by Kay Camden
A real-deal rally car promises a fast getaway but sucks for luggage. For my next birthday maybe I’ll ask for something more practical. Everyone knows the sixteenth birthday demands you go big, bigger than a ŠKODA Fabia R5 that owns the European rally scene and looks sweet doing it. Too bad I got that for my fifteenth. Mine’s been weighed down by a custom luxury sport interior but it can still haul a-dollar-dollar. The ruts in the southeast corner of our land can speak to that. I’m going to need to do some thinking about what I’ll ask for when I turn sixteen. I don’t have much time left to choose.
The night attendant finds a spot for the last jug but the hatch won’t close. Damn that roll cage. Maybe the sleek Audi sedan parked beside it would’ve been a better choice, but the R5 is the only car I know how to drive. Plus, nothing can beat it off road.
I take my eyes off surveillance to help him shove the jug farther in and finally, all jugs are in and the hatch is closed.
“Now get in the driver’s seat.” I squeeze my bag into the back and take the passenger side. I could do this myself if I had a code to the gate. For the first time I see how balls it is that I don’t have access through the front gate of my own fucking house. Once there I get out, pointing a gun at him in full view of the camera as he peels himself out of the deep bucket seat. Here’s the proof so they don’t kill him for helping me escape. It puts me in a bind for my getaway because whoever’s monitoring the cameras probably has my father on the phone right now. So be it. This guy doesn’t deserve a bullet in the brain because I’m the shitbag who can’t kill Sloane Bevan. The dirty traitor who kills Emily instead.
Who kills Emily! I can’t believe it—can’t unsee it—can’t deal—have to get out of here. Have to go somewhere—anywhere—oh shit, Rex, you killed Emily. Oh shit.
The night attendant’s saying my name, shaking my shoulder. I raise the gun again and tell him to go back and tell them not to look for me. As if they’ll listen. I get behind the wheel and screw the takeoff from first and grind second and it dawns on me I just fail at life. I fail at everything I try to do. I fail so hard it’s unsalvageable.
What Sloane Bevan did to me is worse than death. She let me live so I had to face my family as their failed savior. She baited me to her side of the stream knowing Emily would show and I’d react to that gun like I’ve been trained to react. Don’t think. Follow through. My training is my guide, never my brain. Muscle memory. Shoot to kill.
That’s exactly what throwing that spear felt like. My hand guided by some invisible force. By the wind itself. Easy for me to say and an excuse used by many murderers: I plead insanity. As if that’s an option in this family. Insanity is our family trademark.
No, it’s gotten very real. Body count is now at one for the Moores due to my own hand, and no kill points for Sloane Bevan. Bevans are leading thanks to me. I can never return home.
I swerve to a stop on the shoulder and dig the box of granola bars from my bag, inhaling three of them while texting Aaron. Sometimes he responds in the dead of night, sometimes not. Sometimes all I get is a crabby lecture about how some people work for a living, some people have a schedule, some people value their sleep. I plug my phone in to the R5 to recharge. While I’m waiting for him to respond, I grab a Gatorade and fire up the navigation in the car. The screen paints with street names and points of interest that mean nothing to a kid who’s never passed through the iron fence surrounding his family’s property. After poking around the screen for a few minutes I give up, lower the windows, and power off the engine. The sudden lack of engine hum and exhaust drone is almost painful.
The thick summer night presses into the car. It’d be nice to hear approaching tires on the road but the shrieking insects have ruined that plan. They won’t be using the headlights if they’re looking for me. Which leads me outside to the water jugs in the trunk, to apply one of the few nonviolent Moore effects I know by heart: a cloaking spell that can be easily applied using water. I feed the spell into those jugs so I’ll be prepared if they come for me.
Back in the car my phone’s screen is empty of all texts. Because of course. The one night I really need him, and he feels no need to lecture me. I open all my social media apps and scroll through messages from my online friends. Any plea to them for help would pretty much be pathetic. I’ve never left my house. Can you tell me how streets work? There’s no proof any of them are real human beings, anyway. They could all be bots programmed to help me advance through the game levels so I buy more games.
