Oath Bound

by Rachel Vincent

  “I won’t.”

  “Take a breath. Then squeeze the trigger.”

  Sera inhaled again, and that time I held my breath. She squeezed the trigger. The gun fired, the casing ejected over her shoulder and her arms flew up from the recoil. She gasped and would have stumbled back, but I was behind her.

  Her grip on the gun loosened in surprise, and I put my hand over hers, so she couldn’t drop it.

  “Sorry.” She was breathless, and I loved the sound. I wanted to hear it again—in another context. “I almost dropped it.”

  “That’s okay.” I let her go and stepped back reluctantly, then squinted at the target. “Looks like you got a hit.”

  “How can you tell?” She set the gun down and shielded her eyes from the sun while she frowned at the target.

  “I have good eyes.” I picked up the binoculars on the table and handed them to her.

  “That’s not a hit!” she said, peering through the goggles. “The hole’s several inches right of his head.”

  I chuckled. “You hit the target. Not bad for your first try.”

  “Is that...” Sera turned to grin at me, and my chest felt suddenly warm. “Did you draw a goofy face on my target guy?”

  “You put a marshmallow Peep in my hot chocolate. I thought I’d reciprocate.”

  She laughed out loud, and I couldn’t resist a smile of my own. “Try it again, and this time spread your feet a little. That’ll help with your balance.”

  Sera set the binoculars down and picked up the gun again. She took her time, finding a comfortable grip, taking a wider stance and lining up her target. Then she took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.

  Again, the recoil knocked her aim up, but she didn’t let go and there was no gasp of surprise. And this time, before she set the gun on the table, barrel pointed downrange, she remembered to reengage the safety.

  “Did I hit him?”

  I looked through the binoculars to make sure, because it didn’t seem possible. “Yup. Left half of his handlebar mustache.” I set the binoculars down and grinned at her. “Nice. Now do it again.”

  It took her two more tries to get another head shot, but the one she missed went right through the paper man’s neck. When she’d hit him in the head five more times, obliterating his nose and forehead, then nicking the corner of his right eye, I gave her a new goal. “Now aim for his heart.” Where I’d sketched a drawing of the organ, complete with valves, in Wite-Out, over the black silhouette. “And this time, fire three rounds without stopping.

  Sera frowned and took aim with singular concentration, and I knew she wasn’t hearing the birds overhead or the tractor mowing the field to our west. Then she fired.

  The first bullet went through the paper man’s left aorta. A second later, her second bullet hit the other side of his chest. The third bullet, a second and a half after that, hit the poor man’s chin.

  “Well, he’s definitely dead,” I said when she reengaged the safety and set the gun down.

  “It’s harder like that.” She swept stray strands of hair from her face. “There’s no time to aim between shots.”

  “That’s why you have to get the recoil under control. Try it again. In sets of three.”

  She did, with similar results. The first shot was a hit, but the second and third went wide.

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you kidding? You fired your first shot twenty minutes ago, and he’s more than dead.” I smiled, because she looked disappointed with herself. “But here’s the hard part. How many rounds do you have left?”

  She squinted, staring at the ground in thought.

  “Don’t try to count the casings!” I said, when I realized what she was really doing.

  “I’m not.” But that’s exactly what she’d been doing. “Two,” she said, after another second of thought. “One in the clip, one in the chamber.

  “Close. Three,” I said, and she frowned. “Two in the clip, and one in the chamber. Now, eject the clip and reload.”

  “How do I...”

  I took the gun from her, letting my fingers brush her hand a little longer than necessary, and ejected the clip in demonstration. Then I slid it back into place and gave her the gun.

  Sera checked the safety, then ejected the clip.

  I showed her how to load the first round, then I stood back and left her to it.

  A minute and a half later, she set the clip down in frustration. She’d only loaded two rounds. “I can’t do it. It’s too tight.”

  I shrugged. “If you can’t load the clip, you don’t get to shoot the gun.”

  Sera scowled.

  “You wanna try Van’s .22?”

  Her scowl deepened, and she picked up the clip again, determination clear in the line of her jaw.

  It took her another ten minutes, but she got it done—all seventeen rounds. Then she slid the clip into place and fired four rounds with no prompting.

  I couldn’t find any holes, so I picked up the binoculars. She’d shredded the paper man’s groin.

  “Classy.” I set the binoculars on the table, and she laughed.

  “Now try that on a moving target, and I’ll be impressed,” Kori said, and we turned to find her leaning against the door to the shed we used to Travel into the house.

  “You couldn’t hit a moving target when you first started,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah. I was also twelve.” Kori glanced from me to Sera, then back to me, her left brow arched in amusement. “Isn’t this a little cliché? You wanna teach her to hit a golf ball next?”

  “Watch out, or I’ll teach her to hit you.”

  “No lessons necessary,” Sera mumbled, and I couldn’t hide a grin.

  Kori laughed out loud. “So, is she ready to be thrown to the wolves?”

