River of No Return

by Annie Bellet

  Except he wasn’t at my side. My sense of wrongness growing I reached for my talisman.

  That’s when I truly panicked. It wasn’t there. Nothing was around my neck.

  Alek wouldn’t have removed it. I pushed down the panic and ran for the door, throwing it wide. Nobody would touch the D20. Nobody. They knew better.

  “Alek?” I called out again as I burst into an empty corridor. Stone walls lined a narrow hall in both directions. No other doors visible.

  “Jade?”

  I didn’t recognize the voice but it could have been Alek’s. It was male, but muffled and echoing at the same time, as though it came from far away.

  “Alek? Where are you?” Where is my damn talisman, I wanted to scream but I held it in.

  Growling echoed down the seemingly endless corridor as I picked a direction and went in it, my dread growing. I reached for magic and hit a wall inside myself.

  No, not a wall. A cocoon. As though my power were wrapped in layer after layer of gauze. Had I exhausted myself that much fighting the First’s lava creature and then containing the mystery explosion spell? I hadn’t thought so.

  Again I reached for a talisman that wasn’t there. The growling grew and I heard my name again. Definitely Alek’s voice this time.

  Picking up my pace, I ran down the hallway. I had to find him. Something was horribly wrong and I couldn’t get to my magic. I ripped at the gauze inside me with mental fingers, hunting for the feel of my power. My feet slapped on the stone, echoing and downing out the sound of Alek’s voice as he called my name.

  “Jade!”

  I skidded to a stop as the corridor turned abruptly. Aurelio stood in front of me. His hair was a tangled mess, his eyes golden-brown sparks in the dim light.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked. “What’s happened?”

  “Jade,” Aurelio said again, reaching a hand toward me. “I’ll take you to them. But we have to make sure the heart is safe first.”

  I almost reached for the missing talisman again but stopped mid-gesture.

  Aurelio didn’t know about Samir’s heart. If he thought anything about it he would be in the camp that thought I’d killed my evil ex.

  “What heart?” I asked. I took a deep slow breath and stopped trying to unwrap my magic.

  “Samir’s heart,” Aurelio said. “We have to make sure it is safe. Where did you hide it?”

  I didn’t have a magical spinning top or the like, but relief flooded through me and I laughed.

  “I’m dreaming,” I said aloud. “Oh thank the fucking universe.”

  Aurelio’s face shifted slightly, growing uglier, his mouth twisting into a snarl.

  “This isn’t a game, Jade,” he said, his voice sounding less and less like the Softpaw I knew. “We have to make sure it is safe, it’s important. Life and death.”

  “Who are you?” I asked. The growling was louder and I felt Wolf’s presence nearby. She was breaking into the dream, freeing me from the magic holding me here.

  “Where is the heart?” Not-Aurelio snarled.

  Cotton-candy scent turned to burning sugar around me as Wolf, huge and dark and beautifully deadly, slammed into him. Her teeth ripped into Not-Aurelio’s neck before I could ask anything else.

  “Jade!” Alek’s voice again. Louder. Pain, gloriously real, dug into my shoulders and neck.

  Wolf, her starry-night eyes glowing, howled as she dropped the torn, unbleeding body. And the walls came down around us.

  I woke up in my own bed to Alek’s relieved face. His hands dug into my shoulders where he was holding me upright. I knew I’d have bruises for a day or so from the pressure of his grip but I didn’t care. The room was dim though I could see sunlight poking through the edges of the blinds, but my view was taken up mostly by an extremely concerned Alek. I leaned into him and kissed his chin.

  “I’m okay,” I murmured. His scent was deliciously cotton-candy-free and its usual heady mix of musk and spice. He was real. I was free.

  The dream, or spell dream, or whatever the fuck that had been, swamped my thoughts as the tide of relief I felt at being awake and free faded back. Alek released me and I reached for my D20. Samir’s heart gem was still in its spot but I needed more reassurance.

