Thicker Than Blood

by Annie Bellet

  “You think I don’t fucking know that?” I said, spinning around. I made a face at my own tone. “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “We’re all under a lot of stress.” Yosemite managed a smile, his teeth flashing through his beard.

  “I’m guessing they want to go get her?” I asked.

  “Ezee and Levi, yes. Alek and I, no. Rosie, well.” He shrugged, splaying his hands. “If she wasn’t hurt and if Junebug didn’t need her, I think she’d go herself.”

  Rosie would want to go get her daughter, but she was also one of the most pragmatic people I’d ever known. She wouldn’t want anyone else risking themselves.

  “They can’t fight Samir,” I said. “It isn’t a matter of should or shouldn’t. They cannot.”

  “I believe we learned that lesson quite well,” Yosemite said, putting a tiny bit of bite into his tone. “What are you doing here, Jade?” Leaving unspoken, of course, the whole “why the hell did you abandon everyone after making me take us away from a fight before we even found out if we could win” part of the sentence.

  It was okay. I caught the subtext.

  “It’s complicated,” I said by way of non-answer to buy myself a few precious seconds to think. I had no idea how much to tell him. Anything I said would probably get back to my friends, to Alek. I needed them safe.

  How safe will they be going after Harper without you with them?

  “Jade?” Yosemite tipped his head to one side and his eyes narrowed. “Your magic? Your aura is changed, somewhat.”

  I took a deep breath. “I am going to tell you what I’m doing, at least what I can. But you have to promise me, Iollan,” I said, using his given name instead of the nickname we all called him by. “You cannot tell this to the others. Not even Alek.”

  “Not even that you are alive?” He shook his head.

  “You can tell them that, if you must. But not where I am, or what I’m doing. No specifics. Only that they must wait for me. They cannot go after Samir. Cannot. Samir is trying to draw me with Harper as bait, if she’s alive. That means he’ll keep her alive for now. They cannot go after her, or they’ll just become more bait. Or die. I doubt that bastard thinks he needs more than a couple pieces to hook me.”

  Harper is enough. Alek would be more than enough. It wasn’t a pretty thought to consider how expendable or not your friends were. I glared at the druid, trying to beam how serious I was into his brain.

  He pressed his lips together and gave another head shake. “Fine.”

  I didn’t know if I believed his promise, but in the end, it didn’t matter.

  “The fight with Samir didn’t go quite how you think. The short version is that I used the power of the nodes to turn back time, because we all died. Everybody. That’s when I yelled at you to get us out. Doing that, though, it burned me out.” I held up a hand to stall his questions. “That’s why I’m here. I had a vision, of a sort, and Noah is going to help me get my magic back, as well as maybe find a way to defeat Samir so that we all don’t just die again.”

  “You turned back time?” Yosemite put his head in his hands.

  “It’s okay if you don’t believe me,” I said. It was a big pill to swallow, even with our magical experience.

  “Oh, I believe you,” he said. “But you’ve changed the world, Jade. No possibility you haven’t. Not with magic like that.”

  “I don’t know about the world,” I said, rubbing my thumb over the mystery divot in my talisman. “Just the future. I hope. Now isn’t exactly the time for a debate about the long-term effects. I’m more worried about everyone being alive next week.”

  “I will keep them safe,” Yosemite said, rising to his impressive seven-foot height. “But your friends are not helpless.”

  “I know,” I said, mentally adding that they weren’t except against Samir. It wasn’t Yosemite’s job to protect them from my ex. It was mine. So I shut up.

  “Good luck, Jade Crow.” Yosemite opened his arms.

  I hugged him again. “Iollan,” I said softly as he pulled away. “If you do have tell them you saw me…” I hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  “Tell Alek I love him. Tell him to trust me.” I bit my lip. “Please,” I added.

  “I will. Come back safe, and soon.” Yosemite walked toward the door, which opened immediately as he reached it.

  Noah stood in the hall. “Our other guest is here,” he said. “And breakfast is served.”

