“What? Why?”
“Because Creed will find me, but he won’t if all of you are with me. I’ll tell him exactly what our plan is and ask him for his help. He asked me to find one better than his in a month, and I have. The only catch is…” she trailed off a moment before forcing herself to power through. “All of you would have to be willing to work with him.”
Tension spiked from each one of them and she could smell the ketones rife in the air. “Work with the man whose slaughtered dozens of outposts and innocent Shifters for goodness knows how long?”
“To be fair, he considers it a sort of eye for an eye, Old Testament kinda thing since you guys systematically kill all of us. I know we’ve had this conversation before, and I know you all don’t like to think of yourselves as bad gusy, but for a lot of us, you’re the things that go bump in the night.
“I’m not asking you to forgive him. I’m not even asking for you to pardon him of his crimes. I’m just asking that you allow a cease fire if, and only if, I’m able to get him to see reason.”
Bradley was not happy with her. Jaelle could see it in everything from his brow, to his eyes, to his jaw. Even his scent wreaked of displeasure and unpleasant feelings. “And if he doesn’t see reason?”
“Simple, you guys chase him down and execute him before anyone else has to die.” She squared her shoulders and made sure her own expression was just as resolute as Bradley’s. “So, who wants to let me borrow their cellphone tonight?”
****
Digging graves was much harder than Jaelle ever thought it would be. Movies made it look like humans could carve out a fairly deep pit within a couple of hours, so she had assumed that her natural Shifter strength would have her whipping them out in no time.
She was wrong about that.
So very wrong.
It had taken them a good hour just to find three shovels to use. They set up a sort of rotation where the shovel wielders would break up the top soil of a couple graves, everyone else would half-shift to use their hands to fling out the softer soil, then the shovel people could come in again. They had a pretty good circuit running, but by the time it was Jaelle’s turn to shovel, both her shoulders and forearms were screaming bloody murder while her lower back was content to just throb with constant pain.
She supposed they could take the easy way out and just make some sort of mass grave, but that seemed decidedly the wrong thing to do. It harkened back to way too many war crimes and – although the Hunters hadn’t done any of the slaughtering – it felt like their responsibility to give every victim the last rights and accommodations they deserved.
In the back of her head, Jaelle knew this was a waste of time, that the dead were the dead and they didn’t care where their bodies decomposed. But even if one didn’t believe that revenants could rise from the disrespected corpses of murdered Shifters, it still felt dangerous to leave so many souls without a proper send off.
Funny, Jaelle wasn’t sure she had any spirituality, but she did worry about unpleased spirits. She didn’t know where that left her, besides with blisters on her hand and shoulders tight enough to pop out of socket.
She groaned as she stood, stretching her back while she looked to the skyline. The sun was setting, which mean it was almost time.
“I’ll take this,” Bradley said, taking the shovel from her gently.
“It’s all right. I can still do a couple more hours.” Thank goodness for that Shifter healing ability. Otherwise she would be a tightly bound ball of angry muscles.
“Don’t worry about it. You’re the one going to see Creed alone. If things go south, you’ll need all the strength you have.”
“Good point.” She took a step back and let him go to work breaking the soil that she had just been trying to bust up. By her count, their small crew had about ten graves completed while Dannon gave last rites to the bodies they had pulled out from the room. However, those ten graves didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment, considering there were at least twenty more to go.
Jaelle knew that this was going to last into the next day, but if they ended up needing to chase down Creed, what were they going to do? Leave all the bodies to rot for a bit until they could come back or call a cleanup crew? That seemed terrible, no matter what way she shook it.
Boy, Creed really knew how to make her uncomfortable. When all this was over and Aberrancy was no longer a death sentence, she was going to enjoy smacking him around a bit.
Then again, when this was all over, he was going to have to stand trial for his crimes and she would undoubtedly be a part of it – if she survived, that is. What would she do? What would she push for? Yes, Creed had done many unspeakable things, but he was sick and his violent paranoia was being fueled by the people who were hunting him down. Did he deserve a chance at rehabilitation? At treatment? Or had he gone so far down his blood-soaked path that he was irredeemable?
She didn’t know, but she supposed she would need to real fast if she wanted to convince him to see her side. As much as she abhorred Creed’s methods, as much as she feared him turning his madness toward her, she had to admit it could have just as easily been her in his position. What if she had gotten the madness and he hadn’t? Would he show her mercy? Or would she be lying in a puddle of her own blood?
Jaelle shivered at that and pulled herself out of her own introspection. It was bad enough that her body was exhausted, she didn’t need to tire out her mind by chasing thoughts in circles.
“What are you thinking about?” Bradley asked, his eyes shining brightly behind his animal-like snout. She hadn’t realized that he had half-shifted while he was digging, but she didn’t mind the surprise. There was a strange sort of primal ruggedness that she liked about his partially transformed shape. It was all hard lines, thick hair and strong features. Maybe she was a bit primitive herself.
“Nothing really.”
“That’s not what your ketones say.” He took a sniff. “Stress, that makes sense. But confusion, maybe even a little sorrow.”
