by RJ Blain
Amber nudged me with an elbow, pointing to the west. “Look,” she said through chattering teeth.
A massive storm front loomed in the distance, stretching as far as I could see. I yipped my surprise.
“T-that s-started a-about an hour ago. L-let’s g-get back to the c-car and g-get home before Richard k-kills us…”
I staggered upright, shaking the frost from my coat and wondered if the storm was from the magic I wrought or a consequence of it.
Epilogue
We hadn’t quite made it back to Amber’s car before the storm hit. A wall of dust and sand churned over the dry hills. With a dismayed cry, Amber sprinted to her vehicle and yanked open the back door. I launched into it, rocking the car as my weight hit the seat.
Amber fought the gusting wind and choking dust, sprawling onto the driver’s seat. The storm slammed her door shut. A haze engulfed the car. Sand, dust, and snow hissed over the windshield.
Amber twisted around in the seat to face me, her mouth opened as she panted. It took her a couple of minutes to control her breathing enough to speak without gasping. “I think we’re stuck.”
I nodded in agreement; considering I couldn’t see the ground outside the window, driving anywhere was impossible. I shuddered at the thought of anyone being caught in the storm.
“I’m going to assume you didn’t mean for that to happen.”
I nodded again.
“Well, nothing to be done for it now. Let’s just hope the temperature doesn’t drop too much.”
It would, but without a way to communicate that, I watched the snow whip outside. If the storm didn’t provide enough electricity for me to work with, the power plant radiated enough latent energy to ensure I’d have enough to keep us both warm.
It didn’t take long for me to summon enough strength to heat the air in the car until Amber’s teeth no longer chattered and she relaxed. She thanked me with a smile and we settled down to wait. Amber dozed while I kept a tired guard, warming the car enough she was comfortable despite her light clothing. The wind settled, allowing fat flakes of snow to accumulate on the windshield and cake the windows.
When Amber woke, I channeled enough power into the car to turn on the radio. According to the clock it was four in the afternoon. We listened to the reports of heavy snowfall throughout most of California with flurries reaching as far north as Seattle. Amber draped her arm over the back of her seat, shaking her head as she listened.
“Unbelievable,” she muttered.
I yawned and showed the witch my teeth.
“I hope you’re happy, Nicole. We’re stuck. I’d never find the access road. The last thing I’d want to do is drive off a cliff into the ocean.” Amber drummed a beat on her seat with her fingers. “At least there’s some good news.”
I tilted my head to the side and pricked both ears forward. The witch grinned at me and left me waiting for several minutes.
The noise I made at her delay was a mix between a growl and a warble.
“Okay, okay. You’re looking much better now. Not nearly so frayed around the edges. Because I’m so wise and wonderful, I even thought to bring a spare change of clothes.” Amber reached over to the passenger’s seat, grabbed a bundle, and threw it at me. I ended up with a pair of shorts and a tank top draped over my nose. “You’ll probably need that, unless you want to sit around naked once I’m finished.”
My tail thumped against the seat. The wolf within was quiet, and I got the sense that she slept—I wanted to join her, but I wanted to be a human again first.
What type of human I’d become, however, was a mystery. Would I remain a wizard with a heightened sense of smell? The wolf didn’t seem inclined to leave. I wasn’t in a hurry to make her disappear.
Amber reached for me. When she touched me, pain seared through me.
~~*~~
It only took Amber a few minutes to force my body to twist, bend, and reform from a wolf’s body to a human one, but it felt like an eternity. The pain robbed me of my ability to scream. I heard the murmur of Amber’s voice, soothing and reassuring, but I couldn’t understand what she said through the gonging in my ears.
When the agony subsided, I felt raw from head to toe, but I had toes—human ones. I stared at my shaking hands in amazement.
True to her word, I was human—mostly.
A overwhelming number of scents assaulted my nose, stronger than when I had been in the wolf’s body, as though the process of transforming from beast to human had somehow enhanced my sense of smell. I sneezed and pain rippled through my back. My skin felt tight and raw.
Within, the wolf slumbered contentedly.
“Get dressed,” Amber said, her voice loud enough to pierce through the ringing in my ears.
It took me several minutes to situate myself enough that I could wiggle into my clothes; while I hadn’t been a wolf for that long, the transition from four legs to two was harder than the other way around.
“Thank you,” I said. The hoarseness in my voice was gone. I touched my throat, my eyes widening.
“Well, well, well,” was all the witch said with a smile.
Gaping at Amber, I struggled to comprehend why my voice didn’t sound as though I had swallowed nails and sandpaper. Tears blurred my vision. I tried to say something, but I couldn’t force a single word out.
“Come sit up here now that you’ll fit,” Amber said. I climbed into the front and slumped into the passenger’s seat. “I was hoping something like that would happen, but I didn’t dare tell you—didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
I opened and closed my mouth several times. At a loss of what to say, I rubbed at my eyes and tried to keep the tears at bay.
It didn’t work.
Amber waited in patient silence, and when I finally managed to control myself, she offered me several tissues. “If Richard wasn’t panicking already, he probably is now,” she said wryly.
