River of No Return

by Annie Bellet

  I’d made myself eat a three-egg omelet and two pieces of toast after waking up feeling not exactly refreshed. We’d set out as the sun was rising, turning the sky the color of raw meat pink and gun-metal grey. The morning was still but had a heaviness that promised early summer heat later. For the first part of our journey, we were under the thick canopy of Douglas firs but as the ground rose in elevation the fir trees started to give way to Ponderosa pines and the occasional spruce. The heat shimmered on expanses of exposed rock as we stopped at the mouth of a canyon, the wolves testing the air with their noses.

  I took the chance to drink from the canteen I’d brought in my backpack then rolled my shoulders to work out the stiffness. I offered the water to Alek and he drank a couple sips without saying anything. He’d been quiet all morning and I was saving all my breath for the journey. I had no idea what to say, anyway. Grief is monster that takes a different shape for each of us, and often it is a beast we must wrestle alone until we are ready.

  Aurelio shifted to human. “We must climb up the canyon I think,” he said, motioning to the steep, rocky slope ahead.

  Lichens and grasses clung to deposits of soil but few trees found purchase. The ground was open and we’d be obvious moving along it. The floor of the canyon, where a mostly dry stream trickled through boulders and slabs of stone, was choked with sagebrush and bearberry. I could see why we wouldn’t want to go that way, none of us had anything to cut the brush and it would be very slow going.

  “How close are we?” I asked.

  “I am not sure,” Aurelio said. “We came a somewhat different path perhaps, for this should look more familiar but does not. However, I was carrying Halfheart. It is hard to remember when much of our travel was in the dark, but we found Bird and Snowdrop’s scents. They left a trail, knowing I would follow. This is the way. It is still some miles to the old camp, I think.”

  “They going to be okay?”

  “Bird is an ambusher. He fought in one of your wars,” Aurelio said with a shrug that was deceptively casual considering the tension radiating from him. “I do not think he will do something stupid like a frontal assault. Snowdrop would not let him. Always Singing is young, he idolizes Bird, so he will do whatever Bird does.”

  I realized that Always Singing was the name of the third mutineer in Aurelio’s pack just in time to not look like an idiot asking what he meant by that.

  “Lead the way,” I said. “We should stop again once you recognize any landmarks so we can try to come up with a better plan than charge in, magic blazing.” I attempted a grin and from Aurelio’s amused snort must have been somewhat successful.

  Alek did not look amused. I knew he still felt this was a trap but so far there had been no sign of trouble. There had been no sign of anything unless squirrels and birds counted. I put my canteen away, shouldered my backpack again, and started after Aurelio and the pack.

  The side of the canyon was steep but we were able to forge a path zig-zagging our way along the side. Out from under the trees on the hillside the air grew hotter, the sun was unrelenting. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, knowing that I was unlikely to hear or see any danger before my preternatural companions would.

  We had climbed along the canyon far enough that the sun was dropping, the shadows cast by the larger chunks of grey and brown stone changing their direction. Above us was a stand of trees, their own shadows stretching out like seeking fingers over the ground. Alek paused behind me.

  “We’re close,” he said in a low voice. “I can smell them.”

  Aurelio and his wolves were fanned out around us on the slope, most of them farther along and higher up. They were sniffing the air as our whole party stopped. The steep hillside was quiet other than our movement, no sign of humans or even a squirrel. The tension of knowing there would be a fight soon was getting to us. Taking a step, I caught my hiking boot on a chunk of stone and stumbled, putting my hands out to catch myself on a large, lichen-covered rock to my left.

  My arms went right through the stone and hit cloth. Cotton-candy scent, strong as if I’d been at the County Fair eating a cloud of it, filled my nose as whatever I’d fallen on moved.

  “Danger,” I yelled as I summoned my magic. I pushed myself off the man in fatigues as he rose straight out of the illusory stone.

