Thicker Than Blood

by Annie Bellet

  She wanted to fling the stupid collar across the room, but she carefully lowered it to the floor with as little noise as she could. Her feet were still chained to the collar and cuffs, and bolted into the floor. She’d been put into a rough hog-tie, the chains intersecting and locked together at the ankles.

  Unfortunately, the manacles on her ankles weren’t bolt and pin, but sported a pair of heavy iron locks keeping the chain affixed to them. Harper allowed herself exactly three deep, aching breaths of freak-out time looking at the stupid locks, then realized her fox ankles would slip right out of them now that her body wasn’t contorted into crazy positions.

  “Total failfish,” she muttered.

  She reached into the Veil, letting her human body slide away into warm grey mist and her fox body emerge. She remembered the pain of the bear’s teeth ripping into her flank, but enough time must have passed, because while she was sore, her body felt whole and her legs slipped easily out of the manacles. It would have taken at least two days to heal this much in the mists. Harper pushed that thought away. Worrying about her friends wouldn’t get her out of this house. One panic attack at a time was enough.

  More smells and sounds flooded her senses now that Harper could think without the pain from her human self distracting her. Shifter musk, wolf and bear, lingered in the air. A slightly cooler breeze caught her attention, coming from what she’d thought was a solid wall behind her.

  There was a window in the room, she discovered, but it was nailed over with a thick piece of plywood. Harper considered trying to get it loose and escape that way, but her ears picked up slight movement and the vibration of voices coming from beneath her. She’d probably pushed her luck with the chains in terms of noise. A huge piece of wood being pried off a window wouldn’t be silent.

  Most of the old cabins and farmhouses around the Frank were no more than two stories, so there was that, at least. Harper slunk up to the door and pressed her nose to the crack beneath it. She smelled nothing but drying mud, faint shifter musk, and citrus cleaner fluid. No one seemed to be moving around upstairs, but she waited another full count of sixty. If there was a sentry outside the door, he’d have shifted his weight, she thought. She still heard nothing close by.

  Pulling her human form back sucked balls, but she couldn’t open the door with her fox paws—not quietly, at any rate. Her right hand throbbed and wouldn’t grip the doorknob, so Harper gently turned it with her left. It was unlocked, and didn’t appear to have any wicked spells on it, either.

  Praise Jeebus for hubris, I guess.

  Harper eased the door open, wincing as the old hinges squealed. She hovered in the doorway, taking in a narrow view of a hallway. She was at the end of it, two rooms off to the right, one off to the left that smelled like a bathroom, a linoleum floor starting just over the threshold. Beyond the room to the left was a stairway down. She slid out of the room, trying not to touch anything and leave more of a blood trail than she had to, and carefully closed the door behind her.

  Slipping back into her fox form, Harper crept down the hall, pausing every few steps to listen, nose in the air, wary of any sign of Samir or the men with him. She pressed her nose to the bottom of the first door on the right, picking up stronger musk smells. Bear shifter, probably the big white bastard who had bitten her ass. No sound though. She guessed this room was used for sleeping or something, and decided not to risk opening the door.

  The second room smelled strongly of Samir. His honey-sweet, almost cold scent irritated her nose and made her growl. She stayed away from that door, guessing that he’d put some kind of ward like Jade used on his own room. That would be a bad way out.

  Harper flattened herself to the floor at the top of the stairs and poked her head over. The stairwell was unlit, but enough light filtered in from the hall and the window in the bathroom to let her make out a door at the base, which was closed. Light and shadow flickered under the uneven seam of the door and a soft male laugh filtered up. Definitely people down there.

  Harper backed up along the hallway to the bathroom, the one room she hadn’t explored yet. It dated the house to the 1970s with its yellow and green patterned linoleum and lime green-bath and shower combination.

  But it had a half-size window over the toilet. A window with a latch. Harper took a deep breath and then pulled on her human form again. She was getting dizzy from going back and forth between injured, aching human and mostly healed fox. It was annoying. All her human form wanted to do was rest in the mist and heal itself. Not today. Biblethump.

