by Cate Tiernan
“I hear an engine,” I said, closing my eyes to pinpoint it. “Over there.” I pointed to the left.
“There was a field,” Aly said.
“They’re cutting us off!” Matéo realized. “They went off-road and will cut us off! It’ll take us much longer! Start the car!”
Aly did and we tore off, sending mud arcing behind us.
Our only hope was to reach the second campground office before they did. I prayed that someone would be there.
Then . . . “Oh, no.” Aly’s eyes were wide.
The Jeep was heading right at us, cutting us off at a sharp angle. We could either try to stop and go backward, or try to go faster, which meant they would end up right in back of us again, shooting at us.
“Crap,” I breathed.
“Huh,” said Aly.
Matéo looked at her quickly. “What?”
“I wonder . . .”
The Jeep was almost on us. Then, with no warning, Aly yanked the steering wheel hard to the left. I cried out as our car went up on two wheels, threatening to roll over as we angled sharply through a turn. Then the wheels landed hard, rattling my teeth and bruising my spine, and we seemed to go airborne for long, odd seconds as Aly forced the Camry right over the ditch. We landed with a horrible, jarring shock on the other side, and once she gunned the gas again, we were back on the road in half a minute.
“I don’t know what just happened,” Matéo muttered, rubbing the top of his head, which had hit the car roof.
I craned to look through the missing back windshield and saw the Jeep mimicking our move from the other side, trying to follow us exactly how Aly had done. “They’re still on us!” I cried.
But Aly’s maneuver didn’t translate to a Jeep’s shape or height. They went up on two wheels but couldn’t right themselves, and instead of leveling out and jumping over the ditch, they plowed sideways and headfirst into the other side.
“Oh yeah!” I said. “That will slow them down!”
Aly grinned at me in the rearview mirror, and Matéo slapped me a high five from the front seat.
“You are a goddess—” he started to tell Aly, but his words were drowned out by a startlingly loud boom! I’d been watching the Jeep to see if they could pull themselves out of the ditch, so I saw it suddenly explode, a fireball fifteen feet wide poufing up from the crumpled metal. In seconds the interior was aflame.
“Stop!” I said, smacking my hand on Aly’s seat. But she’d already slowed the car, and now we all turned and watched the Jeep with our eyes wide.
“Oh, my gods,” I murmured. “Do we . . . do we go back? Maybe they survived?”
“We don’t go back,” Matéo said solemnly. “They can’t have survived that.”
Moments before, I’d been lit up with hatred and rage against the couple in the Jeep; only last night I’d wanted to kill them myself. Now, knowing they were dead, had probably died in the crash if not the explosion, made the heightened unreality fade, and they became two humans that I’d just seen die. It was awful.
Finally Aly started our car again, and we drove at a cautious speed until we rounded the next bend. I wanted to cry with relief as we saw the second campground office, and suddenly the road was paved and smooth. Gratefully we left the noisy, bumpy shell road. Best of all, there were lights on at the campground and cars parked out front.
Aly pulled up close to the office and parked. We knew what we must look like: our car shot up, both windshields broken, all of us bruised and bloody. We had to tell them about the Jeep; they would have to send EMS and a fire truck out there.
“What in the world can we say?” Aly said.
I couldn’t even begin to come up with anything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
WE TOLD THE COPS JUST about everything. Everything except for the jaguar parts. We were looking for our friends Suzanne and James when two crazy people kidnapped Matéo and Aly. There was a house in the woods, though we couldn’t say exactly where. The people had chased us and shot at our car, and it had wrecked behind us and burst into flame. We didn’t mention the jaguar we’d seen, running out into the night, blood darkening its side. I hoped it had survived and was safe somewhere.
The cops dispatched the fire department to find the Jeep, and they reported that the fire was out, the gas tank had exploded, and that two bodies had been found inside the car. When he heard that, Matéo frowned at the odd coincidence with his own parents’ deaths. Though a lot of details checked out—the police found the house, the basement, everything—there were clearly holes in our story, like the obvious signs of a wild animal attack. Perhaps a bear, they speculated, judging from the front door and various claw marks.
We didn’t see any bear, sir.
We formally registered Suzanne and James as missing, and the police said they would search the area with dogs, starting at daylight. When the police were done with us, it was almost nine o’clock at night. Aly called Coco and let her know we were safe. She was so relieved, but upset we hadn’t found Suzanne and James.
