by R. J. Blain
I wondered what I had done to deserve the hell of my family storming back into my life after so many years. “Have you forgotten that I don’t exist? I haven’t.”
“Well, this could get ugly,” my brother declared, claiming a stool and sitting between our father and me.
Amber’s hand dropped to her side, and with a shift of her weight and a flick of her wrist, she revealed a holster. “All I have to say is that I’m armed, dangerous, and haven’t had enough coffee or sleep for this. I deal with enough of this shit between Nicole and her father to put up with this right now.”
“Dante, please,” my brother begged.
I scowled, wondering why it was my fault.
Maybe I was a witch, but I had been five years old. At least I hadn’t blabbed about my uncomfortable relationship with the dead. Most of my family believed all I could sense was gemstones, witchcraft that couldn’t threaten them. Sometimes, late at night, I still wondered what they would have done if I had developed stronger powers.
My godfather had been happy to take me in, although I had spent most of my time on my own.
“Don’t waste your breath, Elliot. He’s completely justified. The last time we spoke, if you can call it that, I was dressing him down in an email. I had told him to clean up his act or start praying that the Canadians liked him enough to let him stay. I’m pleasantly surprised he’s grown into a well-adjusted adult without nearly as many abandonment issues as I expected.”
I tensed, holding my breath. A shiver ran through me.
Evelyn hadn’t abandoned me. I kept thinking that, but it didn’t ease my surging anxiety. She had no reason to believe I had a chance of survival. She hadn’t abandoned me.
Richard was smart and a realist. To them, I was dead, and their lives came before that of a corpse.
It wasn’t her fault that I hadn’t been killed.
To cover my dismay, I took a sip from my orange juice. Maybe if I ignored my father, he would disappear. “Where’s Alex?”
Elliot frowned at me. “He’s currently in his wife’s custody. They are getting ready to go ATV shopping, which will be necessary for any trips into the bush looking for Evelyn.”
“Credit cards are in the wallet,” I replied, digging it out of my pocket and sliding it to him. “If you get Zachary to send you one of my cards, just charge it.”
“A trip you won’t be going on, Dante,” Gerald said, taking my wallet. “Yellowknife’s pack is perfectly capable of buying their own ATVs, Jackson. As an aside, should the Inquisition be foolish or stupid enough to push a deportation case, Canada would get involved and it isn’t a situation you want to be in. That’s our official stance on the matter. His work is too delicate and important to be risked by a dated familial dispute that belongs in the fifteen hundreds.”
My father grimaced. “I’ll make certain they’re aware of that.”
“Good.”
“Don’t forget Richard, Gerald. If we’re throwing threats at the Inquisition anyway, remind him that both of the Anderson brothers are officially part of the Yellowknife pack due to their status as mates of pack members,” Nicole added, her tone ice cold. “I’m sure it wouldn’t take too much convincing to get Richard to act.”
“Take it from me, Mr. Anderson. The last thing you want to do is come between a Fenerec and her mate. Add in the fact that every member of the pack will join forces to protect their own, and you’ll have quite the incident on your hands,” Amber warned.
“I’m not—”
“Elliot, shut up. All of you are giving me a headache. It’s too early in the morning for this.”
“It’s about time some of the men in our family decided to grow a pair,” my father said, surprising me with his laughter. “I could have told them twins were nothing but trouble. But no, no one listened to me. Okay, so let me see if I understand the situation. Both of you boys decided Normal women weren’t dangerous enough for you? I assure you that they are. I should know; I married your mother. Elliot, you I can understand. But you, Dante?”
“I think you have it backwards,” Elliot muttered. “Why would you think I’d be the one involved with a Fenerec?”
“Your brother has loyalty issues and hasn’t even looked at a woman since Suzanne’s death, that’s why. You, on the other hand, are good looking, very wealthy, chronically single, independent, capable of taking care of yourself, and hold a substantial amount of power. Any smart bitch would want to sink her teeth into you.”
