River of No Return

by Annie Bellet

  The Den was a faux-castle, a huge wood and stone structure complete with towers and a three-story Great Hall. The stones glinted in the sunlight and the whole place felt eerily still as we drove into the large parking lot. The lot was more than half full, which was unusual. The bulk of Freyda’s pack lived here and around in houses hidden back in the forest, though some lived in town as well, but I’d rarely seen this many cars here, especially after Freyda had decided to close the lodge to guests after her father passed.

  Rachel, aka Sheriff Lee, followed us up in her SUV. She’d only told us that Freyda needed me to come look at something, and that the wolf had stressed how urgent it was that Rachel find me. When pressed she’d said that her impression was someone was hurt and it might be magical sort of damage since they wanted a sorceress present. Which was not at all comforting given what I’d just dealt with in Vivian’s office.

  It seemed the First was going to make damn sure my life wasn’t boring from here on out. I couldn’t wait to track the bastard down and show him how tired of assholes and their stupid evil games I was.

  Rachel led us up to one of the small doors flanking the Great Hall. Just a couple years ago, though it felt like a lifetime now, I’d come in this door and stopped a bomb from going off and killing every Alpha in the Western hemisphere. I took a deep breath before I went inside, steadying myself. Alek gave my hand a squeeze before letting it go and all but crowding me through the door and into the huge room beyond.

  There were half a dozen people in the hall, two of them were shifted into giant wolves. One wolf was reddish in color with a shaggy mane of deeper red, the other pure white. The two people who had been sitting on one of the benches arrayed against the far wall half rose at our entrance but Freyda, standing with a dark-haired man near the wolves, waved them down with a quick, casual gesture. The shifters sat back down with worried, tense expressions, but they nodded at Alek and Rachel. I didn’t recognize either the man or the woman, but their faces were familiar and I figured they must be part of Freyda’s pack.

  The man with Freyda turned and I found myself smiling even though his face was grim. Aurelio, called Softpaw by his pack, hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen him. His beard was shorter, hardly more than a long shadow on his brown face. He still had the streak of white in his black hair and golden-brown eyes that were far older than the face they rested in. He was wearing a pair of grey sweatpants and a dark green teeshirt, which was twice as much clothing as I usually saw him in. I swallowed a comment about it being a special occasion as I took in the tension in his and Freyda’s shoulders.

  “Jade,” Aurelio said. “Thank you for coming.”

  “I could hardly ignore a summons,” I said, smiling at Freyda to take any bite from my words. She returned my smile without teeth and inclined her head.

  “Bird, Snowdrop, move,” Aurelio said, looking at the two wolves.

  They slunk aside, revealing a man unconscious on a makeshift pallet of blankets. He was maybe an inch or two taller than I and his sandy hair was plastered to his pale brow with sweat. As I watched he shifted as though dreaming, his body restless. His face was vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t place where I’d seen him. From Aurelio’s wolves posture, I guessed he was part of their pack.

  I didn’t have to reach for magic to feel the spell on him. Pulled by the cotton-candy scent of foreign magic, I cautiously approached. The two wolves had drawn away only far enough for me to reach the unconscious man and they sank down onto their haunches, watching me intently.

  “Can you back off a little more?” I asked the white wolf, trying not to sound nervous. They were shifters, but they were Aurelio’s pack, and his pack always seemed less human than other shifters, more wild. They lived in the woods and ate raw meat, after all. Not my cup of tea. Probably they had no tea ever.

  The two wolves glanced back at Aurelio and must have gotten some signal for they both retreated another half dozen feet. Good enough.

  “Who is he?” I asked. “And what happened to him?” I summoned my own magic and sent a testing tendril out, my hand hovering over the restless shifter. The nagging sense of familiarity with his face grew. “Do I know him?”

  The cotton-candy magic seemed to wrap the man like swaddling clothes but it didn’t react to my magic. A passive effect of some kind? I wasn’t sure. Whatever spell he was under, it was done by another magic user. I couldn’t tell yet if it was sorcery or human magic. However, the smell was wrong for it to be the First, which was a relief even if it only brought on more questions.

