by S. M. Beiko
“That’s it!” Natti jabbed a finger at her brother. “Your haul. We all ride in your truck in, like, the transport trailer. Big enough, no windows. Fastest way to get across the country without being noticed.”
Aivik was caving. “But . . . my Alberta job . . .”
“Alberta?” Siku scented the air, as if he could geolocate with his nose.
“It’s to the northwest. Is it the Fort McMurray run again?” Natti asked.
Aivik nodded. “Yeah. It’ll take me a couple days, but the border to the Northwest Territories isn’t far from there, if that’s where these two need to go. And if I make the run business as usual, then no one will ask questions about me using the truck.” His shoulders fell. Phae could tell he really wanted this job to work out. “But after that, no guarantees.”
Natti slapped him hard on the bicep, and despite the fact that he was twice her size, he winced. “Good. It’s settled.”
“Is it?” Phae asked wryly.
“You can come or you can stay.” Natti squeezed her friend’s arm. “But I feel this in my bones. This is our part to play in whatever’s happening, just like before. And maybe you can find your part, too.”
She left the room to start packing. Phae and Aivik exchanged a glance, and he shrugged before following his sister.
Phae decided she had to be like Natti. Don’t think. Go with your gut. Whatever was in her gut she couldn’t tell, but the familiar twisting that had kept her up at night seemed to be letting go, inch by inch, the dread falling away into a darker sea.
A wave was coming, and she could ride it or drown.
~
Aivik shifted the huge rig into park, one elbow slung out the window. He’d slept as much as the others, which was to say very little.
Natti saw another man in coveralls approach Aivik’s truck from the receiving dock, and they exchanged words. The sun wasn’t yet up and the truck doors were slammed and locked by the dock team that scurried off to prep the next load. If Aivik got out of the truck to reopen the doors, it’d look suspect. He glanced to where they were hiding but quickly looked back to the man in coveralls. He was doing his best to appear convincing, to Natti’s eyes, anyway.
“Too bad Eli had to get himself in a plane crash,” Natti muttered. “Brain hacking would come in handy about now.”
“Yes,” Phae said through her teeth, “you’ve mentioned that about twenty-six times now.” They’d considered calling on Seneca, their only real ally in the Owl Family in Winnipeg since what happened last spring, but with two technically stolen bears on their hands, and Seneca having ties to the police, they didn’t want to chance it.
“Still valid,” Natti grunted.
They’d been waiting on the other side of the parking lot for the past twenty minutes. Getting the bears here had been the hardest part and had to be achieved mostly on foot. There was no way Siku and Maujaq would fit into Aivik’s crummy sedan, and no one could sleep much anyway, so they’d hit the streets. Besides, the transport industrial park was only a few miles away from Point Douglas. But now it was time for the moonshot.
Natti glanced up at the sky. Still overcast, and there was moisture in the air. It’d have to be enough. Her fingers twitched. The man in coveralls moved away from Aivik’s truck, went to the back of it, and shouted over some nearby crewmen to open the rear door. Then he left. Good. He’d fallen for the last-minute inventory request. A foreman would come around in less than five minutes to see Aivik off post-inspection. They had to run.
“Now!” Natti barked, and a pulse twitched down her wrists as she reeled every humid droplet out of the air around them, thickening the mist into a raincloud that could cloak them. The bears bolted, Siku carrying Aunty and Natti on his back, Maujaq carrying Phae. They reached the truck just as the man Aivik had spoken to was coming back around. The bears scrambled inside, and Natti jumped off and yanked the door shut behind her. She couldn’t bolt it from the inside, but she hoped it would hold until Aivik could secure it when they made it to a truck stop. If they made it.
The truck screeched and rumbled beneath them as Aivik threw it into gear, edging the massive trailer out of the lot. Natti staggered in the dark, catching a sharp edge on her hip but holding on. There was shouting over the roar of the engine and the crunching of gravel — the inspector, maybe, the guy in the coveralls?
