Crossroads Burning

by Nash, Layla

  I shook my head as I finally ran out of chores and wandered over to the fire with a fresh pot of water for oatmeal. “Morning.”

  “Morning,” he said. “Coffee’s almost ready.”

  “Great.” I crouched down to warm my hands next to the flames, trying to ward off the chill. At least standing next to the horses had been warmer, though I still had the shivers as I wondered about that nightmare. I’d never felt anything like it—so helpless, so desperate, and so trapped. No options, nothing to fight. Just running and knowing it wouldn’t be enough. No magic to help me, no power to draw from the earth or the air. Just... nothingness. Weakness. Despair.

  “Bad dream?”

  I looked up at him, feeling the heat gather in my cheeks. “Why do you ask?”

  He fed a few more sticks to the fire, not looking at me. “You shouted in your tent, just before you came out.”

  “Sorry.” I rubbed my eyes, trying to laugh it off. “Something about sleeping out in the open, I guess, and hearing stories about monsters all day.”

  Lincoln smiled with half his mouth, and glanced up as he raked the longer hair off his forehead. “Then I suppose it’s my fault. Was the Snarly Yow giving you trouble?”

  “No, nothing I could see. Just…running away, being chased, and not being able to go fast enough. One of those helpless dreams.” Not that someone like him would know what that felt like, most likely. Lincoln probably didn’t even know how to spell fear, much less experience it. Sitting next to him certainly made me feel better. “But I don’t really want to talk about it. What were you carving last night?”

  He leaned back to pull the chunk of wood from his saddlebag, then handed it to me. “Good eyes. It’s a chess piece—a queen. I’m making a set from exotic woods. That’s olivewood.”

  “Huh.” I turned it over in my hands, curious about the heaviness and other... weight. It came from far away, that was for certain, and it had not been an easy life for the tree. There were many memories trapped in the wood, some of which would not be helpful for someone playing chess. It was about as long as my fingers and half of my palm, maybe the size of a soda can but skinnier, and had a full skirt, a shield, a sword, and a crown. “She looks like a badass queen.”

  “Most powerful piece on the board,” he said, and watched me as I studied the carving.

  “Bet she didn’t start that way.” I handed it back, ignoring the tingle as his fingers brushed mine, and wondered if I should have brought Olivia along to chaperone. She was the talker, not me—she could have kept them all distracted for a full month, and I wouldn’t have had to carry a conversation with strangers on anything more than the weather. And Liv definitely wouldn’t have talked about magic in front of a park ranger and a bunch of government researchers.

  “Well, most powerful women seem to know when to conceal that part of themselves, so men underestimate them.” Lincoln rubbed his thumb against a rough spot on the carving, then tucked it away once more. He said the words so casually I almost agreed with him out of instinct, since that was certainly the case with my family. The town might think us crazy or at least eccentric, but we were all that stood between them and annihilation by some unknown evil.

  The water in the small pot had finally started to boil, so I got a couple of bowls of instant oats ready and poured the water over, mixing it up well, and sat back to wait after throwing some dried berries and chocolate into them. I sipped the coffee he offered, which was strong enough to curl my hair, and debated trying to call back to the house to make sure Lucia and Liv were still alive and no dire wolves had broken through the wards. I’d honestly expected the dire wolves to hunt me all the way back to the Crossroads, or to run into them head-on as we rode that way. Not finding any tracks just made me more nervous.

  “I’m curious about something, Luckett.”

  I tried not to freeze like a startled deer. At least he didn’t call me Anastasia again. “What’s that?”

  “Did the kid in the bar call you a witch because of the family history, or something else?”

  And that made all my muscles stiffen right up. If my stomach hadn’t been growling loudly enough to wake the dead, I would have gotten myself up and marched off to pout by the creek. “I really don’t want to talk about him. It’s not your business, just like it wasn’t his business.”

  Another hint of a smile. “I really don’t understand why you’d want to stay in a town that pushed you and your family away. It can’t be the stories about being connected to the land and whatever deal your ancestors might have made with the Native Americans.”

