“When? How? What?”
“I don’t know. Soon, by the weather and the color of your hair. You dye it, right?”
Ettie reached up to touch her hair, seemingly more concerned that I’d accused her of being a bottle blond than by her impending doom.
“Brilliant.” Kandy laughed.
“There’s no need to be nasty about it,” Ettie said.
“No one is being nasty, Ettie,” Beau said. “We’re here to …”
“To help me?”
“Yes, ah … that’s Rochelle’s territory.” Beau glanced sideways at me.
“Do you own a sundress with blue flowers on it?” I asked Ettie.
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Burn it. Dye your hair brown. Don’t hang out in commercial areas, specifically around freshly paved asphalt —”
“I’m not dyeing my hair or burning my clothing because some crackpot says she sees my death,” Ettie said, dismissing me completely and returning her attention to Beau.
“That’s some really detailed and personal info for a supposed crackpot,” Kandy sneered.
I reached into my bag. “I could show her my sketchbook …”
“No,” Beau said, sharper than he’d ever addressed me before. “No one should see themselves like that.”
My heart pinched. Beau and I never discussed the vision I’d had of him dying. A vision I’d only managed to thwart through pure ignorance. I’d never shown him, or anyone else, those sketches. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t looked for himself.
I left my sketchbook in my bag. I’d pull it out as a last resort. “Okay, I get it sounds crazy,” I said to Ettie. “I’m just figuring all this fate, destiny, and future stuff out myself.
“Great,” Ettie said nastily.
I gritted my teeth. I just had to keep reminding myself that I had a function to perform and that with parents like hers I’d be an asshole too. “How about we … go camping somewhere cold. Hang out. Maybe the vision changes?”
“I can’t just hang out with you,” Ettie sneered, running her gaze up the length of me. It wasn’t a long look.
Kandy laughed again. “A fate worse than death, hey?”
Ettie rounded on the werewolf. “And just who the hell are you? Beau always had a thing for older women —”
“That’s enough!” Beau yelled.
A row of glass vials hanging in a metal test tube holder on the shelf beside us shattered. Ettie flinched, but I was pretty sure I was more shocked than she was. I hadn’t known that Beau’s voice could somehow break glass. Maybe that was some aspect of his shifter magic?
“You misunderstand the situation,” Beau continued, his voice low and steady now. “I don’t want to be here. I wouldn’t be here, not without Rochelle’s insistence that we try to help you somehow.”
Ettie stared at me, her brow furrowed with confusion.
“I imagine Cy is in some shit. And that shit is going to bleed over onto you.”
“But —”
“We’re not staying any longer than we have to,” Beau interrupted. “This is not a conversation. I would have preferred to call, but I didn’t have your number. You’ll stay quiet and listen.”
Ettie closed her mouth, shook her head, then lifted her arms in a ‘whatever’ sort of gesture.
“Finally,” Kandy grumbled. Pushing away from the table she’d been leaning against, she sauntered past Ettie toward the main doors. As she passed Beau’s sister, she leaned in and took a long sniff of her neck.
“Oh, ick!”
Kandy ignored her, locking gazes with me. “A dud,” she said. “Through and through.”
“How dare you call me that —” Ettie began.
The door behind me slammed open.
Kandy stepped in front of me as I spun around. Then Beau stepped to her side. They formed a wall, giving me just a glimpse of the men funneling into the room.
“Normals,” Kandy snarled. “Watch your strength. Guns.”
The men formed a semicircle about ten feet in front of Beau and Kandy, deliberately standing out of arm’s reach.
Beyond the broad shoulders blocking my view, I could see the two men nearest to us on either side. The newcomers were bruisers — previously broken noses, gold chains, hairy arms, and all. I was fairly certain there were five of them. They stood with their backs to the main entrance. If they had guns tucked underneath their loose shirts, I couldn’t spot them.
Ettie stepped up beside Beau. “What is going on?”
