by Rider, C. P.
I thought about my dad, how he'd lied to me, even going so far as to send me away to live with my uncle when I was thirteen without telling me why. He'd done those things, and yet, he was my family. The only blood family I had left, in fact, and I still needed him. Not only for answers about my abilities, but for the connection to my past that he represented. Throughout my life, and considering the pain he'd caused me, I'd never once stopped loving him—and I'd tried hard to do so.
Possibly sensing the direction of our conversation had made me uncomfortable, Alpha Juan changed the subject. "We're going to have to be very careful with this group, Neely. Stay alert. It's not like with the sanctuaries, where they want to take paranormals alive so they can study us. No, everything I've read, everything I'm hearing, tells me whoever is running this group wants to use us and then kill us."
"Why?"
"Because they fear us." He smiled, showing his wolf's incisors. "And if they've got my brother, they damn well should."
Chapter Thirteen
Alpha Juan and I climbed into the truck. Gert was in the front passenger seat, so I sat behind her and beside Amir, who stared out the window. I swept over his thoughts—an invasion, yes, but I was a little worried about how quiet and irritable he was. It couldn't all be directed at Gert. He was far too upset for that.
Thoughts piled on top of thoughts inside his head. He was nervous about being in Austin for some reason, annoyed by Auntie Gert, and irritated with me. Once I saw that, I quickly exited his head. It had been rude to peek and I wasn't meant to see that. Those were thoughts and they might not reflect his true feelings. It wasn't fair to judge him by something he couldn't help, but I would find a way to ask him about it later.
Gert and Alpha Juan were talking about how unlikely it was that the dire wolf who attacked Sundance was actually Guillermo. Gert was of a mind that it was another paranormal, maybe a trancer, creating the illusion of her nephew.
"I don't understand why someone would pretend to be Guillermo and go after me. I've never met him before."
"Luke and Amir have," the alpha said.
That may be true, but the wolf hadn't revealed himself to Lucas and had only indirectly, through Dan, shown himself to Amir. No, the wolf had come for me.
You have a destiny to fulfill… You have been chosen to be broken and remade.
"I'd be willing to bet they're using Gil to lure Johnny into the fray," Gert said. "If they wanted a dire wolf for their cause, it would make sense to go after him since he's the most powerful one in the country today. Possibly the world. Plus, he's been working hard to take those sumbitches down."
The alpha winked at Gert. "I'm sure there are others doing the same, but I am a big target."
"Big enough to make 'em change the way they work."
Amir shifted in his seat, his hands curling into fists on his knees, his heels lightly drumming against the floorboard.
Frowning at him, I asked Gert, "What do you mean, they've ‘changed the way they work?’"
Alpha Juan answered. "Used to be, sanctuaries operated in an organized fashion under a similar budgetary structure. In other words, they were connected by money, but largely independent when it came to operations. Depending on the location, you might have one who humanely—from their point of view—housed paranormals like zoo animals for study, another who ran theirs as a research facility, and some who operated a breeding facility. All horrible, though in different ways."
The last mantecada I ate threatened to come up when he said, "breeding facility."
"Over the last few months, I've noticed the sanctuaries have changed. They've become centrally organized, and the people in power aren't interested in observation and research. Their entire goal is to exterminate the paranormal race by any means possible, but they prefer to set us against each other."
Amir smiled, rolled his head to the side. He didn't speak; only stared unblinkingly at me.
I watched him from the corner of my eye and addressed Juan again. "I still don't understand why they would send your brother to me, though. Why wouldn't they send him to you?"
Amir continued to stare. Unless I'd missed it, he still hadn't blinked. Feathers sprouted in his hair and on his arms, black and golden brown, blending with his skin.
"Good question."
"Trouble. All you are is trouble." Amir's voice rolled out in a low growl. His eyes were new-penny copper and his jaws, mouth, and lips had formed into a sharp beak. I was reminded of the time he'd bitten off a man's hand at the wrist with that beak. He'd done it to protect me, but it had been a traumatic experience nonetheless.
