Lost Causes

by Mia Marshall

  I smiled with a bit too much enthusiasm. I much preferred talking to standoffs with firearms. “You. I mean, we didn’t know who you were, only what. So we were searching for the abstract you, not the specific you, if that makes sense. I’m Aidan Brook, by the way,” I added as an afterthought.

  He wasn’t impressed by my explanation, though the last bit caught his attention. “Brook. That’s one of the old names. I imagine a dual from one of those families would attract a fair bit of attention. You probably should find a different name.”

  “Is that what you did?” Sera asked.

  “It’s harder to find someone who doesn’t exist.”

  “Who were you originally?” Vivian asked. I knew she itched to power up her computer and examine every identity he’d ever had to learn why he’d been so difficult to find.

  The man tutted at her, as though she’d asked a naughty question.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I assured him. “Though I’m curious to learn if you’ve been running so no one would discover you’re crazy. Are you, by the way? Crazy?” Why ignore the elephant in the room when you can climb on its back and go for a ride?

  “Are you?” he countered.

  “Only sometimes.” I was opening my mouth to share my entire life story when Mac appeared at my elbow, a gentle reminder to shut the hell up. He’d shifted back and pulled on a pair of jeans.

  “What’s your name?” Mac asked, eyes narrowed.

  The man spun his gun once and slid it into a hip holster. He hooked the thumb of his other hand into a belt loop of his jeans and raised one side of his mouth, more smirk than smile. If we’d ordered a hot cowboy from Central Casting, we couldn’t have done any better.

  “Luke.”

  “No way.”

  He glanced at me, eyebrows raised. “You don’t believe me?”

  “There’s no way you’re named Luke. Or Colt or Jed or any other perfect cowboy name. You were born a Frederick, admit it.”

  His mouth widened in a grin, displaying straight white teeth against tanned skin. He raised his hand to his forehead, tipping an imaginary hat. “You can call me anything you want, darlin’.”

  I gripped Mac’s forearm before he could call Luke a few choice names himself. “It’s better than blondie,” I whispered.

  Luke watched Mac, unconcerned. “Well, with two duals here, any fight will be mutually assured destruction. So how’s about we all put up our arms—” Luke gave Mac’s biceps a pointed look, “—and head inside before the day gets too hot for anyone who’s not a desert or a fire. I’ve got a little place about half a mile up the road.”

  He headed northeast, following a trail no one else could see.

  We waited several seconds, having as many conversations as we could through loaded looks and emphatic gestures, but it was pointless. He was the reason we’d spent nearly three months driving around the southwest and most of Texas. Of course we were going to follow him.

  We were halfway to his house before I realized he never said whether he was crazy.

  House was a generous description of the structure. It had four walls and a roof, but my version of a house had conveniences like soft beds, internet access, and indoor plumbing.

  Instead, we found a structure that appeared to have risen from the desert floor itself, the walls bleached from constant exposure to the merciless sun. A covered well and several large buckets stood on the hut’s east side. I stretched my magic into the depths of the well to greet the water gathered at the bottom. It was stagnant and lacked the vibrance of the lakes and rivers in the Tahoe area.

  I ignored the pang of homesickness. It had been too many months since I fed from either Lake Tahoe or the Truckee River. Other than a quick trip to the Gulf Coast and another to the Rio Grande, I’d been limited to flat, still lakes. Since we started running in June, I’d recharged where I could, because I needed to, but it never felt like home.

  It wasn’t just the fresh, vibrant water I missed. I missed the A-frame cabin, with its living room covered in floor pillows and the ugliest orange curtains this side of the 1970s. I missed the upside down teddy bear wallpaper and the spiral staircase that took me to my small bedroom, where Vivian sometimes lived across the hall and Simon slept upstairs. When I cracked the window, I could hear the river rumbling by. I didn’t sleep as well anywhere else as I did in that cabin.

  Home meant safety. I had to believe I’d see it again.

