Wolf Interval (Senyaza Series Book 3)

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  “Relax a little,” I told her as the elevator descended. “I guess I’m taking you with me.” I could, I thought, set the dogs to look after her. And if anything too catastrophic happened to me—well, it probably wasn’t good for her in the long term no matter what I did.

  Not a comforting thought, really.

  “Of course you are,” she burst out. “But what in the world was happening back there? I didn’t mean anything—I was just teasing—” she faltered to a stop, looking between Yejun and me.

  The elevator stopped, but the door didn’t open. Yejun tapped his fingers together. “Jen’s still coming to terms with what happened.”

  “Which was, surprise! Dying?” I asked sharply. “I know ghosts. My mother is a ghost. She was manifesting a haunt.”

  Yejun shrugged. “She look dead to you?”

  I thought of her faraway gaze. “Sometimes. But she definitely had a physical body. How is that possible?”

  The elevator started moving down again. “How should I know? Nobody ever bothered teaching me anything.” The elevator sped up and then stopped so abruptly Brynn stumbled into me. I caught and righted her as the doors slid open onto the hotel lobby. As Yejun passed through them, he said over his shoulder, “Cat says that Sen did something with her celestial magic that’s keeping Jen going for now.”

  I went after him, then stopped as he flopped onto one of the lobby couches, leaning his head back on the cushion like he was planning on taking a nap. Brynn went past me and stood halfway between us. “So, she’s like... undead? A zombie?”

  Yejun put his feet up on the coffee table. “She doesn’t crave brains or anything. Though hers doesn’t work right anymore. She can’t read now.”

  “Ghosts can’t,” I said quietly. “It’s hard for them to learn anything new without a body. They can if it’s repeated enough, but—” I thought of trying to teach my mother that I was back again and shook my head.

  Everybody was quiet. Then Brynn hugged herself and changed tracks. “So what was up with the elevator?”

  Yejun looked toward her for a long moment, then said, “I was just playing around with it.”

  This, Brynn took without a blink. “I wondered.” She slapped her hands together. “All right! I guess that poor Jen is probably target number one for this Huntsman guy if he’s after ghosts, huh?” She gave me a sidelong look. “Are you coming with us?”

  Despite her look, it didn’t occur to me at first that she was talking to me like I was the tagalong. As she stared at me expectantly, realization dawned. “What? Yes! I mean—”

  “Good!” she said, running over my words. “Let’s do this.”

  A hint of a laugh in his voice, Yejun said, “You know where we’re going, Miss Thing?”

  Brynn gestured grandiosely at me. “I’ll let AT lead the way.”

  I shook my head and walked out the hotel doors.

  It was only luck—definitely not wisdom—that prevented me from walking straight into Scott. He still held a cigarette as he leaned against a brick pillar exactly twenty-five feet from the front entrance. He was positioned so he could watch the comings and goings and he happened to be looking down the street as I emerged. The arm I’d broken was in a sling, which surprised me. Even without my father’s direct assistance, his wolves healed fast.

  I backpedaled so quickly that I crashed into the doorframe. He looked over and met my eyes. A nasty grin spread across his face. “Hey there, girlie,” he called, pushing himself away from the pillar to move toward me.

  My head hurt from backing into the door and I wanted to rub it. Instead, I clenched my aching hands. “What do you want?”

  Scott held his hands up in a conciliatory way. “Aw, let’s be friends again. I hear you’re out doing some shopping. I can carry your packages for you. I know sometimes you have trouble with your hands.” His grin became sly. “We both know what it’s like when your daddy loses his temper, eh?”

  I shook my head. “Go away before I break your other arm.” And I desperately wished he’d listen before it got worse.

  It got worse. Yejun came up beside me—Brynn apparently remembered enough of what I’d said before to hang back—and looked at Scott over his sunglasses. “Who’s that?”

  Scott’s horrid grin changed as his face filled with angry delight. “Coming out of a hotel with your boyfriend. Oh, girlie, and you were so shy last night. Wait until your daddy finds out!”