I groaned, rubbing my forehead in the futile effort of driving my headache away. “You’re disgustingly well informed. You’re also a racist. To add insult to injury, you’re playing favorites again.”
“If it makes you feel any better, you are twins, which necessitates you also being good looking,” my father replied.
Amber rested her chin in the palm of her hand. “This is like watching a drama but better. I wonder how many graves they’ll dig for themselves before they kiss and make up?”
“That’s disgusting,” my brother and I said.
“It’s true, though,” my father said, once again startling me with a chuckle. “Dante, I thought you would have guessed by now that your mother and I had absolutely no say in what happened when you were little. Frankly, we’re lucky that we didn’t get the ax ourselves for daring to spawn a witch instead of the pure Normal boy they wanted. I didn’t agree with it then, and I don’t agree with it now.”
I didn’t want to buy his pretty words; he was either the world’s best actor, stringing me along with a lifetime of lies, or he really did care if I lived or died. The fact he had come to Canada at all supported his claim, which unsettled me. In an effort to dodge the issue, I said, “Elliot, you heard him. We were spawned.”
“Impossible. If we had been spawned, you’d be capable of swimming. Fish can swim. You can’t.”
“It’s true. I sink.” I rested my chin on the island, stretching my arms out in the direction of the coffee maker. “Gerald, can’t you tell the doctors I need coffee?”
“Are you sure you’re not Canadian?” Gerald asked. “No coffee, Dante. Beg for mercy at your appointment today. You’ve had enough, considering you weren’t supposed to have any at all.”
“Elliot, there’s a black box in the gym bag. Would you go get it, please?” my father asked.
For a moment, I thought Elliot was going to refuse, but he grumbled something under his breath, got up, and did as he was told. He returned with a shoe box. My father took it and placed it next to me. “I am under strict orders to offer this to you as a peace offering, along with a message, which I’d take as a warning, if you’re wise. Your mother’s in Atlanta, probably killing people with her tongue alone. Once able, she is expecting your presence so she can fulfill her motherly obligations and tan your hide for scaring her so much.”
I eyed the box warily. “Who are you? My father and mother don’t do open gifts or peace offerings. The threats, however, I readily believe.”
“Deserved,” my father acknowledged. “But, consider this, Dante. We’re asleep when sometime around seven in the morning, Elliot calls us, doing a good impression of your mother, which sets her off once he stopped blubbering enough to tell us you were in a plane crash. Your mother kicks me out of bed and informs me that I am going to Canada on the next flight out, or my balls were scheduled for a visit with a vice. So, by nine, I’m in the air on the way to Toronto, since no one had any idea where the plane had gone down, just that it never arrived in North Bay, Ontario.”
Standing up, he approached me, and before I could do anything other than tense, he dug his fingers into my shoulders and began digging in, massaging at the knotted and sore muscles. I grunted, going limp as he worked.
“You’re knotted all to hell, boy.”
“Whiplash, probably,” Gerald said. “I’ll make sure a chiropractor has a look at him, so that when his wife comes back, he’ll be fit as a fiddle.”
“She’s not my wife yet,” I mumbled.
When
my father found a particularly sore spot, I yelped. Instead of having mercy, he jammed his thumbs at the muscles. “Let me give you a piece of advice, boy. Send your mother an invitation to the wedding. I’m still getting shit over the fact we didn’t get invites to your first. She’s going to skin you for that reason alone when you cross paths.”
“Dante’s right. Who are you? What have you done with our father?”
“I took him out back and killed him,” my father replied. “Be quiet, Elliot.”
“I think it’s time for some breakfast. I have one trick: pancakes. If you want something else, you’ll need to wait until Maggie and the girls get up,” Gerald said, digging through a drawer for a pair of frying pans. “Elliot, there’s eggs in the fridge. Fetch them for me, please. Mr. Anderson, keep playing chiropractor. Ladies, can I impose on you?”