  She eased the bathroom door closed and flipped the lock, hoping if anyone came up here they would assume it was a compatriot inside and not an escaped prisoner. Gritting her teeth, she climbed up on the toilet and used both hands to force the iced-over window open. Cold air blasted her face, clearing some of the pain fog from her mind. It also reminded her she was about to jump out a second-story window in only ripped jeans and a bra. Classic.

  Harper narrowed her eyes against the freezing air and the bright daylight. It was late afternoon, she guessed, the pale winter sun dipping behind the house. So she was facing west. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Immediately below her was snow piled up where it had been dumped off the roof. A few skeletal bushes dotted the snow beyond and then it was open space for a good two hundred feet until huge pine trees rose up. Harper didn’t see any movement or sentries posted here, though the chill air carried voices to her from somewhere very nearby.

  Now or never, she told herself. No reason to stay. Dangerous to drop like this, but the alternative was sit here and wait for someone to find her. Terribad choices, all around. If she could get to the trees, she stood a chance.

  Sure, she thought. A chance against a sorcerer and a pack of mercenary wolves and shit. Cause I’m an expert woodsman.

  These were her woods, at least. She didn’t know the Frank completely, nobody could, but these woods felt familiar enough to give her hope. She doubted they were too far outside Wylde. If she could get away, she would deal with the next issue of figuring out where to go. First steps go first.

  Harper sucked in a painful breath, dragged herself up into the window, and tried to lever out over the side. Her injured hand gave out from under her and she tumbled forward, headfirst, at the snow. She reached for her fox in midair, twisting even as her other body took over. Her landing would have made a cat laugh, but she slammed into the snow mostly feetfirst, the fresh powder just enough over the more packed snow to cushion her fall. The bush under it wasn’t too thrilled, branches crackling beneath the snowpack.

  She lay in the snow for a moment to catch her breath and listen. Movement drew her eyes to the treeline. A huge wolf emerged from the trees and Harper’s heart stopped beating for a long moment as he seemed to look directly at her. She was a shifter fox, oversized for her animal and bright freaking red. No snow coat for her. Snow had half buried her, but she wasn’t sure it would be enough. Any minute he’d start howling. The bloody, crushing jaws of the white bear danced through her memory.

  Then the wolf turned and loped to the side, moving along the edge of the woods. He hadn’t seen her. She didn’t dare cut out into the unbroken snow behind the house, however. Wolves, like many predators, liked to sight-hunt. Movement would catch his eye faster than anything she could do.

  Carefully Harper let herself slip backward in the snow bank until her butt pressed up against the house. She twisted and gained better footing, her ears flicking about to catch any sign she had been noticed. Hugging the house, she slunk through the snow to peer around the corner.

  The coast here was clear; the muddy, snowy ground around it was chewed up and filthy from vehicles and boots. Three SUVs were pulled up next to a long driveway. Movement in the trees beyond the cars caught her eye, and Harper picked out the shape of another wolf. His back was to her, his job clearly to watch the woods, not the camp, but she pressed herself down against the snow and shivered.

  Too many sentries. She wasn’t sure how t
o get out of here, how to reach the woods. The snow she was in was too white, Harper realized. If she could get to the mud she would at least blend in there a little better. Keeping an eye on the sentry, she crept across terrifyingly open ground to the nearest vehicle and slunk under it, flattening herself near a tire where the shadows and dirt would hide her. The SUV one over from her hiding spot had a minor gas leak, her nose told her. Not super useful, but it might conceal her smell as she hid here.

  She lay there, warm inside her thick fur, ears twitching to gather information from behind her, her eyes focused on the wolf ahead of her. The distance to the trees here was maybe a hundred and fifty feet. All open ground. Probably a field in the summer, but now it was half frozen mud and half pristine, deep snow with only a few trails marring it where the wolves had moved through on patrol. She heard low voices and people moving behind her and sank even flatter to the ground.