  “Shut up!” I said, taking a few quick steps toward him. He stepped back again, to the pillar he’d been loitering at before. A few people near the entrance were starting to watch us curiously.

  “How do you think you can convince me to do that?” Scott asked suggestively. “All I want to do is be friends again.”

  My fingernails bit into my palms. I couldn’t kill him. That would just kill his body; his mind would go flying back to my father all the faster. I couldn’t even stop my father from reaching into his mind right now and taking what he knew. I couldn’t do anything to him except avoid him and I’d failed miserably at doing that.

  Instead, I turned to Yejun, pushing him away from me. “What are you doing out here?” Then I grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him back toward me again. “We have to get out of here. We have to go do this thing if we’re going to do it.”

  Brynn slipped out from inside the hotel and attached herself unobtrusively to my other sleeve. Scott laughed, an awful jeering sound. “Where are you going now, girlie? You know you can’t escape him again.”

  Breathing hard, I started walking, hauling Yejun after me. He tried to untangle himself from my grasp, putting his hand over mine, and I said, “Don’t! Just—don’t. Just come. Or go. But if you go, I’m sorry.”

  “I just want my sleeve back,” he said mildly.

  I let him go. “I need my dogs,” I said. “Hold on.” I concentrated and released them from my shadow. Nod stalked out, but Heart sidled and Grim slunk, his belly brushing the ground. Scott laughed again behind us, a disbelieving crow, but I told myself I didn’t care. I had my dogs. I wasn’t alone. No matter what happened to me, I wasn’t alone.

  Yejun and Brynn both looked at me. It was clear they still didn’t understand anything: what Scott was, what he represented. It was too late to keep my father ignorant about my contact with them. All I could do was figure out a way to convince him he was better off keeping them alive instead of killing them.

  I didn’t have a clue how to do that.

  If I didn’t get away from Scott’s stench, I was going to kill him, which would just make everything that much worse, that much faster.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go. Now.” I started walking fast, the dogs ranging ahead of me, and Brynn had to run to keep up. Yejun didn’t bother at first, and I tried to be glad of it. Then, all of a sudden, he appeared at my side, strolling alongside my powerwalk with his hands in his pocket.

  “Your friend is following us,” he told me.

  “Not my friend. I hate him,” I answered. “No good way to stop him, though. He can track us just like I’m tracking our guy.”

  “That got screwed up before, yeah?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea how he did it. Demon magic, I assume.”

  “Hmm,” said Yejun. He took his sunglasses off and fell silent. We moved fast and Scott didn’t, which meant he fell out of sight eventually. I didn’t let Nod circle around to “deal with him,” no matter how expressively he conveyed his interest in doing so.

  Then Yejun did something that made my stomach churn. I barely knew how to describe it. It was like rays of distortion stretched out from his back and swapped pieces of the world around. But nothing actually moved, and nothing actually changed, and the only way I knew for sure something had happened was the way all three dogs whirled around, ears flattening, and how Brynn said, “Whoa, what was that?”

  Yejun said, with smugness hiding under overplayed boredom, “Oh, I just scattered our trail.”

  I realized that the rays of distortion
I’d seen had been his crazy array of nodes moving around. Just imagining it made my insides twist up again.

  Yejun didn’t notice. Calmly, with just a trace of interest, he asked, “Was that what the demon did?”

  “No!” I snapped. “No. Nobody does stuff like that. I don’t understand how you even exist.”

  His faint, pleased smile faded. “Yeah, that’s what they all say,” he said, and put his sunglasses back on. “Oh, no, no point in teaching him about the tangle. That’ll just make it more dangerous when he inevitably explodes.” He pulled his sunglasses down just enough to look at me over them. “But I haven’t exploded yet.”