I sniffled, cleared my throat, and replied, “What do you mean?” My voice shook with emotion, but it was mine; I was a little hoarse from crying, but it was nothing a few minutes and a cough drop wouldn’t cure.
“You’re dense.” Amber grinned at me. “It’s cute. You really haven’t noticed, have you?”
I narrowed my eyes at her as I blew my nose again. “I haven’t noticed what?”
“Poor Richard.”
“What? What are you talking about? Answer me.”
Amber covered her mouth, but I heard her giggling.
“Amber!”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.” Amber hesitated, staring at the snow caking the windshield. “I’m not sure how much I should say.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought about what Richard had said yesterday. After… after you went to sleep, I made some calls and pulled a few strings. I wanted to find out what he was talking about.” Amber reached over me, opened the glove box of the car, and pulled out a thick envelope of papers, which she handed to me. “This is what was faxed to me before we left my condo this morning.”
“You’ve been busy,” I muttered, wondering just how she managed to get anything faxed to her in the middle of the night. Instead of opening the envelope, I turned my full attention to Amber.
“Richard lied,” Amber said. She refused to meet my gaze.
I waited.
“Last night, he lied about a lot of things.” Amber shook her head. “What a daring man.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t lie to Fenerec.”
“It’s very, very difficult to lie to a Fenerec. It’s not impossible, though,” the witch admitted. “Everything you need to know is in that envelope.”
My hands shook, but I managed to pull out the folded sheets of paper within. The first few pages were copies of receipts for hospital bills. “These are paid hospital bills.”
There was no name on the bill or receipt to indicate who had paid for it.
Amber leaned over and pointed at the date. “You were released about a y
ear after you were admitted. This bill was paid six months before when you were still in a coma. Someone was paying the hospital on a weekly basis from the day after you were admitted until you left. I have a two hundred page medical file on my fax machine.”
“You took my records.”
“Damn straight I did,” Amber said in a curt tone. “Something wasn’t adding up and I needed to know what was going on. I can’t protect you if I don’t know who—or what—might be coming for you.” Her tone softened, and when I didn’t say anything, she laughed a little. “Honestly, I was expecting your father to be the one behind the payments, not Richard.”
“Richard paid my bills?” I asked in a whisper.
“Hand me those.” Amber claimed the papers from my shaking hands. She flipped through them before handing me a sheet. It was a print out of a bank statement. “Richard will murder me if he finds out I had an Inquisition friend print out statements from his US banking account.”
“This is really from Richard’s account?” I looked over the statement, which covered a six month period. It showed transfers into the account and payments to a hospital in Florida. Richard’s name and address was listed at the top of the page.
“If he had paid directly from one of his Canadian accounts, I never would have been able to get the proof. I bent the rules a little.”
“But why would Richard…?” I folded the statement and handed it back to Amber.
“That’s what I wanted to know, too. About the only thing that wasn’t a flat-out lie was the fact that you have trauma-induced amnesia. According to your medical file, you suffer from moderate to severe memory loss over a five or six year period. What I wanted to know was why would someone who was known to fight and argue with you all of the time pay for your hospital bills? Why would he pretend like he didn’t know who you were or where you had been? He even lied about the car. Here, look at this.” Amber handed me another sheet of paper.
It was a receipt from a tow company, billed to Richard Murphy.
“That’s how much he was charged for pulling his Porsche from a ravine in Georgia. So I asked to have the tags run and found something very, very interesting.”
I narrowed my eyes but took the bait. “What did you find so very, very interesting?”
“The car was registered to a Mr. and Mrs. Murphy.”
“Richard’s married?” I squeaked.
Amber slapped a sheet of paper onto my lap. “Yes. To you.”
I gawked at the marriage certificate . With shaking hands, I picked up the sheet and read it three times. According to the Canadian document, I had married Richard at age sixteen in Ontario. “How is this even possible?”
Amber laughed so hard she hiccuped. “I wanted to know that too. Ontario requires parental permission for a minor to get married. Since it was pretty obvious your father wouldn’t have consented, I called your mother. She confessed.”
“My mother? You called my mother? How in the hell did you do all of this in one night?” In a daze, I folded the marriage certificate. If the documents told the truth, I had been married to Richard for over a year before the car accident. Why couldn’t I remember any of it? Why didn’t I remember Richard at all?
“It didn’t take me many calls to get the ball rolling. I napped while waiting for calls and faxes back. Anyway, I spent about an hour on the phone with your mother. Richard had asked her if he could marry you. You two, apparently, had been playing everyone, making it look like you two hated each other. Your mother’s quite fond of Richard, so she was more than happy to go to Ontario and take care of the consent forms. She forged your father’s consent. But since she turned in the papers in person, with both you and Richard in attendance, they didn’t think to check to see if your father had actually consented.”
“Oh my god.”
“From what I can tell, Alex didn’t even know.”
I ran my hand through my hair. My fingers got caught in a tangle. “Oh my god.”
“Who would have thought you were such a wild child?” Amber asked before laughing. She gathered the papers, returned them to the envelope, and shoved it back into the glove box.
