by Inked (lit)
“Yes, but I could not have formed a memory bond with a human. Carriers of Neuri are Weres, Lia,” he repeated. “They simply do not change.”
“Then they aren’t Weres!” He was the head of my clan and I owed him big-time. So I didn’t curse him into next week. But it was close. My whole life I’d struggled to be accepted, had battled against the tide of prejudice from both sides. I wasn’t human enough for the Corps, wasn’t Were enough for the Clan. And always, always, there was Neuri, that damned disease that wouldn’t let me truly be either. But at least I hadn’t fully understood what I was missing.
For the first time, I realized the truth of the phrase I’d said so many times: I really wasn’t Were. And God, how it hurt.
“Many of us have spent much of our lives in human form,” Sebastian said—calmly, damn him. “It does not invalidate what we are. It does not make us less Clan.”
“But if you choose to stay in human form, no one cares! They don’t try to kill you for being what you are!”
“Perhaps not. But I regularly run into difficulty with the leading clans for trying to work with the humans instead of isolating ourselves in our own little world—and thereby limiting our voice and our power. I choose not to let someone else dictate the decisions I make or how I define myself.”
“But that’s just it. You choose,” I said, furious that he couldn’t see that simple but so important difference. “The Corps hates me for having a Were mother; Lobizon hates me for not changing when that’s the one thing I’m physically unable to do! I never had a choice about any of it!”
“And if you had?”
“What?”
“Would you have preferred a different mother?”
“Of course not!”
“A different father then? One who was Clan, so you would never have had to face the uncertainty of Neuri?”
“When Lobizon sent the squad to change me by force,” I told him, fighting to keep my voice steady, “my father stood by me against a dozen Weres. Despite the fact that every single one of them was faster, stronger…”
I broke off because I was once again back in those dark streets, watching a mass of shadows slink around a wall, expanding in a blink into larger, more graceful, and more deadly shapes. It had been the beginning of the worst night of my life, as they chased us for blocks, almost overpowering us a dozen times. And the whole time, I’d been certain that, just days after losing my mother, I was about to lose my father, too.
“He could have been killed. He almost was killed,” I finished, quietly furious. “He could have left me—they didn’t want him, they’d have let him go—but he stayed anyway. He risked everything for me.”
“You seem to admire the man a great deal.”
“Of course I do!”
“Then I must admit to being confused. You said you’ve never had a choice.”
“I haven’t!”
“Yet it appears that the life you have is the one you would have chosen.”
I started to fire back a response, and then stopped as his words sank in. “We cannot change what we are,” he said simply. “Only what we do.”
“And what do you expect me to do?” I demanded. “Because I don’t know how to make this connection you want. I don’t even know how to start.”
“It isn’t a task to be performed or a skill to be learned. It’s instinctive.”
“Can’t you track him?” I was desperate for another answer, any other answer. Cyrus’s life could not hang on the tenuous thread of my Were heritage. It just couldn’t.
“Not through a city, not without having a very good idea of where to start looking. There are too many conflicting scents.”
“But he’s your brother!”
Sebastian shook his head. “After the challenge I was forced to sever ties, and for it to look real it had to be real. In Were terms, I am no longer Cyrus’s brother. The ties between us were cut, metaphysically as well as legally, by the ceremony making him vargulf. And an Outcast wolf has no clan until he forms one by taking a mate.”
Leaving Cyrus exactly one hope. Me.
4
“NO.” Sedgewick didn’t even bother to look apologetic, not that I’d have believed it coming from him.
“I’m fine,” I insisted urgently. Hargrove had taken Sebastian off to confer with Jamie, and I didn’t have a lot of time. The release form was on Sedgewick’s desk, but so far, he’d refused to so much as glance at it. “I was planning to go back on active duty soon any—”
“Oh, were you? How kind of you to enlighten me.” He was in rare form even for him. He’d taken Sebastian’s refusal to allow him to carve up the so-fascinating corpse hard. And since this was Sedgewick, that meant that the rest of us were going to suffer, too.
“You know what I mean,” I said, trying for composed while a thrumming instinct urged hurry with every beat of my heart. “After you release me.”
“Which I haven’t done. And won’t, for at least another two weeks.”
“Two weeks!”
“You almost died, mage, not even a month ago!” he snapped. “Or did I imagine the puddle of blood in the hallway, and the five hours I spent in surgery patching you up after that son-of-a-bitch shot you?”
“I’ve been shot before,” I reminded him. Although not at point-blank range. I’d uncovered a traitor in the Corps and almost gotten killed taking him down. I was better now, except for my magic, which had yet to completely stabilize. But it would have to do. “And I’m not going to be doing anything strenuous—”
“I know you’re not, because you’re going to be here.”
“Sedgewick!”
“That’s doctor to you. And you can whine all you like, but I will not sign a release for anyone whose magic is acting as unpredictably as yours!”
“You said that would even out!”
“And so it will, once you’re fully healed.” I started to speak, but he cut me off. “Let me put this in very simple terms. Your body had too many assaults on its magic at one time. Now it is stuck on high alert, very similar to a person’s immune system revving up to combat a serious infection. With the exception that your magic is attacking anything it perceives as a threat—whether it actually is or not! That makes it erratic and dangerous and therefore restricted to base!”