  “We can’t pick how we’re born,” I said. Everything they said just made me feel worse about my lot in life, after I’d worked so hard to accept it.

  “No, we can’t.” Lincoln studied me as if I were an indecipherable problem, a difficult setup on a chess board. Maybe the queen in trouble among the other pieces, powerful but isolated and alone. “But we also aren’t in feudal Europe, Luckett. No one owns your destiny but you. Don’t let the town tie you to this place because of some bullshit story from hundreds of years ago.”

  I glanced over as Eddie ducked out of his tent, yawning hugely and stretching, and lowered my voice as I concentrated on my oatmeal. “Like I said last night, we can have this conversation again at the end of this trip. And even if…even if I wanted to leave, I don’t have the money or opportunities or education or anything to actually get out. There are a lot of reasons why it’s not going to happen.”

  Lincoln shook his head, about to say something else, but silenced as I handed Eddie a cup of coffee and the ranger sat down with us near the fire.

  Eddie also took a bowl of oatmeal, murmuring his thanks, and seemed to shake himself as he gulped the caffeine and stared into the flames. He seemed preoccupied, though, and more tense than normal. But I didn’t want to push him, since I didn’t enjoy being pushed. If the ranger wanted to talk about something, he’d bring it up himself.

  At least Lincoln appeared to have the same kind of patience, and the three of us ate in companionable silence as the sun rose and took some of the chill out of the air. As loud complaining started in the tent Nelson and Mason shared, Lincoln shook his head and stretched his legs out. “Those two. I swear, I can’t take them anywhere.”

  “Seems odd to have such a large group on this kind of mission,” I said, still not looking up from my oatmeal. He wasn’t the only one who could ask pointed questions. “I wouldn’t think that fetching a broken-down drone would take four people, even if it’s out of the way.”

  Lincoln nodded. “That’s true enough normally. We’re a team and get sent out as a team, unless someone’s sick or on vacation. We all have our specialties to draw on.”

  Eddie reached for more coffee and picked up the pot without a glove or cloth to protect his palm, dropping it almost immediately as it burned his hand. He cursed, shoving to his feet to march down to the creek to get cool water, and after sharing a look with Lincoln, I got up to follow. I brought the now-empty coffee pot with me, holding it with the tail of my shirt, to fill up for another pot.

  The ranger crouched near the water, muttering and shaking his head, and didn’t look up as I washed out the pot and filled it once more. “You okay, Eddie? I can get the first aid kit, if you need aloe or a wrap or something.”

  “It’s my own fault,” he said. “I should know better. I wasn’t thinking.”

  I watched the water swirl by in the creek and let my fingers drift in the cool eddies. “You look preoccupied. Anything you’d want to share?”

  “Bad dreams,” he said. Eddie scowled and examined his palm, red and inflamed from the burn. “It felt an awful lot like when I was here the last time. I figured talking about it brought everything up again, but the dream felt so real. Like I was being chased and hunted, and I couldn’t get away.”

  My heart thumped oddly, and it was like I heard him through deep water, his words echoing and reverberating around me. “Running through the grass but it was like pus
hing through a wall?”

  His dark eyes found mine. “Yeah. Then something tore open behind me and I heard–”

  “Growling,” he and I both said at the same time, and for a long moment, we just stared at each other.

  I started to shiver, the hair on the back of my neck standing up, and I realized in a blink that I’d left my rifle up near my tent. We pushed to our feet and I started walking, clutching the coffee pot hard enough my knuckles ached. “I’m sure it’s just coincidence.”

  “Normally that’s my line,” he said, attempting a smile. “Since I don’t believe in magic and all that.”

  “Right.” We went silent as we reached the fire, where the three half-asleep team members were groaning and complaining and trying to work the kinks out of their muscles. I held up the pot and set it over the fire again. “Sorry, had a bit of a mishap with the coffee. We’ll get this going right now.”

