The Pursuers

by Sarah Jaune

  Thane inclined his head in agreement. “There is a way in, but it wasn’t one I could use because the lake is full of mermaids who are not happy with men on their lake.”

  They both stared at Thane blankly. “Come again?”

  “The lake we passed,” Thane explained. “I assume you saw it. It’s a huge lake.”

  “We saw it,” Eli confirmed. “It has mermaids?”

  “I thought mermaids are friendly,” Ivy said in confusion, glancing between them. “I’ve never heard of them being destructive.”

  “These ones are territorial,” Thane told her earnestly. “They’re kept there by the Overseer to keep men and their boats off the water. They’ll tip the boats. It was the only decent way to get to the Overseer’s mansion. The dock isn’t guarded because they think the mermaids have it, but I couldn’t get in that way.”

  “Ivy can,” Eli said with a slow grin. “She can keep the boat stable, even if the mermaids attack.”

  “Wait,” Ivy held up a hand. “We were attacked by that alligator six months ago, and it ate the boat. I might not be able to hold it together.”

  Eli had to concede that she was right. “What about if just Ivy went?”

  “Oddly enough, they only attack men,” Thane said with a laugh. “I heard the locals say that they send their wives out to fish on the lake, which is illegal. They’re the only ones who can. Everyone else has to go out onto the bay or on the river. Lake Pontchartrain is strictly off limits.”

  Ivy hesitated. “I don’t want to go by myself.”

  Eli opened his mouth to ask why, but shut it again quickly. She had the right to say no and against the sort of men she’d be facing, he wasn’t sure he’d want to go alone, either. “I think maybe we should make two plans. If Ivy can talk the mermaids into allowing us safe passage, then we can go that way. Otherwise, our best bet might be to find a servant and try to get a note to the oldest girl.”

  “We also need to retrieve my truck which I hid outside of the city,” Thane told him. “We won’t need it, yet, but I will to get the kids to safety. They already have a home waiting for them if they want to go.”

  “How are we going to locate a servant?” Ivy asked them.

  “Again, I think it’s you,” Thane informed her.

  Ivy did not look thrilled with that. “Why me?”

  “Because of all of us, you look the least threatening,” Eli explained. He knew exactly what Thane was talking about. “Thane told me a story about my sister.”

  “I heard,” Ivy interrupted.

  “Not this story,” Thane assured her, and he quickly recounted the story of the intruder. “The police let her go because she looked too cute and harmless.”

  Ivy’s brows knit together as she chewed at her lower lip. “I’ve seen pictures of Beth as a child, so I can guess what she looks like now. I can see that working for her, but I’m not Beth. Nothing about me says cute or harmless.”

  “Maybe,” Eli said with a shake of his head, “but you’re better than either of us. People hate my pale eyes. They think I’m going to kill them with a death ray glare or something. Thane is as wide as he is tall. He looks like he could snap people in half. No one is going to talk to us the way they’d talk to you. You can protect yourself, Ivy. I know you can, but even so, we’ll be close by for backup.”

  Ivy crossed her arms and scowled at the pair of them. “So, it’s because I’m a girl?”

  “Yes,” Eli and Thane replied together.

  She rolled her eyes and glanced out the back window. They could all see Claire hanging out in a tree. “What are we going to do with her while we’re attempting to break into the Overseer’s house?”

  Thane hesitated. “We might have to keep her with us.”

  “No,” Eli shook his head. “She’s just a little kid. We can’t risk her.”

  “We can’t risk leaving her,” Thane reminded him. “It’s a lot of bad choices, but you have to look at it logically. If we leave her somewhere in the city, we risk her being discovered and handed over. If we take her with us, we risk that we’re attacked.”

  “Exactly,” Eli said as he shook his head. “If we’re attacked, she could be killed!”

  Thane pursed his lips for a moment, then stood, striding over to the door, then back again. He stuck his finger down on the wooden table and stared hard at Eli. “Tell me this. In a fight against two Overseers, even if they’re working together, who will win? You or them?”

  “I…” Eli hesitated. “It depends on their powers. I’m useless against charisma.”

  “I’ve seen what your sister can do,” Thane reminded him quietly. “The only reason that Beth isn’t any help out here is that she has very little control over her power.”

  “I’ve been giving that some thought, actually,” Ivy told them. “I think I came up with an analogy, of sorts. It doesn’t completely work, but I think it gets close.” She stood and moved back from the table, planting her feet. “When a person has a magical power, it’s like having two legs that are equal. Whatever your power level, your body grows to accommodate it, and you stand just fine. With my foster sisters, it’s like they are three-legged stools. Can you picture that?”

  Eli nodded as he watched her place two fingers and a thumb on the table, mimicking a stool. “When they have one power that dominates the other, it’s as though one leg is too short and they’re constantly off balance. I think,” Ivy explained morosely, “that the more powers you have, the more uneven the powers, the more ways to be pulled off balance.”