  “Alpha and Omega,” I said, looking at the nightstand where the dagger usually rested. It was still there, solid and waiting. I summoned my magic, letting power fill my veins and push the nightmare farther away. I stopped short of using magic to levitate the blade to me and leaned toward it instead, my aching body protesting the stretch.

  “Jade,” Alek started to say, a warning tone in his voice that I ignored in my rush to make sure Samir’s heart was as dead as it could be. He caught my reaching arm with his hand.

  “Mystery sorcerer knows about Samir’s heart,” I said, forestalling him as I wiggled more upright. “Give me the damn knife. I have to make sure it stays dormant. Just fucking humor me, okay? I’ll explain in a second.”

  Alek grimaced and shook his head slowly as he released my arm.

  “Samir’s… heart? The heart you ate and destroyed? That heart?” Harper’s voice came from behind my mate. “I think you’ll explain now.”

  Fuck. Fuck toast on a fuck stick.

  I’d just faced a lava snake, an exploding person booby-trap, and a spell-induced interrogation nightmare. But all that had been a lazy stroll in the proverbial park compared to the blender of anger, grief, and betrayal in Harper’s voice.

  “Harper,” I said. “Just give me a moment. Please.”

  Alek rose and picked up the Alpha and Omega from the nightstand, holding it out to me. I sagged into the pillows, flinching away from the look in Harper’s green eyes as she approached the foot of the bed.

  “I’ll be outside,” Vivian, who I also hadn’t noticed, said from the doorway of the bedroom.

  None of us responded to her and she slunk away. I wished I could follow.

  “Furball,” I said softly but she shook her head violently.

  “Don’t you fucking furball me, and stop. Lying.” Harper spit out the words.

  I pulled the dagger free of its sheath. The Alpha and Omega is technically two blades but they could merge into one. Sometimes they turned into a sword. The magic in them was incredibly old and outside anything in my experience, but supposedly they could destroy anything. The knife was how I had killed Samir without having to kill him.

  “The magic in this blade keeps his heart, his entire self, reduced to this tiny gem,” I said to Harper as I touched the tip of the blade to the ruby-looking gem fixed into the one spot on my D20 talisman. “He’s dead, for all intents and purposes. I just didn’t eat his heart.” The gem flared with red light and then went dull again as the knife touched it.

  Samir’s heart was secret and it was safe, but it certainly wasn’t my precious. I wished I could throw it into a fucking volcano right that damn second if it would take the look of pain and betrayal off my best friend’s face.

  I thought of the nightmare interrogation. Not so secret, perhaps. Maybe not safe, either.

  “So you didn’t kill him. He’s right there,” Harper said, making a curt gesture toward my talisman.

  “He’s just a tiny drop of rock-like blood. He’s basically dead,” I said. I knew I had been wrong not to tell her, but it hadn’t seemed quite so stupid at the time. There had been logic and love and sparing of feelings or something, but looking at her face all my justifications and excuses felt like tissue paper against the bonfire of her anger.

  “You lied to me,” Harper snarled. She looked like she might spring at me and Alek stepped toward her.

  “Azalea,” he murmured in a warning tone, using Harper’s real name. Which was probably a mistake since she hated that name.

  “Fuck off,” she snarled at him, too. “My own best friend Obi-Wan Kenobi’d on me. I think being fucking angry is pretty okay right now.”

  “Whoa,” I said, putting the Alpha and Omega down. I folded a bit of the comforter
over the knife, not wanting the super dangerous weapon in view at the moment. “That’s a little harsh. Samir is harmless, dead for all intents and purposes. I’m sorry I let you believe I’d eaten him. But I couldn’t. I can’t end the world, Harper. I can’t.”

  “How do you know?” she said. “How do you really know if killing him would end it or not? And how do you fucking know that what you are doing with that magic blade is really keeping him ‘mostly dead’? Cause from where I’m standing, this looks like a recipe for a big old super villain come back if I’ve ever seen one. Obi-Wan.”

  I tucked the D20 into my shirt. I hadn’t exactly dropped Samir in a volcano and walked away but though it hurt to admit, I guess I was kind of leaving a door open for my nemesis to return, ala Kenobi.