~~*~~
It was long after dark before the snow ceased falling and the cold front retreated, allowing for the heat of the Californian night melt away what had accumulated during the storm. Widespread power outages kept the skies clear. A sprinkling of stars gleamed through tattered clouds.
While Amber drove cautiously along the access road, she ran off the shoulder more than a few times due to the obscuring layer of mud caking everything. An idling SUV blocked where the road met the highway.
Amber tensed and pointed at the glove box. I pulled out the pistol buried beneath the envelope, checking the ammo and disengaging the safety. Parking the car, Amber stepped out, taking the keys with her.
A rumpled and tired Richard emerged from the SUV, followed by Alex and my sister. “There you are.”
I turned the safety back on and shoved the gun back in the glove box.
“Did it work?” Amber asked, sitting on the hood of her car.
Richard ran his hand through his hair. “I think so. Mr. Desmond’s going to tan my hide and use me for a rug for letting you two disappear.”
“You’re looking better, Nicole,” Alex called, waving to me.
I got out of the car and joined Amber on the hood. “Thank you.”
It wasn’t really a lie—I did feel better, except for the fact I didn’t have any idea what to do with the knowledge Amber had gifted me with. Richard was careful not to look at me for too long.
Lisa gaped at me. I tilted my head to the side, considered her, and smiled. She answered me with a brilliant smile of her own. Maybe I couldn’t feel my sister like some twins, but I could see in her eyes that everything was okay between us. That was enough for me.
I focused on Richard. How much had it cost him to pretend we had never known each other at all? I could guess at the why; when he did look at me, I could see the guilt in his eyes.
My brows furrowed as I considered everything that had happened. He had been watching over me from the very beginning, he had been doing what he could to keep me safe without getting too close to me. Sucking in a breath, I realized something, pointing at Murphy brothers. “You’re the dogs!”
In the headlights of Amber’s car, Richard paled. Alex threw his head back and laughed. “I told you she’d figure it out,” the younger Murphy brother said.
“You have a lot of explaining to do, Richard,” I said, sliding off of Amber’s car and stepping forward to stand in front of him. I reached up, grabbed the collar of his shirt, and pulled him down so he was forced to look me in the eyes. I tugged him down a little farther so I could whisper in his ear, “In private.”
A flush spread over Richard’s cheeks. I let him go, spun on a heel, and held my hand out to Amber. “Keys.”
With an arched brow, she tossed them to me. Catching them, I strode to the driver’s side of the car and opened the door. “Are you coming, Mr. Murphy?”
“I’ll go with Alex and Lisa,” Amber said, sliding off of her car to walk to the SUV.
Richard got out of her way. “The keys are in the ignition.”
“I shall chaperon your brother and sister-in-law with utmost care,” Amber promised.
“Not necessary!” Lisa replied. My sister shook her head, sighed, and started to laugh.
Chuckling a little, I got into Amber’s car. Richard hesitated, but opened passenger’s side door. I waited for Amber to drive off in the SUV before starting the engine. I glanced at Richard out of the corner of my eye.
All I could see on his face was guilt.
Like Amber, I drove cautiously, although I was more interested in letting the SUV in front of us pull farther ahead. The silence stretched between us while I tried to find a way to tell him I knew the truth.
For the first stretch, I struggled to force my uncooperative memory to give back what I had lost. For the most part, it didn�
��t work. I did, however, remember one thing. We were halfway back to Los Angeles before I found the courage to say anything at all.
“What happened to our rings?” I whispered.
Richard jerked at my words. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched his face turn several shades lighter and take on a greenish hue. “You remember?”
“A bit here, a bit there. If you throw up in Amber’s car, she’s never going to forgive you. If you throw up on me, I’ll never forgive you.”
Richard swallowed and jerked his head in a nod. He cleared his throat several times. Instead of speaking, he squirmed in the seat until he managed to fish his wallet out of his pocket. He dug into a small, zippered compartment and pulled out a satin pouch. Three rings tumbled out; one was an engagement ring featuring a single small diamond and the other two were plain wedding bands.
Had he carried those with him in his wallet over the years? It hurt looking at them; the bands were clean and well cared for. Maybe it was my imagination, but the rings looked worn, as though he had spent far too long running his fingers over them.
How much had his silence and patience cost him? My heart ached trying to imagine what he had gone through over the years.
I pulled the car over and turned to face Richard. “I don’t remember much.” I doubted I ever would, but I smothered my regret. All I could do was keep looking forward. “Maybe I won’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to start by taking you out for dinner.”
It wasn’t much of a start, but it would do—for now.
Storm Without End (Requiem for the Rift King, Book 1)
Kalen’s throne is his saddle, his crown is the dirt on his brow, and his right to rule is sealed in the blood that stains his hand. Few know the truth about the one-armed Rift King, and he prefers it that way. When people get too close to him, they either betray him or die. The Rift he rules cares nothing for the weak. More often than not, even the strong fail to survive.
When he’s abducted, his disappearance threatens to destroy his home, his people, and start a hopeless and bloody war. There are many who desire his death, and few who hope for his survival. With peace in the Six Kingdoms quickly crumbling, it falls on him to try to stop the conflict swiftly taking the entire continent by storm.