Dammit. Sometimes there was no privacy with Shifters. “Just pondering what’s right, what’s wrong and the meaning of life.”
He let out a short laugh that sounded more like a snort through his elongated fangs. “Why don’t you just tackle world hunger and poverty while you’re at it?”
“Well, I would start with uneven distribution of wealth and go from there.”
“You really have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
Now, it was her turn to let out a snort. “I wish. That would make life a lot simpler.”
“It would. But where’s the fun in that?”
She raised one of her eyebrows, giving him one of her patented looks. “Fun? Is that what you’re having down in that mini-hole you’re making?”
“Well, maybe not so fun right now, but…” He finished breaking up the soil and pulled himself out of the currently shallow grave, ending up closer to her than she had intended. “Sometimes it’s nice not to know what’s going to happen next.”
Jaelle swallowed hard, looking up into his face that was suddenly only inches from her. She felt her feelings come bubbling toward the surface in force. The uncertainty, the loneliness, the constantly second guessing of her choices that had lead her up to this point. For a moment, the world condensed to just the two of them, and his emerald colored eyes staring down at her.
But then Javi cut between them, jumping into the hole to throw out the loosened clods of dirt with his hand. Before Jaelle even had time to comprehend the shift, a large chunk of disrupted dirt slammed into the side of her head, breaking to bits in her thick curls.
“Are you kidding me?” she asked, breaking the intense moment Bradley and she had been sharing.
Speaking of Bradley, he was howling with laughter hard enough to wake the very dead they were burying. Jaelle stared at him, all ready to be pissed, but then the humor and absurdity of the situation sank in for her and she was laughing, too.
“Whoa, what�
��s going on up here?” Javi asked, sticking his head up from the hole.
“Nothing,” Jaelle answered between peels of mirth. “Just the exhaustion kicking in.”
“Gotcha. When was the last time you hydrated, anyways? You kinda look like shit.”
“Thanks,” she said, shaking her head and turning toward the car. “I’ll try not to take that personally.”
“Aw, come on. You know I didn’t mean anything by it. Just that you don’t look like your cooler than you, better than you, all around superior self.”
But she was already walking toward the coolers so she decided not to respond. Besides, keeping it going would just encourage Javi to get snarkier, and there was only room for one wisecracker in the group. Which was definitely Jaelle. She had earned as much, with the whole running for her life through all of her childhood and not going crazy.
It wasn’t until she fished a lukewarm bottle out of the cooler and leaned against the Jeep that she realized if this all went well, she wouldn’t have to run anymore. She could have hope. A town to call her own. Maybe she could even have a lover that she didn’t have to abandon for her own heart’s safety.
Her chest gave a throb at that and she tried to wash it away with several gulps of water. Thinking about David still made her hurt right down to her core. She missed him. Bitterly.
But as the days passed, it became easier to think of how happy his life would be now that he was safe. She could imagine him going back to work then eventually finding some sort of honey and going to line dances with her without feeling like someone had taken her heart and lit it on fire.
Yet, even if she didn’t want to admit it yet, she knew that she could never go back to him. Never find out what path he had taken. It just wouldn’t be right, or fair. She had cut off all ties, that didn’t mean that she could sweep in when it suited her and get all buddy-buddy with him again.
So, all the possibilities of a new life, but nothing to fill it with. What a future. Maybe she would get lucky and wouldn’t survive at all.
She grimaced at that thought. She needed to stay positive. Shaking her head, she finished off the bottle then went back to their makeshift graveyard.
Chapter Nine: Roll a Diplomacy Check
Jaelle stared up at the stars, listening to the steady breathing of the rest of the men as she let her body rest.
“Penny for your thoughts?” she heard Bradley ask, rolling toward her.
“That if I had a penny for every time you asked me what I was thinking, I’d have enough money to have my own cellphone.”
He shrugged non-committedly. “You’re an interesting person. I like to hear your take on the world.”
“Didn’t know you were into bitterness and experience-born paranoia.”
“That’s not what I mean. You were raised completely differently than any of us. You see the world in a way that we can’t. It would be stupid not to use that to our advantage, ergo, I like to ask you what you think or not.”
“Oh, so I’m just a tool then and you’re getting a reading?”
He let out a low, playful growl. “You can turn anything into an insult, can’t you?”
“Hear enough insults thrown your way and it starts to come naturally.”
“You know, you’ve led the type of life that would drive a person mad, and yet here you are.”
“I’m not sure my presence in a band of men who are sworn to kill me necessarily is a good indicator of my sanity.”
“You have a point.” She heard him roll over to face her, so she followed suit. Even in the night, she could see his sharp, defined features. “Can I ask you a serious question?”
“Sure. You’re the one in charge here, you can kinda do anything. Within reason, I suppose.”
“Will you answer it?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“Jaelle, I’m being completely serious.”
“And so am I,” she shot back. “You don’t get to be as old as I am by agreeing to each and everything thing that comes across your path.”