Okay, Rex, pick a city. Any city, any point of interest. Set the nav and start driving. Easy.
I start the car. The initial roar and persistent noise of it is like a beacon to anyone searching for me. I open the nav and zoom the map out. There’s a puddle of green I zoom in to called Pocahontas State Park. That sounds like an ideal place to chill while I figure all this out. I set it as the destination and see the calculated time and miles—it just doesn’t seem far enough. My family can track Bevans in the remotest corners of the U.K. and Europe. A blood relative? They’ll nail me before I can find a place to park. I zoom the map out and look again, but nearby states cause new problems as I try to remember where all my extended family members live. There are estates all over the eastern part of this country. Not to mention all the people my family hires in big cities to do their work.
I’m looking at the whole map of the U.S. and it’s impossibly huge. So many cities. So many highways. I don’t even know how to get a hotel room or how to buy food. At least I know how to drive—kind of—thanks to Aaron. And I have a credit card for emergencies, also thanks to him. He never told me how to use it. Only: Don’t use this, don’t speak of it, always keep it with you. Way to be vague, Aaron. But I’m used to it. Vague is the language my family speaks to me, him included.
After grabbing some clean clothes from my bag, I get out of the car to change, moving my mostly empty wallet to my new pants. Before I toss the dirty ones behind the seat, I check all the pockets and find a small vial.
The bottle of magic to end all Bevans.
How could I forget I had this? Somehow this will be my salvation. I just need to figure out how. Now in clean clothes, I get back in the driver’s seat. Phone check: still no texts. I take out the bottle, noting how the magic churns and slithers against the inside of the glass like it’s coaxing me to release it. There’s one person who can help me escape because she’s working on her own escape. She’s familiar with the world outside my family’s estate. She could be my Pocahontas in this new frontier. She’s already saved my life—didn’t the real Pocahontas save some dude? Too bad teaming up with her is out of the question.
Right?
I rest my forehead on the vibrating steering wheel and close my eyes. It rattles my brain as if shaking out all the thoughts I don’t need right now. Through the sieve goes Emily’s ruined eye. Her lifeless limbs. My uncaring mother. This loud car, probably audible from the house. My inadequacy in surviving outside that iron fence. What’s left is a blinding clarity: I saved Sloane Bevan’s life after she saved mine, but then I freed her. We’re not even; she owes me. Full of all that magic my family thirsts for, she’s a treasure trove I should’ve never let go. She’s the gold nugget left in that sieve. Possession of Sloane Bevan plus the bottle of Bevan-killer means I’m not just king of the Moores. I’m king of the Bevans too. Rich in magic and power.
The hardest part? Finding her on my land with this car. I can’t go back in. I have to go around, navigating roads I’ve never seen in the loudest car a boy racer could dream of. That’s assuming she hasn’t already reached and escaped through the fence. Would she leave tonight, or would she wait for sunrise?
Movement in my side mirror catches my eye—a small group of deer leaping across the road. I peer past them, down the gray strip of road disappearing into the dark made hazy by swarming insects and humidity. An unnamable sensation nudges me until I turn around in the seat to squint t
hrough the back window. All my family’s time and effort went into training me for combat, not passing down their knowledge of magic. What little I do know was casually passed, dwelling in places rarely touched in my head. This strain seems to belong to that buried perception.
I kill the engine, shove out of the car and drop to one knee, fingertips against the pavement, eyes closed. The insects are surely violating noise ordinances, but I choke them out of my brain, sending all sense through my fingers against the road. There—a rumble. A hum. Not of the woods. Something mechanical. I scramble for the R5’s hatch release and haul out a water jug, its unexpected weight knocking it against the roll cage with my fingers acting as a bumper but it has to be ignored. Brace my legs, heave the jug onto my shoulder, slam the hatch. Dump the water over the entire car. Run.