  He had a gun in his hands and there was no time for finesse. I slammed a wave of force into him, sending him tumbling back. I heard gun shots and yelps as other hidden men rose up around us. Higher up on the slope ahead of us, in the stand of fir trees, I caught the glint of metal and more bodies moving in the shadows. A wave of cotton-candy magic shimmered down the slope and I met it with the biggest shield I could manifest.

  Aurelio and the pack scattered across the hillside trying to reach the half-hidden gunmen. Alek had shifted to his tiger form and charged down toward two men who were trying to shoot us from behind. I couldn’t see where Harper was, her brown-red coat and smaller body blending too perfectly into the landscape.

  The ground beneath us began to shake. Then to rumble. Directly above where Alek and I were was a steeper portion of the canyon wall. As I fought to maintain a shield around us and move forward toward the trees, the canyon-side gave way.

  “Move,” I screamed. I tried to grab Alek with a tentacle of magic, thinking I could fly us up above the landslide rumbling toward us but a huge wall of dirt and debris shot up between us as though forced by invisible wind.

  Illusion. I knew it was an illusion but I couldn’t see beyond it. I had no idea where Alek was. I turned and funneled all my power into a shield, bracing as the ground slid beneath my feet. A boulder the size of Alek’s truck slammed into my shield. The force and weight of it pushed me back and I stepped onto ground no longer beneath me. The rock and earth piling up on my magic shield wasn’t an illusion at all.

  I fell backward. Alek emerged from the swirling debris. He was about twenty feet away and barely protected by the shield holding back the landslide. The earth beneath me started to run as though it was water, pushing me farther and farther down the hill. I had to fly but I was terrified that I’d lose the shield and all that rock and earth would bury Alek as he fought to keep his footing and reach me.

  “No, go back,” I tried to tell him but the unnatural wind pushing stinging debris between us ripped my words away.

  I wasn’t sure I could manage three spells at once but I had to try. I pushed myself away from the ground a good ten feet into the air, and felt the shield buckle as I redirected my will to stay over the tumbling earth. Then I formed a tentacle, picturing it like an extension of my arm as I reached out and tried to wrap my magic around Alek.

  My shield failed as another boulder, this one easily house sized, slammed into it with unnatural force. For a moment I lost my concentration as cotton-candy magic whipped the dust and gravel to skin-removing levels and the tide of earth and stone broke the magic dam and rumbled toward me. Something slammed into my shoulder and a wound bloomed as blood gushed. The pain was immediate and burning.

  A bullet wound. I’d been shot enough to know. With my shield down it wasn’t just the hillside crashing toward us that I had to fear. Another bullet grazed my thigh, tearing a bloody, burning path. The shot pushed me around and I dropped down into the churning path of the landslide.

  I lost the hold I’d had on Alek. I wrapped my magic around me in the best shield I could manage as the world went dark and loud. I tried to push myself upward with more magic but I wasn’t sure which way that was as I was knocked around like a pinball. Stone and earth and broken vegetation battered my shield, carrying me along. The sorcerer’s magic coated all of it; he was pushing the rockslide to pick up more debris, to go faster, unnaturally enhancing an already overwhelming force.

  I closed my eyes and focused every ounce of power I could muster on not being crushed.

  It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t breathe. My shield was hit over and over and over. Every blow absorbed, deflected. But I didn’t
know which way was up, which way was out. I tried to stop the panic that formed as I was tumbled like a piece of sea glass in a wave.

  Then it stopped and a great weight settled on me. I opened my eyes and blinked at the grit that filtered into my lashes. Darkness.

  Darkness and no air. The weight increased. I poured magic into my shield and tried to shove upward, outward. To move the tons of dirt and rock.

  No air. No movement. I might as well have tried to use my magic to move the planet Earth itself for all the good it did. I wasn’t sure I was facing upward. I could have been shoving against the ground for all I could tell. I tried to calm my heart, to calm my breathing. My shoulder was a mass of aching pressure, my thigh a searing throb.

  Don’t panic.

  Focus on the shield. Don’t get crushed.

  Don’t panic. Focus.

  No air.

  Then… only darkness.