“Claudette,” some guy I couldn’t see drawled. His accent was an odd mixture of lyrical vowels and sharp consonants. French influenced, maybe? “A lazy birdie said I’d find you here. And you, Beaumont. It’s been too long … for my pocketbook, at least.”
“I don’t know where Cy is, Byron,” Ettie said. She didn’t sound remotely worried about the five guys who’d just occupied the lab as if it were a country they’d invaded.
Byron? I peeked around Beau’s shoulder and caught a glimpse of a beefy guy with a faded scar across the right side of his too-tanned face. He was wearing a collared, short-sleeved silk print shirt loose over his beige shorts.
“What you know, Claudette, doesn’t really factor into our visit,” Byron said. “You’ll come with us, and Cy will come get you. Ada will make him. You always were your mother’s favorite.” The men around Byron snickered.
Beau shifted his feet.
“Not yet,” Kandy said. Her voice was a low growl.
Ignoring Beau and Kandy, Byron continued, “And then he’ll have to answer a few questions about the new shit he’s dealing behind my back to get through the door.”
“She’s not going anywhere with you,” Beau spat.
“Why don’t you introduce me to your friends, Beaumont?” Byron said. “Why hide the littlest one behind you? What’s so important about her?”
“Maybe we’re protecting you from her,” Kandy said.
“I doubt that. But since I’m not inclined to stand around a university campus for longer than I have to, why don’t we move this chat somewhere more … amenable to me.”
The guy closest to Ettie grabbed her arm. She shrieked, more affronted than injured.
Beau reached over and broke the grabby guy’s hairy wrist.
“Fuck!” the guy screamed, definitely in pain. He let go of Ettie and backed away from Beau.
Someone coughed …
No, my painfully slow brain informed me … that was what the bark of a silenced gun sounded like.
Before I could react, Beau was on the floor before me and Kandy was standing in his place.
The werewolf was holding Byron’s gun aloft, standing nose to nose with him.
Beau rolled to his feet but stayed hunkered down. He was assessing the situation.
Kandy had just saved his life.
My limbs felt heavy, sluggish. As if I were mired in a large tub of nasty processed cheese. Weapons were being drawn, bad guys were shifting around me, and I couldn’t move.
That was the moment Chi Wen had seen.
That was the moment I’d almost lost Beau.
“Nice dog bite,” Kandy sneered, nodding toward Byron’s scar. “Bet I can do better.”
Then she crushed his gun as if it were made out of brittle candy.
With his free hand, Byron reached underneath his loose silk shirt and pulled a stun gun out from a body harness. He wore two. He jammed the electric weapon into Kandy’s gut. She snarled and broke his arm.
He screamed, even as he somehow managed to hit her with the stun gun’s shock again.
Beau picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and ran for the locked lecture hall door.
“Stop,” Ettie screamed from behind him, but she wasn’t talking to her brother. She threw herself on the guy with the broken wrist who’d swung his gun to follow Beau’s movement.
Well, points for Ettie.
The other three assholes mobbed Kandy alongside Byron, slamming her with their stun guns and practic
ally frying her with electricity. She didn’t go down, but she wasn’t in control of all her limbs anymore.
“Beau, no!” I cried. “Kandy!”
Beau smashed through the door, stumbling into a huge auditorium. A hundred or more metal-framed gray vinyl seats rose up before us.
“Meth ragers!” someone yelled from the lab.
“Don’t kill them!” Ettie screamed.
Beau dropped me to my feet.
“Beau!”
“Run, Rochelle,” he said. “You promised.” Already turning back into the lab, he glanced back at me, his eyes blazing green with his shapeshifter magic. “You promised.”
I nodded. Then, not wanting to waste time thinking about it, I spun left toward the stage area, away from what I assumed were the entrance doors. I went for the windows, not wanting to get caught in the maze of hallways.
Furniture splintered and glass shattered behind me as I snagged a wooden chair from behind a brown folding table. Once I cleared the lectern, I flung the heavy chair through the far windows, which appeared to overlook some trees growing in the green space between the buildings. The safety glass of the middle window shattered. The chair dropped over the exposed ledge.
