Chapter 13
helena
I hadn’t seen the train station since I first arrived in Henard, and I was a little surprised to see it bright, populated, and empty of Guild Enforcers. My shoes scraped on the gravel-strewn sidewalk as I climbed the drive, surrounded by oak and birch that existed in my memory as dark, naked trunks. It was strange to see the forest that lined the tracks now. It exploded with summer greens, cradling birds and squirrels that filled the air with light threads of noise.
There wasn’t an empty spot in the parking lot. People dragged suitcases or shouldered backpacks through a haze of car exhaust. This surprised me—I guess getting into town at 3AM on a frigid winter morning had given me the false impression that Henard Station was fairly quiet and anonymous.
I’d suggested De Vries meet me here because I thought it was unlikely I’d run into anyone who might try to stop me, and unlikely he’d take the opportunity to shoot me on the spot if there were witnesses.
It also felt a little poetic. I’d come into Henard desperate, hunted, and grieving the family I’d left behind. I would leave it the same way.
I hadn’t been surprised to learn that De Vries was already en route when I’d texted, intent on ensuring the National Guild’s call for my arrest was properly completed. It made the decision easier, giving me no time to stop and consider how much damage I would cause by taking off. I hadn’t even packed anything, just ripped a couple pages out of my sketchbook, hugged Poo-stank, and locked the rescue behind me.
I didn’t even bring my phone, or the picture of my parents. I wore what I’d put on that morning: my chucks, a battered pair of denim shorts, and an old tee-shirt of Jaesung’s that didn’t smell nearly enough like him.
I sank onto the curb at the front of the station and watched a train roll in, give a creaking hiss, and open its doors. The crowd eddied, bodies funneling on and off the train. There were hugs of greeting and farewell, laughter and promises to call and take care and have a nice summer. It all seemed so temporary. Hello for the summer. Goodbye till next semester.
None of it felt as final as what I’d come here to do.
My palms had gone sweaty. I was sure my fingers were marking up the sketches in my hand, but I hadn’t lingered at home long enough to grab a folder or envelope to protect them. It had seemed more important to get out, before I could let myself change my mind.
Most of the cars in the parking lot were red or blue or brown, dull with a coating of road grit and country mud. A few boasted raised beds or spinning rims, most of them with hunting decals or thudding bass that confirmed my assumptions about their drivers’ pastimes. Henard was not a land of imaginative cars.
When the sleek black Audi turned smoothly onto the drive, I stood up without needing to see past the glare of sunlight on the windshield. There was nothing ostentatious about the car, except possibly the fact that it had little to characterize it as being owned by an actual human. A few heads turned, but that might have been because black cars in Henard usually belonged to undertakers or lawyers.
Either way, not a common sight at the train station.
De Vries pulled the car into a clean turn, waited for a lady with a stroller to make her midwestern way across the asphalt, and came to a stop eight inches from the curb.
I reached for the handle, but he’d already leaned across and pushed the door open. Which was weird. Politeness from the man who’d sold me to the Guild. Maybe it was the desire to get me locked inside his car as quickly as possible, or maybe there was a set of manners in there that was more deeply ingrained than his contempt.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the latter, so I decided to believe the first option.
I climbed into the car, giving the interior a quick scan. I didn’t see any cuffs or zip-ties, nothing that suggested this was an arrest and not a courtesy drive to magic jail. There was a bottle of water in each cup-holder. The one on the driver’s side had a broken seal, and seemed to be about a quarter empty.
It smelled like leather, and the stitched seat was buttery soft against my bare legs. Like the outside, the inside had no flashy details or spaceship-like consoles, just a quiet, sleek sort of quality that made me certain it cost more than most American families made in a year.
De Vries was equally expensive-looking. I glared at him for a moment, wondering how someone could manage to finish out a three-hour drive looking like his shirt had just come off the rack. The vivid blue eyes were hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, which was good, because I didn’t really want him to notice the bright red capillaries no doubt making a telling web of grief over mine.
I pulled the door shut.
He didn’t waste time on greetings, just waited for me to click my seatbelt and maneuvered out of the train station. I watched the familiar trees, the unfamiliar leaves, wondering if this was one of those scenes my brain would decide to capture in perfect detail.
I’d seen Isaac here for the first time. It was a place of beginnings, and endings.
We didn’t speak for the first ten minutes. Talk radio played in the background, some channel I didn’t know where the hosts conversed in smooth European accents. De Vries wove in and out of lanes, winding steadily south, until a crop of fast food restaurants and gas stations heralded an approaching highway.
He broke the silence. “Are you hungry?”
I’d forgotten how deep his voice was.
“No,” I said, which was a lie. I hadn’t eaten anything yet today. My stomach churned slowly, and dehydration was already making my head hurt. But right now anything I put in me would probably come back up. Also? I didn’t want to take anything from him. I hated his cool politeness, and I still didn’t trust him not to kill me at the first opportunity. Or try.
Hopefully, I could make it to wherever we were going before hunger drove me past the point of caring.