“Are you going to stay and help search?” I heard her ask Aly.
“I don’t think so,” Aly said slowly. “The only way we can help is as haguari, and that’s out, since the place will be swarming with dogs and search teams. This has shown me that we need more than the three of us. The cops can mobilize a big effort. Maybe we should have gone to them in the first place.”
“We had no idea if they’d just gotten lost,” I pointed out. “Now it’s definitely more clear that they’re missing.”
“Okay,” said Coco. “I’m glad it’s in the hands of the police now. I’m sure they’ll find them soon.”
“I hope so,” said Aly. “I can’t stand leaving without them, without any answers.” She was silent for a few moments, as if weighing other options. Finally she shook her head. “We covered a lot of ground—I never caught the faintest scent. I don’t think we can do much else. If the cops don’t turn up anything in the next week, then maybe we need to call everyone we know and really do a massive search.”
“Okay. I’m in. Now, how are you getting home?” Coco asked. “Do you need someone to come get you?”
It was easier to get a rental car.
It was a long drive back. Sometime after midnight we stopped for food. I was hollowed out with hunger and fell on my burger like a wolf. In midbite I remembered the deer, my first and only kill, and how satisfying and delicious it had seemed. Now the thought was incredibly gross, and though I tried, I couldn’t develop even the slightest hint of wanting to eat raw deer.
After we ate, I drove the last three hours while Matéo slept in the backseat and Aly slept in the front passenger seat. As I was heading up the on-ramp of I-10 that would take us home, she stirred and sat up, her hair all clumped on one side.
“Hey,” I said. “You holding together?”
She nodded, looking exhausted and pale. “Just barely.” She reached out and put her hand on my shoulder. “You came for us.”
“Of course. You’re my family.” I didn’t mention how terrified I had been, how badly I’d wanted to run away and pretend I didn’t know what was happening. It was amazing that I had overcome those fears and forced myself to step up.
“You changed back and forth quickly,” she said. “So it seems easier now?”
I nodded, keeping my eyes on the road. “A bit. No, it’s definitely easier. And I was super relieved that I could change back. But I still have to think about it and focus on it.”
“It will get easier.” She stared out her window at the night, no doubt remembering what yesterday’s night had been like.
Matéo groaned and I saw him in the rearview mirror, sitting up and brushing his dark red hair out of his face. “Hey, is that Veterans Avenue? We’re almost home!” For a moment he looked happy; then his smile faded. “We didn’t find Suzanne or James. But those cages had obviously held other cats before—other haguari.” His face was grim.
“We found names scratched in the cement
floor,” Aly told me softly.
“Oh, gods. Did you know any of them?” I asked.
She shook her head. “But that couple—they must have been the people killing haguari, taking their hearts.” She sounded close to tears.
“I heard the man say something like that,” I told them, and repeated the couple’s argument.
“They were probably the people who killed my parents,” Matéo said. “And yours.”
Gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles turned white, I nodded. “That occurred to me. I wanted to just kill them. But are we a hundred percent certain? There was that weird death up in New York—was that them? We need to know more. I wish we could have trapped them somehow, made them talk.”
“Me too. At the time I wanted to get as far away from them as possible,” Aly said. “Now we’ll never be able to talk to them.”
I remembered the Jeep’s interior, glowing with flame, and nodded soberly.
“There’s got to be a bigger picture here,” said Matéo.
“A bigger picture like what?” I asked, looking at him in the rearview mirror.
“That couple was collecting haguari for their hearts. That other jaguar wasn’t a member of our family, you know?” said Matéo. “He was just some haguari. It looks like what we talked about—it’s not just about my parents, not just about your parents; it’s not about our family. It’s about haguari. That couple is collecting our race. They are killing members of our race. And I think it’s on a much bigger scale than we realized.”
“Why? Why would they do that?”
“Maybe they hate us,” Aly said. “Maybe they think we’re monsters and freaks and want us all dead.”
Her words were a slap in the face. Six months ago I had felt the same way. I had spent years of my life hating what I was, thinking I was a horrible aberration. I’d been furious with my parents for making me what I was. I’d wanted to punish them, to get as far away from them as possible.