Then from closer by, they heard Aivik shouting, “It’s all good!”
Then the speed increased beneath them, like they’d actually hit the road, and after a few minutes like this in the silence of the trailer, braking and going, she figured they were winding through the city towards the Trans-Canada. Natti finally let the tension in her body go.
A white light glimmered; Natti squinted, holding on to boxes and crates. It was Phae, letting her power flow and flicker like a lightning bug night light. Phae held out her hand and Natti took it, for both reassurance and help coming down to the dirty trailer floor without smashing her face as the truck navigated too many service road potholes. In the ring of Phae’s light, Natti watched the bears move to a far corner, Siku pressing into Maujaq protectively as he gingerly put Aunty down between them.
Natti and Phae looked at each other, still trying to catch their breath. They settled on some crates, adjusting somewhat to the jostling impact of the road under the sixteen-wheeler. They’d have to. The road beneath and ahead was a long one, and now they had nothing but time to consider the consequences at the end of it.
The Conclave of Fire
Eli had fought for what had probably been days. He should have died of thirst or starvation by now. But he could feel it — the hard fingers of the tree wrapped firmly around the Moonstone, piercing it like a needle. The tree had made Eli a part of it. It fed off his terrors, his nightmares. It tapped into the stone’s power, too, and as long as the tree lived, so would Eli.
The bark of the tree was his flesh now. The roots his bones, tethering him to the earth. That in itself was a nightmare for a child of the sky.
He had seen these trees in the Bloodlands, for surely that’s what Eli and the rest of the Owls who had miserably followed him here had become. Hope trees. Nothing tortures more than a hope. It was as if Eli were there again — and maybe he was, since the stone wasn’t differentiating between reality and his own memories. He saw that great hulking demon Urka and its axe-hands that slashed the bleeding flesh of the tree, dug around in its remains, and replanted it so it could hope anew for salvation.
But that tree, back then, had been the soul of something. Something punished. And now it was Eli’s turn. In sore silence, the only kind he had, he admitted his soul more than deserved the lashing it was enduring.
All he had was time. Why had no one yet come? The debris had been masked by the thick, twisting grove made by the attack’s victims. But surely the Owl Council, whatever remained of them, knew they had disappeared?
He hoped, though he didn’t dare pray. And with each passing day of disappointment, his prison grew stronger.
But why hadn’t they taken the stone? They’d obviously managed it with the Rabbit Paramount, for there had been no mistaking the Serenity Emerald glinting on the enemy’s shoulder like a trophy. Separating a Paramount from their stone was a feat in itself, one that this enemy’s small army hadn’t been able to achieve with Eli. Not yet, anyway. Maybe he’d been left here in cold storage, and once the cavalry recouped, they’d return for their prize.
Eli never liked being someone else’s sure thing.
But he was reaching his limits far too quickly as each day passed. Exhausted and in pain, he was unable to figure out why this was happening or repress his terror that it could be happening elsewhere to other unsuspecting people. They had to be warned. She had to be warned. If Eli couldn’t escape these creatures and the devastating shadow that led them . . . when they came for Roan’s stone, she wouldn’t have a chance.
Eli tried
to scream, but the tree squeezed, and the nightmares took hold.
~
A scream woke me, like a knife in the kidney, and I twisted with the force of it.
I was probably most surprised to find it was me screaming, and it really surprised the man sitting on the edge of the bed I was firmly tucked into.
“Good lord,” he said, leaping to his feet, hands up. “You’ve a right pair of lungs, don’t ye?”
My legs were drawn up and I clutched the sheet to me, but as I woke fully I saw I was still dressed, still whole. I kicked the twisted blankets away, unzipped my hoodie, and thrust my hand against my chest.
I don’t know if I was more relieved or disappointed to find that the Dragon Opal was still there, as much a part of my skin and bones as it had ever been, glowing warm as an uneven geode at my sternum.
“So it’s true,” said the man, whom I’d almost completely forgotten about. “It chose ye.”