  I awoke in a hospital room. The bed was angled slightly upright. There was a window with the curtains drawn to one side and a chair to the other. Alek sat in the chair, his eyes closed as though he had fallen asleep while keeping vigil. I was wearing scrubs and had a blue knit blanket part way covering my legs. I looked down at my arm, seeing the IV needle taped there. Some kind of monitoring machine was next to the IV bag but it was turned off. The air had an antiseptic tinge to it and a chill that failed to raise goosebumps on my exposed skin. I shifted experimentally on the bed. My shoulder and thigh felt fine. Nothing looked like it was bandaged.

  “Jade,” Alek said. “You’re awake. Finally. How do you feel?”

  “Fine, but we have to go now, before that asshole gets the heart,” I said.

  I ripped the IV needle from my arm. A bead of blood formed where it left my skin but I didn’t even feel a sting. There was a single door into the room. It had a plastic bin on the back of it with a folder tucked into it. There was writing on a white label on the folder, but I couldn’t read it from where I lay. The floor was speckled tile that a designer on HGTV would probably call eggshell.

  “Wait,” Alek said. He rose, his body tense and his face etched with alarm. “What do you mean?”

  “The cowardly pickledicked bastard,” I said. My feet were bare and the tiles felt cold beneath them as I stood up. “The one who buried me under the rockslide. He’s going for the heart. We have to make sure it is safe.”

  Alek seemed to be having trouble processing this. He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me back into the bed.

  “You aren’t well. Tell me where it is and I’ll check. You need more rest.”

  “It’s right here, asshole,” I said as I punched him in the throat.

  Not-Actually-Alek reeled back and I charged past him, throwing open the hospital room door. I knew two things now.

  One, that the asshole who had dropped a mountainside on me had spent more time in hospital rooms than I ever had given how much detail he’d put into this illusion.

  Two, that we were definitely not in Idaho anymore. I wasn’t sure if it was a dreamscape like before, or perhaps some kind of mental construction where he’d trapped my unconscious mind, but this wasn’t the real world.

  Outside the door was a hallway that stretched into dimness in either direction. Not-Alek lunged for me and I kicked him back. I reached for magic but wasn’t surprised to find no response.

  Not in the box. Out of the box, I told myself. This wasn’t real. There was no “there” there.

  A sword appeared in my hand even as I visualized it and not-Alek scrambled back as I turned on him swinging.

  “I can see you have no appreciation for finesse,” he said. “Make this easy, Jade, tell me what I want to know and I’ll leave you in peace.”

  “You dropped a fucking hillside on me,” I said. I tried not to imagine anyone else stuck beneath the rocks. Harper had been out of range, as had Aurelio and most of the other wolves. But Alek… I pushed away that thought. Despair wouldn’t serve me now.

  “You won’t save yourself by playing games with me,” the asshole said. The hospital room faded away and we stood on a hillside now that looked much like the one I’d been fighting him on.

  I thought about burgers and the scene changed to the street outside Marnie’s grill. Not-Alek looked pissed and the hillside returned. So… we were inside my mind and I had some control here. Good to know.

  “Why do you think I have Samir’s heart?” I asked him as I lunged forward, thrusting with the sword.

  A shield appeared on his arm and he blocked the blow, his simulation of Alek’s face twisted with frustration.

  “You already revealed you did,” he said. “You reveal more than you think. No one’s mind is uncrackable, given enough time. And we have all the time. My snipers can hold your people in this canyon until they starve if I want them to.”

  So my people were still alive. I hoped that meant Alek, too. The image of Alek laying on the cement outside my shop, a hole through his neck, slammed into me as the hillside gave way to cement. Tires screeched as the SUV with the wolves who had shot him peeled away.

  Just a memory. Dangerous. I charged at not-Alek as he sat up from the ground, his throat a gaping wound.

  “Tell me,” not-Alek said, blood dripping down his shirt. “And I’ll let this one go.” He motioned to himself.

  The landscape changed around us again as I processed what he’d said. Alek was alive, at least that’s what my tormentor was insinuating. Without thinking, I reached for my talisman with my free hand but found nothing around my neck.