  Lincoln looked at me curiously, waiting for some kind of insight into why the park ranger still looked shaken up, but I cleaned out my oatmeal bowl and went to saddle my horse and get the pack mules ready. But I kept the rifle close, just in case.

  Chapter 13

  It took three more days of riding until their gadgets got some kind of reading on where the drone ended up. Mason made a big show of waving stuff around and checking at different times of day, taking a bearing, then adjusting our course. I didn’t say anything to Eddie, but the creeping feeling of something amiss grew stronger with each passing day.

  It wasn’t the typical unease of the Crossroads that developed after Aunt Bess’s incident, but something closer to home. Something about the people who rode with us. Eddie seemed oblivious, although I noticed he had the same kind of nightmares as I did, and neither one of us looked well-rested when the sun rose.

  Lincoln had a quiet way about him that dispelled some of the worry and the hint of suspicion in the ley magic, though it was a slightly unnerving familiarity with someone I was certain I’d never met yet looked like a relative anyway. I kept an eye on the map as we rode, and periodically dismounted so I could wander around and check the ley magic for any disturbances.

  Hazel or Lincoln tended to linger back, though they did so under the guise of stretching their legs or relieving themselves, so I couldn’t have said they stayed to keep an eye on me. It just felt that way, and I was accustomed to listening to my instincts.

  We circled closer to the center of the Crossroads, where the family tomb waited, and I woke up every morning with a growing headache. It wasn’t right to let strangers get so close to the caves that held the Luckett secrets. But I said nothing and let Mason lead the way with his gadget.

  Eddie kept an eye on the supplies, periodically checking in with the ranger station on his radio to make sure there weren’t any dangerous weather fronts moving in.

  I heard nothing from my sisters, which was probably for the best, and neither did the ley lines carry any hints of trouble brewing. I hoped that we’d perhaps drawn the dire wolves and the rest of the trouble back into the Crossroads, so Lucia and Olivia got a reprieve until I got back.

  I remained lost in thought as we rode, almost a week after we’d left town, and Mason began to veer west. How he determined the coordinates wasn’t readily apparent, particularly as Eddie compared our direction to the original coordinates they’d provided for the center of the Crossroads. I kept an eye on them and finally inserted myself into the conversation as Nelson and Mason conferred quietly as we broke camp in the morning. “So this drone is relocating on its own?”

  They jumped, startled and a little guilty, and Mason tried to charm me with a wide smile. “Luckett. It’s not exactly relocating. The ability to narrow in on where it is is a lot more specific here. We were mostly guessing from headquarters.”

  I nodded like I understood, but studied them instead of their gadgets. “But you had actual coordinates. Right smack in the center of the Crossroads. So those weren’t exact enough, or they weren’t right?”

  A touch of pink colored Nelson’s cheeks. “Both.”

  They were definitely lying about something, both of them looking nervous as a new witch at a Samhain bonfire. I reached for the doodad and raised an eyebrow when Mason started to pull it away. His smile didn’t slip. “It’s a sensitive piece of equipment, Luckett. I don’t think headquarters would like it if we let civilians play with it.”

  “Right,” I said. I folded my arms over my chest and eyed them both. “So how long are we going to wander around and hope that we stumble over the needle in the haystack?”

  “Is there a problem?” Lincoln asked quietly, appearing at my elbow.

  I refused to startle and kept my eyes on both of the brothers in case one of them did something dodgy. “I don’t like wild goose chases, and it sounds like that’s what this is turning into.”

  “Not precisely,” Mason said. “Or—not at all. We’ll find it, Luckett.”

  The creeping feeling of something being off once more trickled down my spine. “Does the drone even exist?”

  “Of course it does,” all three of them said at the same time.

  My eyebrows rose. Right. That didn’t sound practiced at all. Lincoln frowned at the other two, then gestured for me to walk with him away from the others. Eddie was still arguing with Hazel over how to distribute the weight across the pack mules, so there wasn’t anyone else to interrupt as Lincoln shoved his hands in his pockets and studied the grass beneath his feet as we walked.

