by Aiden Bates
“Maybe it wasn’t such a bad plan,” I argued, and jerked a thumb down the road. “These people are dangerous.”
“Wow,” Vance said, eyes wide with mock surprise, “are they? Whatever gives you that impression, is it the way they snuck into a weyr and killed two dragons and—”
“To you,” I snapped.
Vance’s jaw snapped shut. He frowned, his irritation and sarcasm drying up. “What do you mean? Who are these people?”
“You know,” I said quietly, taking the few steps needed to close the space between us. I put my hands on his shoulders cautiously, but once I felt him under my hands I couldn’t help holding tight. “I can’t let you get hurt again, Vance. I know that you don’t remember me, and that you can’t and shouldn’t. But I do remember.”
His troubled eyes searched my face. “I can’t let you trade me for your nephew, Tam. We’ll be careful. I need a little rest, and then I know a couple of tricks that will get us close to them.”
“No, Vance, you—”
He held a hand up, and then put it on one of mine. “I can get you close, and keep myself at a distance. You just can’t go alone. If you do, I won’t be able to do this myself, they’ll know we came for them, and they’ll move.”
I sighed, and hung my head. The moment he agreed to help, I could have guessed that pulling him out of it would be impossible. You just couldn’t tell Vance Beauregard ‘no’.
Especially when he wasn’t wrong.
“We’ll find a place to park,” I said. “Rest in the car, and try to get some recon done so we’ll be as prepared as possible. I need to contact the Silver Tooth anyway, and see if they’ll help us.”
“All right,” he said. “Good.”
I considered waiting for him to sleep and sneaking off on my own. A second after the instinct occurred to me, Vance flashed me a warning look. “Just so you know, you won’t be able to run off without me. I’ll sense it the moment you leave.”
I paused at the handle of the driver side door, and felt around my own mind for the familiar touch of his thoughts. “You’re really not reading my mind?”
He rolled his eyes as he got in. “Do I even have to?”
It didn’t take Vance long to slip into at least a light doze. He snored softly in the back seat once I found a place about a half mile up the road to park at the opening to a hiking trail.
I had one contact in the Silver Tooth clan. It wasn’t what I would call a friendly relationship, but it was at least professional, and Mara knew what had happened with the River Valley pups. She’d know that it was bad news to have Dark Eaters anywhere near her people’s territory.
The phone rang twice before it went to voicemail, and I had to call twice more before she finally answered.
“Tammerlin Blackstone,” Mara drawled, her tenor voice thick with distaste. “Fuck you, don’t call me back.”
Well... professional was maybe a stretch.
“Mara, don’t hang up,” I said quickly. I glanced back at Vance’s sleeping form and lowered my voice. “Dark Eaters. Near your territory. They’ve got my nephew.”
The line didn’t go dead, at least. But she didn’t immediately respond by promising to send her best berserkers, either.
“Did you hear me?” I asked after a moment.
“I fucking heard you,” she muttered. “Three years since you said half a word to me, and it couldn’t at least be good news? Where are they?”
“Off I-92,” I said, “exit 33, out in the hills here somewhere.”
“‘Here’?” she asked. “Where’s here? You’re up north?”
“Of course I am,” I said. “They took Baz, Mara. And... Haval and Sophia are gone. Killed. I’m not that far from Silver Tooth territory, and we could use some backup here. Muscle, in case we can’t do this quietly.”
Mara groaned. “I’m real sorry to hear all that, Tam. Really, I am.”
I closed my eyes. “I hear a ‘but’ coming.”
“But,” she said, as if she really wished it were otherwise, “Carl’s not going to authorize anyone to take a shot at Dark Eaters. Not right now. The clan’s in the middle of a succession issue, Carl’s making people pick sides, and there’s talk of a split. We’re on lockdown here.”
“Carl,” I echoed. “What, Carl Mason?”
“Yeah,” she breathed. “Benton passed away, about six months ago. Died in his sleep, some kind of rare heart condition, if you can believe it. Worst possible timing, too. His boy Matthew’s too young to take over. So Carl stepped up to take over, but his cousin Vera is older, and thinks she’s the rightful chief, but you know how old bears are. She ain’t got balls, so Carl says—”
“Mara,” I breathed, “I get it. You’ve got your own problems. Is there no one you can send? The only other people I can ask for help are the mages up in Vermont.”
She grunted. “Good luck with that. They've got their own shit, too. Everyone seems to, these days. Power structures all over are falling apart.”
Something about that grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go. “What do you mean?”
“Do y'all not get any news down south, or do you just not care?” she asked.
She had a right to be critical, I supposed. Truth was, most of the weyrs didn’t concern themselves much with the other shifter groups, or even the mages most of the time. We didn’t need to, and Mara wasn’t far off. We’d been out of the wider political field for a long time now. In fairness, it wasn’t because we wanted to be. “We’ve had our own concerns,” I said. “Give me the summary?”
