Run, Kat, Run and Encantado Dreams (Mortality Bites: Publisher's Pack Book 4)

by Ramy Vance

  Without thinking, I opened my mouth to call out to Justin, but I had already lost my voice. All that came out were a series of incomprehensible squeaks, and the two humans clapped their hands to their ears.

  Justin's eyes had gone wide as coins. And Inez dropped to her knees, the claw clasped in both hands and raising high, higher, as high as her arms could go so that when she plunged it into me, the claw would become a dagger. An instrument of death.

  If I were Katrina Darling, I would find a way out. To survive. Or at the very least, I’d face this with defiance.

  But I wasn't her, and I never would be. So I did the only thing I had left to me to do.

  I closed my eyes against the violence, the promise of impossible pain and a quick death. And where, every night in seventy years I'd seen Federico's face, for once I did not.

  I saw someone else's face. As a last look, I thought, this isn't a bad way to go.

  Chapter 11

  I didn’t die.

  A thud sounded on the kitchen tile, followed by a chilling scream from Inez. When I opened my eyes, she and Justin were struggling on the floor in the strangest, half-obscene thing I’d ever seen.

  He’d lost or thrown off his blanket, and his naked body gleamed under the light as he tried to pin Inez down, El Lobizon’s claw still clutched in her hand. She yelled, “Stop! Eu esperei tanto tempo. Stop—stop!”

  But of course Justin didn’t understand her, and he yelled in English, “Just drop the claw, lady.”

  And I couldn’t say anything that either of them would understand, so I stared with one unobscured eye as the two of them fought. For a woman her age, Inez was putting up a stunning defense against a college athlete.

  An athlete who had, of course, nearly just died of hypothermia.

  At one point, she managed to angle the claw against his forearm, dragging a red line down his skin. He grunted, but it had no other effect on him, because of course, Justin didn’t possess magic.

  He just was who he was. A human being who was trying to protect me.

  And the thought hit me like a hammer: Justin knew I wasn’t Katrina. He had seen me transform into my true form—the encantado form—and had still decided to save me. He was devoting every bit of his strength to that act.

  No man had ever done that.

  So I needed to help him. I knew from my time in the cafe bathroom that I wouldn’t be able to resume my illusion for at least ten or fifteen minutes, but the floor was slick enough that I could swipe my tail at Inez.

  The two of them weren’t far from me. After she cut Justin with the claw, he’d backed off a little, and she was moving to sit up.

  “Not on my watch,” I squeaked, and when her eyes flicked to me, my massive tail swept around and walloped her right in the face. It was the equivalent of getting hit with a really wet towel—not a serious damage-dealer, but enough of a shock to stun a woman in her eighties.

  She dropped halfway back, and Justin managed to grab her hand and squeeze the claw out of her grip. He sent it clattering across the floor, and she tried to roll over to reach for it, but by that point he had her fully pinned.

  “Fera!” She struggled against him. Her dark eyes lit on me with almost feral intensity. “Você deve destruir a besta. Isso destruiu minha família.”

  “You must destroy the beast,” she had said. “It destroyed my family.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying,” Justin said, “but it’s over. You’re not going to get her.”

  I blinked, stared at him. He meant me. I was a her—not a beast. Not a monster.

  I had a gender.

  And because I couldn’t say or do anything else on that kitchen floor until my magic returned, I wept.

  ↔

  Twenty minutes later, I sat on one of the kitchen chairs, huddled in a blanket. Across from me sat Inez, who had been reduced to staring, her hands bound with curtain ties to the chair Justin had sat her on.

  Justin stood between us, his own blanket wrapped around his lower half like a Greek statue who’d just stepped out of the shower. Somehow, bedraggled and exhausted as he was, he had never looked more attractive.

  “So,” he said to me, “who are you?”

  I swallowed, pushed my curly red hair over my shoulder. I hadn’t resumed my Katrina illusion; this time I’d gone back to my original appearance, the one everyone else knew me as. “Isabella Ramirez,” I whispered. "I'm an Other. A student here at McGill."