  “Iollan,” I said to the retreating druid’s back.

  He stopped and turned, looking at me expectantly.

  “Just, stay safe,” I muttered. There was so much more I wanted to say, but the words clogged in my throat. For a moment I almost begged him to take me back with him, but I had work to do here. My best chance seemed to lay in being away from my friends. I had to cling to the plan, such as it was.

  Yosemite nodded, a sad, understanding smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. Then he walked down the hall and I followed Noah instead, heading to breakfast and an unknown future.

  Harper slunk across the frozen ground back to the edge of the house, waiting for shouts of discovery or bullets or fireballs or worse. Though she doubted Samir would throw a fireball at the house. She had yet to see him pull any of the really obvious magic that Jade liked so much. He was more of the “brutally hurting people and being evil” kind of sorcerer.

  With those comforting thoughts, she crept up to the porch and peeked up over the deck. Everyone was still busy with the unicorn. So far, so good. She popped up on her hind legs and snatched the still-burning cigar from the ashtray. Tobacco acid burned her sensitive tongue, reaffirming a lifelong commitment to never smoke this shit. She tucked tail and ran along the edge of the house until she felt it was safe to dart back under the cars.

  No shouts or fireballs or bullets yet.

  Stealth check, total success.

  Harper dropped the cigar as carefully as she could onto the frozen mud. It kept smoldering. She shifted back to human, red dots swimming in her vision as her battered human body brought back all its pain, and picked up the cigar again. This part would need opposable thumbs.

  On her belly, she crawled to the car with the gas leak and rolled over, suppressing a groan. There. She guessed that salt on the roads had rusted out a little of the undercarriage. The leak was tiny, but Harper intended to fix that, if her nipples didn’t freeze off first. Without fur or even a shirt, she felt the full brunt of the Idaho winter.

  Once again throwing a nervous glance toward the crowd around the paddock, she laid down the cigar, propping it on a tire edge to keep it burning, tapping the ash off as she did so. The cherry was fading, so she took a quick, acrid drag of it, spitting the smoke out quickly and suppressing a cough.

  Keeping her eyes on Samir and the mercenaries, she felt around for a rock and dug it out of the half-frozen mud with her less injured left hand. Then she went to work on the gas leak, rubbing the rock as quietly as possible against the rust. It felt like it took forever, but the damp smear of gas became a drip even as the unicorn was wrestled into the paddock and Samir ordered everyone out. It looked like he was doing something at the gate, which worried Harper when she risked another glance, but she shoved all worries away. Part two was her focus now. No thinking ahead. Too much danger she’d remember what a dumb idea this was.

  She let the gas drip into the mud, digging a little channel for it. The fumes were the most flammable, she remembered vaguely from chemistry. Harper started to wish she’d spent less time programming games into her TI-86 and more time actually studying. Her rough plan was that the cigar would ignite the fuel and travel up the fumes to the gas tank. She had no idea what would happen then, but didn’t care as long as it created a distraction.

  Go time. Harper laid the cigar next to the pool of gas and backed out from under the SUV, moving quickly under the next vehicle over. She shifted back to fox form and headed along the back edge of the house, tense and ready to go. People were leaving the paddock, Sam
ir and the big bear man moving for the porch, sentries heading out into the snow again, back in wolf form.

  For a long moment, nothing happened. She almost went back to check on her distraction, afraid there weren’t enough vapors or the cigar had burned out. Way her luck had been going, it probably had.

  Come on, real life, she thought desperately, for once, just be like the movies. She just wanted one fucking break.

  Shouts rang out like gospel music to her ears.

  “Car’s on fire,” someone yelled.

  “Grab a hose.”

  “Boss, sir!”

  Harper saw no one around the paddock anymore. She didn’t know how long she had, especially since she realized even as she bolted for the fence that she hadn’t thought about how a mage could probably squash a fire real quick. Hopefully he was worn out from capturing the unicorn. Even he had to have limits.

