Lost Causes

by Mia Marshall

  Tricia’s jaw set. “She refused. Maybe she had an ego the other ones lacked, but she saw it as a return to nothing. That horrified her.”

  “That’s all it took? Refusing? Oh. The food.” Remembering the abused elementals made me wish all over again I’d found a way to destroy her.

  Tricia winced at the memory. “Exactly. If she keeps her power high, she can prevent what she sees as death. It may be against all the laws of nature, but if she feeds, she lives. And because the firsts are connected to the land of their birth, she can’t leave. The food needs to come to her.”

  I shivered, the memory of the grasping first in Utah still fresh. That creature hadn’t just been hungry. It had been feral, in the grip of a desperate need. Without any food sources, it was dying.

  Tricia’s explanation made sense, though it didn’t answer everything. “What was her thing with fulls? It was almost like she was scared of them. I thought it meant they could damage her, but my attempt to test that theory went a bit wrong.”

  Tricia shook her head. “All I know is they weren’t allowed on the island. She never explained why.”

  I was still curious, but it didn’t really matter. Not all questions have an answer, and I was more interested in a particular part of the story. “If no one else visits her, she has no food. She’ll have no choice but to return to the land.”

  Tricia nodded, a small smile pulling at her lips.

  With all Josiah’s surveillance equipment and Vivian’s access to satellite footage, it wouldn’t be too hard to make sure no boats full of curious elementals landed on the island ever again. “We can do that. We’ll need to make sure her myth doesn’t spread further than it already has.”

  Eila’s former pets exchanged long looks with each other. “Trust us,” one said, “we won’t be telling anyone.”

  Another week passed. We couldn’t wait forever, but we didn’t know what else to do. For now, Tahoe and the council seemed to be in a holding pattern. There were tiny signs that all wasn’t as it should be—Miriam’s otter home had been burned, forcing her to fight for new territory—but there was no proof the council was responsible. It was now early October and the winter rains had yet to come. Forest fires weren’t uncommon, even if a fire right next to the Truckee River was a bit odd.

  Mac’s uncle reported that a dark sedan frequently parked within sight of his house. The council hadn’t forgotten about him.

  The threat would have been more effective if Will didn’t scoff at their puny efforts. “A tiny blond woman who doesn’t seem to have any idea what she’s doing. I think I can handle myself.”

  Reminding him that the tiny blond woman might be a powerful old one only made Will laugh. After all, this was the same man who patted my head and called me “little water.”

  Carmen sent her younger daughter, who’d been born without the shifter gene, to stay with her father until things calmed. Neither she nor Will needed to worry about their older children—Pamela and James had run off to Los Angeles the day they graduated high school.

  Another dark sedan stood watch over Carmen’s enormous house. Each morning, she brought the driver a cup of coffee the woman was scared to drink after the first time, likely because it was laced with sedatives. Afterwards, Carmen shifted into her mountain lion form and spent the entire day in the forest, well hidden and beyond the reach of any elemental.

  They were all okay—and none of them were safe.

  The descriptions of the women outside the shifters’ houses matched the photo Deborah had given me of two waters holding a gas can. I had yet to meet the women, but already I’d learned to hate them.

  There was no sign of Deborah or Michael.

  It was a stalemate. We couldn’t come out of hiding until we were certain Deborah would agree to leave me alone. The council wasn’t ready to abandon its position of power. And the shifters—well, they were waiting for any excuse to fuck with the elementals who insisted on harassing them.

  It was a powder keg, and it was only a matter of time before it exploded.

  Passivity didn’t suit us.

  Mac prowled the halls with no direction in mind. Vivian refreshed her email every five minutes, hoping there’d be some news we could act on. Grams and I tried turning our excess time toward freeing my mother, but her seduction skills weren’t as effective on guards who worked thousands of miles away. When we hit one brick wall after another, I gave up and tried to read. I scanned the same passage over and over before closing the book in defeat. We played sloppy games of pool, not even bothering to line up our shots. Hours passed in which we didn’t accomplish a thing.