Nicole saluted. “Yes, sir!”
“The dishes are there, if you’d like to set the table. Thank you, Mrs. Murphy.”
Amused, I watched Gerald direct his army of helpers as they made pancakes under his supervision.
Chapter Sixteen
I lost more than a few hours somewhere, which I blamed on the pancakes and the plethora of medications I had taken along with breakfast. I had no recollection of making it to the living room, let alone to the reclining armchair, cocooned in one of Maggie’s crocheted blankets. Stifling a yawn, I rubbed my eyes, wincing at the incessant throb in my skull.
“You slept right through lunch,” Gerald announced, resting his elbows next to my head, rocking the chair back. “Maggie and the girls are out shopping. I evicted the Murphys and the Andersons, who are on route to the crash site. They’ll be out of your hair for a few days. Sorry about your father; he refused to take no for an answer, and it wasn’t a battle worth fighting. Your brother is headed back to Atlanta, probably hoping to limit your mother’s rampage.”
“You knew he was coming?”
“Sure did. I told him he was welcome so long as he didn’t do anything stupid, reminding him that Amber took orders from me before she took orders from him. Considering I told her to come armed, I thought I had the situation under control. Once he sees the plane for himself, he’ll be headed back to the United States.”
“That’s something at least,” I muttered.
Gerald sighed, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “No father wants to get that call, Jackson, and he got it twice in a week.”
Sucking in a breath, I realized I understood. It took one thought of my daughter, who I had never even met, to make my chest tighten painfully. I couldn’t imagine how much her death would have hurt if I had been given a chance to hold her even once.
“Fuck.”
“Okay, that’s one of the last things I ever expected you to say.” Perching on the arm of the chair, Gerald sent it dipping back enough I lurched from the sensation of falling. “What’s going on?” he asked.
I settled back, and for several long minutes, I thought about whether or not I wanted to tell him. Gerald’s access to knowledge was invaluable, but he wouldn’t give it to me, not without my telling him about Jacqueline. Knowing that, I struggled to find the words to tell him about what Suzanne had done.
There was one way I could tell him without having to speak. “Go get your work laptop, and I’ll show you,” I whispered.
When he headed to his office to fetch the computer, I pilfered a cup of coffee, waiting for him at the kitchen island.
“You’re not supposed to have that,” he said, setting the laptop down.
“Don’t care. Give over,” I replied, patting the counter in front of me, careful to keep my coffee out of his reach. After logging in, he slid the laptop over. It took me less than two minutes to locate my daughter’s birth certificate. Drawing a deep breath to steady my nerves, I said, “Suzanne faked her death.” Once he got a good look at the certificate, I continued, “Someone killed my little girl, Gerald. I want them.”
“Oh my Holy God.” Gerald snatched the laptop, typing in commands to a prompt. I waited in silence, sipping my coffee as he worked. All of the data I had wanted was at his fingertips, and I wasn’t going to rush him. “Okay, I got a hit on a missing person report for her and her mother, dated back almost three years ago.”
“Three years ago?” I asked, frowning.
Both my daughter and Suzanne had died a little over two years ago, from what I could tell with my witchcraft.
“Jacqueline was enrolled at a daycare in Thunder Bay. One morning, she didn’t show up. Note here says her mother had showed up to work without her. An Amber Alert was issued, but there were no hits. Her mother disappeared sometime that day. Where’s Suzanne?”
If Gerald’s tone was any indication, I was pretty sure he was asking so he could find her and kill her himself.
“They killed her.”
“You don’t seem broken up by that at all,” he commented, watching me.
“The only woman I need or want in my life right now is Evelyn,” I replied, meeting his gaze without flinching.
After a long moment, he sighed. “We’re doing everything we can to find her, Jackson. You’re really in no condition to join the search and rescue team. I’m sorry. You’d be a liability, and the last thing I need is an angry pack of Fenerec knocking on my door because I let you go wandering out in the bush after barely surviving a plane crash. You’re staying here. We’ll find your lady and bring her to you, okay?”
