by E. A. Copen
“Since you won't answer me, maybe I'll just see what Sal has to say about it, then.” I hopped off the tree and found Chanter's finger in my face.
“You will not mention any of this to him or to any of the others. Not about the ring, not about the fire and not about the state you found me in.”
“I'm not one of your pack,” I said, pushing his finger out of my face. “And the alpha magick you've been using to make me obey you doesn't carry over distance. You want my cooperation? Then give me yours. I'm trusting you with my son's life. I need to know that trust isn't misplaced.”
Chanter stared me down hard. “You have no idea how much I have already given for you and your boy, Judah,” he said sternly. “If you did, you wouldn't push me. But since you're so interested in knowing the weight of the spells I have worked in this place...”
He trailed off and went digging around in his pockets for something. A half a moment later, he offered me a talon that had been all bound up in a hemp rope that was charred on both ends. The talon itself bore a mess of simple, carved symbols that I didn't recognize and vibrated faintly with a thrum of power.
“I offer you the chance to experience it for yourself.”
“What's this?” I said, turning the item over in my hands.
Hunter leaned over and frowned. “A claw.”
“A talon,” Chanter corrected. “Once belonging to a golden eagle. Your mother is going to use it to take us home from here.”
I laughed. I couldn't help it. That was just such a ridiculous assumption that surely everyone would laugh with me. Good one, Chanter. Well done. Laugh at the foolish white girl new to the rez.
But no one else laughed.
“You can't be serious,” I started. “A day ago, I didn't even know Ways existed. I hadn't even ever been inside of one until an hour ago. There's no way I can open one, let alone get three of us through it in one piece.” I tried to hand it back to Chanter, but he wouldn't take it.
“Simply put, you're the only one who can now,” he said, shaking his head. “I'm too exhausted from all the other work I've done, too weak. I'll need to build my strength back up, and that will take time and resources we do not have here. I'll teach you. It shouldn't be impossible for someone as skilled as you.” He grinned at me, and instantly, I knew he was punishing me.
“Me and my big mouth,” I grumbled. “Fine. What do I have to do?”
“Hear,” said Chanter and put his hands on my shoulders, “And see truth.”
Then something like lightning flowed out of him and into me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There’s a moment in everyone's life when they realize just how small and insignificant they are in the grand scheme of the universe. For energy workers like me, that moment came early on.
When I first realized how much energy there was just lying around untapped and that I could control some of what was flowing around me, I thought I was invincible. With a little practice, I learned to jump further, run faster, and kick harder than most people would have thought possible by channeling a small fraction of that energy into my muscles. Within days of implementing my genius idea at the BSI academy, I woke up to find I couldn't even lift my thumb to scratch my nose.
It was then that my mentor casually explained to me that I'd been borrowing energy from long term reserves for short term gain, which was never a good idea. Then, she put me in a wheelchair and made me watch training videos all day.
It was during that video session that I realized just how big the forces I'd been tapping into were. There's a whole universe out there, whole galaxies that the most advanced scientific minds of our age have yet to discover. I was only one of nine billion people on a singular world in a lonely galaxy, flying through space at speeds I couldn't even begin to calculate. Maybe I was made of star stuff, but that didn't make me hot stuff. Compared to a black hole, I was as a worm.
When Chanter clamped his hands down on my shoulders in that Way and sent a surge of his power into me, that epiphany moment in the academy was all I could think about.
Me small. Magick big. Ouch.
It was like taking a log to the face, and the rest of the logging truck backed over me to collect what it had dropped.
The pain eventually subsided, or maybe I just got used to it. Who knows? I do know I closed my eyes at some point because nothing looked the same when I opened them again.
Rainbows of golden light flowed in webs and rivers all around me, passing into and through objects, coming out changed in both color and speed on the other side. Energy. I was looking at energy with my naked eyes, no spell work required.
“How...” I started and reached out to slip a hand through one river of power. It washed over my hand like a wave at first and then quickly redirected itself around me as if I wasn't there. “Holy Hell, this is amazing!”
“Quit your stammering,” Chanter growled, and I noticed he was swaying. If Hunter hadn't reached out to offer some support, he would have fallen. “The longer we stay, the more attention we attract. We're drawing attention to us like a beacon now, having done what we just did. We need to get out.”
“Can't we just go back the way we came?” Hunter said, adjusting Chanter's weight on his shoulder.
Chanter shook his head. “It's not so simple, and it's why your mother shouldn't go jumping into a Way alone and unprepared.”
“Why not?” I said, dropping my hand to my side.
“Simply put? The entrances and exits move. The structures in this world are less permanent than the ones we build. They come and go on the breath of an idea, disintegrating almost as fast as they're built. The only way to find an exit is to follow the flow of power to its source. Without a proper talisman, anyone who comes and goes through a Way is lost. They are not playthings.”
I stared down at the talon in my hand. I didn't see any waves of light and color coming out of it or around it, but I could feel a faint thumping in my hand like a pulse. When I lifted it up into one of the streams of light, the pulse quickened.
“That's...really weird,” I said.
Chanter sighed impatiently. “We're in a Way, child. This world is not ours. We're merely guests, and we've overstayed our welcome. Time to go.”