  “You met Johnny briefly during the trouble before, after my father died,” Freyda said. “He was part of my pack. His mate was killed last fall in that horrible truck crash.”

  “That drunk driver?” I asked, recalling the accident.

  Freyda nodded. Three people had died, including the driver. It was a tragedy for any town, but especially one as small as Wylde. I suppressed a shiver. I had nearly killed Alek and I last summer when I hit a moose and it had taken a while before I’d wanted to get behind the wheel. I could only imagine the grief Johnny must have felt, the helplessness. The anger.

  “He’s called Halfheart, now,” Aurelio said. He crouched by my side but didn’t touch the man. “He disappeared a few days ago and we tracked him to a human camp. I was worried he’d attack the humans, he’d come to us so angry at humans. But they’d captured him. Had him chained up.”

  “What happened to the humans?” Alek asked and I suppressed a totally inappropriate grin. He might not be a Justice anymore, but old habits died hard for my mate.

  “They were extremely well-armed,” Aurelio said, frustration in his voice. “We stayed out of sight and waited to see if we could get him free. But they released him the next morning, at dawn. Only, he wasn’t the same.”

  The red wolf snarled and the white wolf gave a soft whine. Freyda and Aurelio both growled at them and they fell silent.

  “She’s going to help,” Aurelio said.

  I rubbed at the gooseflesh on my forearms and resisted the urge to throw up a magic shield. I wasn’t at my limit yet, but fighting the lava snake inside May hadn’t exactly been a walk in the proverbial park. I had a feeling I was going to be using more magic before too long.

  “He’s been broken,” Freyda said, her eyes flicking from me to Alek and back. “He’s been severed. Softpaw had to knock him unconscious and keep him that way just to get him here.”

  “Severed?” I asked, hoping they didn’t mean what I thought they might mean.

  “Are you sure?” Alek said at the same time, his own voice a growl.

  “I am sure,” Aurelio said. He licked his lips and squared his shoulders as though a decision had been made. “I have telepathy,” he added. “I can link to minds, if they allow it. Halfheart has been cut off from his wolf. He cannot shift. He cannot reach into the shadow wood and become his other half.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked even as I turned my gaze and my magic back to the unconscious man. Sorcery. That was how. I had a feeling that whatever this was, it was definitely a sorcerer. Magic like that, I’d never heard of it being possible. From the expression on my shifter companion’s faces, it wasn’t a common thing, more like some horrible story shifters whispered over camp fires to give each other nightmares.

  “It is something the Council could do,” Alek said. “But they stopped after the first few, deciding death was better. Severing a shifter is a fate worse than death.”

  “This isn’t the First’s magic,” I said. “It’s the wrong smell.”

  Aurelio, Freyda, and Alek all nodded as though that made perfect sense. Which, given how they probably interpreted the world with their preternatural senses, it likely did.

  “But it is sorcery?” Aurelio said.

  “I think so. It could be a different kind of magic, but if it is, we’re still dealing with a very powerful or competent magic-user.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  I looked into his hopeful
golden-brown eyes and sighed. “I don’t know. Undoing a spell isn’t like pulling apart a sweater. It can be more like uncooking a meal. Or unburning a piece of paper. Some things don’t go back.”

  I hated to extinguish the hope in his eyes, and I hated the way the heads of the two wolves flanking us drooped, their ears flattening. I wished I could wave a magic wand and promise the world to the people around me who clearly cared for the broken man lying in front of us.

  “One more thing,” Aurelio said, his gaze still intently on my face. “He said your name, right before I put him out.”

  That didn’t totally creep me out at all. Not a bit. I suppressed another shiver even though the hall was far from cold. It probably meant nothing. Johnny aka Halfheart had known of me and might have realized that if sorcery had fucked him over, sorcery could maybe save him. It wasn’t totally illogical.

  “I’ll see what I can do for him,” I said. “Might want to back away. Magic can do weird shit when poked, especially if this is sorcery.”