I’ve barely made it behind the tree line when a herd of roaring engines and hissing rubber blows past. I count three black fleet cars used by our security guys followed by my father’s BMW and my uncle’s Aston. Thanks to that water spell, my car’s gone invisible on the shoulder to them, but not to me. I watch it drip water, trying not to piss myself.
If I’m doing this, I need to do it now. My car is coated in magic that will linger after the water evaporates but not for long. Only two more jugs in my trunk mean two more times I can hide. The hunt for Sloane Bevan must be pure stealth and efficiency. As I wipe the tickle of sweat on my face against my shirt sleeve, I’m reminded of the symbol she drew, the one she used to invade my head and steal a part of me. We’re undeniably linked now, whether I like it or not. No doubt there’s a range limitation on that thing, but what if—
What if I reverse her attack? Use it back on her.
The moon’s light settles on me when I emerge from the trees. The obnoxious insects take a break from their noise, like the hush of a stadium crowd before some epic play. The dirt beside the road is mush from the last rain and unending brutal humidity. I scoop up a handful, mud mixed with road grit, wondering how to do this to myself. All tricks must be employed to find her. All convictions abandoned. Self-preservation? Screw it. I’ve already been tainted by the Bevans. Nothing can get worse.
I smear my forehead, blinded by the power of it all. My eyes no longer belong to just me. I’ve joined a multiplayer RPG. And I realize then, the reason this connection feels so tainted isn’t because it’s Bevan-created. We’re followers of the same damn magic. This, though, swarms with something different and wrong. Black magic? No way. She’s not that bad-ass.
Boots and socks come off for a better connection to earth. I raise my hands to study them, trying to ground myself. Both palms on the cool wet fender of the R5 send a familiar signal to my brain. Good. Now to make sense of that other input. Breathing myself into my core, as my trainers always tell me, I reach for the unfamiliar. There’s a dizzying shift in my perception. I swallow down the nausea.
Who … Rex?
I focus a thought: Tell me where you are. It echoes back to me, reflecting a moonlit vision of my family’s border fence, the broken portion they fixed a million times only for it to go back to being broken. As a bored little kid I’d follow the workers there to watch each time they tried to fix it. I know exactly where that is.
Stay there, I think. The connection rings in my ears, breaking up like harsh feedback. I breathe back into it, but I sense blocks, hastily constructed, like someone flipping furniture as I pursue them through a room. That’s her doing, for sure. It doesn’t matter though. She won’t make it far on foot from that spot. I draw a mental map of our property to see the relation of that broken fence section to the front gate I just exited. Straight back to the northern border, then a little west. Now to find it in a car.
The roar of the exhaust is too sweet for this life. It’s a kick in my blood so perverse it should be illegal. The road ahead is my victim pleading for its life. I rev to just under redline and dump the clutch, sending rubber particulate into my nose and joy into my heart. Holy oak, this car.
Guilt spirals in like a lethal projectile. Not because I’ve killed one of my own. There are too many Moores I’d love to use as target practice. But Emily? My only friend? They’ll find her body and blame Sloane Bevan, but I know how these things work. The truth is always waiting outside. Whether they find it or it sneaks in doesn’t matter—they don’t trust me. That’s why I’ve been kept inside the fence, why they’ve planned every hour of my every day, why it’s such a surprise they left me alone for so long in the woods while I dealt with the Bevan trash. So if I’m tied to Emily’s murder, they’ll believe it, and when they reconstruct the scene and find I did it to protect Sloane Bevan, I’ll pay in unimaginable ways.
Enough. I’ve already decided I can’t ever go home. It’s time for a new plan. I need to capture Sloane Bevan, lock her in a room, and make her write down every spell she knows. Once I have that, it won’t matter who I’ve killed.
A side road appears ahead at my left. This would have to be the east border of our property. I downshift and engine brake to take the turn. Ahead, I see nothing but the stripe of road and bordering trees, the moon high ahead like a spotlight. This could be the route my father and crew took, but it’s also the one I need. My water spell has surely evaporated by now—a stupid point since there’s no stealth mode while driving this car. The slightest tap on the throttle loads the air with the turbo’s screech and the roaring, popping exhaust. I grip the wheel and slam the pedal, eating road. We scream ahead into the night, stealth out the window, speed my new best friend. At least Sloane Bevan won’t hear me coming.