He took my answer with little more than a nod and flicked on his indicator. I crossed my arms and glared at the stoplight, irritated by the utter lack of…anything. No reaction. No sneers or patronizing assurances that I'd done the right thing by turning myself in. Not a twitch of awkwardness at my bristling silence.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
“National Guild headquarters,” he said. At my silence, he elaborated. Barely. “Baltimore.”
Okay. I probably couldn’t hold out that long.
I don’t know why I was surprised it was so far away. Part of me had assumed the trial would be nearby, maybe in Chicago. A few days ago, I hadn’t really known there was such a thing as a national level of the Sorcerers’ Guild, nevermind that it might have a headquarters. Still.
“What made them pick Baltimore?”
We got the green arrow and he turned onto the highway. On the ramp’s curve, he said, “Is this really what you want to discuss?”
I lifted my feet onto the dashboard, willfully marking it with the bottom of my chucks. “I don’t want to discuss anything with you.”
“Fine.”
De Vries made no comment on my shoes. He downshifted and cut swiftly across to the passing lane. This was the part where Krista or Jaesung or I would have set the cruise control, but De Vries left it in manual and maintained an unsatisfying six miles per hour over the speed-limit. Control freak.
I’d assumed he was done talking, but once he got up to speed, he unexpectedly answered my question.
“As far as I know, the American National Guild felt it would be best to center itself between New York and D.C.,” he said. “Though I’ve never actually heard an explanation. I assume it was suggested, voted upon, and decided.”
“That’s boring,” I said, just to be surly.
“That’s democratic process.”
I snorted. “None of this feels very democratic to me.”
“I suppose you mean it doesn’t feel good to be held accountable. You broke Guild law and now you’re facing trial like any other sorcerer. That’s democratic rule of law.”
He had me there.
Even so, I didn’t think any of this was right—I just couldn't make my brain dredge up a good argument why. It just wasn’t.
I glared down at the folded-over piece of sketch paper in my hand, wondering if I should have just left it behind. I wasn’t feeling charitable toward De Vries at the moment. I shoved the drawing into the pocket on the door.
De Vries caught the movement, and turned his gaze away from the road, immediately tense.
“What’s that?” he demanded.
I guess he had good reason to be afraid. Spells were literally cast through drawings. It gave me a small measure of satisfaction to get a reaction at last.
“Chill,” I said. “If I wanted to cast a spell, I’d just do it. I don’t need to draw it.”
His arms lost a little of their tension, but he didn’t completely relax. Probably because the reminder that I could cast with my mind alone sounded like a veiled threat. Which it was.
“You didn’t answer me,” he said.
“I’m not planning to.” If I was going to sweat the whole way to Baltimore, so was he.
De Vries let out a long, irritated breath, and seemed to decide it wasn’t worth arguing about. This pleased me. It wasn’t much, but it gave me the illusion of some control over my situation.
Which, really, I could have, if I wanted it. I stared at the road ahead, sliding quick and rugged beneath the tires. I could fired off a spell now. Even if De Vries had his personal shields primed and ready to go—which I’m sure he did, the stupid Boy Scout—I could target the car itself. I could take a chunk out of the engine. Or the road. I could fire off spells faster than he could get out that gun strapped to his hip.
Or, hell, if I distracted him enough, I could probably just punch him. It would be a gamble. There was a chance I could grab the wheel and guide the car to a stop. There was also every chance we’d go careening off the road, or into another car.
But it was an option. And it gave me some comfort to know I had the power to change my situation. It reminded me that I had chosen to be here.
Still, if I ran now, I would put Deepti and Eric under suspicion. I would put Jaesung at risk. If I ran now, I could never stop.
Imagination would have to suffice. I reached for the handle to lower my seat back, but after a moment’s search, I realized there wasn’t one. That particular function seemed to belong to one of the several buttons on my door.
I reclined the seat and settled into a comfortable position, reassuring myself with all the ways I could get away if I wasn’t trying to protect the people I loved.
“Can you get your feet off the dash?” De Vries said, breaking at last.
I smiled and crossed my ankles.
Chapter 14
jaesung
Krista screamed.
I winced, but a scream was totally fair. A second ago, I’d been a wolf.
I remembered wanting to scream the first time Helena had transformed in front of me. I didn’t think Krista had actually seen the shift in progress, but the plastic loop around my throat was at least a hint.
Krista shoved the rabies pole to the end of her reach, forcing me to flail backwards with both hands. She screamed again, but this time, I had the feeling it was because she’d just gotten a money-shot view of my junk.
“Jesus Christ, why the fuck are you naked?” She yelped. “Wolf—where’s the—” She looked around wildly, searching for the massive black beast that should have been at the end of her pole. I could see it on her face, the refusal to make the deduction. As far as she knew, the obvious answer was impossible.
“Where’d the wolf go?”
Eric moved into the doorway, subtly blocking Krista’s exit. Which made sense. We couldn’t have her run screaming into the world, announcing that I could shapeshift.
“Miss Rosenberg,” Eric said. “We need you to stay calm.”
“Calm? You expect me to stay calm right now?” She demanded, her voice ascending into distressed-chihuahua territory.