  For now, I fed off the stale well water, and soon the last residue of the drug exited my system. My power remained dull, but I was getting used to it. It was the cost of using the serum, and I tried not to think about whether that cost was permanent.

  Luke’s home didn’t have a door so much as a heavy piece of wood covering a large opening. He grabbed it on either side and easily moved it out of the way. Next to me, Miriam made an appreciative sound.

  I slid my eyes toward her.

  “What? Being a dual doesn’t mean he can’t be hot. You better hope that’s true, at least.”

  I couldn’t deny she had a point. While I’d developed an appreciation for men built like small trucks, Luke’s lean body held a certain appeal, particularly when his back and shoulder muscles flexed under his cotton shirt.

  Heat filled me that had nothing to do with the attractive stranger or the rising temperature. Even before I faced him, I knew Mac stared at me. His expression was opaque. Before I could say anything, he walked away, joining the agents as they pulled up in the vehicles.

  “You’re going to need to move those.” Luke told them. “There’s a decent-sized ridge five miles north of here. The overhang should hide them.”

  Sera glanced into the dark room. “No.”

  “This isn’t a discussion.” Luke drew a bucket of water from the well. As his biceps bulged and released, I was pretty sure I heard Miriam whimper.

  Sera wasn’t so easily distracted. “Ten minutes ago, you were pointing a gun at us. We’re going to keep our escape route open.”

  He grabbed the full bucket off the rope, then faced Sera.

  Carmichael stepped closer, and I resisted the urge to yank him back. The agent hadn’t always shown sound judgment when interacting with the magical world. Placing himself between two ludicrously powerful elementals was a terrible idea, but he might not figure that out before he was dead.

  Luke set the bucket on the ground and leaned against the adobe wall. From a distance, it was a casual, even relaxed pose, but tension thrummed through his body. He was prepared for a fight.

  “For the last eight weeks, everywhere I go I’ve gotta worry that some old one’s gonna turn up. I’ve been keeping a low profile for a damn long time, and up until recently, it wasn’t that hard. All the old ones, anyone who might know what I am or what’s supposed to happen to someone like me, I knew where they were. Now I’ve got strangers traveling around every place I’ve ever lived, and you lot show up out of the blue in all the same places.”

  I felt a stab of guilt. He was safe until we decided to find him.

  Sera didn’t appear to feel the same. Her eyes flashed and her fingers tapped against her thigh.

  “Of course it’s not a coincidence.” I spoke in a rush to intercept whatever Sera was about to say. “But we already said we don’t want to kill you. We’re here for information, and dead people don’t answer questions. But while you don’t know us, we don’t know you, either. Until we’re sure you don’t have some medieval torture chamber in there,” I waved toward the inside of the hut, “we’re taking your word that you won’t kill us.”

  A clever woman would have stopped there. “By the way, how are you doing with that whole sanity thing?” I offered my brightest, most helpful smile, the smile of a woman who’d never thought of hurting another, and I ignored the shadow stirring to life now that the drug had worn off.

  Luke offered an inarticulate shrug, though a smile played on his lips as he watched me, through pure force of will, stop talking.

  “It’s not up for discussion
,” he repeated. “This is my secret home. It has no records, and it’s impossible to see on any map or satellite. Even someone in a helicopter would have a tough job finding it. If you want to learn whatever you’re here to learn, you’ll move those shiny heaps of metal where they can’t be seen.”

  He disappeared into the hut.

  “Let’s move them,” I decided. “We can’t ask him to trust us if we won’t do the same.”

  “And if he tries something, I’ll take him.” Miriam grinned, possibly hoping it came to that.

  Mac scowled, but he didn’t argue when Johnson climbed into the camper van and Miriam slid behind the wheel of the Bronco. We watched them drive off until they were out of sight, then moved toward Luke’s home.

  I stepped into the darkness.

  The inside did nothing to dispel my first impressions. It was, at most, fifteen feet in either direction. The floor was packed earth, the walls unpainted adobe. The only furniture was a cabinet that doubled as a counter, a large cooler, and a twin mattress held off the ground by a crude wooden bed frame.