  He studied my face. “You do look kind of familiar.”

  “I live two doors down from Katrina.”

  He made gun-fingers at me, like we weren’t in the apartment of a woman who’d just tried to kill me. Evidently he’d been through a lot of stressful situations with Kat. “That’s it.”

  But he didn’t smile.

  “Você vai queimar,” came the hissed words.

  My gaze flicked down to Inez, whose bloodshot eyes narrowed on me. She hadn't spoken in English since the tussle. “All the hells are gone,” I murmured.

  “What did she say?” Justin asked.

  “She said I would burn.”

  “Whatever replace Hell will have you.” Her voice sounded flinty, defiant. Any elegance her hair might have possessed had disappeared during the struggle, and it now lay tangled and half-matted around her face.

  For the first time, I allowed myself to stare at her. At the smoker’s lines threaded around her lips, and at the grooves between her eyebrows. She bore nothing of happiness on her face—no laugh lines, no crow’s feet.

  “How long did you say you’ve waited to find me?” I said in Portuguese.

  “Seventy years,” she spat. “Since I was a girl.”

  “Seventy years,” I whispered. “You spent your whole life seeking revenge for your father. Why didn't you come for me before I left Brazil?”

  "I could never find you.” Her eyes glazed as she remembered. "Not until the curse—until I was taught to summon the creature."

  El Lobizon.

  "And you followed me here to Canada. How did you know I was here?"

  "The creature led me. It scented you on my father's shirt, and when you used your magic ..."

  She meant when I'd used my magic on arrival in Montreal, I realized. That had occurred over a year ago. She'd traveled all the way from Brazil to Canada, and only now had she found me. Now that I’d used my magic a second time, to transform into Katrina Darling.

  My eyes widened. "After all those decades, it scented my magic on his clothing?"

  She didn’t answer, but her thin lips came together hard.

  "Inez, were you ever married? Did you have children?"

  She didn't respond to this, either, but her eyes blazed with ire. It isn't just me she hates, I realized. It's the life she's lived.

  I stood from the chair, crossed to where Inez sat. I knelt in front of her so that she had to look down on me. “I’m sure your father was many wonderful things, Inez, but here’s the truth: he wasn’t the man you believed him to be.”

  “Enganador,” she breathed, jerking against her restraints like she would bite me.

  I straightened, and behind me I heard Justin step forward. “What did she say?”

  I raised one staying hand. “She called me a deceiver.” Then I spoke in Portuguese. “Inez, your father was a man who abandoned his family for an illusion, and when he discovered the truth of that illusion—of me—he abandoned me, too. He called me a monster, and left me.”

  “So he saw you for what you are.”

  “For my part,” I continued, “I didn’t know you existed. And I can’t say whether I would have let him be even if I had. I only knew I loved him unconditionally, unendingly.”

  She didn’t speak, but tears rose in her eyes. Of rage? Of sorrow? I didn’t know.

  “I know you hate me too much to believe anything I tell you,” I said. “But I see your suffering all over your face. A life lived for revenge isn’t a life at all.”

  Inez screwed up her mouth and sp
at. It landed on my cheek, and I jerked back, one hand rising to my face. She stared at me with shaking anger, the kind of anger that ceases to be about anything except what exists inside.

  It wasn’t even me she hated anymore. It was just hate.

  Under the blanket, one of my hands went to my neck, searching out my amulet. But it wasn’t there.

  “All right, that’s enough,” Justin said, stepping forward.

  I rose, wiping Inez’s spit from my cheek. “Where’s my amulet?” I stepped around the kitchen table, scanning the floor.

  “Your what?” Justin asked.

  “The necklace I always wore.” It had never left my neck since the gods departed, not even when I changed illusions. Not even when I entered encantado form. It was bound to me, the one possession I couldn’t lose.

  Justin knelt, and I heard a tinkling as the emerald gem rose into view, hitting the light with a single, blinding flash. “It slid under the refrigerator.”

