Emma scrubbed at her face. Five months?
Telly suddenly stood bolt upright, a look of fierce concentration furrowing his brow. From the motel room, a bark sounded, sharp and harsh.
Adrenalin flooded Emma’s system. “Telly?”
He looked at her, their eyes level, and she didn’t like what she saw.
“They’ve found us,” he said. “Get dressed. And hurry.”
10
Telly fled the bathroom as Emma scrambled for her clothing, trying not to think about the wide open bathroom door as she dropped her towel and whipped her underwear up her legs with shaking hands. She could live without the bra; t-shirt came next, the fabric clinging to her wet skin, hair cold and heavy down her back.
She heard Anton swear. The dog kept barking. Emma zipped the fly of her jeans and stuffed her runners on her feet and sprinted out of the bathroom, straight into Ricky. His eyes were huge and he was hyperventilating. Great , Emma thought, we’re back to being scared . It was the last coherent thought she had before the windows of the motel room exploded.
Glass crashed into the room like a wave. It shredded the thin curtains as it came down, flooded the small room with glaring sunlight. Emma froze, brain screaming while her feet refused to obey her, but then Ricky shoved her towards the door.
It worked; she ran. “Bruce, c’mon boy!” Emma had her hand on the doorknob when Anton’s arms caught her waist. Ricky let out a dismayed shout; Telly shouted something unintelligible in response.
“Off me!” Emma yelled through gritted teeth and kicked.
“Not that way,” Anton growled into her ear. He tightened his arms around her waist and swung with her, looking for a way out. She barely had time to wonder why the door to the hall was a no go before she heard the agonized shriek of timber behind her and wooden splinters sprayed the beige motel carpet.
Pressed so close to Anton, she felt the crash of his heart against his chest, his indecision as he searched for an exit, but there was nowhere to go. He hitched her up so her feet weren’t touching the floor, and moved sideways away from the door, backing himself into one corner of the room. He made as if to try for the bathroom, but the sound of shattering glass from that direction decided him; they were going to hide in the corner. Emma thought that idea stank, but given the hold he had on her, what she thought didn’t matter. Bruce crouched at her feet, vibrating with snarls and fierce terror.
Telly was suddenly in front of her, blond hair ablaze in the sunlight streaming through the shattered windows as he put his back to her. He thrummed with something palpable and electric; anger, fear, the cold hum of magic.
Ricky joined Telly, completing the protective wall around her. “Ricky,” she hissed, “get away!” She grabbed at his upper arm but he ignored her, gaze fixed on the figures stepping through the now-empty frame of the large window.
Emma’s breath died in her throat.
They looked barely bigger than girls of ten or twelve, but their odd colored bodies were full and muscled and lithe, clothed in primitive looking brown leather skirts and jerkins. All of them boasted great falls of straight, golden hair, framing small bronzed faces, skin the color of terracotta rubbed to gleaming with gold dust. Each face was dwarfed by dark eyes — eyes trained on Emma, what little was probably visible of her from behind Ricky and Telly. There were eight, identical, and all of them carried daggers that looked like swords in their doll-like hands.
“What,” said Emma in a low voice, “are they?”
Ricky swallowed audibly, shoulders bunched with tension. “Ocelot maidens.”
Oh.
One of them advanced ahead of the others, illuminated by the streaming sunlight, like a dream brought to life. She pinned Anton with massive eyes the color of dying coals.
“You.” Her voice was rich and heavily accented, drawing the word out like a tangible, sensuous thing. Emma flinched in Anton’s arms. “Hand her over to us, and the king’s mercy shall be swift.” The golden creature lifted her chin imperiously. Emma wondered vaguely where she’d found such a classy line.
Anton didn’t seem to think much of it either. “Fuck the king’s mercy,” he said with disgust. “We’re not giving her to you. And we’ll kill you all if you try to take her.”
Emma thought that was pretty damn ambitious since the golden women already outnumbered them two to one. They were small, but they looked deadly. The creature gazed at Anton with open contempt.