  The cooler was the only thing that didn’t look like it was cobbled together from items found on the side of the road. It was high end, the sort that might keep food cold for several days despite the heat. Most elementals had more than their share of money—live long enough, and even a conservative investor would became wealthy enough to buy a small island—but the cooler was the only sign Luke hadn’t gambled his fortune away one drunken night in Vegas.

  The room was barely large enough to hold all of us, and there were no chairs. Mac claimed one corner, where he could best observe the entire room. Sera perched on the edge of the mattress and Carmichael followed, keeping several inches of space between them.

  Simon had assumed his human form for the walk to Luke’s home. He glanced around the dark room, unimpressed. A second later, he returned to his cat self. He strode outside, a tiny bundle of pure grace, then ruined the effect by flopping on the ground with his belly exposed to the sun.

  Luke watched the transformation, his expression somewhere between shock and amusement. “If we’re trading answers here, I’d appreciate it if one of you lot could explain why people keep turning into animals. I heard rumors, but figured that’s all they were.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at his confusion. Many fulls weren’t taught about shifters, though we shared a similar origin story.

  Both races were born from the earth’s first magic, but whereas we were born of humans and magic, they’d been born of animals and magic. The old ones tended to find this, to use the technical term, icky. Many of them preferred to deny shifters existed rather than share their origin story with creatures they considered polluted. The original magic that created shifters lived for a while in human form, which was why shifters could assume both human and animal shapes, but that made no difference to the old ones.

  “I’ll let Simon fill you in. He loves correcting elementals’ ignorance.” Luke nodded his thanks and moved to the counter, pulling bowls and utensils from the cupboard. He seemed to consider my response good enough for now. Whatever else he was, the man wasn’t easily ruffled.

  I wished I could say the same. I bent to pick up Simon’s discarded clothes but saw no place to put them. Instead, I folded them and set the neat pile back on the ground.

  Luke dipped a glass measuring cup into the bucket of water he’d drawn from the well, then held his fingers to the cup. A few seconds later, he poured boiling water over a bunch of eggs and into a large French press filled with ground coffee.

  No one seemed inclined to speak.

  “Is this some sort of Walden Pond, go back to nature thing?” I asked to break the silence.

  Luke pulled out a loaf of crusty bread and cut several thick pieces. It was one of those artisanal loaves, the sort that went stale in a day. He might live here, but he still visited civilization on a regular basis to collect supplies.

  All eyes were on the serrated blade he’d used to slice the bread. He replied while gesturing with the knife, big sweeping motions that didn’t come near any of our bodies. I didn’t feel threatened. I thought he was messing with us.

  “Well, I can’t say it’s a bad idea to get away from the concrete and air conditioning, but if I recall, Walden Pond was all about deliberate solitude. Being here isn’t a choice I made.” He ended with a pointed look at me, both eyebrows raised, but he also set the knife down. “So, care to tell me why a dual, a strong fire, a…” He looked at Vivian, who sat cross-legged in the corner. “…An earth?”

  She confirmed his guess. Vivian was too weak to have the traditional physical characteristics that strongly marked both me and Sera—or Luke, for that matter. Powerful earths’ hair and eyes were nearly the same shade, the deep brown of the richest soil, and Vivian’s eyes were hazel. However, she was also too damn calm and grounded to be anything else.

  “Okay then. Why are several elementals, a couple of humans, and some people who turn into animals all looking for me if they don’t want to capture or kill me?”

  It looked like the small talk was over. “I’m trying to understand what I am. The dual part, I mean. I don’t know any others.”

  Luke’s expression softened a bit. “You won’t find any others, darlin’. So far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re all dead. The old ones made sure of that.”

  Mac’s eyes darkened. I feared, if Luke didn’t start calling me by my actual name, or perhaps “Ms. Brook, the woman I’m not even a little interested in,” he’d find himself with claw marks in unexpected places.

  “Because of the crazy.”