I closed my fist around the talon and glanced around. The light river seemed to flow in random directions. It was impossible to tell where it was going without following it for a good, long while.
“I don't know which way is the right way.”
“Just pick one,” Hunter mumbled. “I'm cold.”
We stumbled forward, hurrying through the dark, snow-covered forest, following a river of light that only I could see. I was pretty sure I'd gone crazy and that Chanter's shed was a portal to Hell. I mean, here we were cold, wet from the shins down, and stumbling through nature in the dark without any cell phone service. I'm sure that would be Hell for most people.
For me, having grown up in rural West Virginia, I'd spent my fair share of nights in the woods, though I'm not what you'd call a nature freak. It wasn't my idea of fun, especially when only God knows what might be watching us from the tree line.
Eventually, we found ourselves standing on the edge of a frozen lake. There was a lone door in the center of the lake where the ice would be thinnest. Chanter grunted and sank down to sit on the shore. I stopped at the edge and leaned forward, looking down into watery blackness. “Now what?”
“Do you see the door?” Chanter asked, leaning against a log.
“Yeah. Center of the lake. I bet the ice out there is paper-thin. I'm sure as hell not taking Hunter across it. We'll all drown or die of hypothermia.”
A twig snapping in the forest nearby caught all our attention.
Hunter's head shot up, and he stood rigid, on high alert. “What's that smell?”
Chanter grunted, winced, and pulled himself up, holding a hand over his chest. “I don't think you have a choice, Judah.”
A line of shadows blocked out the light shimmering in the trees. Ins
tinctively, I grabbed Hunter's hand and held it tight, jerking him behind me. “What are those?” he whimpered as pairs of red eyes appeared.
“Natives,” Chanter growled with his back to us. He turned his head. “Get to the door.”
“But—”
Chanter gave me a shove backward. I fell onto the ice, twisting to make sure I didn't fall on Hunter. It cracked beneath me but, that close to the shore, it was thick enough that we didn't go through.
“The door,” he commanded again. “Go.”
He didn't have to put any alpha power into his words at all to make me back away from him. Drowning was preferable to whatever he might do with me judging by the tone he chose.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was out on the ice, slowly shuffling along the smooth surface, listening to the lake creak and groan beneath me and directing Hunter where to stand. I could hear sounds behind me, earth and trees moaning under a great shifting weight, but I couldn't look back. I needed to focus on where both Hunter and I stepped. We had to keep moving, keep our weight shifting and keep spread out. If we stopped, we were going to go through.
I tried to tell myself that the door was only a hundred or so paces away, that I could ignore the way the ice shifted slightly under the pressure of my feet. It was all in my head. Never mind the fact that I didn't know how to open it when I got there. On the other side, Shauna had closed the door, and things changed on their own. Maybe that's all I needed to do here, open the door, step inside and then open the door again. But is this the door I want? Will it take me back to the shed or somewhere else?
I was so busy that I forgot to be afraid. Maybe ten feet from the door, my foot went through the ice. I screamed, panicked, and grabbed for the first thing I could, which turned out only to be more ice. It crumbled under my fingers and, soon, I was swimming in freezing water, desperately trying to claw my way back up to the tiny hole in the surface without sucking in water. My arms and legs were numb by the time I made it back up to the surface.
Hunter screamed after me.
I tried to yell to him to keep moving, but I was still gasping for breath.
He rushed toward me. “No,” I shouted. “Stay back! It's too thin!”
But Hunter didn't listen. He went down through the ice just out of arm's reach of me. I screamed after him and ducked back down into the water, intending to go after him. I opened my eyes against the icy blackness to look for him, but all I saw was a tiny trickle of moonlight slipping down through the holes we'd made. I stayed down there until my lungs burned, and then survival instinct forced me back up to the surface to gasp and cough.
A flash of gray fur and fangs went by me as I came up. It dove into the water, leaving me alone with the red-eyed, shadowy natives as they advanced onto our position. I couldn't afford to worry about them. My son was drowning.
Hunter can swim, I told myself. He's an excellent swimmer. He'll come back up. But as time ticked by and neither Chanter nor Hunter came back up through the ice, I started to panic even more.
Just as I was about to duck my head back down and swim after them, despite the numbness setting into my limbs, they burst through the ice right next to me, Chanter carrying a limp, blue Hunter in his jaws. He spat my son out onto the ice and nudged him forward with his nose and paws away from the hole. I tried to climb out, but my arms were too numb and my legs too weak. Somehow, Chanter knew and got underneath me so that he could push me up out of the ice.
Free and shivering, I didn't even think about getting Chanter out. I ran to Hunter and found him cold but coughing.
A half-second later, there was a wolf beside me, the biggest I'd ever seen. Even on all fours, Chanter's wolf stood even in height with me. All that size was useless for opening doors, though, especially since he couldn't even see it. He started sniffing around, pawing at the ice before turning back to me and growling.
“Door,” I managed in a squeaky tone. “Right.”
I fumbled forward and tugged on the doorknob. The door didn't budge.