  They stared down at her fingers until she let them crash sideways onto the table.

  “Yeah,” Thane practically sighed the word out in agreement. “That is a really good way of explaining Beth.”

  “Eli’s powers are all even,” Ivy told him matter-of-factly. “Like I said before, it’s typically on a scale of one to ten. Eli’s powers are all an eight. He had a surprisingly easy time adjusting to the magic when it came in.”

  “What happened with that?” Thane asked him curiously.

  “A bear attacked us,” Eli replied with a shrug. “She’s right, though, I didn’t have any problems. My issues are still losing my temper, but the magic isn’t part of that.”

  “Beth’s magic sort of explodes out of her if she gets too upset or scared,” Thane informed them. “Like I said, she’s working on it. My point was that if we’re going in to face off against them, if it came to it, you could protect my sister. I could protect my sister. Ivy can protect her. We have three capable people to look out for her. If we leave her alone, we might be leaving her as a sitting target.”

  Eli gazed out at the little girl with the sun shining down on her warm, brown skin as she reached up to pluck a leaf from the tree. “She’s your sister. It’s your call. She follows orders and seems to have a level head on her shoulders. I don’t think she’ll hold us back.”

  It was settled. They decided to wait it out for another day, give the zone time to settle down from the breakout of the prison, before heading back in.

  “The key is going to be staying out of sight,” Ivy told them as she watched Thane sketch out what the Overseer’s house looked like.

  “There’s no curfew, so we can go at night,” Eli said as he prepared their dinner, which was simple stew that they’d eat cold. A fire could attract attention. “If we get onto the lake at night, we have a decent shot of staying out of sight. There’s all those reeds and whatever we can hide in.”

  “We’ll try the lake first,” Ivy agreed as she squinted down at the paper. “But if the mermaids aren’t willing to work with me, we have to give up immediately. They could just go and tell the Overseer what we’re up to.”

  “Eh,” Thane shook his head. “Mermaids talk, but they don’t have a great handle on English most of the time. If this Overseer is anything like my father, he’ll not pay any attention to the mermaids.”

  “Except he uses them as guards,” Ivy reminded him.

  “Fair point,” Thane ag
reed. “I bet the police officers are still really mad that you broke me out of prison.”

  Eli shrugged that off. “I’m still curious about why they drugged you. They couldn’t have known your power, right?”

  “I didn’t use it at all,” Thane assured him. “As soon as we were close, I stopped using it so I could stay hidden.”

  “It will be his size,” Ivy informed them absently. “They probably knew he could overpower them if he put up any effort. What is this?” she asked as she pointed to the map.

  “That’s a service road into the back of the property,” Thane explained as he labeled it. “I heard one of the merchants in town talk about using it. If we have to go by land, that’s the way to go. We’d sneak in with one of the merchants.”

  “I don’t like this,” Ivy said with the shake of her head.

  Eli didn’t either, but they were out of options. They had to move soon or it would be too late.

  CHAPTER 19

  A FATHER’S LEGACY

  Sneaking back into the city of New Orleans ended up being easier than any of them would have anticipated. It was decided that they’d swap out Thane’s truck for the jeep, simply because the jeep stood out more than the beat up work truck that might have once been green, but was now more of a rusty-brown. It was a big truck, but it looked absolutely ordinary from the outside. When Eli popped the hood, however, an admiring whistle escaped his lips.

  The engine appeared brand new. “What happened?” he asked Thane, who came around to admire it with him.

  “We swapped it out a few months back,” Thane explained with a grin. “It was something Beth and I did together.”

  Eli shot him a sideways look. “Beth likes engines?”

  “She’s not a fanatic,” Thane conceded, “but she does enjoy working on them. I take it you do as well.”

  He nodded absently. It wasn’t something his sister had done when they’d been together, but Eli had to admit he hadn’t been a fan of engines, either. It was something that had happened after he’d moved out and learned about other things besides the four walls of the mansion in Chicago. “Listen,” he said as he lowered his voice. “Is Naomi going to take my father’s seat?”

  Instantly, Thane shook his head. “No, no way. She’s not powerful enough.”

  Eli let out a long sigh as he closed the hood of the truck. There was nothing to tinker with here; it was perfect. If he was honest, he was afraid that was going to be Thane’s response. “Has she said that?”

  “Yes,” Thane said flatly. “We’ve talked about it. She says she’s only a little more powerful than your mother. She would be killed if she tried to take the seat.”

  Unfortunately, Eli would have to agree with that. His mother couldn’t have taken the seat from his father. First off, it wasn’t legal, but second, she wasn’t magically capable of killing Campbell Hunt. That was the rule with Chicago. It was a death sentence. “And Beth?”

  Thane didn’t answer.