  “She’s getting there.” But I wasn’t going to throw her to the wolves. Everyone else may have been willing to let Sera march into Tower territory on her own, to find our Kenley, but I wasn’t. I was going with her. Whether she agreed or not.

  “Gran says if you don’t come eat, she’s going to throw your dinner down the drain.”

  I huffed. “If by drain, she means her own gullet.”

  “We’ll be in in a minute,” Sera said, and Kori must have been feeling generous, because she took the hint and retreated indoors.

  “Thank you.” Sera ejected the chambered round from her gun, just like I’d shown her.

  “No problem. I like guns.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Thanks for helping me, beyond the guns.”

  I concentrated really hard on putting the unspent .40 rounds back into the box. “I like you, too.”

  “Now you’re just messing with me.”

  “I’m really not.” I met her gaze, letting her see the truth. “And I don’t want you to get killed trying to find my sister.”

  She held up the gun, safety engaged, aiming downrange. “Thanks to you, I just may walk out of there alive.”

  But the gun was no guarantee. The fact that she didn’t seem to understand that scared the living shit out of me. I couldn’t lose her. I didn’t even have her, but I already knew that I couldn’t survive losing her, and that was the scariest thought I’d had since the day I’d decided my life was worth living, even without Noelle in it.

  Eighteen

  Sera

  After dinner on my third night in the House of Crazy, Kori and Van started their anti-Julia viral campaign, jokingly referred to as “Off With Her Head.” Though I truly hoped no one actually planned to decapitate Julia Tower. A bullet through her brain was enough for me.

  Ian held the master list of names and phone numbers they’d compiled—an act worthy of punishment within the syndicate itself, where writing criminal details down was h
ighly...discouraged. Kori and Van each took half of the list and texted every number with a prepared statement, declaring that Julia was actually Tower’s regent, not his heir, and naming me as the oldest of my biological father’s children.

  No one texted back with a response, and I was tempted to see that as the failure of our scheme, but they all assured me that the opposite was true. There would be doubters, of course, but if no one believed the text so many people were getting, there would definitely have been a response.

  After that, while all phones remained conspicuously silent, we went out back to Kris’s homemade gun range again, but this time the entire household came with us. We drew faces on our black silhouetted targets with neon markers and Wite-Out pens, then tacked them to trees on the edge of the woods behind the house.

  Since there were so many of us shooting at once, Kori brought out a plastic tub full of mismatched sets of headphones she’d evidently taken one at a time from every gun range she’d ever visited. I didn’t want to know how she’d gotten out the door without turning them in.

  Then I realized she probably hadn’t gone out through the door at all.

  On the third try, I shot the button nose off the demented teddy bear Kris had drawn on my new target—he was pretty damn good with a marker—and I was feeling pretty good about my new skill, until Kris and Kori pulled down everyone’s first target and handed them out.

  Neither Daniels sibling had missed a single mark. In fact, Kori had hit the center of her target’s forehead so many times that there was only one big hole where his poor paper brains had once been.

  Kris went for the heart. And he hit it every single time.

  For our second round, I drew shaggy white facial hair on Kris’s target man, and when I turned to hand it to him, I found him bent over the card table with a sparkly sliver pen—I have no idea where he got it—drawing on my target as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.

  I took one look and wanted to hide the one I’d done before he saw it. His soon-to-be-destroyed art was incredible. “Holy shit,” I breathed, and Kris chuckled. I recognized Julia’s sparkly scowl staring out at me from the face of my target guy with a single glance.

  He held the paper up. “I thought you might like the inspiration.”

  “That’s incredible. I’d say it’s beautiful, but...it’s Julia.” My biological aunt was not unattractive in real life, but I would never think of her as pretty, because I would always know what lay behind the blessings genetics had given her. But Kris had drawn her so well I almost hated to shoot her.

  “Show off.” Kori had already demonstrated the fact that she’d rather decorate her target with 9 mm piercings, and I wasn’t sure whether that was because she was obviously violent in nature or because she had no other talents that I could tell.

  Ian glanced at the drawing, then at me, then at Kris. Then he gave us both a quiet smile that made me blush.

  While Kris nailed up our targets, I headed to the cooler next to the back steps to grab several bottles of water. When I stood with as many as I could carry, I was struck by the sight of them all together, doing what they did best, like any family might. Sure, my family’s together-time had been spent singing along with my dad’s acoustic guitar rather than shredding paper targets with high-velocity personal projectiles, but the gist was the same. They were together, and beneath the bickering over who’d hit the target’s left eye more times in a row and Gran’s nagging Kris to quit shooting Kori’s target on the sly, you could see that they loved each other. And that more than anything, they wanted Kenley back, to complete their family.

  Seeing the pain they shared and how it drew them together made me ache with memories of my own, a pain so deep that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. That ache grew sharper and gained focus, not in my chest, but in my abdomen. Beneath my scar.

  My eyes closed and tears rolled down my cheeks before I’d even known they were there. The water bottles fell from my arms to bounce in the dirt and I clutched at my stomach, hating how flat it felt. How empty.