Running over the escape scenarios Beau had drilled into me for eighteen months until they were just a jumble in my head to block out the grunts and groans emanating from the lab, I grabbed the ledge, scrambling to find a solid grip among the pebbles of glass littered there.
I flung my leg over the window frame. It was a high drop to the grass below. Well, for me at least.
A man screamed in pain behind me. Not Beau. I couldn’t help but smirk nastily at the sound. If it wasn’t for the stun guns and protecting Ettie and me, Beau and Kandy would have cleared the lab in two minutes.
I lowered my body over the edge. My satchel got caught up on the ledge above me. I tugged at the strap until the bag fell, whacking me painfully on the hip. Thankfully nothing appeared to fall out. I hung there for a moment, scraping my palms on the red brick of the exterior ledge. Then I dropped to the ground before I could talk myself out of it.
I lay there, stunned on the well-watered green grass, and staring up at the broken window ten or twelve feet above me. The wooden chair was on the ground beside me, but even if I dragged it underneath the window, it wouldn’t raise me high enough to climb back into the lecture hall.
Muffled grunting filtered down to me, shot through with pain.
Then a ferocious snarling growl.
Then nothing.
“Where’s the little bit?” Byron asked, sounding as if he was moving into the lecture hall. I still couldn’t place his accent. It was Southern, but definitely not the same as Beau’s and Ettie’s.
I rolled over onto my stomach, then pulled myself to my hands and knees. I was fairly certain I hadn’t hurt anything in the fall, but I didn’t feel like testing that notion right at this moment.
Footfalls crunched through glass on the other side of the window. “Hey!” someone shouted.
I wasn’t going to have much of a choice.
So I ran.
∞
I ran.
It was sweltering. And, though the sun was dipping in the sky, it was not yet setting.
I wanted to turn back, but I didn’t.
I ran away, as I’d promised so many times in so many training sessions over the past year and a half. I should never have persuaded Beau to go home. I should have been happy with a phoned-in warning … if only we could have found a working number. Obviously, if we’d tried harder, we could have found a working number. Everyone was online these days …
But I hadn’t been happy with the idea of a phone call. Had I been so convinced of my own abilities that despite Chi Wen’s warnings to observe and interpret — to not get involved — I had pushed Beau until he’d relented?
Had my arrogance and my childish need to claim my magic gotten Beau mentally screwed by his mother, beaten by his stepfather, and almost shot?
Oh, God. That had been the moment Beau was supposed to die. The moment Chi Wen had seen … and thwarted.
If nothing else, that was crystal clear. The far seer had just manipulated the future he’d seen. He’d just saved Beau’s life via Kandy.
Though I was clear on one other thing. I was running away while an asshole drug lord tortured Beau with thousands of volts of electricity. Of that, I was sure.
I blew by the next two buildings, startling a few students as I jogged past. Then I remembered that Beau had always said that I should call 911 and circle back in this sort of situation.
I cut right, then right again.
Actually, I wasn’t sure that calling the authorities was a smart move just yet. With Beau’s juvie record — plus whatever his connection to Byron was — a police presence might make everything a bigger mess.
Slowing my pace, I fell in behind a group of other twenty-somethings on a sidewalk that ran parallel to a road cutting through the campus. They were chatting about what cafeteria to hit for dinner while my boyfriend was being assaulted two buildings away.
A gray van drove by in the direction we were walking, then turned right across the sidewalk up ahead.
Finding the road made me realize I wasn’t sure I could backtrack to the parking lot where we’d left the vehicles. What happened if I couldn’t make it back to the Brave? Would it be towed?
Stop. Stop. Stop thinking.
Following the van, I left the shelter of the students heading for dinner, then jogged across the lawn to round the corner of red-bricked Coulter Hall.
I crossed to the wide front walk leading to the entrance of the building, ducking in behind a group of four girls. By their endless stream of chatter, they seemed years younger than me. But by the discussion they were having about fall classes, they were actually two years older, at a minimum.