  Simon… well, Simon mostly napped, but even his naps were interrupted by unpleasant dreams.

  The volcano might be Sera’s home, but after two weeks underground, she was ready to crawl out of her skin. “What the fuck are we waiting for?” she asked.

  No one had a good answer. What had begun as a welcome reprieve from nonstop chaos had turned into a prison.

  After too many days of this, we at last gathered around an enormous wooden table in the conference room off Josiah’s office. It was time to decide on a course of action. Even a flawed course of action was better than whatever the hell we were doing now.

  The office was on the family side of the compound, which meant the room held the kind of heat that usually indicated a hell dimension or an excellent spot to destroy a magic ring. We’d brought in as many fans as we could find, and several people sat with their feet in bowls of ice.

  Despite the heat, it was the best spot for this meeting. Depending on how generous one felt like being, Josiah was either a cautious, paranoid, or sociopathic man with a fondness for intrusive levels of surveillance, particularly where his daughters were concerned. In his smaller office, four television screens displayed rotating images. In the conference room, at least twenty screens lined an entire wall. They featured familiar locations.

  On one screen, I saw the house where I’d been raised, on another island far to the north. In his own way, Josiah had watched me grow up. It was creepy as hell, but it was also Josiah’s inappropriate manner of expressing love. I hadn’t really known the man, and I couldn’t say I would have learned to like him, but now I’d never have that chance. The pulsing anger I’d once felt had passed. These days, there was just a small, constant sadness I expected to live with for a long time.

  Several other screens focused on locations around the world. Two scanned the Princes’ Islands in Turkey, where he’d believed another dual hid.

  Josiah had also set up a camera inside Allison Ash’s house. She was the current leader of the fire council, so of course he would spy on her. We turned that off in a hurry. There was information, and then there was voyeurism.

  On the top row, one camera after another showed Tahoe, including the shifters’ homes and multiple angles of the cabin. The Airstream was in one shot, and Mac’s shoulders sagged in relief to see it. We already knew the agents had arrived safely with the Bronco and trailer intact, but it was comforting to see our home waiting for us.

  Another screen revealed the Rat Trap, once again open for business thanks to Johnson and Carmichael. I wondered how long that camera had been in place. I rather hoped Josiah hadn’t installed it ten years ago, when Sera and I found a new kind of trouble every weekend in that bar.

  It was a gross invasion of privacy, but I had no energy left for indignation, and it would have made no difference if I had. At the very least, it explained why Josiah seemed to know everything.

  “I guess we should start with what we’ve already got,” I said.

  Vivian considered that her cue. She had connected her laptop to Josiah’s surveillance system. With a couple clicks, she brought up an image.

  “What are we looking at here?” I asked. So far as I could tell, it was the Truckee River. The water was lethargic, not yet fattened from autumn storms.

  Vivian used a red laser pointer to circle a small patch of black. “This was Miriam’s territory. She
helps her sister raise her pups here when they’re in otter form. She used to, that is. As we know, the whole area was scorched. There was no sign of arson.”

  I checked the time stamp. The photo was taken two days after we escaped the island.

  Vivian dropped the laser pointer and turned back to the table. “For argument’s sake, let’s assume this was the council’s work. What would they hope to accomplish by burning such a small piece of land?”

  Sera tapped her fingers against the wood. “They’re trying to get to Aidan, and they’re assholes, so they think it’s okay to do it through her friends.”

  Luke leaned back in his chair and studied the screen. “That doesn’t sound right. They’ve had months to hurt your friends, so why now? I’m not seeing a good reason to think it’s their work, ’specially without any proof.”

  “Unless they are trying to draw you out.” Simon sounded a bit smug, as he often did when he believed he had an answer no one else did. “If they believe you left the island, they will wish to make contact with you again.”

