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

by Ramy Vance

  “Okay,” he said with a little surprise. He squeezed my hand before turning away, but I held on.

  “Justin,” I said.

  He glanced back.

  My thumb rubbed once over the back of his hand. “See you around?”

  He nodded, a curl forming at the side of his mouth. “See you around, Isabella.”

  I started toward my dorm, the claw clutched in my hand. As I walked, a bird screeched through the night once. It’s just a bird, Isa, I thought, because I had nearly cleared a foot off the ground.

  But I still jogged the rest of the way back to the dorm, and not just because it was cold.

  Chapter 12

  When I closed my eyes, I saw him. The wolf—the hunter.

  He’d been behind my eyelids all week.

  I lifted my head, turned toward Aimee on the bed next to me. “Did you shower today? You might have my scent on you.”

  She lifted her own head, eyes lidded as she let a puff of smoke into the air. “Isa, this is my last joint, and I’m not going to waste this afternoon obsessing over the past.”

  The past, I repeated. The past. I lowered my head, let out a long sigh against the current of my thoughts. It didn’t matter if she had my scent on her—the hunter was gone. He was in the past. “Sorry.”

  “Usually I’m the paranoid one.”

  She was right; we’d reversed roles. Which was strange, because a little weed had almost never made me paranoid like this. And I had been high many, many times—chalk it up to five hundred years of immortality and a whole lot of natural curiosity.

  Then again, a week ago I had survived a vengeful Brazilian stalker and her supernatural wolf, all of which had resulted in just barely surviving a dip in a frozen river. That kind of experience rewired the circuitry of your brain.

  I hadn’t seen Inez since. I took that as a good sign—the best possible sign: she was enjoying her new (youthful) life. Or, at least, not trying to kill me anymore.

  Next to me, Aimee’s hand found mine. “Just be in the moment. Tell me what you see.”

  I lifted my eyes. Above us, the dorm room swirled. “It’s a storm,” I said, nearly dropping the bud as I propped up on my elbows. I reached up from where I lay on my bed, fingers tracing through the air.

  “No”—Aimee plucked the blunt from between my fingers and raised it to her mouth—”it’s the ocean.” She set it to her lips, inhaled.

  “That’s beautiful,” I whispered, the paranoia ebbing. I flopped onto my stomach, pressing aside the wrappers on my duvet. “Hey.” I lifted one wrapper, then another, and a third, finding each empty. “You ate it.”

  Aimee blinked once as she raised the bud from her mouth, and with it, offered a new stream of white smoke to the ocean on our ceiling. “Ate what?”

  I crumpled the wrapper I held. “The last Twinkie.”

  She gasped. “You accuse me?” She struggled to her elbows, half-lidded eyes searching out my own. “I’ve only had one to your six.”

  As she sat up, I spotted a glint on the bed. I shoved her aside. “Hey!” she yelped, but I’d already snatched the flattened mass of dough and cream from beneath her. “Chill out, Stay Puft.”

  I still didn’t know who Stay Puft was; I held the treat to my chest. “You were hiding it.”

  She huffed and dropped onto her back. “I’ll never understand Others and their obsessions with junk food. It’s not like you never had access to that stuff.”

  “It’s not junk,” I said. “If you had lived five hundred years before the mass production of refined sugar, you would understand.” I tugged the plastic with pinched fingers. It came apart with machine-perfect exactness, and the aroma of porous dough and cream touched my nose. I stared at the Twinkie before me. The last one.

  Aimee caught my eye. “What is it?”

  I held it out between us, an offering to the GoneGods. “Do you think eating this is the equivalent of burning a little time?”

  She stared at me, her blue eyes widening. “That would mean …”

  I waited, the delicacy still held out between us. I started into a slight nod; whatever Aimee was about to say would be profound, important.

  “That would mean the entire food industry has been designed around forcing us to burn time.”

  I nodded harder.

  She sat up. “Sugar. It’s in everything. Absolutely everything.”