  Luke took a bite of buttered bread and swallowed before answering. “Because of the crazy. Most don’t learn to control it. I only knew one other, about a hundred years ago. He hid it as best as he could, but our kind of nuts doesn’t sit quietly in a corner. Eventually, it needs to be heard, and the kind of destruction that happens then… let’s just say it draws attention.”

  Excitement rose. I was only in my sixties, though few would peg me as being older than my early twenties. Still, for a full, I was practically a baby. If Luke was already more than a century, there might be hope.

  “How old was the other one?” Carmichael asked.

  “Forty.”

  Damn.

  Still, he’d said most don’t know how to control it, and most wasn’t the same as all.

  It was a start. I turned to Mac, who’d moved closer to me. He no longer had murder in his eyes. Instead, they held the same hope I was allowing myself to feel.

  “But it can be controlled?” The words came out higher than expected. Sera learned forward, elbows on her knees. Sparks flew from her fingers. She tucked her hands under her thighs to hide the agitation.

  Luke hadn’t expected the intensity of our response. “You don’t know? I guess you wouldn’t, if you never met any others.” He smiled at me, and again I was aware of our connection. It wasn’t physical, not even emotional. It felt like I’d found one of my people.

  “No one knew what I was. Except my father, and he never…” I stopped, remembering Josiah’s last moments, dead on the floor of a library, and I remembered my response. The death I’d caused, not out of self-defense or by accident, but out of the need for retribution. In a life of questionable choices, it was the only thing I’d done that was truly unforgivable.

  I reached for the cup of coffee Luke handed me. I rarely drank it, preferring tea, but the simple act of stirring in milk and a bit of sugar was calming. I handed the cup to Sera. She preferred it black, but she never turned down morning coffee.

  Sera finished my thought. “Our father never found a cure.”

  Luke’s eyes flicked between us, seeing no family resemblance, but he shrugged and kept going. “Well, it’s not common knowledge, to be fair. I didn’t know there was a cure until I stumbled right into it. I guess I got lucky.” He didn’t sound certain.

  “What is it? How do I get it? Can we do it today?” The words rushed out, and only
Luke’s pained expression kept me from badgering him further.

  Luke rolled one of the boiled eggs on a table to crack it, then peeled off the shell. He sprinkled salt on the top, then bit off half.

  If I was a suspicious sort, I’d say he was stalling.

  He finished the egg and washed it down with a sip of coffee. “Are you that far gone? No other options?”

  The madness writhed within me. Most of the time, I could hold it at bay, but it was always there, always looking for opportunities to escape.

  It always found one.

  “No,” I said, with absolute certainty. “No other options.”

  He nodded, as if he expected that response. “Right. Well, I can help you with some basic stuff to get through the day. But if you want a permanent solution…”

  “Yes,” I interrupted. “Permanent, yes.” I could barely contain myself. It was more than I’d dared to dream. If I could control myself, maybe even learn how other duals could be cured, I could reason with the council. I could convince the old ones I wasn’t a threat.

  Maybe they’d let me live.

  “It’s not going to be easy,” he began. “In fact, it may be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. And I’ll tell you what to do, but I won’t go with you. Information’s all you’re getting. First, you’ll need…”

  He didn’t finish. Simon rushed in, once again wearing skin, and began yanking on clothes. “Don’t you hear it?”

  He scowled, frustrated by our limited hearing.

  Mac went still, listening. “It’s the Bronco. It’s coming back, fast. There’s a second vehicle right behind it.” He moved to my side, as if he could protect me through his bulk alone. “It’s not the camper.”

  Sera and Carmichael stood, faces set. His gun was already drawn, and Sera’s fingers sparked as her fire roared to life.

  Luke calmly took another bite, then crouched by his bed and withdrew a well-worn canvas messenger bag. He slung this over his neck and arranged it so the bag was well-balanced. He unholstered his gun. “Suppose I knew I couldn’t hide forever. Any chance this isn’t the waters that’ve been following you?”