“Fine.” He took a breath and she heard his heart pick up. Curious, something was either agitating him, or he was nervous. But what could there possibly be for him to be nervous about? “Do you still see us as the bad guys?”
“What?”
“You keep saying that to Aberrants we’re the boogeymen. It’s easy to imagine you running and afraid as a teenager, fearing every moment could be your last. It makes me… uncomfortable. What else could we be to you other than specters bearing death?”
For some reason, she felt like tormenting him just a bit more. “You want to know what my first experience with Hunters was?”
“Am I going to regret hearing it?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
He heaved a sigh, but his heartrate was still increasing. “Sure.”
“It was when I was nine. It was winter and my mother and I couldn’t scrounge up enough food to keep us alive no matter what we tried. We boiled leather, dug through our dirt roof for roots, everything really. Eventually, she knew we had to go out and find food.
“So, we did. We trekked across the snow for miles until we reached a tiny village. They sold us some fish and some vegetables and we turned right back around to go home. We were gone less than a full day, but it was enough.
“A human thought they recognized me from the posters the Hunters had been distributing about a missing child. They called the number and a group of them descended on us right as we got home. My mom, though, you should have seen her. She was a fox Shifter, you know, and twice as cunning. She already had an escape path planned out and we had practiced it hundreds of times.
“At first, it seemed like we would get away. There was a local fishing boat that my mother knew would take us out of Hunter reach for at least a little while. We just had to get to it.
“But there wasn’t enough time. My mother knew this. She always knew.
“When we were halfway across the last flat of ice we needed to cross to get to safety, the Hunters almost caught up with us. So, my mother threw me ahead, giving me the distance I needed, and she stayed behind to fight them.”
Bradley was quiet for several long breaths. “They killed her, didn’t they?”
“I don’t know,” Jaelle answered. “She told me to run and never look back, so I did. I just ran and ran and ran until I was on the boat. And by the time I finally looked back, I couldn’t see anything but a snowy expanse. So, I left, and came to the continental United States, and thus began my life on my own.”
Bradley groaned and covered his eyes with one of his muscular forearms. “You’re right. I do regret asking.” She waited for him to find his words. “How could you not hate us? We’ve destroyed anything that you ever loved. We took your mother from you. Your life. I don’t understand how you could let go of that enough to work with us.”
Jaelle shrugged. “For a long time, I believed you guys were right. That I was some monster to be contained and I would eventually go insane and kill everyone I met in a murderous rampage.
“So, if it was so easy for me to believe those things about myself, how could I blame you for believing them, as well? All you’ve ever personally been exposed to is Aberrants sick with madness. Even I was terrified when I first ran into Creed. I was so certain that we were mindless killers.”
“You’re much more forgiving than I could ever be.”
“Am I? I never thought so.” Then again, what he said made a bit of sense. She had spent so much of her life both hating and fearing herself that it had taken meeting an Aberrant who told her the truth of their condition to jolt her out of that. Maybe she had needed to go through everything she went through just to forgive herself. “I would think the more important question is, do you think you’re the bad guys now?”
“Well, no. Definitely not,” Bradley answered, his tone relaying how carefully he was choosing each word that left his mouth. “I know that we have done too much good to be the bad guys. We’ve saved village
s. Wiped out a wendigo or two that were terrorizing different mountain communities. We’ve stopped gangs, caught criminals, and made sure that Shifters who commit crimes against humans are dealt with properly.
“But all that good doesn’t erase all that bad. If you’re right, that an Aberrancy causes a mental illness that could be treatable, then our species is responsible for the needless executions of thousands of children. Young men and women cut down before they lived their life, all for how they’re born. Sure, in Shifter history they’ll gloss over it as a necessary evil even if we do manage to prove that what you’re saying is real, but I’ll never be able to.
“I look at you, and it’s so easy to see the child version of you. It’s also just as easy to imagine your mother turning you in rather than risking everything to make you into a fugitive. It’s terrifying how easily the scene comes to me. Big curls, bigger eyes, looking in fright at the men who carry you to that chair. Crying for your parents as the needle goes into your skin.
“And yeah, you survived. But so many didn’t. So, I find myself hoping that you’re wrong. That Aberrancy is a violent, lethal disease that claims its every victim. But the more time I spend with you, the more I found myself doubting everything I thought I ever knew about your condition.”
“You and me both,” I murmured. “You and me both.”
A comfortable sort of silence settled between the two of them, Jaelle lost in her own thoughts and she was sure Bradley was just as absorbed in his. She wasn’t sure of the exact minutes that passed in the quiet, but it was a nice respite.
“I should go,” she said finally, sitting up from the back seat of the Jeep.
“Yeah. I’ll make sure the men are ready. You remember the code, right?”
Jaelle rolled her eyes. “Yes, Daddy, I remember the safe word.”
“Daddy?” he repeated, a smirk forming on his lips that she could see, even in the dark. “I think I might like that a little more than I should.”
“Well, maybe if you’re really nice to me, I might do it again. But for now, I have to go deal with a bloodthirsty murderer.”
The Aberrants Box Set (Books 1-5) Page 31