by Annie Bellet
“You could try going to a person and not a place, but it is less accurate.” Ash folded his arms across his chest, his red-flecked eyes fixed on my face.
“Why can’t you just drop me off in Wylde?” I asked. He’d explained why he couldn’t come with me; that he had to stay in the Veil and become guardian to the cracked Seal again. Him being fully in the real world would be one dragon too many, apparently.
“Holding this pocket has been tiring enough,” Ash said. He shook his head. “The Seal weakens. I cannot leave the Veil again. I’ve played chicken enough with the Oath for one lifetime, I think.”
It was interesting to have my very existence referred to as playing chicken, but I let it go. Things were tense now that I was leaving. He’d accepted my promise not to kill Samir, but I had a suspicion that Ash was perfectly aware how thin that promise was, and that if push came to dying horribly, I’d break it in a heartbeat.
A person. Not a place.
“I can do this,” I muttered. “Good-bye, Ash. Thank you,” I added. He didn’t offer a hug and I didn’t ask. Ash nodded at me and smiled. I decided to pretend his smile was less sad than it looked.
There was only one person I wanted to be with if I got right to the core of it all. I closed my eyes and let all awareness of the field and my father slip away. Instead I pictured Alek. Tall, strong, ice-blue eyes, soft, pale skin, lips curving in a smirk that said he could see through all my bullshit. My tiger, my rock, my mate. I let my magic flow through me and focused all my will on being with Alek, on feeling his arms curling around me again, on the wild, musky scent of him.
Then I clicked my heels, because why not.
“There’s no place like home,” I whispered.
Turned out there was no place like home. There was fucking cold air, shitloads of snow, and my damn friends about to get themselves killed.
I popped out of the Veil and ended up standing on the roof of an SUV in the middle of a big clearing. There was snow everywhere and my thin flannel shirt felt like nothing against the below-freezing air. I gasped for breath and squinted to look around in the dimming light. I barely had a moment to register that Harper was here and alive. The damn fox was about to get herself killed. Samir’s magic coated this place like sugar on Frosted Flakes. It was writhing all around a paddock formed of silvered barbed wire, and radiated out in a spiral from there. I couldn’t tell what the spell would do once triggered, but I couldn’t imagine it was anything good.
There was a two-story farmhouse to my right with a huge white tiger crouched by the porch. Alek. Alive, for the moment. His blue eyes met mine and I held up my hands in a stay-put gesture.
“It’s a trap, stop!” I called out to both of them. How the hell Harper hadn’t triggered it yet I didn’t know, but I could puzzle that out later. Provided later wasn’t too late, of course.
The fox turned and looked at me. Her mouth opened and then shut. It was almost comical except for the dire circumstances. I gave her a thumbs-up. Fox-Harper didn’t move, staying frozen in place. Tiger-Alek shifted to human, but also stayed where he was.
“Jade,” he called out. “What is it?”
I rubbed my thumb over my talisman, using my newfound skills to examine Samir’s spell. His power smelled honey sweet and sickened me. I forced myself to remain calm. Destructive magic. Coming into the area hadn’t triggered it. The spiral looked like a whirlpool of power, pulling in toward the center. It encompassed the house, the paddock, even the area I was in.
“Jade?”
I turned my head as Ezee shouted from across the field, his voice another balm on my worried soul. He and Levi stood at the edge of the clearing, just outside the spell’s range.
“Stay back,” I yelled to them. “Stay at the tree line.” The last thing I needed was for two more of us to be caught in this.
“What about the unicorn?” Levi yelled. “We’re here for it.”
I looked back at the dome of glowing wires over the paddock. For a moment I saw the white horse, but something about it seemed off. Samir’s magic colored it as well. I summoned more of my power into myself and really stared. The unicorn seemed to melt away, leaving a grotesque construction of silver wires, a white horse hide, and chunks of carved wood behind. The spiral of magic was anchored at the center, buried inside the construct.