"What's wrong with you?" I hiss-whispered. The others could easily hear me so there was no need to whisper, but I did it out of habit.
"What's wrong in this world is not wrong with me, but with you." He shifted then, all the way to eagle. His wings were crushed to his sides, his head butted the roof of the truck. "Read my mind, spiker. It's what you do. You get inside people's brains and poke and prod and make a mess, and we're all supposed to lie back and just take it."
"Amir?" I had no idea how he was able to speak. He appeared to be fully shifted and, as fast as I knew, he was only able to speak when in hybrid or human form.
"I bit the hand off a gunman to protect you. Tell me, Neely. If I bite off your hand, who will protect you?"
"You're in full eagle form. You sh-shouldn't be able to speak."
Amir burst out with an entirely human-sounding laugh and dug his talons into the truck seat. I had no idea how he fit in such a small space. It was like an optical illusion. "You always focus on the wrong details, Neely."
He craned his enormous neck and, quick as the wind, bit down on my wrist, severing my hand from my arm.
I screamed as blood gushed from the limb, sheeting me in red, spraying the back of Gert's head, the side of Alpha Juan's face, and soaking Amir's feathers. From the bloody stump, a paw sprouted—a wolf's paw.
I screamed again. To my bewilderment, neither Juan nor Gert turned in their seats, and even Amir had shifted back to human form and was staring out the window at the open plains and great blue Texas sky on either side of the highway upon which we were traveling.
I screamed a third time and reached for Gert, patted her shoulder to get her attention. At my touch, her head rolled off her shoulders and onto the floorboard by her blue sneakers. Alpha Juan turned to me then, but at an unnatural angle, his neck popping and splitting as his head spun impossibly far.
"You always focus on the wrong details, Neely," the alpha said.
Amir turned to me, smiling this time, and took my remaining hand in his. "And you trust too much." He twisted my hand, shifting his head to eagle as he did, and snipped it off with his beak. Another wolf paw emerged from the wound, this one with sharp claws extended.
I screamed until my throat was raw.
"Neely? Hey, there. Are you okay?" Auntie Gert's lined but unwrinkled face appeared above me. "Wake up."
"Was it the dire wolf again?" Amir was shoulder to shoulder with Gert, brow crinkled, mouth drawn into a worried frown.
"Unless you can think of something else that would make her take a side trip into Cuckoo Town, feathers, I'd say yes."
"Will you stop calling me that?" Amir snapped.
I jerked my arms to my chest, saw that my hands were still hands, not paws, and breathed a sigh of relief. Amir hadn't turned on me, I wasn't bleeding to death, and I was … still on the plane?
"We aren't there yet?" I sat up, peered around the luxurious cabin.
Gert replied, "Only been in the air for a half-hour. Takes at least three to get to Austin in this thing. Although the way Celio flies…"
"Watch yourself, Tía," Celio said as he walked past on his way up to the cockpit, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand. "I'll drop you off in Odessa and make you run the rest of the way home."
"Shoot, I'd probably beat you there."
I shook off my lethargy. Blinked. Sat up. "What happened?"
Gert w
rinkled her nose at me. "You and I were eating some of the best mantecadas I've ever tasted when you started wailing like a gee-damned banshee."
"Is my nose bleeding? My eyes?" I patted my face, but my hand came away clean.
"Nope. You look just like you did right before you started hollering. Amir said he'd started feeling a little strange, too. I figured it was the wolf and went to the cockpit to check on my niece and nephew. None of us were affected."
"How in the world could Legion reach me way up here?"
"There isn't any way." She rubbed her chin. "Either he's on the plane with us, or he's got his claws in you. Both of you," she glanced at Amir, for once not lasciviously. "I can get him out of your heads, but not while we're flying. For now, we'll have to pay close attention to each other. Once we've landed, Johnny and I will help you—"
Gert screamed as a blade-like shard of glass burst through her chest. Blood poured from her mouth and onto my lap as she slumped forward. Amir shifted into eagle form and attacked the wolf who'd stabbed Gert. Fur and flesh and blood sprayed the floor, the interior of the plane, and the furniture.