“Kris,” I said, holding up placating hands. “It’s okay. We’ll expla-”
“Gyah! Cover your dick, Jae!” she shrieked, shaking the rabies pole, and me.
“Okay, okay!” I secured my junk.
“Gross gross gross gross gross!”
I stared at her, disbelieving. “Is that really what you’re the most concerned about right now?”
“I don’t want penis-nightmares!” she said.
Seriously. I get that she’s a lesbian and thinks penises look like low-slung chestbursters without the teeth, but come on. A few seconds ago, I’d been a wolf. Of course, she might not have put that part together yet, so great was her devastation at seeing my dick. I tried not to take that personally.
Still, if there was another explanation for the replacement of a giant wolf with a naked dude, I wasn’t aware. Like, I know the brain is willing to do some serious gymnastics to keep from having to reformat itself to accepting magic, but Krista seemed to be taking it to an Olympic level.
Bewildered, I looked past her shoulder at Eric, who was in full facepalm-mode. I swallowed.
“You…you’re home earlier than I thought,” I said.
“And you’re naked in the kennel area with Helena’s detective buddy.”
Whoa, okay. That’s not where I thought this was going.
“Oh,” I said. “No. That’s-”
“I wasn’t with,” Eric cut in. “There was no with. I’m married.”
“And Jaesung has a girlfriend!” Krista said. “So either you’re both cheating, or-”
“Remember the wolf?” Eric said. “Can we talk about the wolf again?”
“No!” Krista said, and her gaze on me was both frantic and fierce. She shook the pole again. “Because we’re friends, Jae! And friends don’t let friends cheat on their other friend with their other friend’s cop friend!”
We were all silent for a second. Eric traced the sentence in the air, trying to work it out. I sighed and met Krista’s gaze with all the gravity I could muster.
“I’m not cheating on Helena,” I said. “I changed into a wolf to see if I could track down her scent, but you got home, and I’m still too new at the form to hold it very well yet. I changed back when you started yelling.”
Eric was back to facepalming. Krista was back to staring.
“So…” I continued. “It would be cool if you let me go, because I just got Hel’s scent and we need to find her before…uhh…” I looked at Eric. He scowled at me, tossing a hand in the air as if to say, ‘what does it matter now?’ “Before the person shows up to take her to trial for using blood magic.”
Krista was still staring. I watched the word ‘magic’ plink into her brain, floating down like a penny in a wishing well.
“Magic,” she said, expression not changing.
“Yeah.”
“Blood magic,” she said, still staring.
“Yeah?” I was a little nervous. She was taking this way too well, and she still had me on the end of a pole. Some sort of painful, flailing reaction seemed inevitable.
“Is that bad?” She asked.
I looked at Eric.
“Pretty bad,” he said. He crossed his arms, eyeing Krista as if he too thought she was being remarkably chill about having actual evidence of magic.
“Can you let me out of this thing?” I asked, tugging at the loop.
“No,” she replied, adjusting her grip. “It’s kind of fun. And I still have questions.”
“That’s fine,” I said, slipping two fingers between the loop and my neck. “It’s fine for you to have questions. Just let me off the pole first.”
“Of course it’s fine,” she said, and tugged the pole, bringing me forward onto both hands. “NO. PENIS. PUT AWAY.”
“Well stop jerking the pole then!”
“You stop!”
“You have the pole!”
“Both of you!” Eric shouted over us. “Shut up! Krista, let him off the pole. Jaesung, get back into your fur-suit and-”
<
br /> Krista gasped, and as Eric continued making orders, she turned to me and mouthed. “You’re furries?”
I closed my eyes, like that could dampen the agony. “No,” I whispered back. Though that might only sort of be true. I wasn’t sure if my wolf-form counted as a Fursona, and if it did, I definitely didn’t want to know.
When I opened my eyes again, Krista was looking at me, frowning uncertainly.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m not a furry. Even if I was, you’re supposed to be anti-kink-shaming.”
She straightened up a little. “I’m not anti-furries. I’m just…I thought I knew you.”
Eric stepped forward, snatching the pole from Krista and releasing the loop.
“Oh, thank Christ,” I said, ripping it off my neck. I made a grab for my boxers, sending Krista into another fit of dick-induced squawking. As I dragged on my jeans, Eric leaned toward me.
“I’m not sure she’s taking in the important points,” he said.
“What tipped you off?”
Eric pulled out his phone and checked it. “You can’t hold that form in public, can you?”
“Haven’t tried,” I said, buckling my belt. “It’s been a few weeks, and it’s always hardest if I haven’t done it for a while.”
“At this point, I think your wolf would only slow us down.” He motioned me toward the door. “Come on.”
I halted with one arm halfway inside my tee-shirt. “What, now?”
“Yes, if you want to find her before De Vries does.”
I jerked a thumb at Krista, who was staring between us like a person who’d just turned on a TV show in the middle. “What about—we have to explain.” Eric looked at me like I was an idiot. I looked at Krista, then back at Eric. “Wait, don’t we?”
Before I could be too scared that Krista somehow already knew about all of this, she raised a hand. “I would very much like an explain.”
“See,” I said. “She wants an explain.” I pulled my shirt over my head.
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