  Not looking back, she darted under the fence, half waiting for her skin to fry off with a magic trap or something. The unicorn colt turned and snorted, shaking his haltered head. Betting that he wouldn’t kick her, Harper went right up to him, and then dared to look back at the house.

  Black smoke billowed up, from burning tires Harper guessed, and metal screeched and whined as the SUV went up in flames almost good enough for a Vin Diesel movie. Burning debris smashed into the cars next to it. Nobody was near Harper or even looking this direction.

  Harper shifted to human and murmured softly at the unicorn to hold still. To her surprise, he pressed his soft nose into her palm, trusting. She doubted he’d been born when they’d saved the unicorns a few months ago, but maybe his parents had passed on word that Harper and her folk were good. Or maybe he was smart enough to recognize any port in a storm.

  The colt was pure white, but this close Harper saw that his hair was blackened as though singed under the silver wire of the halter. New step one: removing that. It was constructed like a rope halter, a single thick strand that was looped around his nose and over the ears, all held with a knot under the chin. She took a deep breath and started pulling on the knot.

  Her fingers burned as though she’d grabbed a handful of hot coals, but Harper mentally added it to the list of physical suckitude and kept working the knot. It came free all at once and the halter fell away to the ground.

  The colt snorted and turned, making for the fence. Harper looked at the gate, saw the thick, intricately woven silver chain on it, and past it the mass of people slowly containing the fire as Samir played director from the porch. Seeing all that, she quickly went over to the unicorn. The fence hadn’t stopped her from going under and the unicorn was pretty small, so she had vague hope she could lift the wires or lift him over.

  The barbed wire was looped to fence posts and looked standard feed-store issue, but had a small modification as she examined it more closely. More of the silver wire was braided through it. Her burning hands didn’t want to grab it again, but she was this fucking close to freedom and wasn’t about to let acidic pain stop her now. Harper reached for the bottom strand.

  The unicorn jumped the fence, popping into the air as though he had wings and landing on the other side in a tiny puff of snow. He looked back at her with another snort as though to ask what she was doing still in there.

  “You’re welcome,” she muttered. Then she was fox again, slipping her body under the fence.

  “No! Stop them!” A terrible shout rang across the open field as Harper charged through the snow after the colt. Her luck had run out.

  The colt ran across the top of the snow like an elf straight out of Lord of the Rings. Harper floundered along behind him in the deepening snow, struggling to get to the trees. We make it out of this, I’m naming you Legolas, she silently told the baby unicorn.

  A wolf charged her from the right, barreling through the snow. She barked warning at the unicorn, mentally willing him to keep going, to get to the trees. He was a lot faster than she. If she saved him plus stuck it to Samir in doing so, it was all worth it.

  The first bullet zipped over her head close enough she felt as much as heard it miss her. The second hit her in the ass, tumbling her forward. Then the wolf was on her. Harper snapped at him, catching his foreleg, but got only a mouthful of fur. His jaws closed on her back, tearing white-hot gashes across her barely healed flank. She was big for a fox, but he was huge for a wolf. His powerful jaws lifted her right out of the snow and he shook her like a rat.

  Her last thought as snow and sunlight turned to pain and darkness was that she should have been born a tiger.

  Breakfast was in the same room where we’d had dinner. Apples, bananas, bacon, hard-boiled eggs, and Old Fashioned donuts were piled on the table this time. From the depleted platter of bacon, it looked like everyone else had gotten a head start on me.

  I was relieved to see Kira and her crew. If they were still here, hopefully it meant they would help.

  The other person at the table surprised me. He was a Hispanic male in his mid-thirties, with short brown hair and deceptively sleepy brown eyes. His suit was different from the last one I’d seen Agent Salazar wearing, but it had the same kind of understated tailored cut. I’d last seen him in Wylde, after walking naked out of a fire that had destroyed my game store.

  “Salazar,” I said, taking a seat next across from him. “We meet again.”

  He was seated where I had been the night before, next to the twins. Kira had the head of the table again. I glanced at Jaq as I sat, nodding a greeting.