The wolf howled once, opened its mouth impossibly wide, and bit the head off the eagle—I would not think of it as Amir, could not think of it as Amir—in front of him and swallowed it whole. The creature wheeled around to face me with golden brown feathers and black blood on its grinning maw. It shifted then, took the form of the human who called himself Guillermo, and dropped in front of me, wrapping his hands around my throat.
"I won't … join your … c-cause," I gasped.
"There's no need for you to join us, spiker. We already own you. You've been one of us all along, another bag of broken glass waiting for the leader's hand." He squeezed hard, talons digging into the flesh of my throat. I slumped back against the chair where Amir had sat earlier—don't think, don't think, I told myself, but I did think and pictured and whimpered and reached for the body of my friend.
He shoved me aside and disappeared. I wasn't sure if he'd gone up in a puff of smoke, disappeared in thin air, or run away. The images in front of me weren't making sense to my brain.
Gert's slim, dead body lay beside Amir's headless eagle on the floor. She was so small. Lying there, still and pale, she looked like a doll. A blood-soaked, glassy eyed doll. I glanced toward the cockpit, saw bloody footprints leading into that compartment, and turned away.
Were we going to crash? I didn't know how to fly a plane. Maybe I could find a parachute, but that would leave an unmanned plane flying through the air. What if it hit the ground and killed people? What would it matter that I survived if so many others died?
Beside me, Gert blinked dead eyes. Her mouth moved out of sync with the words coming out of it.
"You always focus on the wrong details, Neely."
I shoved away from her, from Amir—no, not Amir, the eagle—and pulled myself to my feet with the help of the table. There were no living paranormals on the plane to draw energy from, so I'd have to rely on my own. Using my telepathy, I reached outside of me and searched for a living brain. If that bastard wolf thought he was going to get away with killing my friends, he was mis-fucking-taken.
I found a brain and was preparing to spike it straight to hell, when I found another.
And another.
If I were in an airplane seven miles above the earth filled with dead people, the only living brains I could easily access would be mine and that of the creature. Yet I was counting more. Three, at least.
You always focus on the wrong details.
What does that mean?
I dragged myself into the cockpit where both pilots, one male, one female, were slumped over the controls. Celio and Claudia Martinez. I touched Celio's shoulder, and he deflated like a three-day-old balloon, his body melting into the chair and disappearing. I touched Claudia's and she did the same. The plane, however, remained steady. Auto-pilot?
Deflated Celio spoke, his voice, like his head, flat and empty. "You always focus on the wrong details, Neely."
I ran back to where I'd left Amir and Gert. When I touched them, they too deflated, melting into the floor. Their bodies looked like discarded Halloween costumes. No bones, no meat, no life.
Costumes.
I shuffled to the nearest mirror, a circular one with an Art Deco-style frame that I hadn't noticed when boarding the plane. My throat was bruised and bloody where the creature had choked me, but my mouth, nose, eyes, and ears were clean. Unlike the other times the creature had attacked me, I hadn't bled—in that way, at least.
I'd bled every single other time.
"This isn't real."
"Oh, it is." From the other end of the plane came Legion's hateful voice. He was in dire wolf form, exactly the way he had appeared to me outside the Dusty Cactus. "It is very real, spiker. I am Legion. You are Legion. There are many of us."
"Why do you call yourselves Legion?"
"It is what we are." He opened his hands and bees flew from his palms, tangling in my hair. I didn't swat them away. I let them buzz.
"This isn't real." I glanced into the mirror again. My head sat atop my shoulders in a wobbly, melting mass of human skin and wolf fur. The fur had taken the place of the bruises and tears on my throat. I was healed.
"It is."
"Why do you keep showing me a wolf?" I asked. "I'm not a shifter, I'm a spiker."
The wolf smiled with all of his sharp teeth. "Tell me, Neely spiker, what hurts more? An inconvenient truth or a comforting lie? Which do you seek?"
