facing for it to have been a spur of the moment thing.
Two foxen, both known criminals, had gathered the vocal minority, whipped them up into a frenzy, and convinced them to make a public statement at a local community college. They’d all loaded onto a bus and headed out there, but once the foxen had rallied support at the college, including a group of what seemed to be twenty human females, the two ringleaders had pulled out guns and ordered everybody back onto the bus and driven them out to the property Trevor was now staring at. Then the real demands had come in. Not one true mates, but ransom money from the families. They were threatening to start shooting women at random at noon tomorrow if every penny of the money didn’t show up.
Trevor shook his head. Just the fact that they had given them over a day to gather the money meant they were completely confident in their ability to defend their position. They were in an underground bunker that had automatic guns on a tower above it, and three of the four sides were protected by the spouts of fire fueled by an underground natural gas reservoir they had somehow cut off from the gas company. So the gas company couldn’t shut anything off. The pipes and the fire system must have taken them months to build. Trevor stared at the screens that showed the fires, their burning reminding him of Khain’s home in the Pravus.
He rubbed his temples and wished again for Graeme to hurry, then looked around. He spotted Ella in the corner of the barn, sitting in a folding chair, sipping coffee and looking at her phone. He approached her and sat down next to her, nuzzling into her shoulder. “I wish you would nap, El. The young need you strong.”
She gave him a look. “Could you nap if you were me?”
He shrugged. “There’s nothing going on right now.”
“For a few moments.”
As if accentuating her words, Mac swore from the map table and pounded on it. Trevor kissed Ella on the cheek and strode over.
Mac swore again. “I never though
t any foxen would have the balls to pull something like this off, even these two!”
“It’s a brave new world,” Wade mused, looking at one of the screens. “That video and its message got them pretty riled up.”
Trevor held up a hand to Mac and addressed him quietly. “Have you ever arrested these two foxen, personally?”
“Hell, yeah, I used to get them all the time for stupid shit like human-baiting or vandalism. You know, small-time stuff. Nothing like this.”
Trevor knew what human-baiting was, a sick sport certain nasty foxen enjoyed that almost never went further than humiliation and assault. The wolven went after human-baiting like hate crimes, as aggressively as possible.
“Do you know anything about them that can help us? Anything personal? Any weaknesses?”
Mac thought for a few moments, pacing as he did so, then came back to Trevor. “Nothing I haven’t already told you.”
Trevor nodded. “Ok.”
Mac looked at the screens again. “Too bad Harlan’s one true mate isn’t here. She could get past that fire.”
Wade’s head whipped up. “What?”
Harlan strode their way, his energy hostile. “What the fuck, Mac. She’s not my one true mate.”
Wade held up a hand, his eyes jumping from male to male. “Who? What are we talking about here?”
Mac scoffed, ignoring Harlan completely. “Harlan’s one true mate. She’s a ghost or some shit. We saw her a few days ago at Trevor’s place. She appeared out of thin air, said his name, then disappeared again.”
Wade addressed Harlan, who was shaking his head, his eyes shooting daggers at Mac. “Harlan, if she’s not a one true mate, who is she?”
“I have no idea.”
“How does she know your name?”
“She’s appeared like that before. Always wearing that same outfit, like a hospital gown, and I can always see the same white hallway behind her. We talked a couple of times. I told her my name.”
Wade turned his head to look at him almost sideways. “Appeared when before?”
“When I was eight or nine, again at thirteen, and then once last year, right before Christmas.”
Mac shook his head. “See, she’s gotta be a ghost, Wade. She was no older than twenty-five, for sure. Old Man River here is pushing ninety, at least. How could she have shown up when he was a kid?”
Harlan growled and Trevor turned away before anyone could see he was laughing. Fucking Mac. At close to fifty, Harlan was their oldest member, but ninety was insulting, and of course Mac knew that.
Wade held up his hand and raised his voice. “Everybody listen up! New rule! Tell every single shiften you know. From now on, anybody in Serenity even gets a whiff of a female who could be a one true mate, I want to hear about it. Immediately. Got that?”
“Yes, Chief,” Trevor said, hearing the bearen and the felen mumble in the affirmative behind him. Beckett said yes, still pacing, his energy topped off. Harlan nodded. Ella was silent.
“Ya vul, mein capitan!” Mac shouted and stood at attention. Wade shook his head and Trevor waited to see if Mac was gonna get it. Mac was in rare form tonight, on edge like the rest of them, but Mac being Mac, it was worse. He was gonna get something before the sun came up.
Wade went back to the screens, looked at his watch, then stared out the windows. They were all getting antsy, waiting for Graeme to show up so they could move on the situation. The longer they waited, the greater chance everything had of going to shit, and if he didn’t get there before sunup, they might have lost their chance until the next day.
Trevor wandered over to the windows that lined the front of the building and stared out into the night. He could see the faint glow from the wall of fire the foxen had created, blocking their ability to sneak up to the property, forcing them to only enter from the front. Beckett had already been shot trying to go in under the cover of darkness. Trevor didn’t know enough about foxen to know how their night vision was, but it didn’t matter, did it? Not when night vision goggles existed. Mac and Harlan had acted quickly, pulling Beckett back behind cover, then Harlan had gone in with his fingers, pulling the slug out of Beckett’s shoulder even as he screamed. Beckett had shifted, so he was as good as new, but his recent behavior said he wasn’t going to forget being shot and the blunt bullet extraction afterwards for a long time.
