Bite Back Box Set 2

by Mark Henwick

  The Final Ruling. The end of the legal battle over my dad’s huge medical bills that’s taken three years and pushed us further and further into debt.

  “And his qualifications to make that assessment?” I ask.

  Cassie’s parents have been a great support for Mom, but her dad’s got a tendency to say what makes Mom feel good at the time.

  No way does that justify my pettiness.

  But Cassie takes it all in her stride and keeps coming back. She just smiles crookedly, so I’ve got nothing to fight against, even if I want to lash out.

  “I hate you forever,” I mutter, because she understands. She knows what I mean and doesn’t pay too much attention to what I say.

  “Likewise.” Then her eyes look over my shoulder and go all wide and soft. “Oh, my God,” she says.

  I don’t fall for that. I’m immune to her tricks, which is why, four years later, she’s still trying to get me back for the frogs I put in her bed.

  But it turns out there is someone behind me.

  He’s tall and slim. His thick, silky hair is that sort of blond that looks brown in some light. It’s raked back, but it’s always falling forward under its own weight. There’s a curl that brushes his forehead. His chinos don’t crease; his pale shirts manage to look soft and crisp at the same time. And it all looks effortless.

  “Hi, Amber,” he says.

  Tanner Forsythe is talking to me, and he even remembers my name.

  I cough to hide my astonishment.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Err…hi, Tanner.”

  So cool. I mean, what a clever thing to say. Hi.

  “I’m not interrupting?”

  “No.” Cassie finds her voice, and she’s very firm. “Not at all.”

  “My folks are away until next weekend, and I’m having a party on Thursday,” he says. He looks down at his loafers and slips his hands into his pockets. “I’m kinda restricted on numbers, but I wondered if you’d like to come?”

  It’s not April 1st. Check.

  I am awake. Check.

  “Of course we will,” Cassie says. She’s glaring at me, eyes glinting like knives.

  “Ahhh…” Tanner looks embarrassed.

  Cassie is so quick. “I meant, of course she will,” she says without missing a beat.

  Before I have a chance to stop this, it’s done.

  He tears a page from his notebook and writes his cell number and address down. I don’t know what I expect, loopy calligraphy maybe, but his writing is neat and blocky, like he used a stencil.

  I give him my number in a daze.

  Tanner takes his slim Nokia out and types it in. It’s the latest cell, all copper sheen and sleekness, with a web browser, like that’s going to catch on. Anyway, my three-year-old basic cell with its ugly, stubby antenna and gray plastic case stays in my backpack.

  “I’ll call,” he says and then he’s moving away, quickly gathered into a posse of laughing friends.

  “I can’t,” I mutter, more to myself than Cassie.

  It’s on a Thursday night. I guess that’s so he has Friday to clean the place up before his folks arrive back, but it’s a working evening for me, waitressing at Lario’s. One strike. Followed by a school day. Two strikes. And party clothes? My clothes are the clothes I go to school in. Three strikes.

  It’s all kinds of flattering, but I don’t move in his circle. I probably won’t know anyone who’s going, and it’s not like he said he wants to date or anything.

  My circle? My circle is school, eat, work, study, sleep and repeat. Run sometimes. Running helps.

  “Yeah,” Cassie says, surprising me by agreeing. Then she adds: “Unless it turns out he wants to take you to the prom as well.”

  As if.

  We’re heading for class and there’s someone blocking the way: Fay Daniels. Another person who’s never spoken to me that I can recall. That makes two in the same morning.

  There’s a kind of symmetry to it: if there’s a female equivalent of Tanner, it’s Fay. Long wavy black hair. Big blue eyes. Pouty red lips, like she’d gotten bee-stung. Stacked, of course. And when she wasn’t dressed like a model, she was being a cheerleader. Cue trail of drooling boys behind her that she ignores.

  She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

  “Tanner just feels sorry for you,” she says. “Look, it’s sweet of him to invite you, but I wouldn’t advise taking him up on it.”