I nodded my agreement, but it didn’t stop me from trying to find a way to give him the slip. It made me angrier and more anxious that he was right.
All I would do was get in the way.
“What I want to know is how you found out about this, eh?”
“I can’t say. I had a list of all of the people who were also murdered along with my girl. Unfortunately, the list was on the plane. If you give me some time, I can rebuild it.”
The names of the dead wouldn’t be forgotten so soon or so easily. I shivered. “Just give me a few hours.”
“Theodore told me you had been poking around our databases. Is there any relation?”
I nodded.
Gerald grabbed his cordless phone and punched in a number. “Put Theodore on,” he demanded. After a few minutes, he said, “I need you to pull all of the records Jackson was looking for; if he typed it in our system, I want a copy of it. Build a report and get it to me as soon as you can. Prioritize it over everything else.” He hung up. “There. All I want is a confirmation that your source won’t cause any harm to my government.”
“My information was acquired legally and shouldn’t have any legal ramifications for Canada. That said, my brother, the Yellowknife Fenerec, and a few Inquisitors left a few bodies on the Wave Dream…”
“I know. He gave us a call and dropped word with us not long after it happened, seeing as he had reason to believe your would-be kidnappers were attempting to take you to Canada. Your brother’s a nice guy, by the way. That’s the reason you’re with me. This place is wired and there’s security never too far away. No one gets near this house without someone being aware of it.”
“I really should be with them looking for Evelyn,” I muttered, rubbing a finger around the rim of my mug.
“Jackson, you’re the luckiest man alive right now. Your only job right now is to heal. You have a doctor’s appointment in a few hours for another CT scan and an MRI. My job is to take care of you. It’s a matter of interest for quite a few people. Give me some time and I’ll get all of the info I can for you about your baby girl. We’ll find whoever did this,” he swore.
“They’re mine,” I growled, and the roughness of my voice reminded me of Evelyn’s when she was angry. It was a wolf’s vocalized rage, and it rumbled in my throat.
“No problem, Jackson. I’ll get you a nice gun, all the ammo you could want for it, and make sure everyone’s looking the other way when you pull the trigger. Just don’t leave any evidence behind. We don’t like cleaning up messes like that.”
“Then we be
tter keep this a secret from Evelyn,” I replied.
“Why?”
“She wants the fuckers almost as much as I do.”
“Good.”
~~*~~
I had attended enough hockey games to understand that beneath their polite and generous exterior, Canadians could be a vicious lot. While I watched him work, Gerald muttered to himself. Sometimes he complained about a slow server, but more often than not, he was inventing new and horrifying ways to kill people. His patience and focus was admirable, but it was his self-absorbed ranting that held my attention.
“Fires are too flashy,” he mumbled, scrolling through the list of names recovered by Theodore. It had taken the tech less than an hour to grab all of my queries and organize them into something usable. “Maybe a steamroller.”
“I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice, hospitable people, Gerald,” I said, careful to keep my voice soft in case he had forgotten I was with him.
Judging from the way he jumped, he had forgotten about me. “Jackson, there are almost two thousand dead witches on this list of yours. That’s almost four times the total number of homicides reported over an entire year across the entirety of Canada. It’s on par with the total number of adults reported missing for an entire year in Quebec—and that’s before considering the number who are found within a few days.”
“Most of them aren’t adults,” I pointed out.
“I was trying to forget that fact,” he snapped at me. “The real problem is that most of these reports are localized to the Montreal area. That’s going to complicate things, seeing as Quebec really doesn’t like when Ottawa gets involved in their business.”
I drummed my fingers on the island. “Tough shit. I know someone. I’ll give him a call.”
“Jackson, you know everyone. Call him after the doctor’s appointment. We need to get on the road.”
“It’ll take five minutes,” I replied, reaching for his phone.