  If it wasn’t sorcery, it would have more pattern to it, and there was always a chance I could undo it. If it was sorcery, my best chance to fix it would be to find the sorcerer and eat his or her heart. Which was a thought I shoved deep into a reinforced chest in my head and slammed the lid on. I knew in my head I’d have to kill the First that way, unless I used the Alpha and Omega magical dagger the way I had with Samir, but I was not thinking about that issue. I was not thinking about it really fucking hard. Nope.

  Not thinking about Samir at all, promise, I clutched my D20 talisman with my left hand and put my right hand on Halfheart, formerly Johnny’s, chest. The cotton-candy scented cocoon of magic did not react as I slid my own magic down into his body, looking for some kind of root or basis for the spell.

  There was nothing at first, not even a kernel. It felt like the magic I felt and smelled was residual, a byproduct of what had been done. His heartbeat was irregular beneath my palm, his bare chest slick with sweat. He thrashed his head back and forth and I heard Aurelio suck in a breath behind me.

  “He’s waking.”

  “Let him,” I told Aurelio, not wanting whatever telepathic power the Bitterroot Alpha had to interfere with my own magic.

  I let go of my talisman and crawled forward so I was straddling Halfheart. I pinned his arms with my hands, knowing I wasn’t strong enough to stop a shifter from moving me out of the way like a sack of flour if he wanted. I poured magic into my hands and along his arms, over his chest, using it to hold him down, keep him still.

  “Johnny,” I said as his startlingly blue eyes opened and blinked at me. “Halfheart. It’s okay. Do you remember me? I’m Jade, and I’m going to help you.” Or try. But I left that bit off.

  “Jade,” he said, his voice sounding like it had to travel a hundred miles uphill over loose gravel to escape his throat. The cotton-candy scent grew stronger and I wrapped a shield around the two of us on instinct.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s right. I’m here to help. Just relax.”

  The magic was reacting now, building from somewhere inside him and rising from his skin like steam. I tried to follow it back into him, now that he was awake and the spell, whatever it was, had come alive. I had a slim hope that perhaps he wasn’t really severed. That instead this magic was keeping him from shifting, from even sensing his wolf half, much like the magic I’d fought earlier had kept May from changing shape. I had the unnerving thought that apparently sorcery could affect shifters far more than I’d ever been given to understand, and that my friends might be more vulnerable than I wanted to contemplate, but the fleeting worry was burned away by the rising tide of power. It wasn’t a cocoon anymore but a cloud.

  “Jade Crow,” Halfheart said in that rough, far away voice. “Good.”

  I had no warning. Just a sense of incredible emptiness inside of Halfheart, as the magic seemed to give way and I saw into him. It was like watching a spider thread drifting on the wind over a barren plain. Vastness and hollowness and loss like I could hardly comprehend, the feeling of all the grief in the world slamming into a space so large nothing could ever fill it.

  Then Halfheart exploded.

  Levi would also joke when we’d watch anime that while the IRL human body might have about eight pints of blood, in the animated universe clearly it was more like eighty and highly pressurized to boot. I’d laughed about it at the time.

  I wasn’t laughing anymore. Levi had never had the singular experience of a body exploding all over him.

  My eyes wouldn’t open and for a moment I couldn’t get my arms to respond either. The explosion had slammed me back into the shield I’d thrown up around Johnny and me, knocking the wind out of me from both directions as I pancaked, caught between bursting body and magic shield.

  “Jade?” Alek’s voice was muffled, as though my ears needed to pop.

  Which from the pressure in and on my head, they probably did. I opened my mouth, half in an effort to respond and half to see if I could relieve the pressure. Mistake of epic, bloody proportions. Gore and blood coated my mouth and face and a chunk of something I didn’t want to think about too hard fell into my open mouth.

  I spit it out as Alek helped me sit up. A piece of cloth wiped over my face and I realized my eyes had been glued shut with human parts debris. I blinked, sucking in another breath as my ears finally popped.

  Blood was everywhere around me. Soaking me, the floor around me, the blankets Johnny had been lying on. Stinging in the cuts along my arms and legs. There was nothing left of him. Even his bones had pulverized, which explained the rips and tears in my clothing and the myriad of small wounds I was starting to feel all too clearly.

  Eighty gallons of pressurized blood, more like. I was glad Levi wasn’t there, for a lot of reasons.