  My jaw works, but no sound comes out.

  “You won’t know anyone,” she goes on. “I wouldn’t want you to feel awkward or anything, so it’s probably for the best that you don’t come. You understand.”

  Her lips stretch a little more before she turns back to her fan club.

  My head finally catches up.

  “Y’know, Cass,” I say loudly, “I need a night off. Next Thursday. Think I’ll go to a party.”

  What kind of stupid decision was that?

  What if she’s right? I mean, I’m all elbows and knees. I’m clumsy around boys. Tanner just feels sorry for me, so we’ll both be embarrassed when I show up.

  Fay Daniels is looking back at me like I slapped her.

  “Ow,” Cassie says, as if she’d stubbed her toe. Then she laughs that raucous, killing-the-donkey laugh she does and I have to join in.

  Fay is not laughing.

  We’re late for class.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  I’m sitting in the teepee and a hint of smoke curls up from the embers.

  Across from me sits my great-grandmother, Speaks-to-Wolves. I know this is her, but she wears another’s face today. It’s the face of Martha, sister of Felix, who has been gathered up into the song of the pack, the song that is everything the pack has ever been.

  I chose a path. I chose a path that led me to that bleak hillside and I chose a path that led me here.

  Chatima, the Caller, the Navajo shaman from New Mexico, had warned me that every path bore death and sorrow and pain and loss. And the path I chose bore death for Martha and for Silas, Felix’s huge lieutenant, and many more.

  “There were no easy paths,” Martha says. “All of them held many deaths. And you must walk on. To stop is to lose everything that has been sacrificed to do what was done and to bring you this far.” She leans forward and the smoke curls around her like an old memory of ghosts. “Always remember, you are still none of the things they say you are. When they say rogue, they mean when the anger overcomes the heart and the head. But your anger is the great strength that carries you, and your heart knows the path. Trust yourself.”

  But I am broken.

  “You are only as broken as you allow yourself to be. Trust yourself. Use that strength.”

  Outside, in the darkness, I hear the song. It sounds so comfortable. It would be easier to let myself float away. To be one with the song. To put an end to pain.

  “Coward,” she says.

  That hurts.

  And the whole teepee begins to float upward and disperse like smoke.

  Chapter 3

  It felt like I was lying in a pool, looking up at the sky. But the sky was a white ceiling in a room I didn’t recognize, and there were faces looking down at me.

  It hurt to see them. Every face seemed to pull my mind off into the direction of something painful, and it was easier just to float and not think about them.

  I had to be dead. They were holding a séance.

  Or dying. Dying people have their lives flash before them, don’t they?

  Why did that brief time at my locker flash before my eyes, instead of…

  Instead of things that could really hurt. The locker conversation was safe. However stressful it felt at the time, it was safe.

  No. Wait. This wasn’t my life flashing before my eyes. This was deliberate. Controlled.

  I was in therapy—an Athanate therapy, run by Diana.

  Rogue! I’d gone rogue.

  My heart surged and immediately calmed.

  That feeling. Eukori. The same way
I’d used it to help others, it was being used to help me.

  Diana.

  That was one of the faces—the closest. But something was wrong with her.

  I wasn’t floating. I was lying on cushions. My head was resting in her lap and her fingers were touching my forehead.

  Everyone else was sitting on the floor around me.

  Jen and Alex! My kin.

  Bian, Yelena, Julie and Keith.

  Keith? Why was he here?

  There was a physical pain in my head, like it had split open.

  “Shhh. Don’t try and reach with your eukori.”

  That was Diana. Not the Diana I remembered. An old Diana, white-haired and aged. An impossible Diana, because Athanate don’t age.

  Athanate.

  More pain; a blinding pain in my head.

  I wanted to go back. I wanted to dive back down into my life at school where problems seemed overwhelming, but they were human-sized problems that could be fixed. And at the same time, I didn’t, because there were other things from that time, things that had to be left buried.