  I pushed half the Twinkie out of the wrapper and bit it off, nodding still.

  Somewhere under the pile of covers, a chirping sounded. We stared at each other, both perplexed. It sounded again.

  “Isa, I think a bird flew in.”

  I threw the covers aside, wrappers flying with them, and uncovered the source. I lifted my phone, blinking hard at the unfamiliar number on the screen. “No bird,” I murmured, and all at once, I couldn’t remember what time it was. How long had we been here? I accepted the call. “Hello?”

  “Isabella?” came a man’s voice.

  “Is that your new hot thing calling?” Aimee asked, leaning close. “Justin, is that you?”

  I set a hand on her face, palm atop her nose, and pushed her back. My head swam, and I sat up on the bed to keep myself still. “Professor Allman?”

  “I’m sorry to be calling so late,” he said. He spoke almost too fast for me to follow. “I’ve got huge news. It’s about your genetics research.”

  “My genetics research,” I repeated, the details of my own life returning to me from the haze. “On Other DNA?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Isabella, you’ve received a huge grant. Well, the whole biology department, but they’ve earmarked most of it for your work.”

  I pressed Twinkie crumbs off my mouth with the back of my hand. “No shit. I mean—sorry, Professor. Why my work? I’m just an undergraduate.”

  He laughed a little. “To be honest, Isa, I had the same reaction. As you know, we have a whole host of graduate students and professors doing important work here. But they were very specific about supporting your gene-mapping project.”

  That was strange; reactions to my Other gene mapping efforts had been mostly received with indifference, if not occasional derision. The truth was, even at an open-minded place like McGill, most people still placed a priority on Homo sapiens. Not many cared all that much about Others, much less their DNA. Only the military had ever shown interest in the makeup of Others, while universities—and more specifically, science departments—considered our kind so foreign, our biologies were considered almost indistinguishable from magic.

  Of course, magic is science unexplained. Being an Other, I could see patterns that escaped human scientists’ minds. Not that it mattered—almost every paper I’d put forth in my three semesters was dismissed as fiction. Seres humanos estúpidos.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.

  A pause. Stoned as I was, I sensed a weight on the other end of the line. “The Other Anti-Extinction Initiative.”

  Aimee, whose head was pressed alongside mine, shot me a confused glance, which I returned. “Who?” she whispered.

  “Isabella,” Professor Allman asked, “are you alone?”

  “I’m in my dorm with my roommate.” And 100% not high.

  “I think it’d be best if you just came in to my office tomorrow so we can discuss this. It’s good news—great news, so you should be happy. But it’ll mean changes.”

  Changes. He’d delivered that word with none of his typical enthusiasm.

  A knock sounded at the door. Tap-ta-tap-tap. Justin’s knock. Then his muffled voice: “Isabella?”

  He was early. Two hours early.

  My stomach slid over, and I rose, pressing wrappers and crumbs off my shirt. “What time tomorrow?” I said into the phone.

  “Noon. And be prepared for company, okay?”

  Aimee was already sashaying to the door. “I’ll get it,” she called. Aimee was never this loud, this extroverted. GoneGodDamn, how high had we gotten?

  “I’ll be there, Professor,” I said,
ending the call and making a dash for the mirror—my eyes looked redder than a black cadejo—while flapping my hands at Aimee, who saw none of what I was doing, both hands trying to yank the door open.

  “This door is broken,” she said.

  “It’s a turn knob.” I pushed my red hair away from my face, disentangling a glob of something yellow. Cheese? Yes, it was cheese. When had we eaten—

  “Justin!” Aimee called, throwing her arms into the air. “Isa, it’s your namorado.” She had been taking Portuguese 101, and somehow she’d already learned the word boyfriend.

  “Ele não é meu namorado,” I chided, leaning to see past her. There he stood in the doorway: the man I’d fallen not-so-secretly in love with, tall and black-haired and staring right at me with a look in his eyes I’d seen before.

  Admiration. Desire. Affection.