  He would have been seven months along now, my baby that never was. He would have been mature enough to live, even if he’d chosen to come into the world at that very moment. But he would never be born. And he would never have a brother or sister, because the wound that ripped him from my life and from my body had ended any chance of me ever having another child.

  My knees hit the ground, and my hands followed.

  “Sera?” Vanessa called, and when I looked up I saw her at the end of the line of shooters, blurry through my tears. Alone, because she was missing her heart, too. With Kenley gone, did she feel as empty as I felt?

  The others loved Kenley, too. They would have done anything to get her back. But in her absence, they still had one another.

  Vanessa had nothing, now. Like I had nothing.

  “Sera!” Kris set his gun on the table and jogged across the grass toward me, but I was already on my feet wiping tears away by the time he got there. I cursed myself silently and assured him aloud that I was fine. That I’d just tripped. That I hoped the water bottles hadn’t burst because of my clumsiness.

  He didn’t believe a word I said; that was clear. But he only picked up the bottles and tossed each one to a member of his family, willing to let me grieve privately, even though I wasn’t actually in private. For which I was more than grateful.

  Then he tacked Julia’s image up on the tree designated as my target, and as I took aim with a full clip, he leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “I didn’t know what your bad guy looks like, so I drew mine. Feel free to blow her sparkly brains out.”

  With remembered pain still burning in my stomach and fresh loss aching in my chest, I took aim. My first shot hit the left side of her forehead, and after that, my aim only improved. I fired all eighteen rounds into Julia Tower’s effigy, and nearly all of them found their mark in her head, her throat and her chest.

  By the time I was finished, they were all watching me as the sun—a fat scarlet ball—sank below the tree line to the west.

  I didn’t realize I was crying again until the echo of my last shot rolled into the distance.

  * * *

  I’d just pulled a clean T-shirt over my head when someone knocked on my bedroom door. “It’s open,” I called, running my comb through hair still wet from my shower.

  Kris opened the door, but stayed in the threshold. “I thought you might want these.” He held out two long tubes of paper, which could only be my targets from that evening’s shooting session. “And this.” His other hand held a roll of Scotch tape.

  “Thanks.” They were for inspiration. I was proud of learning to defend myself, and potentially protect others.

  I took the targets and waved him inside while I set the brush on my dresser. His dresser. Then I climbed onto the bed in borrowed socks and stood, leaning against the headboard for balance as I unrolled the first paper.

  “We have to get you some clothes of your own. You can’t keep wearing Kori’s shorts.” He tore off a piece of tape for me as I positioned the first of that evening’s targets next to the one from that afternoon, already on display above my bed. His bed.

  I took the tape he offered and secured the top left corner to the wall. “I have to wear something, don’t I?”

  His brows were arched halfway up his forehead when I reached down for the next piece of tape. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to reply.

  When I tried to take the strip of tape, his hand closed around mine. “In case you’re tempted to misinterpret that as another mixed signal, let me be clear about three very important things. One—I like you. A lot.”

  A fluttery feeling took over my stomach, like when I’d played on the swings as a kid, and I couldn’t make it go away.

  “Tw
o—I will never, ever hurt you, for any reason, and I don’t give a damn who your father was or how valuable you are to my mortal enemy.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t blink. I could only stare down at him while he stared back up at me and the rest of the world seemed to fade into the background.

  “And three—the biggest mistake I’ve ever made was letting you walk out of the kitchen the other night without understanding exactly how I feel and why I said what I said.” His hand squeezed mine, and tears filled my eyes. “And that’s really saying something, because most of my high school extracurriculars weren’t exactly legal. If I’d gone to college, I could have majored in Bad Decisions. If there was a title behind my name, it’d sound something like, Kristopher Daniels, Professional Fuckup. But I’ve never made a mistake as big as letting you walk away from me.”

  “I...” I had to swallow, then start over, my bare feet buried in a tangle of his sheets. “I’m not sure what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to make sure you understood all of that, so that if you walk away from me again, I’ll at least know it wasn’t because you didn’t know how I feel.” He blinked, then let me have the piece of tape now stuck to both of us. “The rest of it is up to you. We’ll do whatever you want.”

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted from Kris. All I knew was that I liked the way he looked at me. And I liked the way his voice sounded when he said my name. And I loved how the same fingers that could mercilessly aim his gun and squeeze its trigger could also brush hair off my shoulder with the ghost of a touch, or cradle my fingers between his own during that first step into the darkness.

  We finished hanging the targets in silence, while I thought about what he’d said, and what that might mean for us, and how the only reason I’d had to walk away from him—the secret of my birthright—was no longer an issue. And when that was done, I stood on the floor at the foot of the bed, staring up at the targets, thinking about how brutally different my life had become in the past three months.

  Ninety days earlier, I couldn’t have imagined myself like this. Childless. Sterile. A decent shot with a handgun, if unproven in action. Possessing more power, money and authority than I’d ever dreamed possible—yet unsure how to use any of them. Or even whether I should.