Telly spoke, voice quiet and frightening. “You forget yourself, Rish”. The small woman’s gaze flicked to him and her face went smooth and hard, trying and failing to mask the fear that showed in the whites of her eyes. Telly laughed, low and cool. “I’m more than a match for well over half your number. Anton can take the rest.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed, calculating. She cocked her head, birdlike. “But can you protect the girl from harm in the process?” Those smoldering eyes shifted to Emma, and Emma met them. Just.
“And can you kill us before we can shoot you?” came a male voice.
Anton went rigid. He turned his head slowly towards the ruined motel door as the muzzle of a rifle with a very long barrel swung into view. It looked like an assault rifle, which was scary enough without looking at the juggernaut that followed it through the door.
The man stood at least seven feet high and was half that in width, all muscle, from his brutish head to his enormous booted calves. His deep brown skin and strong, square jaw pegged him as native to somewhere in the Americas, but it wasn’t North — his face made Emma think, stupidly, Aztec. As in ancient Aztec. Black dreadlocked hair hung like a mantle over his massive shoulders. He wore dark jeans and a black muscle shirt that left nothing, not even the veins on his biceps, to the imagination.
Worst of all, unlike the women, he was moving. He sidestepped towards the bed, tracking with the nose of the gun, eyes fixed on Telly.
“Don’t even think about running, my friend,” said the big man, voice accented and painfully deep.
Telly’s jaw flexed. His shoulders bunched, getting ready for something. Then he froze, and a moment later, a second man — shorter than the Aztec — stepped through the broken window with his rifle leading the way.
Glass crunched under his boots. Ripped blue jeans clung to long legs and narrow hips. The pale arms cradling the rifle were bony, a faded gray t-shirt hung from wide, angular shoulders, and a shock of spiky black hair crowned a face that was slim and hollow and painfully young. Then Emma met his eyes.
She cringed involuntarily. His eyes were black. And as he gazed at her, they filled with something sharp and hungry.
“Telly…” Anton’s voice was a barely audible warning. Emma felt tension singing through him, apprehension. A dozen small women with daggers, they could handle — assault rifles, they could not.
Telly knew it too. He stood rigid, unmoving. Emma began to think he was going to surrender when the skin at the nape of her neck began to crawl with something more than fear — something cold and out of this world.
“Tone it down, old man,” said the Aztec, voice a deep basso rumble. He narrowed glittering eyes at Telly. “Tone it down or I shoot.”
“You wouldn’t dare, Kal.” Telly’s voice held a rustling edge, like grass in a restless wind. Nothing about it human. “You’d risk hitting her.”
Unless he was really good, Emma thought. Or reckless. Either way, the Aztec — Kal, was that his name? — looked like he had an itchy trigger finger.
His eyes came to rest on Emma, and they chilled her. An amber so dark there was almost no light to them, they were almost red, nothing like the bright orange of Ricky’s eyes. The look in them was flat and indifferent, and he held Emma’s gaze as he answered Telly.
“If you decide to kill us all, if you even can, Telly, then I will take all your lives with ours. I don’t give a shit if I hit her; hell, I’ll aim for her, if I think you really can kill me. I’m loyal to my king, but that ends with my death, and my threat is my own. No one else’s.
You know that.”
The thin man with the starving eyes took another two steps into the room. His throat worked, eyes round and hard on Kal; a muscle in his jaw clenched, but he said nothing. A growl trickled through Telly’s teeth. At Emma’s feet, Bruce echoed the sound. Then gooseflesh seized Emma and spilled frigid cold down her spine, poured over her skin,and she swallowed and tried to breathe past her pulse, past her heartbeat kicking behind her breastbone and throbbing in her ears. If they got out of here alive, she would ask what the hell that feeling was.
“I mean it.” Kal growled the words out, the sound of them like a fluid thing.
“Telly,” Emma began.
“Leave. This. To me.” Telly growled again.
Nobody was backing down. They would die rather than give her up — but she preferred to live, even captive. She had to hope there would be better chances than this.