“But—”
“Although if you think you can convince Dick otherwise after almost decapitating him this morning, be my guest,” he finished, with the smug expression that was factory standard for assholes.
I left before I was tempted to put Sedgewick in one of his own hospital beds. I slammed out into the corridor, furious but already planning how to get around his prohibition. He might not have a problem saying no to me, but the leader of the Clan Council was another matter. I’d let Sebastian talk to—
Something hit me with enough force to slam my head back against a row of lockers. I saw stars, and my lip split, spraying blood across my chin. I could taste it—hot and metallic-sweet as I grabbed for a weapon, before I belatedly remembered that I wasn’t currently authorized to carry one.
I threw myself around the side of the lockers, trying to prepare a rough-and-ready spell that might carve through my assailant’s shields without taking out half the corridor along with them. I expected another attack, one more serious than a crack to the jaw, but there was no follow-up. I peered out through the small clear space under the lockers, looking for feet, but there weren’t any. That didn’t necessarily mean there was no one there. But if someone was hiding behind a cloaking spell, the distinct lack of pummeling was odd.
After a breathless moment, I emerged to see the same white tile, the same pale walls, the same water fountain that no one had ever bothered to hook up. I put a hand to my face, expecting to feel the pain of a split lip if not a broken cheekbone, but only soft skin met my fingers. There was no wound, even though the ache was still there.
It wasn’t helped by the shock of icy water that came out of nowhere and hit me square in the face. I
coughed, wiped my eyes, and looked up to find that the corridor was gone. In its place was a hot summer day, with the sun glaring down from a vivid blue sky.
It gleamed off the chrome fender of a beat-up motorcycle and the dark brown hair of the guy washing it. The hair tickled his neck because he didn’t get it cut as often as he should, like he remembered to shave maybe twice a week. Whiskey brown eyes that were the same shade in either form met mine, sparkling with challenge.
I blinked, but it was definitely Cyrus. He had the stripe of sunburn across his shoulders he got in the spring, after last year’s tan wore thin, and he was wearing the ragged cutoffs with the yellow splotches from the time we’d painted his living room. They rode low on his hips, showing off a hard stomach and thighs heavy with muscle. The sight was enough of a distraction that it took me a minute to notice his accessory—a now-empty bucket clutched in one hand.
“Big-time war mage,” he taunted, yelling to be heard over the blaring radio. “Is that the best you can do?” I followed his gaze down to the water balloon I gripped in one hand. “I bet you can’t even hit me,” he jeered, dodging back and forth along his driveway, deliberately using only human speed.
I took a drink of the beer I’d gone into the house to get and grinned back, making very sure not to watch the garden hose that was slithering toward him through the grass like a long green snake. And then it pounced, pumping jets of icy water all over his bare torso. He cursed and whipped around, grabbing it in a two-handed grip that only made it that much easier to spray him full in the face.
“You cheated!” he sputtered, looking outraged, before putting on a burst of speed that made him only a blue and tan blur as he tackled me around the shins.
I went down, but hit tile instead of grass, so hard that I slid all the way across the corridor, bashing my head on the side of the water fountain. I lay there for a minute, panting, until an orderly caught sight of me and hurried down the corridor, looking concerned. I waved him off and staggered back to my feet, amazed to find that I wasn’t dripping wet.
I exited medical and propped myself against an empty piece of wall down the hall while I waited for my heart rate to edge back into the safe zone. A couple passing mages gave me the once-over, but looked away when I scowled at them. I rested my head against the wall and swallowed, wondering if I was crazy.
The day I’d just relived had been a few months before I moved to Vegas, when I was still working for the Corps’s Jersey office. Like most Weres, Cyrus didn’t care for city life and felt claustrophobic in apartments. He’d had a house on a few acres in Galloway, close enough to Atlantic City to make his cover as a ne’er-do-well with a gambling habit believable, but far enough away that he could breathe. I’d driven down one Saturday with a six-pack and a birthday cake to celebrate his turning the big three-oh, and found him feeling playful.
He never did finish washing that bike.
I hadn’t thought about that day in months, but it had been just as clear as if it had happened yesterday. Clearer, because I couldn’t taste yesterday’s fettuccini like I had the chlorine in that water or the smoothness of that beer. I’d never had a memory that real.
If it was just my memory.
Had Sebastian been right? Was I somehow tuning in to what Cyrus was thinking about? If so, it would quiet the biggest fear I had about this proposed expedition.
Mated was a Were term, and not one that was usually applied to human-Were couplings. My parents had been married for more than four decades, but no Were had considered them mated. I think most of Lobizon had assumed that Mother was going through some kind of phase and would eventually come to her senses. Because human marriages, even long-standing ones, didn’t bind two people as closely as a mating.
Or so I’d heard. It wasn’t like Mom had bothered to explain exactly what the term meant. With Neuri forcing me to keep my distance from the clan, she’d assumed I would marry a human. So had I, until I met Cyrus. Not that we’d gotten around to talking marriage. In fact, we’d only recently gotten back together after a lengthy split. So mating didn’t seem too likely. Not to mention that Cyrus had never so much as uttered the term.