I flicked and narrowed my eyes at him, zipping back up. “And who the hell are you?” I slid off the bed, keeping it between us as I pressed up against the wall. I tried not to let on that my legs felt like soup or that I was fighting not to vomit. I straightened my spine. “And where the hell am I?”
His mouth, an impassive line, broke into a charming grin. “God,” he whispered, shaking his head, “yer so like her.”
“Quit dodging my damn question.” Regardless, I searched his face — hard to tell the age, but late forties at least judging by the crinkles at the corners of his mouth. I didn’t recognize him, though, not from any of Cecelia’s memories or from any of my own. Could he have known Cecelia? Or even Ravenna? But when my spirit eye decided to boot back up, one thing at least was clear. Beyond those hazel eyes, the dark hair, and the curious scar that cut a line from his left eyebrow down to the cheek, the man was a Fox.
“Didn’t mean to dodge. Name’s Killian,” he said, offering a mock bow that only set my hackles higher. “And yer in a compound in Glencoe belonging to the Conclave of Fire. The leading force of the Fox Family. Who will be pleased to see you and the stone are in fightin’ fettle.”
A shiver went down my back. The Conclave of Fire. I’d heard the name before but in someone else’s life. To have it made real here and now made me wonder if I was still somehow trapped inside the stone’s memory.
“That’s supposed to reassure ye,” Killian said, his voice even. I tried master my face as Cecelia would. I was probably still giving him massive, obvious stink eye, but I wasn’t sure yet if he deserved any less.
“Well, it doesn’t.” Cecelia’s memories, though biased, had already taught me not to trust the Conclave, or at least to take their measure with a grain of salt. I looked around. The room, filled with rows of beds and lit with enough torches to insinuate daylight without windows, was spartan and stone-hewn, the air close. It reminded me of Cecelia’s summoning chamber underneath her house in Winnipeg, and I felt certain we were underground. “And what? They sent you to interrogate me, good-cop style? Or do I have a hall pass to take a pee before the tribunal starts?”
“Oh.” He suddenly seemed at a loss, rubbing the back of his neck. “The lav’s at the other end of the infirmary . . .”
“I was joking.” My mouth quirked.
“Oh,” he said again, but he seemed amused if not relieved. “Right, well. Yer no’ a prisoner here. Quite the contrary. Yer —”
“A guest?” I finished for him, crossing my arms. “Which is totally political doublespeak for prisoner.”
He sighed. “Then we better get a move on so I can prove yer otherwise.” And instead of taking the semantics any further, he pushed the door open and swept his arm out. “After you.”
I hesitated, but I figured that, if anything went wrong, at least the stone had my back. It’d protect its own interests, at the very least, and I was attached to it. So I followed.
It wasn’t some narrow corridor he led me to; I’d expected the place I was taken to be a Gulag, like a bunker, or at least something close to. But directly outside of the infirmary’s door was a set of stairs, suspended above an enormous open cavern, and if I staggered I would’ve slipped off the edge into the shadows cast by the flickering light below.
The man, Killian, turned smartly and caught me by the elbow — he’d finally noticed I was off balance. “Careful,” he said, but the warning didn’t damage his cheerfulness. “Wouldn’t want to lose the Paramount just as we’ve found her.”
If there was anything that would make me dizzier, it was being called that. “I’m not the Paramount.” I yanked my arm out of his grip, willing my body to be rigid, to be strong.
I looked away from him and back down into the cavern, noting crossing tunnels and arenas and suspended pathways not only beneath us but above as well. The place was massive, crawling with activity, deep down under the earth.
I couldn’t keep the awe out of my voice as I followed Killian closely as we stepped onto a wider landing, heading for more steps, still descending. “What is this place?”
Light glinted and heat flared all around us. What I assumed were students, of a range of ages and ethnicities, went through regimented exercises as we passed, fists and flames striking the air, pulling back, again and again, led by three supervising masters. Some couldn’t help themselves, looking up when we went by, pointing. Whispering. Even the teachers who scolded them watched me with bald curiosity, and I quickly looked away.