“It’s an illusion,” I said. I had a feeling that touching that thing would have caused the spell to trigger, but I doubted that was the only way to set this off. It was too elaborate, thrown too wide across the clearing.
Alek cursed in Russian. Fox-Harper started to move away from the paddock back toward Alek, being careful to stay in her old tracks, and the spell shivered in response, the honey-thick magic rising. The magic clung to her fur, outlining her in a glow apparently only I could see.
“Harper, no,” I called out. “Don’t move.”
Her movement had confirmed my second assumption. The spell was a trap with multiple triggers. It was open right now, waiting for one of those trapped within to try to leave it.
I looked down at my own legs and feet. The car wasn’t covered in magic. The spell was focused along the ground. I followed the spiral and began to pick out small points of concentrated power. As Ash had said, Samir was going with his comfort zone. He’d anchored the spell along the arms of the spiral with ensorcelled stones. I hadn’t touched the ground, so I wasn’t caught in the spell yet. The spell was designed for people who had to be in contact with the earth.
I didn’t think I could dispel it without triggering it. That left getting Alek and Harper out quickly. Samir was predictable in that he would probably have rigged the effect to be some kind of explosion. He liked explosions. Messier and showier, the better. Plus if this trap was designed to catch my friends, he would have made sure it would do lots of damage. No guarantee of killing a shifter otherwise.
I shoved away that thoroughly unpleasant thought.
“Okay,” I called out. “I have an idea. Ezee, Levi, back out of here. Like way, way back.”
They must have picked up on how deadly serious I was, because they disappeared into the trees with little more than a worried look in our direction.
“What do you need?” Alek asked me.
“For you and Harper to hold really still. This might feel weird. Harper, I think it is safe for you to shift.” It would be easier to do what I wanted if everyone was human since we might need to hold on to each other.
Harper shifted to human but stayed in place.
“Holding still, got it,” she said.
“I’m going to yank you guys to me and then fly us out of here. When you get within reach, grab a hold of each other. This might be kind of explosive. Ready?” I pulled on my magic, letting it sing in my veins. I’d been training for weeks. This was just two little spells at once, with the two people I loved most in the world’s lives on the line. No biggie.
“Ready,” Alek said.
“Let’s do this,” Harper said.
Throwing my arms wide, I snapped out two long coils of power and wrapped them around Alek and Harper. In my mind I drew the shield, summoning it around me as I yanked them into the air and across the field. I was already rising, towing them along like action heroes being dragged into a rescue helicopter. Only instead of a helicopter, they just had a giant glowing sphere of shield magic. I hoped it was up to the task.
Alek’s hand closed on my forearm first, warm and solid. Then Harper slammed into us as Samir’s magic reacted and his spiral unwound in a spectacular burst. I slammed my shields closed and let the wave of Samir’s magic throw us into the air like a punted soccer ball. Wind streamed past my face, whipping my hair free from its braid. I leaned into Alek and held on to my spell, pouring everything into the shield.
Then we were free from the explosion, sailing high above the trees. I opened my eyes and looked down with tear-blurred vision. Below us the clearing was blackened and cratered. The house was gone. It looked like a meteor had hit, the trees around all
bent and broken in a circle leaning away from the point of impact. There was no fire, just destruction. I hoped the twins had gotten far enough away from the edge.
I let go of the shield and wrapped us in magic so we wouldn’t plummet to our deaths. I’d never flown with someone else clinging to me, much less two someones, but I managed a more or less graceful descent toward what looked like another clearing. Open ground seemed better than trying for a forest landing.
We crashed less than gracefully into the snow, Alek twisting at the last moment and catching me so I landed more on him than anything else. We just lay like that, Harper next to me, her hand still gripping my arm, my body sprawled half over Alek, and caught our breaths.
Alek’s arms came up around me and squeezed me hard enough that I had to squeak in protest. Then his mouth was on mine, and for a moment I forgot everything. This was what I had fought for. This was what I had missed, had craved.
“You two want to get a room?” Harper’s voice pulled me back to reality.