But despite occasional rumors about my mental stability, I didn’t go around hallucinating.
I didn’t want to feel hopeful, in case I was wrong. But I didn’t think I was—that crack to the jaw still hurt like a bitch. And if that was what Cyrus was currently experiencing, then he was already in trouble.
“And I’m telling you, a map won’t do you any good!” My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Jamie’s distinctive burr coming down the hall. “Tartarus isn’t fixed like the city above. The tunnels are, o’ course, but the rest of it…floats around, so to speak.”
“What rest of it? I thought the tunnels were the city,” Hargrove was frowning at the map he had in his hand.
“That’s a typical newbie mistake,” Jamie said kindly. “The tunnels are like the roads above—they get you from place to place. But the markets, the shantytowns, the bars—they’re mostly carved out of the surrounding ground. One of these days, I fully expect half the city to implode, they’ve undermined so much of it.”
“Then those caverns should be on the map,” Hargrove insisted, trying to hand it to him.
Jamie didn’t even bother to glance at it. “If that thing’s more than a week old, it’s out of date; if it’s more than a month, it’s useless. There are turf wars going on all the time, and the city shifts with them. You have to have someone who knows the signs to get you anywhere, much less to get you back. You need a guide.”
“I thought you—” Sebastian began, but Jamie was already shaking his head.
“I’ve been out of it too long. Sure, I could figure it out, given time. The main markets are pretty stable, although I doubt your beastie is holed up anywhere so public. But what you need is someone who has been there recently. And that lets out every tunnel rat we have.”
They disappeared into medical, probably looking for me. I stared at Sebastian’s back until the closing doors hid it from view. Then I took off in the other direction.
If a dark mage was responsible for this, then a mage needed to go after him, not someone who would be just as vulnerable to his spells as Grayshadow had been. I knew Sebastian wanted to help, but he’d said it himself: if he died, the next bardric might not be so interested in maintaining ties with the humans. Not if it was going to get some of his people killed.
So I was going alone. Well, more or less.
“NOPE, nothing.” The moon-faced mage behind the desk made a brief moue of disappointment to show camaraderie before preparing to blow me off.
“What do you mean, nothing? A bum, a bag lady, a freaking pimp. I don’t care!”
“Yeah, I got it the first time,” Michaelson told me, scowling. He was already having a rough day, and I wasn’t making it better. “Look, I gave you the report, okay? That’s all I got. If you want to talk to street people, go to a police station; hell, go to the street! But you won’t find ’em here.”
“Since when?”
“Since we started needing the lockup for more dangerous types.”
“Nsquital demons are not dangerous!” I pointed out, referring to the red-haired creature who had just been escorted in back.
“Ever had one spit at you? Anyway, he was selling weapons to the wrong people, so we picked him up. But he’ll probably be out on bail in a couple hours, after he gives up his cache. These days, if it doesn’t relate to the war, nobody cares.”
He motioned the next person in line forward, without so much as another sympathy pout. I was jostled out of the way, over near a window where a bounty hunter was waiting to turn in a prisoner. The guy in question didn’t look dangerous, just an average junkie with waist-length dreads, dirty cargo pants and a long-sleeved black tee. Except for the stench, which was enough to clear the sinuses. I gagged and looked around for another perch, but the place was packed.
“Thanks. I’ve been wanting to do that
since I caught him,” the bounty hunter said. I realized he was talking to me, and glanced over. His prisoner’s matted mane now littered the floor around his feet, like long fuzzy brown snakes. Uh-oh.
The man clutched his head. “My hair!” he screeched. “What did that bitch do to my hair?”
The bounty hunter raised an eyebrow as the guy’s remaining locks sheered off. “You should learn some manners,” he chided.
“Witch! I said witch!” the guy told me desperately. Too late, because I couldn’t regrow hair. Not even when my magic was working properly.
“Been to Tartarus recently?” I asked him, as he felt around his now-bald head.
“What?” The guy looked at me like I was crazy.
“I picked him up in a bar there this morning,” the bounty hunter told me, collecting his payout.
“What’s the charge?”
“Possession, suspicion of dealing,” he said, on his way out the door.
“Possession of what?” I asked baldy. He ignored me. “What were you dealing?” I demanded, jerking him closer.
“You got no proof! I had nothing on me,” he spat, glaring at me. “And anyway, punch shouldn’t even be illegal. You’d think it was dangerous or something—”
“It is.”
“Punch” was the street name for a mind-altering concoction derived from a distilled wine made by the Fey. It was said to give a wicked high and to enhance latent magical abilities. But like all drugs, it carried risks—addiction, mental instability and, for longtime users, insanity.
“Only if you get greedy,” baldy sulked. “You can drink yourself to death, too, you know, and nobody cares.”
“Alcohol doesn’t give humans the ability to curse each other into oblivion,” I pointed out. “A couple brothers did just that last week. Seems they had some mage blood back in the family tree. They got into an argument over some girl after an irresponsible asshole sold them punch, and one of them wished the other would go to hell.”
Baldy winced. “Yeah, but you got him back, right?”