  After a long moment, Harper made herself twist around and look the other way, though she hated turning her back on the wolf. Ahead of her now was the front of the house. It gave her no information, looking, as she’d suspected, like any one of a couple dozen ramshackle places built edging the Frank during good times and gone to let for hikers and the like in recent years if they didn’t just stand completely boarded and vacant. There was a slouching porch with two chairs on it, one occupied by a big man in a green parka. Cigar smoke wafted toward Harper, and in the slowly dying daylight she saw the cherry glow in his hand. The white bear, she thought, unconsciously baring her teeth.

  There was a gravel drive that had been plowed leading into trees beyond her line of sight, and more vehicles, two big trucks and a domestic sedan, parked across the way. The trucks had big cages in their beds, heavy metal contraptions that reminded Harper of her first, and only, trip to the circus. She’d hated seeing the big cats crammed into things like that. Max had too; he’d cried and wailed the whole time until the babysitter brought them home and vowed never to do Rosie a favor again.

  Thinking about Max brought the void screaming up in her mind, and she pushed down the black pit of despair. No time for that. This is was time for escaping. Then she could find the cavalry, figure out the plan, and come back to enact terrible, murdering revenge on the bastard who had killed her brother.

  She refocused, picking out more details. Beyond the trucks on the far side of the house, a makeshift corral had been erected out of slivered barbwire. The corral was empty, but the gate stood open like a mouth expecting a meal. Harper shuddered again. She didn’t want to know what Samir had planned for that. Just looking at it made her sick inside.

  The whir of a truck engine broke the quiet. Two more wolves loped up the road ahead of a large truck pulling an enclosed trailer. Three more men came out of the house, pulling on coats as they tramped down the drive to meet it. Harper slowly turned her head and watched as the wolf that had been on sentry behind her made a beeline for the house, his attention on the incoming vehicle and not the woods.

  He passed a dozen feet from where she lurked. The coast behind her looked clear. Time to go.

  Except. The truck.

  What was in the truck? What if it was one of her friends or all of them? She’d been in and out of consciousness for at least a day, probably more. Enough time for Samir to spring his trap, maybe.

  Harper turned back to the action at the front of the house. Curiosity was apparently going to kill the fox, too. It was probably just Samir coming back and that would make everything more dangerous. But she had to know.

  The big man got up from his spot on the porch, leaving his cigar burning in a tin ashtray on the railing. Behind the truck, the trailer shook as though something inside were putting up a fight. The truck came to a stop near the house and Samir climbed out of the passenger side.

  “Careful,” Samir warned his men as they converged on the trailer. “You all can look your fill later. Get the package secure in the paddock first.”

  “Where’s Dal?” the big man asked, looking from Samir to the man coming around the truck from the driver’s seat.

  “He did not make it,” Samir said with a casual lift of his shoulders. “He was slow.”

  “Unicorns got him, but he kept them off us, did his job,” the driver added. He was a younger man with brown hair and wind-chapped skin, with a flat, cautious voice. He gave the big man a tense nod.

  Unicorn. Unicorn. Oh no.

  Harper watched with growing horror as two men muscled a small white body free of the trailer, half dragging him with chains hooked to a thick, silvery wire halter. The unicorn was a colt, and she was guessing born recently, though the lifespan and growth rate of unicorns wasn’t something she’d ever put skill points into. But she knew horses, and he looked maybe two months old at most. Past the initial super-awkward stage, but still small and weak. He had a nub instead of a horn and he was trying to put his teeth into anyone he could reach, snorting and neighing when they jerked his head to the side.

  “Careful! I need him alive for Balor,” Samir said. “Get him to the paddock.”

  The paddock on the opposite side of the house from her. Everyone was watching the struggle with the baby unicorn. Harper doubted they’d notice if she danced across the open ground to the woods naked with theme music playing.