  I felt Jen kiss my hand and press it against her cheek.

  Alex patted the other hand clumsily.

  “You’re all right,” Jen said. “We’re here. Let us help Diana fix you.”

  I blinked, trying to remember how I’d gotten here.

  The lock. The Taos Adept community had put a lock on Diana that had drained her Athanate powers away. That was why she looked aged—eroded by the power of the lock.

  We’d broken it, Kaothos and I. But the huge explosion of power had broken more than that. It had ripped my mind wide open, and everything was jumbled together randomly in my head. Killing Amaral. Feeding from Jen and Alex. The ritual. The flight on the plane to LA. The seeping rogue darkness that seemed to spread until every part of me…

  “Hush,” Diana said, and I realized I’d been babbling disconnected sentences.

  “We’ve got to go back,” she whispered. “You’ve got to take us back through all those painful things you locked away and refused to think about. You need to relive them, stare them down until they lose their power. Everything you locked away.”

  “No,” I said, my voice thin and uncertain. I was seventeen again. “I can’t look at those things. I can’t let you see them. I can’t.”

  You’ll despise me.

  But they weren’t listening.

  “Love you.”

  “Trust us.”

  All their voices whispering.

  “We can’t make those memories painless,” Diana said, “but we have to make them less poisonous. We have to share them so we can build you back up. And you have to lead us. You have to want this.”

  “Please, honey.” Jen pressed my hand against her lips.

  “No,” I said again.

  I shook my head from side to side. I ached all over. I felt weak.

  “Whether you lock them away or not, every event stays part of you,” Diana said. “Today’s Amber is always built on yesterday’s. Now you have to unlock those memories. Only you can do it.”

  I felt like I was falling.

  I remembered Martha, talking about the little cemetery nestled in the arms of the yew tree hedge, behind the ranch at Coykuti. Parts of the yew die and rot and feed the rest of it. It lives off itself. It makes itself new from all it has ever been. The pack’s like that. It’s all the things it’s ever done, all its loves and hates, all its desires and fears, all its triumphs and failures.

  I was all the things I’d ever done. All the things that had ever been done to me. I couldn’t escape that. I couldn’t escape.

  But there are parts of me I can’t let them see.

  Diana’s fingers were pressed into my forehead. Cold as ice. Deep. Remorseless.

  My body fought to escape against hands holding me down.

  No! So many things I can’t let them see.

  “Calm, Amber.” Diana’s voice, seeming to echo down a corridor. “None of these memories are easy, but we’ll start earlier…here.”

  I’m falling through the depthless night. Ahead, somewhere in the dark, there’s a massive rock emerging from the jungle. Rendezvous point. Hacha Del Diablo, the Devil’s Axe. The mission where my team died. I can feel the blood pulsing from the wound on my neck as I collapse against the rock which blocks out the stars in the sky above me. The despair. My team. All of them. Dead. The blood lust, the elation, as my knife skrees off his cervical vertebrae, telling me I’ve cut through every blood vessel in his neck and he’ll die before me, this thing that killed my team. Killed me.

  No. That’s in the wrong order. Jumbled. Chaos. That Athanate died—the crazy descendent of the Carpathian House Chrysos—he bit me and I killed him. But I didn’t die. I became Athanate and lived.

  Start again.

  Step through it.

  Start at the beginning…

  I’m falling. It’s night. Ops 4-10’s Cyclops system readouts tell me where to head for. How far. When to pull the cord. My batsuit and brake will get me there in one piece. My team is behind me.

  The wind is screaming past my face…

  Chapter 4

  It was light. The blurry passage between dreams and memory and reality had a feel of familiarity now.

  This was real. This was now. Lying down with my head in a lap.

  Diana’s lap. This was her leaning over me, not Speaks-to-Wolves or Martha or any of the phantoms from my head, and we were alone.

  A Diana whose face was slightly younger every time I woke.