“This place is many things. A training ground. A stronghold. One of many. All of the Families have these sorts of keeps in key places around the world. This one is only about three hundred years old — the original one was in Ben Nevis, y’see, but it seemed a better bet to move when it became a protected site. Too many hikers.”
I frowned. “Ben Nevis? The mountain?” I looked closer at the rock-hewn stairs, the high-climbing walls of the cavern. He did say the place was in Glencoe. “Are we . . . are we inside a mountain right now?” I was tempted to make a Lord of the Rings reference, but I didn’t want to look that giddy.
“That we are,” Killian chirped, because, to him, this was all rote. “It’s a Fox thing, liking the underground. Like a den, y’know? ‘A wise Fox prepares in the dark to better command the light.’” I could feel him surveying me expectantly. I had drawn up beside him, trying to match pace, keeping an eye on him while ignoring the much louder remarks as we went by.
When I openly shrugged, he chuckled. “It’s the Family motto,” he replied in his bright brogue. He must have been born in the Highlands. “Ye better brush up on yer Fox knowledge before meeting Mala. Thought I’d give you the express course on our way.”
“Mala?” I forced myself out of my awestruck reverie at the general surroundings. I had to admit, as we passed glowing antechambers full of fiery fighters, underneath columns and through tunnels covered in arcane symbols and sigils, I felt a growing excitement. I didn’t know that I’d been missing something like this, a secret world just on the outskirts of the one I’d been brought up in. A world to which, maybe, I belonged.
“She’s sort of the de facto leader ’round here. She’s keen to meet ye. Probably not too keen that ye technically outrank her, but she’s a canny woman. She won’t want to make an enemy of you. Least not before tea.” Killian’s grin was sardonic at best.
“You and me both are strangers in a strange land,” he went on, and I looked at him anew. “Haven’t been anywhere near the Conclave in decades, myself. So I’m also on thin ice, so to speak. Best we interlopers stick together, aye?”
I was curious what he meant, but I figured I had bigger problems. The place was extraordinary, and being among Denizen family had felt like too much of a relief up front. I had to be careful. I hadn’t known about this place for a reason.
But if Killian was like me, then he wasn’t close to these Conclave people, either, and he was right. I needed to be ready. He seemed like he wanted to c
hat, and I let him. “So do you have any idea why they brought me here?”
Killian’s mouth twisted. “Och, that one’s a bit too obvious, eh? But I suppose there’s much ye weren’t privy to. Extremely long and drawn-out story short, the Dragon Opal has been missing for a number of years. And so has its Paramount — yer granny, y’ken? Yikes, really never thought of someone as formidable as Cecelia as a grandmother, but there it is. Everything happened so quickly with the Zabor incident in Canada, and some deemed it better to stand by and watch rather than intervening, hoping the stone would reveal itself. Evidentially ye made off with it a little too quickly to track. Though it was a lucky thing you came to the very place where the Conclave had gathered now that there’s this new threat of those boggy kiddies running ’round. Very lucky indeed . . .” I caught him glancing down at me again, this time with his own sort of reverence.
It was getting on my nerves. “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”
Killian grinned. “I’ll let you sort it out. Same reason they’re all looking.” He jerked his head, and some of the knots of fighting instruction had ceased, small bunches coming closer, getting bolder.
If it was the exhaustion from the attack talking, or just my own shrinking will, it was painful to look at them, the growing adoring crowd. Bile churned in my stomach, and the skin around the stone itched. That feeling of belonging was short-lived. I wasn’t like them. Most of these kids had been brought up knowing they were different, that they had power, and they were special because of it. Ancient’s world was in their programming. Mine had been badly rewritten and had one too many bugs.
I raised my voice. “I already told you. I’m not the Paramount. I’m not . . . your leader or anyone’s leader. I’m just me. And I aim to keep it that way.”
Killian just shrugged. “Good luck with that. You’ve been picked, girlie. Whether they like it or not. Whether you do.”