  “Okay, fair enough. But I can’t take the chance that Brie and my father are right, that truly killing him would cause a magic apocalypse. Please, you have to see how I can’t risk that. I can’t. This, the knife, it seemed like a better way. A compromise.”

  Harper’s shoulders slumped.

  “I wish you had trusted me.”

  I held my arms out even though I knew it was a futile offer. “I wish I had, too. I know it isn’t an excuse but you were so angry, so broken after…” I trailed off, unsure how to phrase it all.

  “After Samir killed my brother, destroyed my home, and tortured me?”

  I felt like the worst kind of friend, the worst kind of coward. Only the length of the bed stood between us but a chasm had opened in our friendship and I wasn’t sure what would close it, or if I had the strength in me to bridge it at all.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Tears stung my eyes but I blinked them back. I didn’t want her to think I was crying because I was sorry for myself, for being caught in the lie. “I should have told you.”

  Harper stood, stiff and still, for a very long time. Alek remained tense midway between us, watchful but unmoving as well. Every second of silence was another wound in my heart until I felt as though I would either bleed to death inside or start screaming just to break the tension.

  “I accept your apology,” Harper said after what felt like eternity and a half. She slumped onto the bed. “Do the twins know?”

  “No,” I muttered, relief and regret churning my stomach.

  “You are going to tell them.” Harper raised her eyebrows but her tone made it clear that wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” I said. “I should have told you all long ago. I’m truly sorry. I was just trying…”

  “Nope. Shut the excuse closet, Jade. I accepted your apology but we’re not okay yet. We’ve got bigger fucking problems though, it sounds like. But you gotta stop thinking you know what is best for everyone around you because you pretty fucking clearly don’t. Kenobi.”

  “Ouch,” I said, trying to summon a smile. She had a point and it was a sharp one. “We do have problems,” I added, glad for the distraction of current events to get us onto a less painful subject.

  “You wouldn’t wake up,” Harper said. The anger in her face and voice had mostly faded and she looked tired. “Alek called Vivian when you wouldn’t wake up this morning. We’ve been trying all day.”

  “All day?” I said. I looked at the blinds and then to the other side of the bed where the clock was. It was nearly seven. I had thought that meant it was morning but I realized the dot indicating AM or PM on the clock was firmly in the PM spot.

  “I brought you home yesterday,” Alek said. He looked more relaxed now that Harper no longer looked like she wanted to kill me. “I thought you were exhausted from all the magic, the way you are sometimes. I let you sleep.”

  “All day?” I said again. I couldn’t really fault him. After I did a lot of magic I was often tired and could sleep through a whole day pretty easily. Alek had no way of knowing this was different.

  “When you still had not roused this afternoon I tried to wake you,” Alek said. He knelt beside the bed and caught one of my hands in his own. “You were so still,” he murmured. “Still and cold. It was not natural. I knew something was wrong.”

  So it probably had been him calling out to me in the dream. But I had been under for hours. I recalled the wrapped in gauze, locked in feeling of the trap nightmare. Mystery sorcerer must have needed, as best I could guess, time to break into my mind, to get through natural and magical defenses. I knew very little about mind magic. My own power lent itself far better to fireballs and external expression.

  “Johnny, Halfheart, his body was a trap. I got infected by the magic, I think.” I pushed my own magic through my body, closing my eyes as I focused. I felt no trace of the mystery sorcerer’s magic, no hint of cotton-candy sticky sweetness. Opening my eyes, I continued, “He broke into my mind through my dreams. He knows that I didn’t kill Samir, that I have his heart stashed somewhere. I think I kept him from figuring out where. I didn’t have my talisman in my dream and I don’t think he was inside my head enough to realize why I was terrified by it being missing.”

  I hoped. If he knew I had Samir’s heart on a chain around my neck, I had a feeling my neck would be the next thing he’d want to explode.

  “You saw him?” Alek asked.