I glanced in the mirror again. My real face and healed neck were back. No fur, only flesh.
And still no blood.
"None of this is true, you son-of-a-bastard. It's all a big lie." Staring straight into the creature's golden eyes, I touched my own shoulder the way I had the others', and I too, began to deflate.
The creature shrieked in rage as I collapsed to the floor, bled through the confines of the plane … and then I was airborne, coasting on the wind, soaring among the clouds, flying with the birds. Away from the wolf, I cautiously reached out to the brains around me. Still three, and none of them belonged to birds, except for one.
Amir.
"You're nothing but a liar." I laughed until I lost my breath. "I may be a bag of broken glass, but your leader will not be the one to put me back together. Your power is illusion? Well, mine is death."
With that, I turned my ability inward instead of outward, gliding into my own head, taking care not to go too deep—surface coast only. This was a side of my ability I hadn't explored much as it was a scary side, incredibly dangerous, and not completely controllable.
I took a deep breath and spiked shallowly into my own brain.
It hurt. I forced myself to relax, to lean into the spike a little. Let it guide me to where I needed to be, which was the part of my brain capable of separating reality from hallucination. I peeled away the layers of illusion in my own mind, then used my telepathy to map out the positions of the brains around me. Two were on my right, one was half-beneath me, holding me tight.
"Neely, wake up. Please," Amir's low voice floated into my head.
"You can do this, Neely." This voice was different. This voice felt warm and safe and enormously strong, but it wasn't Lucas. I liked it, though, and when that voice called to me one more time, I followed it out of my head and into reality.
My eyes blinked open and immediately closed again. We were outside, and the sun was high and eye-stingingly bright in the sky, so it had to be around noon or one o'clock.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"It's one. Pretty near one thirty by now. Celio, the good Lord, and a strong tailwind got us here a little early, and Johnny driving hellbent for leather, got us to the ranch in half the time." Gert spoke into my ear, but she didn't lower her voice any, so I drew back and hit a brick wall. My eyes flew open. No, not a brick wall. A solid wall of alpha shifter.
"Alpha Juan?" I tipped my head all the way back so I could see him better. "Th
at you back there?"
"It's me. Did I make a comfy chair?" He grinned down at me, but he looked worried. "You okay now?"
"Yeah, I think so. That is, if you're all real." I reached out to each of their brains. As far as I could tell, they were the real deal.
Amir held a handkerchief to my nose. When he drew it away, it was bloody. I never thought I'd be so happy to see a bloody nose.
"I thought he'd killed you," I croaked. My throat was dry and sore. I grabbed his hand and held it against my face as tears rained down my cheeks. "I was so afraid."
Gert found some wet wipes and Amir got me cleaned up. "You're safe now," the eagle shifter said, repeating it until I finally stopped crying.
When I was calm again, I told them what had happened.
Gert whistled when I was finished. "This Legion thing is sure pulling out the big guns for you."
"I wish they wouldn't bother."
Amir and Juan helped me to my feet. I was on solid ground—grass—and in the middle of what appeared to be some sort of field. "Where am I?"
"My land. The edge of it, actually." Juan shrugged. "When the wolf started his attack, I hit the gas until we got here." He snatched his hat off the ground and smacked it against his thigh. He was dressed as he had been when he picked us up, as were Gert and Amir. "If I had to make a guess, I'd say the attack began shortly after we pulled onto the highway."
"Lucas suggested that the dire wolf might have anticipated that I'd come here. Looks like he was right."
Gert's eyes rounded. "Whew, it sounded like a doozy of an attack. You were hollering and crying and calling out for Luke and Amir, and yelling at me and Johnny. Then you did the most curious thing. You got all calm and said, 'None of this is true, you son-of-a-bastard.' That's when I said, 'This gal is going to be all right. She's got some snap in her garters, that's for sure.'"
"I can verify that is precisely what Gert said." Amir smiled shakily, took my hands in his, and let out what sounded like ten pent-up breaths. "You had me very worried."