She reached out and put a hand on Telly’s shoulder. His growl cut off abruptly. He turned and looked at her out of the corner of one blazing blue eye, and there was a world of doubt and questions and curiosity in that look — but he stayed silent.
Emma braced herself and met Kal’s hot, empty eyes. “I want them all alive.” She swallowed. “If at any point we think you’re going to harm us, then we’ll make life difficult for you. Really, really difficult.” The nose of the gun lowered a fraction, and Kal gave her an appraising look. She hurried on before he could call her bluff. “We’re going to cooperate, okay? That way everybody gets out alive, and your king gets exactly what he wants, and nobody has to die. That has to count for something. Or is life so cheap to you?”
The gun didn’t move any lower, but Kal relaxed, stood a little straighter. “To me,” he said with a humorless smile, “Yeah. Rish?”
The tiny female turned towards him, motion lighting her up like a statue come to life. She thought for a moment. Her gaze raked Telly, Anton, Emma. She barely spared a glance for Ricky, and Emma thought it just as well.
“Fine,” said Rish. Her eyes came to rest again on Emma. “We may as well keep you happy, if it costs so little,” she said with a disdainful twitch of her nose. She gestured at Kal. “You and Fern may escort them out.” The pale man with the black eyes moved farther into the motel room, and Emma guessed he was Fern. Very pretty name for such a frightening individual.
Suddenly something occurred to her. Her heart lurched. It might be pushing their luck, but she just couldn’t let the opportunity slip away, and she doubted the boys would be able to pull it off even if they thought of it.
Without giving herself time to reconsider, she squeezed Anton’s hands and tried to look faint — not something she’d had a lot of practice at, but she was determined.
“Emma?” Anton leaned his head in, putting his cheek to hers, and Emma took a shaky breath she didn’t have to fake.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
He frowned and glanced around. “I don’t…”
“Seriously. I’m just… I…” She coughed and willed her eyes to water, taking a deep breath as though trying to stem nausea. Anton looked at Kal, who grunted and jerked his chin towards the bathroom.
“Take her,” he said to no one in particular, obviously confident they had the motel room surrounded. Or maybe he just wanted an excuse to kill someone. Anton stirred, and Ricky shifted so they could get past, turning to watch her with wide, pale eyes. She couldn’t recall him ever looking so guarded. She couldn’t measure that look, whether he was afraid or angry or desperate, and it frightened her.
Emma swallowed the lump in her throat and told the dog to stay. He whined, ears flat to his skull, mismatched eyes roving the motel room. Poor baby. What the hell had she done? I’ve gotten a fricking stray mutt kidnapped, that’s what I’ve done. Some animal rescuer she turned out to be.
With an arm around her shoulders, Anton walked her to the bathroom door, probably intending to go in with her. That wouldn’t do.
She coughed and made as convincing a gagging noise as she could. It wasn’t hard. She pressed a hand to her mouth and shrugged Anton’s arm off her. “I’ll be fine, just, please…” With that she staggered through the door as though she didn’t think she’d make it in time, slamming it behind her.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, eyes wide and skin pale. Sweet Jesus, she had to pull this off without any of the jaguars suspecting, and all that separated her from them was an unlocked door and a wall no thicker than her wrist.
She walked over to the small toilet, lifted the lid and seat noisily. Forced herself to count to thirty, breathing heavily, adding a few more gagging noises. Then she flushed. Then went to the basin, where her purse still sat on the ledge, and turned on the cold water tap as high as the pressure could go. Just had to pray the sound of rushing water would be enough covering noise; there was something she had to do, and it had nothing to do with using the facilities.