I felt quite differently now. Not a 100 percent embracing of the lifestyle, but I’d come to feel acceptance where I had felt revulsion. I saw truth where before had been confusion and pain. When I was a jaguar and I caught sight of myself in a stream, I thought I was beautiful, and I thought I looked like me.
“What if that couple had other haguari caged somewhere else?” Aly asked, looking at Matéo. “With the people dead, no one will know to go rescue them.”
“We can’t help what we don’t know,” said Matéo. “We just have to do the best we can. But I don’t think those people were killing haguari just because they hated us,” said Matéo. “They were collecting hearts—like as trophies, or for some other crazy reason.”
My brain was racing. “We’ve got to figure out if there was a bigger plan. We’ve got to stop it somehow. Worse—what if that couple was working for someone else?”
“They didn’t seem all that organized,” Matéo went on. “But what if they were like middlemen?”
They might not have even been the ones who killed my parents. There could be others who were doing the same thing as that couple.
I slammed my hands on the steering wheel. “Goddamn it!” Angry tears rolled down my cheeks. I snuffled and brushed my sleeve across my nose. “Goddamn it.”
“We’re almost home,” said Matéo. “Here in New Orleans we can be real detectives. We’re going to find out what the hell is going on, and how we can stop the whole thing.”
“We can’t stop till we know,” said Aly.
The rain had drizzled itself out, and the clouds were rapidly clearing from the dark sky. I felt like we’d been gone a week. I was sad that we hadn’t found Suzanne and James. They might be dead. I thought about everything Matéo and Aly had said, and realized that my life had acquired a purpose when I wasn’t looking.
I wasn’t moving back to Sugar Beach. I wasn’t going to Seattle. I was going to stay here in New Orleans, and I was going to devote myself to figuring out who was killing my kind. And I was going to stop them.
“Hey, prima?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for risking your life to save ours.” Matéo smiled at me and brushed his hand against my hair.
“You’re welcome,” I said, and felt better.
Turning onto Esplanade Avenue felt like coming home, coming back to safety and acceptance. All I wanted to do was cry in the shower for a while, put a Band-Aid on my cheek, and collapse in my bed for a long, long time.
“What’s that?” Aly said, pointing. I’d been so focused on aiming Matéo’s car between the brick pillars of the driveway that I hadn’t even noticed the large, wet lump on our kitchen steps.
“Is it a person?” I asked, just as the headlights shone on dark hair. As I parked the car, the person sat up, rubbing her hands over her face.
“It’s almost four in the morning,” Matéo said. “And it’s been raining. Who is that? What’s she doing?”
When I looked closer, my mouth dropped open; then I jumped out of the car and ran to the steps. The girl looked at me without smiling, and in the dim light from the kitchen I took in how much weight she had lost, how unhappy she looked, and the fact that she had a huge duffel bag on the steps beside her.
“Babe,” I said, holding out my arms to hug her.
“What happened to your face?” Jennifer asked, getting up stiffly, and then I was holding her, feeling her dampness and thinness. She rested her head on my shoulder. “Columbia sucked,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’ve run away.”
ALSO BY CATE TIERNAN
THE SWEEP SERIES
THE BALEFIRE SERIES
THE IMMORTAL BELOVED TRILOGY
CATE TIERNAN is the author of the Sweep series, the Balefire series, and the Immortal Beloved trilogy. She lives in North Carolina with her family.
Jacket designed by Jessica Handelman
Jacket photograph by Michael Frost
Author photograph by Paul L. Della Maggiora
Simon Pulse
Simon & Schuster, New York
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
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First Simon Pulse edition January 2014
Text copyright © 2014 by Gabrielle Charbonnet
Cover photograph copyright © 2014 by Michael Frost
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Cover designed by Jessica Handelman
Interior designed by Bob Steimle
The text of this book was set in Bembo Std.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tiernan, Cate.
Darkest fear / Cate Tiernan. — First Simon Pulse edition.
p. cm. — (Birthright)
Summary: “After the death of her parents, Vivi reunites with her long-lost family and learns more about her heritage as a haguara—a person who can shapeshift into a jaguar.”— Provided by publisher.
[1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Shapeshifting—Fiction. 3. Jaguar—Fiction. 4. Families—Fiction. 5. Orphans—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.T437Darm 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2013025046
ISBN 978-1-4424-8246-3 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4424-8245-6 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4424-8247-0 (eBook)