  That sounded ominous. “But how the hell would they know that? Damn it, someone get Jet.”

  It didn’t take long. She was standing outside with her ear pressed to the door.

  “I was curious,” she said, without a hint of apology.

  I hit her with questions before she could sit down. “Would they be able to watch the island without you? Did you show them how?”

  Jet laughed. “Deborah couldn’t work Google maps without me, let alone a satellite system. She could have hired someone, I suppose.” Her tone suggested it would be a fool’s errand, as she was irreplaceable.

  Simon considered the images. “Perhaps they heard about it from one of the escapees or their families.”

  It was a possibility. Eila’s ex-pets had sworn to never speak of the place or the creature that lived there, but the promise might have weakened with distance.

  If Deborah was behind the fire, she’d just rung the bell to start the next round. “I guess we should be happy they gave us this much time,” I muttered.

  Jet perched on the edge of her chair. “What about the forest fire?”

  Everyone turned to her.

  “Didn’t you hear? There was a huge one started a while back. It took them a week to put it out.”

  Vivian considered it for a moment, then shook her head. “I know what you’re talking about, but fires in the Tahoe National Forest are common after a dry summer. Like the one at Miriam’s, there’s no proof. Plus, it’s worth remembering that we’re dealing with waters here—waters who’ve given no indication they want to involve other elements.”

  “If you say so.” Jet sounded like she meant the exact opposite.

  “Wait, didn’t she threaten you with a forest fire when she showed up at my house?” Luke looked as if he was reconsidering his earlier doubts.

  “Deborah had me pull up some footage of the area. She wanted to know what animals lived there,” Jet said.

  Mac grew very still. Only his hands shook as he fought the shift. His fingernails began to lengthen. “Show me.”

  Jet wheeled her chair over to Vivian and pushed her away from the computer. A moment later, a topographical map of Tahoe was projected against the far wall.

  Mac’s face grew black. “A lot of bears use that forest when they need to run. Some permanently live off-grid there.”

  His ears rounded. Mac’s father and brothers lived wild in that forest.

  I had to control this before Mac went full furry. “Let’s end this. We arrange a meeting, show them that I’m not crazy anymore. We offer them what I’ve learned about a cure, so maybe they can help others, too.”

  The table studied me like I had the wit of an especially clever rock.

  “They’ll still want you punished for David,” Sera reminded me.

  “Plus,” Luke noted, “They won’t believe you. It’s a hard one to prove, and too risky for them to take the chance that you’re lying.”

  Damn bunch of negative nellies.

  “So what does this mean? I hide out in Europe?” Maybe a few centuries in the south of France wouldn’t be so bad.

  Luke watched the thoughts play across my face. “There are worse options.”

  I let images of a lifetime frolicking naked in the Mediterranean with Mac fade. “If I keep running, they’ll keep hurting my friends. So we either need to fill that damn school bus with everyone we know and drive it far out of town, or I need to meet with them. That’s the only way this will stop.”

  Vivian reluctantly agreed. “They’re chasing you because they fear you could be a remorseless monster, but they’re also counting on your conscience to draw you out.”

  Sera jumped up and began pacing, fingers beating against her thigh so rapidly they blurred. “What if it isn’t only about Aidan? She’s actually not the center of the universe, whatever the last few months have felt like. If the council started that fire, they did it while we were on the island. Aidan might never have learned about it, so it couldn’t have been about getting her attention.”

  I picked up the thought. “And the council hates shifters. They pretend they don’t even exist, and that’s harder to do when they dominate one of the largest forests in California. It’s a two-fer. It would draw me out if I survived the island, plus they got to harm shifters.”

  “But shifters have always been there,” Vivian argued. “Why now?”

  Sera knew. “Josiah’s gone. He lived there part-time since we started at the university. No one would dare cause trouble in his backyard.”