  I stared at him for a minute, my anger fading with my nausea. Slowly, something else replaced it. I remembered my father talking about other nephilim, and I felt nasty and dirty. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “It made my stomach hurt. I didn’t know what was going on. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Yejun shrugged and walked on ahead. I looked after him, miserable, hating myself. When Brynn touched my arm questioningly, I pulled away and crouched down. All I could think of doing was hiding. I was already so messed up and it was only going to get worse. I wanted to be a good person, wanted to be somebody my mother would be proud of, but everything my father did or said seemed to get stuck inside my head. Sometimes he seemed to fill the whole world.

  “Hey,” said Brynn, kneeling down so she could look at my face. “It’s okay. It was a really weird feeling.”

  I jerked away and scrambled to my feet again. “We have to keep going.”

  I concentrated on what I could smell, what Grim and Heart were still tracking. Alastor and the Huntsman had both entered the world through the same loosely woven spot in the Curtain. The trail led us across four intersections and I kept my head down at each one, following the crowds of pedestrians but not looking at them. I didn’t want to think about Halloween. It made me think of my father and that made me hate myself.

  Grim finally sat down outside another tall building. Looking up, I thought I recognized it from the skyline, but I’d never bothered finding out what it was called. Now, thanks to a large sign next to the main entrance, I knew: McAllister Law.

  Brynn looked the building up and down and said apprehensively, “Do we have to go inside? This place doesn’t look as friendly as the hotel.”

  I thought about the information I was getting from Grim and Heart. “The soft spot they’ve been traveling through is up. So it’s best if we go up, too. We have to do some more traveling once we’re on the other side of the Curtain and if we start from the wrong place, it could take a lot longer.”

  Brynn sighed and hauled one of the big doors open. “After you.”

  I sent Nod and Heart away again and pulled a leash from my pocket. Grim sat down patiently to let me attach it, then bounded to his feet again and immediately started pulling at the leash.

  “Cut that out,” I said sharply. “Walk properly.”

  Grim’s tail came down and he gave me a pained look, but came back to sit primly by my side. “Okay,” I said, and led him through the door Brynn was still holding open.

  The first floor of the building was an open space, with a couple of restaurants and a coffee shop and a lot of random seating. A security desk stood near a bank of elevators. Yejun was peering at a large digital building directory. “Pretty big law firm. There’s a few other tenants, too. Do you know what floor we’re going to? Or do we get to go joyriding in the elevators?” He looked speculatively around the lobby. “They have a lot, they wouldn’t miss one.”

  I stared at the display, chewing on my lip. “It’s not here.”

  “Whoa, what do you mean, it’s not here? You said it was here.” Yejun took off his sunglasses to scrutinize me.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s in the building, but nothing on the map matches the sense I’ve picked up from Grim.”

  “Maybe ol’ Grimwhiskers here is just messing with you?” Yejun suggested, lightly twisting one of my dog’s ears around.

  I gave him a flat look. “Grimwhiskers.”

  “He’s too cute to be Grim. You can’t say he’s not cute. He’s your dog and you’re a girl.”

  “You’re not renaming my dog,” I warned him.

  “It’s a nickname.” Yejun grinned at me.

  “Some buildings have hidden floors,” said Brynn loudly, bumping me with her hip. “Maybe we could figure it out if we focused.”

  Too loudly, it turned out. A slim man with silver hair and a fine-boned face stopped leaning on the security desk and approached us. I eyed him warily, but Yejun actually scowled and stepped backward, closing ranks with us.

  “Hello,” the man said politely. He had a polished, beautiful voice, and his eyes were inhumanly luminous. And he smelled like vanilla natively, which was enough for me to realize he wasn’t human. Faerie or faerie’s spawn—they called them changelings—but either way, not good news. A badge around his neck said, “Winterwhen Special Security” and “My name is Jake.”

  Probably a changeling, I decided. I couldn’t imagine a celestial, even a faerie celestial, going by “Jake.”

  “Do you have an appointment with somebody in the building?” Jake inquired.

  “Yes,” said Brynn, at the same time that I said, “No.”

  Brynn dug her elbow into my side and went on. “Not an appointment, exactly, but we need to return this dog to its owner.”