  I crossed to him, lifted it slowly from his fingers. I rubbed the gem, which swirled under the light. "The second life," my sister Ananda had called it when she gave it to me. Her precious amulet—her greatest treasure. She’d put it into my hands when we encantados became mortal, just after the gods departed.

  “I don’t need it anymore,” she’d said. “Not where I’m going.”

  “Where is that?” I asked.

  She winked. “Las Vegas.”

  She called it a last illusion that wasn't an illusion at all, but the most powerful magic still available in the world. I had worn it around my neck ever since. And I had been instructed to safeguard it until my end.

  This wasn’t my end, but I understood now what I had been safeguarding it for.

  I swicked open one of the drawers in the kitchen, found a series of utensils in a tray. I grabbed up the sharpest knife I could find and turned back to Inez.

  “What are you doing, Isabella?” Justin asked.

  I walked across the tiles toward Inez, the amulet in one hand and the knife in the other. “The right thing.”

  “What is this?” Inez said as I placed the chain over her head, the amulet settling on her chest. She breathed faster with the pressure of the amulet on her. "Witch! Curse you."

  I got on my knees in front of her, gripped the knife so that the end of it pointed right at the amulet’s heart—right at Inez’s heart—and took a quick breath. “It’s the end of this life,” I whispered in Portuguese, “and the beginning of another.”

  For both her and me.

  With that, I stabbed the point into the heart-center of the amulet.

  ↔

  “Isabella, stop!” Justin yelled. His arms swept around me. But it was done. The amulet’s magic had been released, and it swirled around us now in streaks of forest green.

  The forests of my home. Of the Amazon rainforest.

  Inez screamed as the magic enveloped her, cloaking her like many ribbons wrapped around and around and around as she spewed English and Portuguese words into the air: “Demon! Magia odiosa! Stop this—stop it!”

  I allowed Justin to pull me back, the knife slipping from between my fingers and hitting the tile as the ribbons obscured Inez completely, from head to toes.

  Soon, I couldn’t even hear her voice anymore.

  “What’s happening?” Justin said, his arms still around me. So strong, so steady.

  “You’ll see,” I whispered, my eyes filling. I swiped at them with the blanket’s edge; I didn’t want to miss this.

  We watched in silence as the ribbons tightened to Inez’s form, and then all at once they wound themselves away, slipping to the ground and dissipating as they touched the tiles.

  First her face. Then her chest and arms. Then the rest of her, like a painting. Like a dream.

  “Holy … ” Justin murmured.

  Like her father, Inez had been beautiful. Would be again, for the rest of her life. Her long life.

  She blinked, lowered her eyes. Black hair ran in rivulets over her shoulders and down her chest. “What have you done,” she breathed, and the voice that issued into the small kitchen didn’t have the creakiness I’d come to know, but a softness. Youthfulness.

  I pressed against Justin’s hold, and he allowed me to slip out. I came toward Inez, who stared at me with the wide-eyed uncertainty she must have borne as a young woman. Her father’s same wide-eyed gaze.

  Those green eyes glittered as I untied her hands, one and the next. She didn’t spit on me. She didn’t yell. She only lifted her hands, turned them over. And back again. Brought them to her hair, her face.

  “Porque?” she said.

  I set one hand on the back of her head like an ordaining. “I’m sorry, Inez. For your mother. For your father. And for the seventy years you spent seeking revenge. This time, you can spend them in joy instead of fear.”

  Because that was the true root of all anger, all hatred: just fear.

  And for my part, I didn't feel so afraid anymore.

  She stood, crossed to stare at her blurred reflection on the stovetop. For a minute, no one spoke. Not until Inez did.

  “You know,” she said in Portuguese, gripping the stove’s edges and staring into it like a pond, “I don’t even remember his face. I was too young to remember what he was really like.”

  “He was dark-haired and handsome,” I said. “As much as you are beautiful.”

  She turned toward me, her face angled up to meet my eyes. And for one moment, I couldn’t speak. She looked so much like the man I had once loved, and once you truly love someone, seeing them again—even their likeness—can still floor you.