“No,” I whispered and tried it again. Still locked. I stole a glance behind me at the advancing shadow figures. They were almost to the holes in the ice now. They'd be on us in less than a minute. I didn't want to think about what might happen then.
“It's locked.”
Chanter growled at me again and pawed at the ice insistently.
“Well, unless you have a key-” I stopped and looked down at the talon in my hand. It was thumping even faster, like a heart working double time. Duh, I thought and tried the pointy end of it in the lock.
The door sprung open. The inside of Chanter's shed might as well have been a glimpse of Heaven.
Chanter snatched up Hunter by the jacket and dragged him through it. I followed, slammed the door, and locked it behind us just as the first shadow creature reached out for us.
“Holy hell,” I muttered and turned around just in time to see Zoe Mathias fire three shots into Chanter's chest.
Chapter Twenty-Four
There were six of us crammed into that shed: me, Hunter, Chanter, Zoe, and two goons in black leather. Even as small as the space was, when that gun went off, it sounded as if it were happening a mile away. It could have been thunder in the clouds, a truck on the highway, a jet in the sky. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I might have believed any of those.
The third shot finally jolted me out of my shock, and I realized that I should do something. Hunter was sprawled on the floor halfway between Zoe and me. He was in danger. I needed to get to him.
“Stay where you are,” Zoe commanded when I took a step forward. She redirected the gun at Hunter's head. “Take one more step, Agent Black, and I will shoot.”
Against my better judgment, I stood where I was. All my training, all my experience told me to keep advancing, to talk her down. Get close enough to take the weapon away. Keep talking. Don't panic. That's what all the training literature said. None of it said what to do when the gun was pointed at my son.
I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay. Just don't shoot. Look, we're no threat to you. I'm not even armed.”
“The boy has teeth,” Zoe snarled as she glared down at him. “That makes him a threat.”
I swallowed and tried to slow my breathing. Zoe's hand was steady, her demeanor icy cold. There was no doubt in my mind that she would kill Hunter given half the chance. I didn't want to be her excuse to pull that trigger again.
“What do you want?”
Her glare shifted back up to me. “You were warned,” she started. “All you had to do was back off, turn tail, and run away. This could all be over. No one else had to die.”
“Zoe…” I shifted forward, still in surrender. “It still doesn't have to go this way. I know you're not behind all of this. You're being manipulated. LeDuc is lying to you.”
Zoe brought the gun up and pointed it at my face, sneering. “Don't you dare say that to me!” She touched her free hand to her swollen belly. “Not after everything I went through to come this far. You of all people should understand. You’re a mother. I bet it was easy for you, wasn’t it? What do you know about motherhood? About fighting for your child’s life? Nothing!”
There was a glint in Zoe's eye, the kind of sheen only desperate people get. Every person on this Earth has a limit to the amount of mental or physical abuse they can take. At some point, Zoe had been pushed over that edge never to return. She was waging a war against her own self-worth, justifying everything with some reasoning I couldn't hope to understand.
“This could have been easy,” she continued, a slight tremble in her voice. “It didn't have to be like this.”
“Zoe, put the gun down. We can still talk.”
“There's nothing to talk about!” She pointed the gun more insistently at me, and I raised my hands higher. “Don't you understand? This whole place, all of you, everyone... You're all going to die. It’s inevitable for you. But it doesn’t have to be inevitable for her, for my daughter. This world
we inhabit, it doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the children. My children.”
“Where are the children, Zoe? Tell me. I can still stop this. I can help you!”
Zoe opened her mouth and flexed the muscles in her throat as if she wanted to say something, but no sound came out. Then, she clenched her jaw tight, steadied her grip on the gun with the other hand and said to her goons, “Get the boy.”
I sprang forward, intending to throw myself over Hunter. That way, anyone who wanted him had to very literally go through me first.
Zoe pulled the trigger.
I fell to the floor just short of Hunter, terrible searing pain in my neck. Falling didn't hurt, and it didn't make any sound. The lights in the shed were suddenly too intense, the concrete floor deceivingly soft. Shapes and shadows moved around me, though they didn't seem concrete enough to be people. I drew in a breath, surprised that it didn't hurt anywhere but in my neck.
“I admire your selflessness,” said Zoe, stepping into view over me. She was loading more bullets into her gun. “And I’m sorry that it turned out this way. I never wanted it to be Sal. He’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve any of this. We were happy once. It’s so hard to remember that now.”
There was a sudden, large crash. Zoe's head jerked up and away from me, her eyes growing wide. She brought her gun up and tried to fire it but didn't have time before a big, red wolf swung at her, driving her back. I remember thinking that the wolf should finish her, chase after her, but it just stood there over me, growling and snarling while Zoe backed toward a door that looked very out of place, her goons following and dragging Hunter along. She slid her back against it, her expression terrified, but the wolf let her open it and retreat through, her goons and my son in tow.
When Zoe was gone, the wolf backed off, and Shauna dropped to one knee beside me. She touched the burning spot in my neck. “Grazed,” she muttered. “Ed, give me your shirt.” She took Ed's shirt and pressed it against my neck. Then, she grabbed Ed, jerked him down, and forced his hand against the bleeding hole in my neck. “Hold this.”