  And he was looking at me, plain Isabella. I looked like myself now—at least, the Isabella I’d been when I came to McGill: red-haired, green-eyed, freckled and average height.

  It was an amazing feeling.

  But the better feeling—the one I’d never expected—was to care so much about a man who knew I was an encantado and looked at me like that anyway. I felt like a deer caught in a pair of headlamps. In the best way.

  Except something in Justin’s expression suggested trouble, despite the half-smile he’d conjured. He coughed, one hand sweeping through the air. “You two are going to set off the smoke alarm.”

  “It’s been a good night,” Aimee said. “And it’s about to get muito quente.”

  Now I felt myself blushing, especially when Justin’s lips curled. “This is an unexpected surprise. You’re two hours early.”

  “Are you here for beijos?” Aimee grinning up at him. “Muitos beijos?”

  What are beijos?” Justin asked.

  “Aimee,” I rasped, “shut up.”

  He ruffled his hand through his hair. “Sorry to surprise you.” He stepped into the room, letting the door shut behind him. “It’s just, I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for you to be out alone at night.”

  I made a face. Was Justin a secret chauvinist? “I’ll have you know that I’m perfectly capable—”

  My phone began vibrating in my hand. Aimee’s did the same on her desk. I lifted mine. CAMPUS ALERT, the screen read. UNCOMMON CONCENTRATION OF BIRDS FLOCKING ON CAMPUS. DO NOT AGGRAVATE OR INTERACT WITH FLOCKS.

  “Uh,” Aimee said from her desk. “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of weird,” Justin said. “And in my experience, when things get weird, they get dangerous.”

  “This is a joke.” I crossed to the window. Outside, the setting sun streaked through the clouds and an otherwise bare sky. No birds. “It’s the middle of winter—they shouldn’t be flocking at all. It’s not the students who should be concerned … it’s bird conservationists.”

  “Maybe it’s best if we don’t go out tonight,” Justin said. “To be safe.”

  I kept staring out the window, and I realized that I hadn’t left my dorm all week except to attend class. I’d spent the whole time vaguely traumatized, paranoid about what had happened.

  But it’s in the past.

  “No.” I turned. “I want to go out tonight. To celebrate.”

  Justin’s eyebrows went up.

  I half-smiled. “My research just got a huge grant.”

  Justin threw his hands up, and so did Aimee, and the two of them came at me at once and despite my objections, I was soon enveloped by four human arms. “That’s amazing,” Justin said. “All right, the two of you get on your coats.”

  “No way,” Aimee said. “I’m not getting in the middle of this.”

  I shot her a glare. “Aimee, we’re not—”

  “Dating?” She scoffed, broke away and dropped back onto the bed. “Whatever. That’s why you two are still pressed against each other.”

  I glanced down; Justin’s arms were wrapped low around my waist, and mine were clasped at the back of his neck. I stepped back, and I sensed his unwillingness to let me go, even though I knew he was conflicted about Katrina and me.

  The thing is, throughout history we encantados have been great “breaker-uppers.” In fact, you could call us the royalty of broken relationships. This time, I was trying to be better than that. I wanted to do this right.

  But then I saw that leopard’s grin spread across his features, and I thought, Better, but I’m not going for sainthood.

  “I need to get ready. My eyes slowly tracked up to Justin’s; sometimes gazing at him felt like looking into the sun. “Meet me at the street corner like we talked about?”

  “Are you sure?”

  I set one finger at the center of his chest, and he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing hard. The encantado effect. “Don’t worry—I know how to take care of myself.”

  Chapter 13

  As I walked to St. Catherine Street to meet up with Justin, I crossed by the river.

  The surface bore a thick layer of ice. Atop it rested a foot of untouched snow.

  I stood for a few minutes at its edge, hands in my pockets, and stared at the spot where I’d broken through a week ago. As several hundred years of immortality had taught me, nature worked fast. You couldn’t even tell, much less have guessed—if you weren’t me, Justin or my roommate Aimee—what lay beneath.

  The hunter. El Lobizon.