Chapter 9
Sloane
The doe nudges me in my side. She’s led me to the broken part of the fence and now she’s shooing me out as if she knows I must hurry. I turn to look into her eyes, still trying to dissect the mystery about her. She reads differently than every other animal in the woods. Her mind is older somehow, as old as some of these one-hundred-year-old oaks. And I can’t understand why she’s pushing me to get on the move now, in the middle of the night, instead of waiting for the sun. I want to tell her my vision isn’t as good as hers, but she probably already knows that.
She moves forward to head-butt me gently in the stomach, forcing me to take a step back. The power in her restraint is a bit humbling—she could kill me with such simple grace if she wanted to. I’m aware of the hustle she’s trying to inspire, but I can’t leave before I figure her out.
At a loss, I sign, Who are you?
She tosses her head and comes in for another nudge, but I sidestep it this time, placing a hand on her muscular neck. Maybe she’s been with me this whole time, waiting in camouflage until I lost Rex. Now she’s trying to scoot me to safety before he comes back. It’s a motherly gesture that pokes me in a tender spot. I’m too slow to raise a shield against that last memory of my mom. Her face full of pride, her eyes full of tears. Her grip on Marcas, full of fear.
Ears high and open, the doe has raised her head to peer stiffly ahead. Her rigid posture appears cautious but in this forest she’s not the prey. She reigns. For how long? And why? A heartbeat later she’s dancing around me, and I have to move for fear of getting trampled. She nudges me again—hard. Okay, time to mind. I step through the break in the fence, and she follows me out, ready to nudge me again should I even think of slowing down.
There’s a faint light through the underwood ahead, almost like we’re about to reach a clearing painted by the moon. It must be high by now but it’s hard to spot through this thick canopy. Twin lights blink through the trees, streaking low. A car? Can’t be. If we’ve already reached a road, that’s insane. This can’t be that easy.
Unless it’s someone looking for me.
The lights pass by and the doe presses me on. A road ahead would explain this light already permeating the forest around us, seeping in from a reflection off what must be pavement. One dimmer white light appears to my right, creeping left until it slows to a stop
directly in front of me and blinks off.
That makes me stop in my tracks. Which makes the deer go in for another shove. I brush her away, suddenly sick with a new fear: she might actually be working for them. They could’ve affected her, forced her … or she could simply be their companion like the creatures in my woods are to me. It would be easier to catch me by car and drive me back than hike all the way out here for me.
I raise an arm to make a call for the moths. They burrowed into the Moore castle to help me so they must be on my side. My plea is disrupted by another mental stampede. Rex, snapping through my carefully built barricade to plant himself front and center. I can’t decide whether it’s bad manners or ego that makes him think this is okay. Yes, I did it to him. When he was killing me. That’s the difference, moron.
This time I pinch my inner arm, close my eyes, and do the alphabet backward. The pain and mental work consume enough brain power to degrade his connection. My closed eyes prevent him from seeing anything through me. Then I take the input I just received from him and jumble it up. A car’s muddy tire? Make that a Ferris wheel. His bare feet against earth? Chicken feet. I send the images back to him and resume the backwards alphabet. Winnie deserves a thank-you for teaching me this trick. Only the best mind invader herself can teach such a righteous defense.
I have to lean on a sycamore trunk to collect my breath, not because of his invasion or the defense, but what it all woke up. That pit of dark hate I stole from him flexes in my chest again, stronger this time. There’s probably something I should do to disable it or better contain it. My family’s black magic texts were incomplete. My dad always said he could only teach me enough black magic to be dangerous. And that practice of non-native magic is always a risk, that we should learn it but never use it. I promised I’d only use the exact spells he taught me, and only in an emergency. And I’d never improvise, no matter what. Well, I lied, because that’s exactly what I did in that room.