I let go of Alek and turned to look at her. She was sitting up in the snow. Whole. Healthy. She looked tired and her eyes had dark circles below them, but she wasn’t looking at me with that haunting glare of utter betrayal. I ignored a twinge of guilt. I didn’t have to tell her about not being able to kill Samir yet.
“I thought you were dead,” I said as I crawled off Alek and wrapped my arms around her.
She hugged me back, burying her head in my neck. “I ain’t so easy to kill,” she said. Her words were flippant though her tone was anything but.
“I’m sorry, furball,” I whispered into her snow-caked hair.
“Jade!”
I let go of Harper reluctantly and looked up to see Ezee and Levi stumbling through the snow toward us.
“When you said way, way back, you meant it,” Levi said with a grimace. His coat was torn across his chest and fresh blood stained the ripped material.
“Are you all right?” I got to my feet. The snow coating my shirt was starting to melt and I was getting colder and colder by the second.
“Just a scratch from some branches I didn’t dodge,” Levi said.
Ezee stopped a couple of feet from me. He, too, looked tired. They all did. Tired and more careworn than I’d ever seen them. I had a sudden and uncomfortable suspicion that more time had passed than I realized, or than Ash had said would. I hoped Ash had merely been wrong and not lying to me.
“So, what did I miss? What happened to you guys?” I said with an only half-forced smile.
“Mercenaries,” Ezee said, returning my smile, his white teeth flashing brightly in the dimming light. “What happened to you?”
“Training montage,” I said. “Is everyone else safe?”
“Mom is back at camp guarding Yosemite while he tries to contact Brie and Ciaran. Junebug is keeping an eye on the road. We should probably find her. I can’t imagine she missed the giant explosion.”
Junebug was alive? The last thing I remembered was her being shot. Relief was truly a tangible thing when it was this strong. I hadn’t realized how deeply I’d buried all my worries about my friends until just now. I felt like someone had removed a thousand pounds of iron from off my shoulders.
“Good, gang’s all here,” I said.
“Except Max,” Harper said behind me.
I had no response to that.
“Let’s get back to camp before Jade freezes, yes?” Alek said. He pulled off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders.
“Don’t you need this?” I asked, trying to be polite even as I shoved my wet arms into the warm sleeves.
“I have fur,” Alek said.
Good point. I pulled his oversized coat around me and felt marginally better.
My friends shifted to their animal forms and led the way. I followed Alek’s tiger, my brain already working out how to tell my story. I owed them all a lot of explanations. They deserved the truth from me, about everything.
I watched Harper’s red fox shape disappear into the gloom, and despaired. I was so damn glad she was alive, and so damn dreading having to tell her that I couldn’t kill the man responsible for murdering her brother.
All I could hope for was that somehow she would understand.
I had a feeling asking Harper understand we had to let Samir live would be a lot like asking the sun to rise in the west.
Levi peeled off to go collect Junebug. I followed Alek to their camp. It was cold, slow going through the woods, and the sight of the camp was a welcome thing indeed.
Iollan, the druid, must have made the camp. It was a tangle of branches and vines that didn’t look native to the area grown into a domed structure that was covered in snow. The snow proved insulating, for the inside of the dome was far warmer than the outside. There were sleeping bags on rough pallets made of branches and a small camp stove, along with some electric lanterns. It was rough, but cozy.
The best part of arriving at camp was seeing Rose. Harper’s mother came out of the dome and wrapped her wiry arms around me. I let myself indulge in her hug, wrapping my arms around her and holding on for a long time. It was nice to feel missed, to feel a little mothered as well.
“It’s good to see you,” Rose said. Her face had more lines in it than I remembered. Her eyes were shadowed with grief and determination. She was alive and vibrant and strong, and I was glad to see that.
Turning back time had been worth it, I knew then, in a deeper way than I had realized. Having Harper alive, sinking down onto a sleeping bag next to Alek as everyone gathered around, I looked at my friends and felt a strange satisfaction, a warm sense of belonging. If only I’d been able to save Max and Steve.