  “Shh, just breathe,” Alek murmured as I blinked at him.

  With my ears working better now I could hear Freyda telling someone to get more towels. Towels sounded nice. I blinked again, exhaustion and pain doing battle to see which could keep me awake and which could push me under. I wanted to curl into a hot bath and sleep for a thousand years without dreams of a terrified man’s blue eyes staring at me as the world exploded into cotton-candy flavored blood and gore. Looking down at my shredded jeans, I winced. That was almost definitely a piece of intestine resting on my thigh.

  Alek followed my gaze and brushed the grey-brown slippery-looking chunk off me. Aurelio handed him a huge towel and Alek bundled me up despite my muttered protest. I was glad for the detergent-scented black towel that hid the sight of myself from me but gladder for the strength of Alek’s arms as he lifted me away from the circle of gore.

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” I said to Freyda, repressing what might have looked like a crazy-person kind of smile. I wasn’t thinking clearly and I knew it.

  “Why did he…” she trailed off as she made a wide gesture with her arms.

  “I don’t know,” I said, only partially lying. I had felt the spell, laid like a trap inside him, waiting for the right trigger. I wasn’t certain, not fully, but it was like it had been waiting for me. My mind was spinning down the drain of exhaustion and I couldn’t hold on to the speculating thoughts whirling around it. I needed rest.

  “She needs to rest and heal,” Alek said, forestalling any other questions. “I am taking her home.” He looked at Aurelio. “Come tomorrow morning? I am sure she will have questions for you.”

  “And I for her,” Aurelio said as he exchanged a heavy glance with Freyda.

  “I’m right here,” I muttered but my protest was as weak as I felt. I needed rest. I needed time to think. Two sorcerers possibly gunning for the Wylde shifter population was two too many.

  Though I had a feeling, recalling that far away, gritty voice, that sorcerer number two was after me, instead. I wormed one hand through the wet mess of my teeshirt and felt for my D20. It was still there, Samir’s heart a strangely comforting bump against my thumb. I felt like Gandalf asking F
rodo if the ring was safe.

  “Shower,” I said to Alek. “Please.”

  “Here, take her to my quarters,” Freyda said. “It’s closer than your home.”

  That sounded like a solid plan to me since it was a quicker path to hot water and hopefully less blood. I nodded at Alek’s unasked question and he changed direction, following Freyda from the hall.

  Closing my eyes, I rubbed Samir’s heart gem. I had thought him an evil dick, which he was, truly, but part of me, a tiny traitorous part, could see the merit in just offing every other sorcerer. They were sure a fucking destructive lot in my short experience with most of the ones who had crossed my path. Shoving that thought away, I leaned into Alek’s warmth and dreamed of soap.

  I vaguely recalled Alek getting me into the shower. The sting of water in the fresh cuts on my skin. The relief I felt as the pain faded and the blood washed away. I wanted my own bed and I think I said something aloud about it but sleep was calling my name as loud as I’d ever heard it.

  I remembered Wolf leaning into me, visible only to myself and acting very oddly. I remembered a thread of panic hanging like a lifeline thrown by my brain to what little conscious thought I was still capable of.

  I remembered thinking I shouldn’t be this tired. That I must be hurt worse than I thought.

  And I remembered the smell of spun sugar. Pink wisps of sugar. Spinning and spinning and wrapping around me until everything else was unimportant and I sank into a sugar cloud and slept.

  I awoke alone in a strange room. The walls were bare grey stone, so I figured I was still at the Den. They must have decided not to take me home after all. The bed was narrow and the room hardly larger than my almost palatial new bathroom in my apartment. It was also empty of anyone but myself, which I found odd and alarming. Something must have happened.

  “Alek?” I called out. My voice reverberated from the stone walls.

  There was no window, just a single door. I pushed off the heavy black quilt and put my bare feet on the stone floor. The stone was surprisingly warm and smooth against my toes. I was wearing only a long black teeshirt that said “Death Before Decaf” across the chest, one of my favorites to sleep in. Alek must have had someone bring it from home, I thought. There was no way he’d have left my side.