She whistled. “Well, basically every shifter population along the East Coast has had some kind of power struggle in the last six months or so. Leaders have died or left, or gone missing. One went on a fucking murder-blitz and had to be taken down by the fucking FDPA—full storm trooper squad affair and everything. There are three cabals, including the Mountain Guardians up in Vermont, who’re seeing power struggles between high seats. It’s fucking chaos. Can’t believe you haven’t heard of this.”
I could, though I hated it. Shifter communities in general tended to keep to themselves, but at least the people in power shared news. Had Haval known any of this?
More importantly, though, the timing was suspicious. Dark Eaters had come to the weyr and taken Haval down, and run off with Baz at just the moment when getting any of the shifter groups or the local cabals to give a shit was going to be hardest. I didn’t think there was anything overly special about Blackstone, but it was difficult not to think this was all part of a larger plan. One that had been slowly coming to a boil while we ignored everything outside the weyr.
Which, of course, had to be at least partially true. Dark Eaters had an agenda, and everyone who knew about them knew it. They were a cult of abyssal devotees, bent on bringing their masters across the divide from whatever was outside the cosmos into it. The few I’d had the pleasure of tearing limbs off of always babbled on about the ‘rightful rulers of this fallen plane’ as they died. Which was one good reason so many of us had spent years busting up their compounds and killing them off.
Problem with that was, the more we got rid of, the harder it was to find the rest.
“If Haval knew about all this,” I said, “he didn’t pass it on to me. Thanks for giving me the heads-up. I hope the clan makes it through.”
“We will,” she said wearily. “We always do. Wish I could do something to help you, Tam. My paws are tied. Push ‘em west, into our territory, and that’ll be a different story.”
“I don’t intend to push them anywhere,” I growled. “I intend to leave behind a crater where they used to be.”
“I hope you do,” she said. “Good hunting.”
“Thanks.” I ended the call and leaned my head back, then angled the rearview mirror to watch Vance in it. His face was peaceful, and so far no errant sex dreams seemed to be leaking out.
Once I started watching him, I couldn’t stop. I was transfixed, remembering all the times I had seen him sleep
before. The first time, especially. That was the moment I had started to fall in love with him, after he’d snuck out of the cloister to meet me for a midnight flight out to a little cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains, inaccessible by vehicle or even on foot. That night, I’d been in charge. I’d worn him out, and he’d fallen asleep on my lap afterward, naked in the warmth of a fire, snoring just like he was now.
I had stayed up all night, never moving for fear I’d wake him up.
With an effort, I tore my eyes away and straightened the mirror. I didn’t have a right to remember any of that. Not when he couldn’t.
And if he ever found out what I’d done, what choice I had made for him... he’d agree with me.
10
Vance
I didn’t dream. Which on the one hand was a pleasant reprieve from either horrible nightmares or another accidental psychic encounter with Tam, but on the other left me feeling only barely rested when I woke. Without psychic clean-up detail happening, my mind felt almost too full, like a meal I hadn’t digested yet.
Tam was still in the car, sitting in the driver’s seat, staring out the window at the forest. “Sleep well?”
I sat up, and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “How long was I out?”
“Three hours,” he said.
“You just sat there the whole time?” I wondered.
He twisted in his seat to look back at me. “Of course. You threatened to come after me if I left you here.”
I had been lying about that. With my mind basically on lockdown while I slept to prevent another run-in like before, I wouldn’t have known unless he woke me up. Still, I shrugged. “At least now when I follow you, we might not die horribly.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Might not? You sound so optimistic.”
“It’s a character flaw,” I muttered as I cracked my neck. My shoulders were stiff, and I had a wisp of a headache from sleeping poorly and tucked into a back seat. But, I could feel my magic stronger than when I’d drifted off. “You called someone. Silver Tooth? Are they coming?”
“No,” he said. And then, he asked a strange question. “Have there been any recent problems with the Custodes Lunae leadership? A change of power in the upper circles or... a recent unexpected death of some kind?”
I frowned, thinking. “Mikhail is more likely to know about it than me, if there has been,” I said after a brief review of what I did know. “We’ve got an election coming up, but only fifth circle and above will vote, so most of us lower tier mages don’t pay much attention to it. Why?”
He turned back to the front, humming thoughtfully. “Maybe nothing. There’s just a lot going on right now, according to my contact with the Silver Tooth.”
“Well,” I mused, “shifters are mostly tribal, mage cabals barely tolerate one another, the government may as well be the Sword of Damocles. There’s always some kind of drama going on, right?”
“Not in the weyrs,” he said. “Not for a long time, anyway. Maybe that’s changing. Do you think you’re recovered enough to do a quick sweep of the area?”
I sighed at that, and opened the door to get out and move into the passenger seat up front. “For the record,” I said, “it’s not a ‘sweep’. But yes. I’ll see what I can get a sense for. If they’re off the main roads, they can’t be far. No one would trek across a state using utility roads if they intended to get anywhere fast.”
He gave me some quiet as I closed my eyes and stretched my mind and magic out into the psychic plane again, picking up where I had last seen the van. The trail went cold almost immediately, as I half expected. If I was abducting someone and expected angry dragons to come after me, I would cover my tracks as well. But whoever was managing that feat wasn’t as well trained as I was. Even after years in recovery, I had finesse that could only be learned in the cabals, and used it to push a bit deeper into the psychic landscape of the region. Animals were first, but once the engine of the van entered the territories of the local wildlife, they’d mostly hidden or ran.