  The faerie held out his hand. “I would be pleased to assist you. Just tell me to whom he belongs and I’ll take him up.” He paused, and when I didn’t hand over the leash and Brynn didn’t say anything at all, he smiled, all flashing white teeth. “Or you could simply leave.” Lowering his voice, he added, “You look like nice kids. You don’t want to get into trouble.”

  “No. We just want to go to the hidden floor,” said Brynn, meek as a kitten.

  “There’s nothing interesting on the mechanical floor,” he assured Brynn kindly. “And it’s not a safe place for younglings. Even younglings of your friends’ capacities. Do run along and play somewhere else.” And he gave us a meltingly sweet smile.

  I backed away. “Let’s go.” Then I all but ran from the building, hurrying Grim alongside me.

  “Why did you run away?” demanded Brynn a moment later when she emerged with Yejun. “I could have talked him into it.”

  “You couldn’t have. He was using some kind of magic,” I said. “I’d have to fight him. I didn’t want to fight him.”

  Yejun frowned. “He didn’t look like he was using magic to me. I mean, nobody ever bothered to train me, what do I know, right? But the ol’ tangle wasn’t moving at all like it does when even Tia does something shimmery.”

  I shuddered. “He was a spawn. Faerie spawn. Changeling.” I stumbled over my words. “They’re built. Everything they are is magic. If they’re ever nice, it’s because their master wants something.”

  Yejun crossed his arms and leaned against the wall beside me. His shoulders were noticeably broader than mine. “Do you think he’s specifically there to stop us from getting to this mechanical floor?”

  “He must be,” said Brynn.

  But I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe.” I thought of his nametag. “Maybe not. A law firm must have an awful lot of secrets. Maybe he’s just there to protect them from people like himself.”

  “People like us,” said Yejun deliberately, looking up at the tower looming over us as if waking up to the possibilities

  “It doesn’t matter,” I decided. “We’ll go in down here.” I pushed away from the wall and went around the corner, looking around until I found a Dumpster. Brynn followed me like she was on the leash, not Grim, but Yejun didn’t, not right away.

  “Here,” I said. “I’ll open a tear in the Curtain. It’s not the right spot, but it’s close. And on the other side we should have more freedom to do what we need to do.”

  “This is to make a door to the other world?” Brynn swallowed and adjusted her camera bag
on her shoulder. “I’m ready.”

  I eyed her but resisted suggesting once again that she stay where it was safe. Scott was still out there. The only way I’d know she was safe was if she was with me.

  Yejun appeared around the corner of the Dumpster. “You know, I cracked an ATM so we wouldn’t have to spend any more time in dumps.”

  Brynn goggled at him, but I just concentrated on releasing Nod and Heart from my shadow. Then I unleashed Grim. It was best when traveling to the other world to be ready for anything.

  The dogs prowled around me, picking up on my tension. It occurred to me that I ought to explain a little. “So what I’m going to do isn’t what other people do. Wizards and all. They have spells and stuff. This is just part of my magic. It’s going to look like a window.” I looked at my companions and realized they had no idea what I was talking about. Neither of them had been in the Backworld before.

  I hurriedly went through what else they absolutely needed to know. “Right, um. Until we’ve figured out where we are on the other side, we need to hold onto each other. Sometimes it’s just sort of a white featureless hallway. If we end up there, we need to keep in contact or you’ll maybe fall out. I don’t know for sure, but that would probably be bad.”

  Brynn and Yejun each grabbed one of my hands. I heard a crunch and blackness passed across my vision. When it was gone, my hands were tucked under my armpits, just fine, and I was leaning against the wall again, panting. “No! Did I scream? No... Give me a minute. I need to just... get ready.” Brynn gave Yejun the stink-eye while he watched me with genuine concern in his eyes.

  I’d taken some friends through the corridors of the Backworld once before and I’d held their hands without losing it. But I’d been living in LA for months then, away from my father. I’d even occasionally forgotten about him. But—now, I just couldn’t.

  “One of you hold onto my wrist, then hold onto the other. That will work fine.” I untucked my hands and held out my left one, fist clenched.