  He’d frozen there, claws outstretched toward me in his last moment of majesty. When it warmed, would he be washed away with the breaking ice? Or perhaps he’d vanished already, disappeared into the ether from which he’d been summoned.

  Either way, I had returned to this spot every day since. I felt somehow dutybound to keep vigil. And I’d kept a token from our battle: his massive claw, which rested in my purse. Hey, a dagger that can also nullify magic? Way better than a mace.

  But the claw was more than that, I thought as I walked toward our meeting spot downtown. It also represented the first time in my life I hadn’t run away. And as I stood at the corner of St. Catherine under the streetlamp, that knowledge warmed me despite the frigid January air.

  “You’re awfully cute with red hair.”

  Delicious pride filled me; I knew that voice was referring to me, Isabella Ramirez, and no one else. My lips curled, and I spun on my heels, shrugging with my hands deep in my coat pockets. “You’re lucky you’re so cute, or else I’d be supremely irritated by your lateness.”

  There stood Justin Truly. Every time I heard that voice, spotted those blue eyes and black hair, I wondered at how the gods could have justified gracing one man with so much charm before they left.

  “Hey,” he said, palms going up, “I was the one who came by your dorm extra early.”

  “And unexpectedly.”

  We came together on the sidewalk, he staring down and I up until our bodies nearly touched. My hands didn’t leave my pockets. “Tell me meeting here wasn’t worth it.”

  I knew from the look in his eyes how I appeared to him: a beautiful stranger standing on the street. And it was this string of tension—the little surprises, the unexpectedness—that would make the culmination of what was happening between us explosive. Eventually. When the time was right.

  He nodded once, eyes unwavering. “It was worth it.”

  I stepped beside him, sliding my hand through the crook of his arm. “I hope you like greasy spoons.”

  “What, like a diner? Are we … going steady? Like two teenagers from the fifties?”

  “I’ll have you know, that was a particularly good decade.” We started down the sidewalk, the setting sun pale on us through the clouds. I still hadn’t seen any dangerous flocks of birds since we’d received a campus alert about them earlier that afternoon. “And no, we’re not going steady. We’re celebrating my research getting funded,” I deflected.

  I knew what he was asking, but Justin was with Katrina—who still hadn’t appeared since the semester began—and he and I were dancing around this thing between us, unwilling t
o name it and equally unwilling to ignore it.

  After all, a week ago I’d hoodwinked him into thinking I was his absentee girlfriend, Kat—which is a long story. But the gist is: if you were an encantado with the ability to look like anyone, and your love interest’s girlfriend hadn’t shown her face in weeks, wouldn’t you burn two months off the end of your life to look like her for a while?

  We’d sort of gotten past it, but we still had to get to know each other better now that I looked like me. Well, he had to get to know me better—the real Isabella. And he had to choose between Kat and me.

  “Justin,” I said, “what we’re doing isn’t as innocent as you make it out to be.”

  We passed a few other groups of pedestrians, turned at a cross street that would take us toward the restaurant I’d picked. As soon as we did, the street noise grew.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Justin said. But he avoided meeting my eyes for the first time since we’d met up.

  “You asked me if we’re going steady. You can’t fool a 500-year-old encantado—I know all the signs.”

  He pretended to be distracted by a storefront display of candles. “Signs of what?”

  “Of when a man is considering cheating on his significant other.”

  He slowly unhooked his arm from mine. That was never good. “I’m not a cheater,” he said in a low, testy voice.

  I stepped ahead of him, turned so we were facing. When I put my hands on his arms, he stopped and looked down at me. “I know that,” I said. “But all this time we’re spending together … it’s only going to hurt your relationship with Kat.”

  He took a deep breath. “My relationship with Kat is pretty hurt already.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We had a big falling out before winter break. I haven’t even talked to her since then, and I don’t know if she wants to be with me or not. And then you showed up.”

  “Which is why you were asking me why I hadn’t called or texted when I showed up in the dining hall that day, pretending to be Kat.”