Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies
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Pack of Lies
The Twenty-Sided Sorceress: Book Three
Annie Bellet
Copyright 2014, Annie Bellet
All rights reserved. Published by Doomed Muse Press.
This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to doomedmuse.press@gmail.com.
Cover designed by Ravven (www.ravven.com)
Formatting by Polgarus Studio (www.polgarusstudio.com)
Electronic edition, 2014
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This book is dedicated to Demon Fox:
Curse you for all the total party kills, and all the unskippable cut scenes.
Four pairs of eyes watched the twenty-sided die bounce across the hex mat, life and death riding on its little blue plastic numbers. We had gathered in the back room of my game shop for our usual Thursday night game session. First one since I’d returned from Three Feathers. Steve hadn’t been able to make it, but the twins were here, and Harper of course. She’d stood by me while I moped and struggled to resume training to fight my psychotic ex-lover.
While I pined for my other probably ex-lover. Who hadn’t called me in over a month. The leaves were going to start changing. Our summer together, the ending of it in total disaster, it seemed like a weird dream now. I missed Alek like hell, but I was recovering. Sorta.
Okay, I’d admit it. I’d been a mess. It felt good to game again, to resume some semblance of normal life again.
“Nat TWENTY,” Ezee yelled as the die finished its roll and sat in the middle of a knocked-over pile of orc miniatures. The coyote shifter flipped his thick black hair back from his forehead and pumped a fist in the air.
“All right,” I said, hiding my grin. “You successfully perform the heal check. Harper, err, I mean Liandress the Unlucky, stabilizes.”
“Cheap bastard,” Harper muttered. “You could have just given me a potion.”
“Potions are reserved for people who don’t cast fireball in small rooms,” Levi said, reaching over and ruffling Harper’s hair. She flicked one of his many facial piercings, sending the dangling seashell shape hanging off his lower lip spinning.
“What are you doing next?” I asked, before this could end in Harper or Levi flipping the table or tearing out piercings.
“I’ll waste a heal spell on this useless wizard here,” Ezee said.
“I’ll loot the bodies,” Levi added. He winked at me, leaned away from Harper, and slid a note across the table.
“Not the notes again,” his twin groaned.
Harper rolled her eyes.
I had to admit, as I watched my friends bicker, that it was good to be here, to be doing things with them again. I felt like I was coming out of a fog, finally. For a week after I had returned from Three Feathers, after my anger and arrogance had gotten my father killed, I’d been despondent. Samir’s games had gotten to me. Had nearly killed my tribe, killed my whole family, such as they were.
I’d stopped the killings, true. But I’d gotten the man who I had thought was my father killed in the process. I had been banished from my childhood home a second time. That part stung less than knowing that Samir had manipulated me, tricked me. I felt like his little puppet toy on a string, dancing until he got tired and smashed me.
It wasn’t a good feeling. All the training in the world, training to become strong enough that I could fight him head-on, it seemed pointless. He wasn’t facing me head-on. Instead he kept up his little postcards.
Alek had heard me out, heard the whole story of Shishishiel and Not Afraid, heard how I freed the spirit or whatever it was and saved everyone, though at a cost. He seemed to understand. He told me it wasn’t my fault, that my only mistake had been acting so quickly, and acting alone.
I was used to working alone, being alone. This whole having friends who knew who I was and the dangers that posed and who didn’t care was a new thing. The whole idea of having a relationship with someone was a new thing.
A thing I apparently sucked at.
Alek and I had talked a little, but I hadn’t been ready for more, not right after. I’d retreated, hiding from everyone, alone in my grief and my pain.
Then Alek left. Justice business, he said.
He didn’t call. He didn’t come back.
I didn’t quite pull a Bella from Twilight and mope for weeks, but it was a close thing. Harper kicked my ass out of bed after a week of me pretending I didn’t need to eat or bathe, and made me come run the store.