I shoved that thought away. I was here. Everyone was whole and alive. I looked around.
“Wait, where’s Iollan?” I asked, not seeing the huge druid.
“He was in here, contacting Ciaran and Brie,” Rosie said. “Then he came out to where I was keeping watch, said he had to check on something, and walked into a tree before I could get a word out.”
“Typical,” Ezee muttered.
I glanced at my friend, wondering if there was trouble in paradise. I knew his relationship with the druid was complicated. As Ezee had told me, they came from different worlds. A cosmopolitanish coyote shifter who loved his fine wines, modern-day comforts, and being professorial versus the big druid who loved the wilds and looked like he hadn’t seen a tailor or a razor in three hundred years.
“He can handle himself,” I said. I dreaded my next question, but it had to be asked. “How long have I been gone?”
“You don’t know?” Harper asked.
I shook my head.
“Little over three weeks.” Levi was crouched in front of the camp stove’s dubious warmth, heating a pot of water for what I hoped would be tea.
Three weeks? Shit. That was longer than I thought.
“So what’s been happening?” I asked.
“Where were you?” Harper said at the same time.
There was an awkward silence as we stared at each other.
“You first?” I said lamely. I needed a little more time to figure out what to say and how to say it. There was so much. For them it had been three weeks. For me, it had been months. I felt so much had changed. I was changed.
“Samir captured me after you left,” Harper said with a shrug that looked far too casual. “I escaped, but I figured out his plan first. Oh, and I rescued a unicorn.”
Of course she did. I smiled and shook my head. “What’s his plan? Besides apparently killing us all?”
Harper looked at Alek, who slid his arm around me.
“We think Samir is going to resurrect Balor, then eat his heart,” Alek said.
“He wants to become a god,” Ezee said.
“Fucktoast on a stick,” I muttered. “Will that work?”
“Yosemite thinks it is possible, yeah,” Harper said. “Samir seemed very convinced, too.”
I wanted to ask her more about her captivity, b
ut I was afraid. It was partially my fault she had ended up like that. I kind of didn’t want to know what had happened. I had enough guilt clogging my brain. I vowed to ask later, maybe after that bastard was dead as fuck. Or at least destroyed. Thinking about him hurting Harper, I was on the fence again about killing him. If the dagger didn’t work, I wouldn’t have a choice. He had to be destroyed.
Before he turned into a god. Because why would life take it easy on me? Ha.
“He needs a unicorn?” I asked, thinking of the illusion at the farmhouse.
“Last tear from a unicorn, last feather of a phoenix, last drop of blood from a dragon, I guess,” Ezee said. “Harper also stole what we think was dragon blood and we destroyed it.”
“Phoenix feather? Like in Final Fantasy?” I asked. Last drop of blood from a dragon sounded pretty bad, considering I’d just brought him myself. I had no intention of giving him my last drop of blood. Or any drops.
I was glad it was the last drop, because Noah the vampire had taken some of my blood. I hated the idea of him helping Samir at all, but I didn’t trust the Archivist and wouldn’t put it past him. However, the blood he had was hardly my last. It wasn’t even the last blood I’d shed.
“Yeah, I guess. Magic is weird,” Harper said.
Levi dipped out a cup of boiling water and dropped a tea bag into it. He repeated this until the water was low, then dumped the final amount into the final cup. There weren’t enough to go around, so he and Junebug shared. I watched him hand the cups around and accepted mine gratefully. It helped thaw my hands. This was how they’d been living for weeks.
I had amazing friends. I was going to get maudlin if I wasn’t careful.
Tea handed out, everyone sat around in the circle of sleeping bags and looked at me. They were waiting for an explanation.
I leaned into Alek’s warmth. I’d taken off his coat when we sat down, but now I wished I still had its bulk so I could hide in it. No. No more hiding. Time for the truth. Or at least most of it.
“This is going to sound kind of crazy,” I warned them.