  The world blurred. We stood now in a field surrounded by trees. Samir stood not even twenty feet in front of me, blood running down his arm.

  “Traitors,” Samir hissed.

  Shit. Memory again. Burning fog rose in tendrils from the ground.

  “Show me,” not-Alek murmured at my side.

  “No.” I thought about the hillside rushing down on me, about my fear for Alek, the feel of rock and gravel and dirt burying me alive.

  Hillside again, Samir’s face and the burning fog disappeared.

  I morphed the sword to a laser sword and unleashed on not-Alek with a flurry of attacks. We danced across the rocky bottom of the canyon, my sword slicing and dicing sage brush and starting tiny fires. The too-still air took on the scent of burning brush, but faint for how much vegetation was smoking now, as though the mindscape was more echo and afterthought of what reality should be than anything truly tangible.

  The fact that he was dodging told me that attacking in this place still meant something, was potentially dangerous to him. Otherwise why would he bother? I visualized a spike of rock shooting up at him from the ground. Not-Alek leapt into the air just before I manifested the earth spike as though he could anticipate my very thoughts.

  Which, given he was invading my mind, made a sick kind of sense.

  I dropped a twenty-ton anvil on him. No visualization this time, I just went with the first image that came into my head. No delay between thought and manifestation.

  The anvil crashed into the asshole and slammed him into the ground.

  The air and light went out of the world for a moment as my chest felt like it was being crushed from all sides. Cotton-candy strands wrapped around me, brushing my hands, arms, and face like spider webs. I tried to gasp, to choke, to move at all.

  Then I was back on the hillside. The sage was whole again, no smoke hung in the air. I fell to my knees, coughing, even though I told myself it wasn’t real.

  Clapping sounded behind me as not-Alek picked his way across the rocks toward me.

  “Was that fun?” he said, his mouth twisting in an unattractive way that Alek’s never would.

  “You have real talent,” I said, spitting what was probably imaginary grit from my mouth. The dirt tasted real enough, like sand on my teeth and lips. “You’re in the shape of one of the hottest people I’ve ever met, and you still manage to look ugly and pathetic. How do you do it?”

  Maybe not the smartest plan to insult someone w
ho was clearly holding my brain hostage, but if it kept me far away from any memories of Samir, I was okay with that. What was inappropriately timed snark for if not saving lives?

  “How long do you think you can last under that much rock and dirt? You won’t die, of course. Dying isn’t for our kind. But this won’t be a comfortable undeath. You can make it stop anytime.” Not-Alek’s eyes were cold and he folded his arms across his chest.

  This dude had some learning to do about sorcerers if he thought dying wasn’t something we were capable of doing. I dropped another anvil on him. This time I was ready for the pain. The crushing lack of light or air or sense of where I was.

  A hunch. And a prayer to the Universe that I wasn’t totally stupid. That’s all I had. My gamble was that the crushing, airless place was the real world. In my experience, only reality could hurt that much.

  There was only a second to act. A second to reach for the thread of my own magic. I wasn’t even sure I was awake but something answered me, a tendril of fire that I grasped with every panicked ounce of my consciousness.

  And I was ready for the cotton-candy scented strands that pulled me back into the dreamland or whatever this hellscape was. I spun my own thread of magic around them, linking us together, forging a pathway between my mind and that of my tormentor.

  “Okay asshole,” I said. “Show me who you are.”

  It wasn’t the hillside but the hospital that appeared around me. I knelt on the floor, a strip of red cloth wound around my left hand and stretched like a rope straight into the white wall. The cotton-candy scent lingered and my hand burned beneath the cloth. I knew without understanding how that the strip was my own magic, a visualization of the hold I had on the sorcerer’s spell, and hopefully on him, whoever he was.

  A young woman lay in the hospital bed. Helena. Her name slipped into my head. She had red-gold hair that curled in ringlets around her face and wide-set grey-green eyes. Her face was ravaged by pain but she still had a kind of fragile beauty that could have launched a dozen ships if not a thousand.