Someone came up behind him and Trevor whirled around. It was only Mac, a grin on his face.
He lifted his chin to point at the bearen on the far side of the barn. “Hey, am I crazy or is that bearen carrying a gun under his shirt?”
Trevor looked hard and sure enough, he could see the outline of the gun and something else. “He’s got handcuffs in his back pocket, too.”
Mac frowned. “What the hell is that about?”
Trevor knew he was making a mistake, but he asked anyway. He was just as antsy as the rest of them and he wouldn’t mind watching the show. “Think you can ask him without making an ass out of yourself?”
Mac snorted. “I doubt it,” he said, and Trevor almost laughed.
Too late. Mac had already stalked across the room and had the bearen turned around in frisk position before Trevor could even say ‘I told you so’.
Mac pulled the bearen’s shirt up, slid the gun out of its holster, racked the slide forward, and dropped the magazine before the bearen even had time to say a word. “What the fuck is this?” he snarled into the bearen’s face as he spun him back around and held the gun up.
The bearen didn’t answer right away, and when he did speak, the tone in his voice didn’t match what Trevor would have expected from him. His face didn’t, either. Cool and calm is how Trevor would describe him. Like Mac didn’t scare him one bit.
“That’s Presley. She’s my firearm.”
Mac snorted. All the chatter in the large open room had stopped. “Your gun’s name is Presley? And she’s a girl?”
The bearen showed his teeth but didn’t respond. Trevor began walking that way. He didn’t need this going sour, and, technically, he didn’t even know if the bearen were allowed to carry a weapon on duty. If he had a concealed carry permit, and the fire department allowed him to carry on duty, he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Wade spoke up from across the room. “Hey, bearen, you got an on-duty carry permit?”
The bearen nodded. “Name’s Bruin. And, yeah. My boss says I shoulda been a wolfen. Presley don’t never leave my side.”
“Mac, leave off him,” Wade said, turning back to the screen. Trevor was close enough to see Mac’s eyes narrow and hear him when he leaned in close. “What are the handcuffs for, huh?”
The bearen leaned against the wall behind him and crossed his arms. His tone stayed conversational and open, like he didn’t know the words he said could get him killed. “I figure if you pups can’t get the job done, somebody’s gotta be the one to haul Khain in.”
Trevor froze, his eyes on Mac. Calling an adult male wolven a pup was not a smart idea. Mac’s eyes widened, then narrowed as Beckett started laughing from across the room and headed their way.
“You think you can handcuff Khain? You’re a special kind of stupid, ain’t you? You ever even seen Khain?” Beckett asked.
Mac laughed, too, and Trevor relaxed slightly.
Bruin faced Beckett. “No, have you?”
Beckett quit laughing and didn’t respond. Mac got up in Bruin’s face again. “I have. He was fifty fucking feet tall. You got handcuffs that big?”
Bruin scratched his head, and still his tone didn’t change to match Mac’s hostility. “No, I guess I don’t. What did he look like? Did you shoot him? Are you the wolf who went into the Pravus?”
Mac shook his head and looked at Trevor with a do you got a load of this guy? look. Trevor shrugged. Bearen were open and friendly, and notoriously hard to piss off, and clever if given time to figure stuff out. This guy was nothing more than a quintessential bearen.
Mac turned back to Bruin. “Wait a second. Your name
is Bruin? Doesn’t that mean Bear?”
Bruin nodded. “Yeah.”
“Your parents named you Bear.”
Bruin smiled and nodded harder. “Yeah, cool, right? But if you don’t like it, you can call me Scorpion. That’s what my friends call me.”
Mac handed Bruin’s gun back to him then wandered away, a look on his face like he couldn’t believe what had just happened. Trevor grinned and stared back out into the night.
Any minute now.
***
Mac paced around and around the map table. That fucking bear. He got under Mac’s skin like a tattoo of a tick. Thinking he could handcuff Khain. Walking around with his stupid name and his stupid gun’s name and his stupider nickname. Fuck! If Graeme didn’t get there soon, Mac was going to go out of his mind! Wolven were not meant to wait for hours and hours in a building while there were criminals a football field away holding a bus load of humans hostage.
Mac found the Rubbermaid container of food one of the dispatchers had dropped by after it was clear they’d be there for a while. He dug through it. Spam. No. Beef Jerky. No. Chips. Fuck no. Candy. No. Wait. He turned the bag of candy back around. Gummi Bears. Ah, hell yeah.
He walked casually around the map table, eyeing Wade and Trevor, who had their heads together discussing strategy. Perfect. He strolled back over to the bearen, who watched him come, a welcoming smile on his face. Fucker.
He dropped a gummi bear in his mouth and chewed, then held one up between his thumb and fingers so the bearen could see it. He waggled his eyebrows. “Want one?”
As the bearen watched, he tossed the gummi bear into his mouth, then grabbed a huge handful and threw them all in there, chewing ferociously with his lips open while little gummi body parts fell out and landed on the floor.
The smile finally slipped off the bearen’s face. Jackpot!
“What is wrong with you?”
Mac smiled around the gummi carnage. “What?”