  Harper looked behind her with longing and then sighed. Whatever Samir was up to, this seemed important to him. He’d mentioned Balor, too, which rang a lot of alarms in Harper’s mind. They’d had a hell of a time shutting down the Fomorian before—what if Samir planned to open his Eye again? Or something worse. With Samir, she was willing to bet on worse. The unicorns helped safeguard the wilds. If Samir wanted one alive and trapped, there was probably nefarious, awful reasoning behind it.

  Besides, in the end, it came down to WWMD. What would Max do?

  He’d save the damn unicorn. She knew it in her bones.

  So that’s what she was going to do. Be a big damn crazy hero.

  Harper looked around, taking in her resources, and came up with a really stupid plan. Time to kick ass, and take screenshots.

  I was awake long before Noah tapped on the door and led me to the sitting room with the couch and two chairs. He left me at the door with a nod.

  Walking in, I saw Yosemite standing by the couch. The huge druid’s hair was tangled and his multi-colored eyes, one green, one blue, had bags under them that spoke volumes about how much rest he was getting. I hadn’t realized until I saw him how close to the precipice of losing my shit I was. Seeing him here, alive and more or less well, dragged back the memory of his death, the images of all of my friends dying.

  I failed my willpower save and practically threw myself into his arms, clinging tight to his barrel chest, breathing in his scent of snow and pine.

  “Jade,” he said softly, patting my back with a gentle hand. “What happened? The spell had you—why aren’t you with us? Why are you here?”

  It felt like pulling to strong magnets apart to step away from him, but I managed.

  “Sit,” I said. I had to decide how much to tell him. But first, I had to know the things I’d been dreading.

  Yosemite sat on the couch and raised a red-gold eyebrow at me.

  “Is everyone—I mean,” I said, but couldn’t get the full question out.

  I already knew everyone wasn’t okay. But I wanted to keep hoping, just for a moment.

  “Alek, Ezekiel, Levi, Rosie, and Junebug are safe in a grove of mine. Freyda and her surviving wolves are around as well.” The druid took a deep breath as though he would say more, but instead he held it, staring at me. With him sitting down, we almost were eye to eye.

  Junebug was safe. “Junebug is okay?” I said, avoiding the nine-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. Or really, the fox. “I saw her get shot.”

  “Freyda’s wolves found her, brought her to me in time for me to heal her. She’s still injured, but should recover. Shifters are strong.” His smile was faint and faded quickly, like a flash of sunlight peeking out from a
storm cloud.

  “And Harper?” I asked, forcing myself to say the words.

  Yosemite shook his head, shadows filling his eyes. “We don’t know,” he said, letting out another long, sighing breath.

  I thunked down into the chair and closed my eyes. Harper’s face was waiting for me there in the darkness behind my lids. Her green eyes wide with pain and betrayal as we left her behind. I’m so sorry, furball, I whispered to her in my head. Then what Yosemite had said sank in and my eyes popped open.

  “Wait, what do you mean you don’t know?” I looked at him, trying to squash my thin hopes. He hadn’t said “she’s dead,” after all. “I saw her get shot,” I added. “I saw her being left behind, out of range of your magic.”

  “I know,” he said. Yosemite stared down at his big, tattooed hands and gave a small shake of his head. “In the forest we found pieces of Harper’s shirt, covered in blood. Freyda scouted back to the grove where the fight was. Harper’s body isn’t there.”

  “Samir could have her,” I whispered. I didn’t know if this was worse or better.

  “He could,” Yosemite said. “Or he could have her body, though the shifters swear the blood was fresh, not days old.”

  I stood up and paced the length of the small room, clenching and unclenching my fists until my fingers cramped. Harper could be alive. Alive and held hostage by my psychotic ex. Noah knew where Samir was; he’d said as much. Which meant, if Harper was alive, we could go get her.

  “It’s a trap, Jade,” Yosemite said. His voice held a weariness in it that made me wonder if he’d been arguing the same thing with Alek and my friends. They wouldn’t want to leave Harper in Samir’s hands any more than I did.