  She’s recovering. We’ve spoken about that. The lock the Adepts used had drained her energy, made her age. Now she was recovering. When had we spoken?

  “How long?” I said. My voice felt rusty, my throat sore.

  “Nine days since we left New Mexico.” She spoke carefully, watching me intently.

  Watching for what?

  Watching me because sometimes I’m crazy.

  Wait. What did she say?

  “Nine days? Where am I? What’s happening?”

  A little tick of panic beat at my ribs, and there was an answering pulse of soothing pacifics from Diana.

  “We’re in Los Angeles. You’re in therapy, and you’re doing well.”

  Doing well. Something they say that doesn’t mean what it says.

  “What about…” I trailed off. Where would I start?

  My House was with me. Some of them at least. My kin. That was real.

  Mom? Tullah?

  Another tick of panic.

  Ingram? I said I would meet him. That was ten days ago now. What was he—

  And Felix? How had the—

  Olivia? Had it really worked?

  My mind raced in circles. It was like trying to climb out of a pit of ice. I couldn’t seem to get any traction.

  Diana said soothingly, “Everything’s being taken care of.”

  I realized I’d been blurting the names out.

  “Alex and Jen have been speaking to your mother regularly. Tullah and her parents are in hiding from the Adepts with Chatima, somewhere down in New Mexico or Arizona. Agent Ingram has been sent a message explaining you are in recovery and will get back to him. Alex talks to Felix every day. Olivia is well and enjoying being a full werewolf at every opportunity, from what I hear.”

  A breath escaped me.

  Everything is fine. Relax.

  “You have to concentrate on yourself for a while,” Diana said. “Let us worry about the rest.”

  Concentrate on myself.

  “I went rogue,” I said. That was real, too. I could remember that.

  I had a flashback to Bian’s chilling summation about how Athanate dealt with rogues: We provide a quick and humane death.

  Why am I still alive?

  “We got to you in time,” Diana said, seeing the questions forming in my head.

  “Like with David?”

  David had started to go rogue. Diana had brought him back, almost effortlessly. But that had all happened in t
he space of one evening.

  Nine days?

  “Not like with David,” Diana said. “You went much further, and you’re much more complicated.” She smiled to soften the words.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, lulled by the pacific pheromones she was dosing me with.

  No, not like with David.

  Only Diana could have brought me back. I’d saved her in New Mexico and in doing that, I’d saved myself. Without Diana treating me, the Athanate would have killed me by now. Or the Were would have—they took the same line with rogues. Even though what had finally sent me over the edge wasn’t my Athanate, or my Were. It was what humans had done to me.

  And that wasn’t fixed. Despite Diana’s soothing, I could feel it like a darkness moving in the deep beneath me.

  “No, we’re not finished yet,” Diana whispered. “But hear my oath, Amber Farrell, House Farrell, beloved: I will hold you, as long as it takes, as long as I am able. I will not let you fall. On my Blood, I so swear.”

  I felt her eukori supplementing the pacifics. Calm. Calm.

  She would cure me. I didn’t need to worry about anything outside of my treatment.

  That in itself was enough to worry about.

  “I’m all the things I’ve ever been.” The words sighed from my lips, as if Martha’s spirit were speaking through me. My heart rate tried to spike. “All the things that have ever been done to me—”

  “And you’re all the things you ever could be, as well,” Diana said.

  Her eukori stirred again, reached into me, synced my heart with hers until they beat together as slow as waves on the shore.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “to fix things, we have to take them all apart and put them back together again. It’s like a strange puzzle. Everything connects to something else, but it all has a place. Even the bad things.

  “This is not like a physical injury, not like fixing a bone.” Her voice seemed to float down to me. “I can’t make you like you were before anything bad happened, without erasing everything you’ve become. That same everything that we all love, and is worth having.”

  We.

  My House and…

  “Keith,” I said. “I saw Keith, didn’t I?”