  Grams nodded in agreement. “There’s a power vacuum. Elementals have always sought to claim their own spaces. Tahoe isn’t as isolated as most of our homes, but it’s been a beacon to our kind.” She nodded at Mac. “I gather it’s the same for shifters. For the last fifteen years or so, Tahoe has been Josiah’s nearly as much as this compound was, at least according to elementals. Now it is unclaimed.”

  Realization didn’t dawn. It slammed into me like a bullet. “They didn’t hit Stephen Grant, or anyone we know from school, or Vivian’s apartment. They never even threatened them. Other than Frank and the Rat Trap, they’ve only gone after shifters.”

  The table lifted several inches when Mac gripped its edge. He shoved himself away and stood against the wall, fighting the urge to rampage.

  Sera’s pacing increased, her fingers sparking as fast as I’d ever seen. “Damn it. Damn it.”

  I looked at each person in the room, the elementals and shifters who’d proven they would lay down their lives for each other.

  “Sera’s right. It isn’t all about me. I’m the bonus prize, or maybe Tahoe is. The point is, they want both. They’re going after our home, and they’re sending a message that shifters aren’t welcome in the new Tahoe.”

  No one argued.

  Sera stopped moving with no warning. She didn’t sit, but she braced her hands on the table and stared at me, black eyes burning. “Tell the truth. Can you handle this? We’re gonna need you, Aidan. The rest of us have a lot of power, but not more than the council. You and Luke are the only ones strong enough.”

  “I’m in.” Luke answered the question before anyone could ask.

  Once more, I reached for my magic, exploring the threads Eila had merged. I didn’t do it because I doubted myself. I did it because I never tired of feeling the solid bond between fire and water.

  Until I reached that tiny bit of loose fire Eila tried to rip free during our last battle. I studied it from every angle, searching for any new frays. I found none. It might not be a perfect cure, but it was the best I’d ever have. It was enough.

  “I can handle it,” I told the room.

  “Good, cause we’re done running,” Sera said.

  “It makes us look like prey.” She said that to me long ago, when life had been much simpler. It didn’t make it less true now.

  I stood, and despite everything we’d just learned, I grinned. “We’re going back to Tahoe.”
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  CHAPTER 24

  It took us another day to make arrangements. Josiah’s private plane was in Seattle, and it needed to be diverted several times to ensure the council couldn’t track it. They’d find out we were coming soon enough, but we’d rather they didn’t shoot us out of the sky before we arrived.

  Vivian and Jet worked together. One redirected the satellites while the other convinced air traffic control that the plane didn’t exist. Basically, they performed Jedi mind tricks with a computer.

  “Please don’t get arrested,” I told Vivian.

  Jet gave me what could only be called an evil grin. “Impossible. I’m a ghost. If I don’t want them to know I’m there, they won’t.”

  Vivian grimaced. Jet had already proven that.

  Jet continued. “The only time someone found me, it was cause they didn’t think a fifteen-year-old should have access to the state pension funds. I’ve learned a lot in ten years.”

  Vivian tutted. “You got caught? Sloppy. No one noticed when I refinanced my mother’s house when I was twelve. Also, didn’t you say you worked for Deborah because she made some criminal charges go away?”

  The other hacker’s eyes narrowed. Jet typed faster.

  There was no question about leaving Jet behind. She was helping. Plus, we weren’t willing to let her out of our sight.

  Grams would travel with us. Ani, however, wasn’t invited.

  “You’re sure? I mean, you just found her.”

  Sera was sure. “It’s been decades, Ade. You learn not to miss someone in forty years. I don’t need her.”

  I let my doubts show. I had a lot of them.

  “I don’t,” Sera insisted. “I needed to know if she was alive. I needed to know that she chose to leave me. I got that.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re not giving up until we have some happy Disney moment, are you?”

  “I’ll settle for a Hallmark movie,” I told her. “I mean, Josiah was way worse in the grand scheme of things, and you liked him.”

  “Because Josiah was there.”

  I couldn’t argue. The ones worth keeping are the ones who never leave in the first place.