  “The Archivist told you I was coming?” he said. “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “He didn’t,” I said, grabbing a donut and an egg. “But you being a special agent of some unspecified secret agency, combined with us needing information about a secret government prison, I just can’t find it in me to feel shock right now.” Which was true. I’d been surprised for about half a second seeing him there, but logic had quickly draw the lines for me.

  “I hear you want to break into Custer,” he said. “Because you haven’t done enough crazy shit.”

  “I need to talk to one of the inmates,” I said, unsure how much Noah had filled him in. “It could be the key to defeating Samir.” I knew I was overstating things. I had no idea what would happen when I met my father for real. I don’t always make life-or-death decisions that impact everyone I love, but when I do, I go off vague ancestral vision memory thingies.

  “Don’t hurt yourself with the convincing,” Alma said. She and her twin giggled.

  I glared at them, glad my twins didn’t giggle at least, though their smart-ass qualities seemed similar enough to put on a real cage match against each other.

  “Jade doesn’t need to convince me,” Salazar said. “Things are changing, have been for a while. My time with the NOS is nearly over.”

  “NOS?” I asked around a mouthful of donut.

  “My agency. Not Otherwise Specified. Our government does love their acronyms,” Salazar said. He blew on his cup of coffee.

  “So you’ll help us break in?” I said. Ideas were already whirling around in my head. “You have codes or clearance or whatever?”

  “Ooh, maybe he could take you in as a prisoner!” Alma said.

  “Or pretend you are some kind of government inspector,” Cora chimed in.

  “I do have clearance, but stop whatever you are thinking,” he said. “You all have seen too many spy movies. Spy movies always forget one thing.”

  “Paperwork,” Jaq said with a chagrined smile.

  “Paperwork,” Salazar confirmed. “It would take weeks to process a new prisoner in. There are holding facilities all over the States where people and such are evaluated before transfer. Almost no one is sent directly to Custer. And before you ask, no, I can’t fake the paperwork.”

  “Before you ask me, neither can I,” Noah said from the other end of the table. He’d been so still I had forgotten he was there for a moment. Pesky vampires and their lack of breathing and noise-making.

  “So we can’t walk in
the front door,” Kira said. “Obviously, or we wouldn’t be needed.”

  The twins made faces at her. I felt a pang of longing. These people were friends, Kira had her crew with her. I was alone, in a room of near strangers. No history, no camaraderie.

  Whose fault is that, exactly? the traitorous voice of reason whispered in my head. I mentally slapped tape over her mouth.

  “I can get in myself,” Salazar said. “Though it will likely come back on me and I’ll have to burn this identity.”

  “You mean your name isn’t Salazar?” I asked. I cracked an egg against the table and started peeling it onto my plate. I was hungrier than I had felt in days. Maybe because I knew that my friends were safe, for the moment, and that if I could get my magic back, I might even have a chance at saving Harper, too. Hope can really work up an appetite.

  “It is, but I was placed in the NOS by the Council of Nine. The government doesn’t like to hire shifters and supernaturals directly. Only on a contract basis. The Council pulled some powerful strings so I could keep track of Custer and the NOS. I reported to them.” His shrug was careful, belying the tension in his body.

  “To them, and to the Archivist,” Kira said. She had her ice-blue lazer beam gaze focused on him.

  “The Council knows, I’m sure,” Salazar said, returning her look with bland acceptance. “As long as I reported to them too, they didn’t care.”

  “Why do you keep using the past tense?” Alma asked.

  “After I help you, I’m out. It’s complicated.”

  “Need-to-know-basis?” I asked, though I had a pretty good guess why he wasn’t going to report to the Nine anymore. Alek’s words about the Council being dissolved ghosted through my brain.

  “That’s right,” he said, throwing me a small smile that told me he’d guessed that I knew.

  It was like a word puzzle. He knew that I knew and now I knew that he knew that I knew… Fuck it. I preferred puzzles that gave me levels.