  I kept my arms over my chest, wondering if I should have carried the rifle with me everywhere. What if they were all in some weird cult or they murdered people or were hunting meth dealers or something? What the hell had Eddie and I gotten into the middle of? And would I ever get paid?

  “We don’t know where the drone is,” Lincoln said finally. “It’s a lot less precise than we led you to believe, mostly because we didn’t think you’d agree to be our guide if we didn’t have an exact location.”

  “You’re right, I wouldn’t have.” I stopped and leveled my mother’s “you should have known better” look at him. “Because it’s a waste of my time to roam around out here, and it’s a waste of Eddie’s time, and it’s needlessly dangerous. We could be caught up in a flash blizzard before we get back to town, or we could be attacked by wolves any night, or we could lose a horse or two and none of us could get back to town.”

  At least he looked chagrined. “The only explanation is the true one, Luckett—this is a very, very important mission. We have to figure out what happened.”

  “Or what?” I wanted to believe him. In spite of everything, I desperately wanted to believe that going on the trip wasn’t in vain—regardless of whether the payout was the money or more time with him. “What could the consequences possibly be if you don’t find the drone and figure out what happened to it?”

  Lincoln ran his hand through his hair, turning away for a second before facing me once more. “It’s hard to explain. These particular wolves are something we’ve been looking for for a long time. We can’t afford to lose the data we’ve collected, or to lose the location of that pack.”

  The ley magic whispered not to trust him, that he was hiding something important. The Luckett ghosts in the cave murmured to return to them, to fix whatever it was Bess broke, and then get the hell home so I could plan with my sisters. I shook my head and retreated a step. “Data isn’t worth six lives, Lincoln.”

  “This data is worth a lot more,” he said quietly. “Anastasia, trust me.”

  The way he said my name made me shiver, inside and out. Green and gold flared in his aura, trying to dissuade the whispers of the ghosts, and urged me to stay. I should have taken the horse and turned away and ridden home right then. I should have told Eddie to get his shit and we could head back together and leave the tourists to do their own thing and live or die for their data. But there was something in Lincoln’s dark eyes that swayed me, that drove a wedge between my certainty and my decision-making, and made just enough
space for me to come up with an excuse. “You’ve got one more day to find this thing, then we’re heading back.”

  “Two,” he said, and when I started to argue, he held up his hand. “And we’ll pay you a bonus to cover the inconvenience.”

  It set my teeth on edge. “Money won’t mean anything if we’re dead, Lincoln.”

  “I know.” He glanced over as Hazel called a question. “But give me two days.”

  I needed to talk to Eddie, that was for damn sure. Against my better judgment, I relented. “Fine. Two days and not a second more.”

  He smiled and squeezed my arm in thanks before he strode off to confer with the rest of his team. I watched them as I saddled my horse, acutely aware that Mason still periodically looked at me to see if I was still watching. Stranger and stranger.

  Eddie wandered up to hand me the lead for one of the pack mules. “What’s going on?”

  “They have no idea where their drone is,” I said under my breath. “I gave them two days to find that thing, then we’re going home. They can stay out here if they want, but I’m not going to waste any more of my time.”

  The ranger shook his head, irritation making his eyes flash. “Damn it. I’ll have a few choice words with headquarters. I don’t know who they bribed to get this set up, but this isn’t going to happen again.”

  “Just keep an eye on them.” I shook my head and tightened the girth strap a little more, so the horse wouldn’t exhale and let the saddle dump me to the ground. “Something else is up.”

  Eddie nodded, patting the long holster on my saddle where I carried my rifle. “Yep.”

  Everyone got in the saddle, some a little more stiffly than they had the first couple of days, and Mason held the gadget up and pointed us west. “That way.”

  I rolled my eyes and touched my heels to the horse’s sides, waiting for the equally ornery mule to get his ass in gear, too. That way. The other way. Any way. I probably could have tossed a stone in any direction and had equally as much luck finding the drone as their silly gadgets. Lincoln glanced back, clearly sensing my disgruntlement, and smiled just a touch before he turned his attention back to the horizon in front of us.