  “No. He appeared looking like Aurelio, maybe he got Aurelio’s form from my mind or maybe Johnny’s mind, I dunno. But he did a shitty job cause Aurelio has no idea I have Samir’s heart still.”

  “Who does know?” Harper asked. “You, Alek, Brie and Ciaran, I’m guessing?”

  I nodded. “The Archivist, maybe Iollan.” I tried to remember who I had told what and my head started aching. That’s the problem with lies and secrets. Keeping track of them and what story you’ve told which person is a bitch.

  “What about the suits?”

  “The suits?” Alek asked and I remembered I hadn’t had time to tell him about the NoS agents showing up yesterday.

  “Maybe they know somehow.” I had a guess that if they knew they’d bought the information from Noah, the vampire Archivist, somehow.

  A year ago, I wouldn’t have believed he’d sell information like that, I would have thought he was more or less on our side and wanting to keep Samir’s heart safe and secret too. But after the not-so-simple job I’d not exactly done for him last fall, I didn’t know where I stood with the vampire.

  But I knew he was dangerous and that likely he didn’t trust me. He’d certainly lied to me, as well.

  I kept that wild speculation to myself. I doubted that even if that were the case, I’d ever get the agents to admit it. Noah in my experience wasn’t the type to directly involve himself when he could pull the strings of others to get him what he wanted. If he wanted to fuck with me, he’d be well behind the scenes and two or three layers of plausible deniability away from anything going on.

  I realized that I had slipped into my own thoughts as Harper explained about the visit the afternoon before. Alek gave me a patient, vaguely frustrated look.

  “There wasn’t time to tell you,” I muttered. “Things have been a little crazy.”

  Alek’s phone buzzed in his pocket before he could respond.

  “Speak of the devil is the phrase, yes?” he said, looking up from his phone.

  “Suits?” I said, confused.

  “Lara. She says the agents are back and waiting in the store. She told them she would text you.” Alek showed me the message.

  I threw the comforter off my legs and stood up with Alek’s steadying hand which I totally didn’t need at all.

  “Call Perky,” I said to Harper before I realized she already had her phone out.

  “On it,” she said with a weak smile. The gulf between us was still there, but the chasm no longer looked impossible. It was a start.

  “First, pants,” I said, squeezing Alek’s arm. “Then we’ll go rescue Lara and hopefully witness a legal slaughter.”

  And I hoped it would be a slaughter of the verbal, paperwork-filled kind. For I had a feeling that government agents had nothing on a mountain lion with a law degr
ee and a license to use it.

  I got pants on but my dreams of seeing the special and not-so-special agents handed their asses died in the fire of Levi’s ringtone on my phone.

  “Sup?” I said, already walking toward the door and my shoes. Vivian had left apparently, for there was no sign of the wolf-shifter vet in the living room or kitchen.

  “Is Alek with you? Can you get here quickly? Are you at the shop?” Levi’s voice was breathless and panicked.

  “Yes, sort of, at home,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  Alek and Harper had stopped politely pretending they couldn’t hear Levi on the phone, their bodies going tense.

  “Wolves, men, they’re trying to get into the house and we’re surrounded,” Levi said. I heard a male voice ask him something but Levi didn’t respond verbally. Then a huge crash sounded followed by the unmistakable crack of gunfire.

  “We’re on our way,” I said.

  “Hurry,” Levi said. He started to say something else but the phone cut out.

  “Shit.”

  “Are Carlos and May still with him?” Alek asked as he jammed his feet into his boots.

  “They were with Levi?” I asked, shoving my phone into my pants. If they were there, likely this attack was the First’s doing. Damnit.

  “May is too weak to travel so Levi offered his place,” Alek said. He strapped on his gun after handing me the Alpha and Omega in its sheath.

  “I called Perky, she’s on her way to the shop now. Says she’ll bill you later.” Harper joined us by the door, grabbing her own shoes. “That was gunfire. If they are already in we’re never going to make it in time.”

  “Not if we drive,” I said, a really stupid thought forming in my head. But Levi was in danger. Junebug and her unborn baby were probably there, too, given it was her home and all.