  Eli pressed his hands to the warm hood of the truck and closed his eyes as waves of nausea and fear slid over him. He knew the answer without Thane saying a word.

  “Hey!” Ivy called to them as she grabbed the last of the gear from the jeep. “Are we leaving?”

  They both nodded silently.

  “You go in the front,” Eli told Claire. “Ivy and I can sit in the back.”

  “Okay,” Claire agreed, clearly not unhappy to not have to ride in the hot, noisy bed of the truck.

  Ivy grinned at him as she climbed up and rested her back against the cab of the truck.

  Eli froze, his foot on the tailgate and stared at her. Instantly, he was brought back to the moment when he’d first run from his father’s house, with Beth. They’d sat in the back of a truck, ridden together away from the horror that was their life.

  Ivy gave him a curious look. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded and hopped in, grateful that he was now big enough to climb into the truck without getting a boost up. “Just a flashback,” he explained as he sat next to her. “This is how Beth and I rode to freedom.”

  She took his hand and squeezed for a moment, before letting go. “You and Thane were in a heavy discussion.”

  Eli wasn’t sure he really wanted to talk about it, but the loud thrum of the tires on the road as Thane pulled out to head to New Orleans seemed to lull him into opening up. “I wanted to know about my sisters… if they wanted the seat.”

  “You know what I find really funny,” Ivy mused as she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She might as well not have bothered, though, because the wind knocked it loose again, and the long tendril whipped around her face. “Most of the Overseers have children who are fighting over the seat, but your father has three kids who want nothing to do with it.”

  “It is a little weird,” Eli chuckled as he watched the trees fly by them. “Beth could take the seat. If she’s as powerful as I am, or more powerful, then she can easily take my father down.”

  Ivy stared off across the green land around them. “That doesn’t seem like it would be her thing.”

  “It doesn’t,” he agreed grudgingly.

  “That leaves you,” Ivy said as she knocked her shoulder into his. “You have to take the seat, and you don’t want to. The only reason you don’t have it now is you aren’t old enough, and your home zone is a fight to the death.”

  Eli’s foot tapped nervously on the metal base of the truck. “Would you want your father’s seat?”

  “No,” Ivy replied simply. “My father wanted nothing to do with me, Eli. It would be safest for me to never, ever express an interest in the seat of Portland.”

  He had no good response to that. She wasn’t wrong, of course. Her father would likely make sure she never took another breath if she threatened one of her half-siblings. As the oldest, Ivy should have rights to the seat. “Did you ever meet him?”

  “My mom tried to have us meet, once,” Ivy told him, so quietly he almost didn’t hear her. “He wouldn’t see me. I was maybe three or four at the time. She’d told me we were going to meet my daddy, but he never came out. The guards made us leave.”

  Eli wanted to tell her that it was not her fault, but the words stuck in his throat.

  “My mom really went off the deep end, then,” she informed him in a tone so matter-of-fact that he knew it was all pretense. “She’d say things that didn’t make sense, then. I didn’t understand at the time that she was really going crazy.”

  “What…” he swallowed down an emotion he couldn’t name. “What happened at the end?” Eli had always wanted to know, but he’d never dared ask.

  Ivy shrugged her shoulders and pulled her knees up closer to her chest. She used her fingernail to trace along the grove in her jeans, before folding her fingers together to hold them still. “I came home from school one day and she was dead. I was nine. I don’t know how she died, just that she wouldn’t wake up.”

  Eli couldn’t imagine just what that would be like. “I’m sorry, Ivy.”

  She shook her head, and he barely heard the sniff as she turned away from him. A full minute later, she finally turned back to him. “My mom spiraled down through depression, anger, despair, and insanity. She traded those things like they were hats she put on and took off again. I’d never know what I’d be facing that day with her. I don’t have a clue how she managed to hold down a job or pretend that she was still sane. If it weren’t for the food rations, I’d have gone hungry more than once because she didn’t care if I ate or not. After the split with my dad, her whole world was about him and getting him back.”

  Eli didn’t touch her, mostly because he knew he didn’t like to be touched when he felt so close to shattering. One finger might be the thing that would send her over the edge. “What happened then?”

  “I think she figured out he was never coming back early on,” Ivy said thoughtfully as her brows knit together and she curled her fingers together, nervously fiddling to keep herself in check. “Then I think
the crazy took over, and she thought she stood a chance, despite the fact that he was married and had moved on. She started following him. She made me follow him, too. She tried to get me into places where I could meet people and socialize with the powerful of Portland. I still don’t know how she managed to get into most of the places we went.” Ivy sighed and splayed her hands flat on her knees, holding on tight. “I feel stupid and embarrassed just thinking about it. We had to look so desperate and foolish. Everyone knew I was the unwanted child of the Overseer. They had to be thinking my mom was ridiculous for trying to get close again.”