  “Is this real?” she whispered. “It’s another trick—a dream, a—”

  I shook my head, took a deep breath. “It’s magic, but it’s no trick. This is my gift to you.”

  “Why?” she said again.

  “Because you lost your father, and no matter what he was to me, he was your god. Losing your god changes everything.”

  Tears filled her eyes. She lowered her forehead to the countertop and wept with her arms crossed over her head. She sobbed as if she was alone, unselfconsciously.

  I knew it was time for us to go. My eyes rose to Justin, and I extended my hand toward him between the folds of the blanket. Something floated high in my chest as he touched my hand, and the two of us walked into the living room and found our clothes and shoes laid on the floor.

  Justin lifted his jeans. “They’re too wet to wear.”

  “Just the shoes, then,” I said, pulling on my boots.

  He did the same, and the two of us stepped out of the silent apartment and into the frigid night.

  We closed the door behind us, stood facing onto the street for a few seconds.

  “Well,” I said. Now the barrage of questions would begin. What was all that? Where did she come from? Why was she trying to kill you? And just the thought of them lidded my eyes, made me feel exhausted.

  “We’re naked," Justin said.

  I glanced over at him, pulling my blanket tighter around me. He didn't say anything else. I suppressed a smile. “Nothing you haven’t seen before.”

  He let a small exhale of amusement, the first good feeling I’d managed to elicit from him as Isabella. As me—not Kat.

  His eyes traveled up and down the road. “I know where we are. It’s about ten minutes from the O3 house.” Then his gaze came back to me. “What should we do about her?”

  “Inez?” I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “She tried to kill you. She summoned a massive were-dog thing.”

  “It’s over.” I revealed El Lobizon’s claw from the folds of my blanket. It glimmered, iridescent in the moonlight. “El Lobizon won’t be hunting us anymore.”

  And I knew it to be true.

  I lifted my eyes; for how cold Montreal was, the city certainly had its appeal. As a Brazilian—used to forests and temperate nights—that wasn’t easy to admit.

  Justin’s voice interrupted the drift of my though
ts. “What will you do with that thing?”

  I returned my eyes to the claw. “I’ll keep it. As a reminder of who I’ve been, and who I want to be.”

  “And who do you want to be?”

  I adjusted the claw under the moonlight, watched the colors play across it. “Still me, but the better part. The part of me who makes choices I can stick by. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think I do.”

  “You think you do?”

  “Well, we’ve only just met.”

  Touche.

  “We should walk back to my place together, just to be safe.”

  My eyebrows lifted as I turned to him. “Your place? You don’t hate me?”

  He shook his head. “Hate? I’ve never hated anyone. I mean, you did trick me into believing you were my girlfriend, which was a terrible thing to do. And I nearly died ... twice.”

  I lowered my eyes. “Yes.”

  His hand came out, the warm fingers finding mine. “But you also saved my life in the river. You gave that woman an incredible gift. You were brave tonight, Isabella.”

  “I’m an Other. An encantado. My true form is ...”

  “Is …?”

  “Terrible. Ugly.”

  I felt him shrug. “So you’re a pink mer-dolphin when you aren’t a beautiful young woman. Trust me, I’ve seen weirder Others since I came to McGill.”

  I raised my face, trying to keep my chin from crumpling. “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. You should meet Mergen; he either looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or a translucent scarecrow.”

  I laughed a little, wiped my eyes. All I wanted right now was to stay by Justin's side, to hold his hand, to climb into the same bed as him. And maybe those things were possible. But just because they were possible didn’t mean I had to rush them along. We’d both nearly died, and we needed sleep. Food. Warmth. And we had time for those things. I didn't have to pretend I was someone else anymore; the illusions between us had fallen like a veil.

  Plus, there was the real Katrina. Still out there, somewhere.

  I took a long breath before I smiled up at him. “Thank you for the offer to walk back together. But I’m going to head back to my dorm tonight.”