Heart in her mouth, surrounded by glittering ocelot maidens, Emma stood in the parking lot with the sun pressing down on her like a physical thing and Bruce pressed to her leg like he could fuse himself there if he just pushed hard enough. She murmured soothing nonsense to the dog and watched Kal frisk Telly. He’d already frisked Ricky; only Anton to go. And her. One of the maidens already had possession of her bag. When the maiden had followed them out of the destroyed motel room window with the bag in her small hands, Emma realized with a sickening jolt that the shapechangers could probably smell the gun on her, or the remnants of its scent in her bag, and she was surely busted. But none of them had pulled her up yet. Maybe the smell of all the other guns they were carrying made it harder to pick out individual scents? Or maybe they were just waiting, giving her time to get nice and anxious before taking the gun away and with it the last shreds of her hope of somehow escaping them with her best friend and her life.
Had she gone to all that effort only moments ago for nothing? Sweat trickled down her sides, and it wasn’t just from the heat.
She looked around. Where the hell were the cops? Someone from the motel had to have reported the windows smashing by now, not to mention the two men with assault rifles currently holding Emma and the others at gunpoint in the parking lot. The muzzle of the thin, dark haired man’s gun looked dark and huge, like a hole for her to fall down. Like his eyes. He stared at her, and it took effort not to stare back; it should have been easy not to meet his gaze, but something about him made a part of her unwilling to let him out of her sight. As though if she looked away, he would — well, she didn’t know what he’d do. And she never wanted to find out.
He blinked at her, slowly, once. Beside her, Ricky growled. It made Emma spare him a glance, and she found him staring, nostrils flared, lips parted. Scenting the air.
“What’s his kind doing here?” said Ricky in a low voice. Kal shot Ricky a look, but said nothing. The maidens just watched everything with identical, implacable eyes like burning embers, their small faces fixed and unreadable.
“The Aranan have been ingratiating themselves to the royal jags for a couple of years now,” said Anton, sounding unimpressed. “The alliance is new. They’ve been busy learning interesting new skills to sweeten the deal, like driving. And shooting.” The note of amusement in Anton’s voice was so dry it should have cracked open and disintegrated in a puff of dust. “He’s hired muscle. That’s all the Aranan are good for.”
Emma wondered at Anton’s tone; interspecies racism, how charming. She forced herself to look at Fern’s boots as she asked, “Who are the Aranan?”
Ricky scowled and tore his eyes away from the person in question. “Not who, what.” The corners of his full mouth turned down in a grimace as he met her eyes. “They’re tarantulas.”
Emma stared at the dark haired man who watched her with such intensity. To say she suppressed a shiver was a vast and fierce understatement. A gust of warm wind buffeted them, flinging Fern’s spiky hair in all directions, made his loose clothes ripple as though they were alive — or like there were thin
gs moving restlessly beneath them. Things with too many legs.
“Enough talk,” Kal said flatly. “Time to get in the van. And keep that dog under control, or I put it down, understood?”
Emma nodded and did what he said without voicing any of the colorful estimations of Kal’s character that leapt to mind; the main thing was, she hadn’t been frisked. Ten points for sexism, all in her favor.
The ocelot maidens and their retinue had arrived in a big white van, but it wouldn’t hold everyone — they hadn’t been planning on taking any hostages, other than Emma. Just another nasty reminder that the men had come close to being executed. Fern — the Aranan — climbed behind the wheel of Anton’s truck and four of the ocelot maidens rode with him, to make space in the van.
Emma ended up wedged in between Anton and Ricky, with Telly on her far left, on a padded bench that ran the length of the end half of the van. The dog crammed himself between Emma’s knees and refused to move his head from her lap, which put his nose right in her crotch, but she didn’t have the heart to move him. A wire partition separated the front and passenger seats from rest of the van, which was more designed for storage and transportation than for sitting. Still, the seats weren’t too bad. But the company sucked.
Four of the maidens occupied the back passenger seats, and Kal drove alone up the front.
They drove a few minutes with only the sound of the van’s engine thrumming and the road hissing by beneath the wheels, until Anton turned to look at the maiden sitting closest to the passenger side window beyond the wire partition.
“Rish,” He said. The maiden lifted hooded eyes to gaze on him expectantly.
A muscle jumped in Anton’s cheek. “How did you find us?”
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