Trees, though, can’t run. They also don’t have eyes, or ears, but they can pick up vibrations and pressure. It took a particular kind of skill to tap into the psychic memory of plants. It didn’t last long, for one thing, like it could with sentient beings. I only needed records of the last day or so, though, and that was well within what a plant maintained; especially a tree.
It took time to match the impressions the forest had collected with the landscape provided by the local animals, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle when some of the pieces only had one color and others only had sounds or familiar little trails. But gradually I managed to orient myself to the utility road and the angle of the sun, and follow the trail of sound and surprise and pressure out to a spot that was utterly blank.
Sometimes, knowing what should be in a place was as useful as knowing what was actually there. “Got them,” I murmured, and gave the etheric fabric just outside what I assumed was their hiding place a little twist to mark the location for myself. I opened my eyes, and cracked my neck again. “They’re about a mile in, just south of the road. Hiding; they’ve established a dead zone of sorts, but I can get us close.”
“You don’t need to,” Tam said, putting a hand on the keys in the ignition. “Just tell me where, and I’ll—”
I sighed. “We’re not having this conversation again, Tam. I appreciate your concern, but you still need me. They could have the whole place warded to the abyss and back, there could be traps, sentries—who knows? It’s stupid to go alone.”
Tam’s jaw muscles trembled, and I thought he might actually argue with me again on the wisdom of us going together. Instead, he gave a short nod. “Fine—but only because it’s Baz,” he said. “And there are going to be strict rules—you stay behind me. Well behind me. Keep in contact telepathically, stay out of sight, and if we have a chance to go in, you provide support from a distance. If I can get him, and get him out, there’ll be fire. A lot of it.”
As if to emphasize the point, smoke curled out of his nostrils. That was a dragon on the verge of putting on his scales before we’d even gotten out of the car. Scary, up close. And a little, well… hot. In more ways than one. “Okay,” I agreed, putting my hands up to remind him that I wasn’t the one in need of incineration. “That’s reasonable. Just be careful with the fire? You don’t want to burn down the entire national forest, after all.”
In fairness, this close to Custodes Collis, chances were there were fire-suppression spells networked all around the region. We certainly did it back home, with the southern Blue Ridge range in our backyard. But a lot of that same spell work helped the cabals monitor their respective regions, per the agreement with the FDPA that gave us all our charters. If this group of abyssal mages was holed up here and no one had dropped the hammer on them yet, it was possible they’d disrupted the region’s network.
Tam hesitated before cranking the ignition. “I want to be absolutely clear,” he said slowly. “You can’t come in after me once we get there. If it goes wrong, and I don’t come out, you’ll need to call for help; not rush in and try to save me or something dangerous like that. Understood?”
I gritted my teeth at that, but he did have a point. I wasn’t exactly in shape to single-handedly take down more than maybe one abyssal mage, much less a group that included another esper. “Deal,” I agreed. “Try not to let it get to that point.”
He nodded, took a breath like he was about to dive into deep water—which, in a way, we both were—and then started the car and pulled back onto the road.
It didn’t take long to get back to the utility road. We parked to the side a little way up from it, and I did a quick check for any other blindspots where someone might be keeping watch. Everything seemed clear, so we got out and went on foot down the utility road. A mile was not a short walk, but if we had to leave in a hurry, we’d probably be doing that on the wing. If we didn’t need to leave in a hurry, a mile wasn’t that far to go.
And if we were killed, well… it wa
s moot now, wasn’t it?
I should have been more afraid, probably. And there definitely was a knot of anxiety in my stomach. But when it started to go shaky, trying to grow roots and limbs and take me over, something about Tam’s presence helped hold it back. For one, he was a dragon. Resistant to most destructive magic, really strong, really fast, very sharp senses. Also, capable of breathing fire. So, having that in my corner was reassuring from a tactical standpoint.
It was more than that, though. Being close to him reached into some deep part of me—maybe even a part on the other side of that Big Wall of Bad—and soothed me in a way I didn’t even feel when I was around Mikhail. I knew right down to the core of me that Tam would keep me safe.
How he would do that against abyssal magic, I didn’t know. I’m not saying it was a rational feeling, just that I was more able to keep myself together with him there.
“Hang back,” he whispered when we were coming up on the bend in the road where I’d left my marker. He reached up and tapped the side of his head.
Very carefully, I spun out a sort of tunnel in the psychic plane, weaving magic into the telepathic equivalent of a telegraph wire. My range wasn’t fantastic—telepathy wasn’t one of my stronger talents unless I was pretty close to a person—but for this it would do fine. Testing, one, two, three, I thought, pushing the words along the connection.
Tam gave a shallow nod. Got it, he thought, my mental telegraph system carrying the intentional surface thoughts back to me. From here on out, no words out loud.
Roger that, commander, I responded.
He gave me a frown of consternation. Take this seriously.