A small crowd had gathered before a paved area adjacent to the side road and before the front doors of the science building. It wasn’t a parking lot, so I guessed it was an area for delivery vehicles and whatever.
“What’s happening?” asked one of the girls I was tagging along behind when our forward progress was impeded by a wall of students.
“Some sort of campus security training exercise,” a guy answered back from the middle of the crowd.
I pushed my way through the students until I stood just behind the first row. Someone had thrown a couple of battered red cones on the sidewalk. Everyone around me was chattering and pulling out their phones.
About twenty feet away, Ettie was being pushed, none too gently, into the back of the gray van that had just passed me on the road. The guy with the broken wrist was doing the shoving. He was also limping, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, and wearing a navy windbreaker with the word ‘security’ emblazoned in white capital letters on the back. It was the sort of jacket that the bouncers or security guards wore at big events.
“That’s not campus security,” one of the girls said behind me.
Mr. Fake Security climbed in the back of the van after Ettie as I pushed my way through the crowd sideways in an attempt to see more of the interior of the vehicle.
Byron and a third meathead hustled out of the building, carrying Kandy between them. Apparently, the tiny werewolf was too heavy for just one of them. She appeared to be out cold. The sight made me seethe. At least, Byron’s right arm was tied in a makeshift sling.
They swung Kandy, dropping her — hard — into the back of the van. The meathead eyed the crowd nervously, stuffing his hand deep in the right pocket of his fake security jacket as he yanked the sliding door shut with his left.
I caught a glimpse of Beau and the two other bruisers in the back just before the van door latched closed. All three of them were out cold. And, even from this far away, I could tell that Byron’s thugs would have been better off being loaded into an ambulance. Beau’s head had been in Ettie’s lap, which made me feel slightly better about her.
“Are they … are they kidnapp
ing those people?” another woman asked from my left.
“The real campus police are on their way,” a guy right beside me said.
The meathead crossed around to the driver’s side of the van as Byron turned to address the crowd. “No worries, guys,” he called. “Just a training exercise.” Then he flashed some sort of badge.
“Like that’s legit!” the guy beside me cried, stepping forward as if to confront Byron.
I grabbed his arm. “No,” I hissed. “Let security handle it.”
The guy shook me off, but he opted for pulling out his phone and taking pictures of the van instead of pushing forward.
Byron climbed into the passenger side of the van. The vehicle pulled away before he got his door fully closed.
The muttering and fretting of the crowd grew, but it was just a wash of useless noise.
Beau had drilled me with contingency plans, over and over again. I was supposed to call Audrey if we got separated. I was supposed to make it back to the pack if anything ever happened to him.
I cleared the crush of the crowd, but stayed nearby on the grass in the shadow of the brick building. I dug my phone out of my satchel and pulled up Audrey’s contact info.
Except … if I went to Portland, that meant I had to just let whatever was happening with Beau … with Ettie … with the vision … happen.
Beau would be pissed if I didn’t follow the plan he’d painstakingly drilled into my fiercely independent brain.
But how long would it even take Audrey to get to Mississippi? And then what? She’d call the police, or she’d at least ask for assistance from the Gulf Coast pack, and neither of those things was good for Beau. Well, I wasn’t sure about the pack thing, except I got the sense that Beau was protecting Ada from them for some reason.
I scrolled from A to B with a flick of my thumb. I had a dozen entries total, at most.
I stared down at the contact I’d selected.
Blackwell.
I didn’t trust the sorcerer. Beau didn’t trust the sorcerer. But he and I had formed a pact over a year and a half ago. Blackwell’s end of the bargain had included a ‘friends’ clause, one that meant he’d come to my aid if it was in his power to do so.
As far as I’d figured, sorcerers didn’t get much more powerful than Blackwell. Which was probably why most of the other Adepts I knew hated him. That, and he had a habit of collecting things that didn’t belong to him.
I See You (Oracle 2) Page 11