“Life gives you lemons, you poke it in the eye with a stick,” she’d said.
“Fuck you,” I’d said. “I am just making a mess of everything.”
“So he’s gone. Either suck it up and call his ass, or stop moping.”
“It isn’t just Alek,” I had muttered. “I don’t know how to stop Samir. I hate this waiting.”
“So get out of bed and train.”
“It’s that easy?”
“No. It’s hard. But you gotta get up and do it anyway.” She had settled down on the bed beside me and tugged on my admittedly greasy black braid. “I’m a professional gamer. And a woman. You know what that’s like? I get told I’m gonna get raped, that I’m ruining the game, that I should go back to playing with Barbies, that my hair is too masculine or that my boobs are too big or small or whatever, and all kinds of stupid shit. All the time. It sucks. But I don’t let it break me and I don’t let it stop me from doing what I love, from being who I am.”
I knew some of the things people said online to and about her. I’d seen the comments, read the tweets. She never seemed bothered by it. I realized I’d just assumed she wasn’t and hadn’t ever asked. Great, on top of everything, I was a shitty friend, too.
“How do you do that?” I asked, resolving in my head to ask my friends more about their lives. Be more involved. They were risking everything by wanting me to stay in Wylde, by helping me train. Maybe it was time I started risking my heart for them.
“I tell myself every morning that today, today I’m going to kick ass and take screenshots.” And with another tug on my braid and a bright grin, she had leapt up and started raiding my closet.
Kick ass. Take screenshots.
I wanted to screenshot this moment, my three best friends gathered around a table in a comic book and game store that I owned. Nobody trying to kill me. Just people who cared that I was here, people who I would die to protect. This was happiness.
“Okay,” I said. “You walk down the long hallway and see a set of huge doors. They open as you draw near, as though inviting you inside. The room is circular, with an ornate ivory throne sitting on a dais at its center. A man in red robes rises and greets you each by name.”
“I ready my crossbow,” Levi said.
“I’ve got the fireball wand online,” Harper said.
I reached into the messenger bag at my feet and drew out a flashlight. I clicked it on and pointed it at the ceiling. The words “unskippable cut scene” were illuminated instantly.
“Woah. How long did that take you?” Ezee asked.
“Not that long,” I lied. It had taken most of a season of Highlander while I wrestled with the stupid idea, trying to
get the words to project properly.
Ezee, Levi, and Harper all swiveled their heads at the same time, just before a knock came on the back door.
“Pizza break! I’ll get it.” Harper jumped up.
So much for my big dramatic moment where I introduced them to the big bad who would hopefully become their nemesis throughout the rest of the campaign. Gamers. Universe save me.
Joel, the pizza delivery guy, came in and set the pizza warming case down on the side table next to the half-size fridge I keep in here. He was a wolf shifter, one of the few who lived in town instead of out at the official pack home; a giant faux-castle estate that pretended it was a hunting lodge.
“You guys sounded slammed,” I said as he pulled the two pizzas from the case, pepperoni and pineapple for Harper and I, everything under the sun plus mushrooms for the twins.
“It’s the wake, for Wulf. Every alpha in the States is here, with their seconds.” He sighed, rubbing a hand over his short brown hair.
Harper had explained that Wulf was the local pack alpha, a legend. I’d seen him once or twice in town, an old man with white hair and watery grey eyes. His last name was Leifson, supposedly the son of Leif Erikson, the famous Viking who discovered Vinland and the new world. Harper wasn’t sure about that, but he was old even for a shifter, over a thousand if the legend was true.
He had died a week ago. Wolf shifters from all over the States were trickling into our small town, causing a weird end-of-summer boom in the hotel and restaurant industry. The hunters weren’t here yet, as only wolf season had started and hunting wolves was banned in this county, and the students up at Juniper College wouldn’t be back for two weeks, so the business was nice. Not that it was much business for me. Apparently not a lot of gamers in the alpha wolf gene pool.
“They’re going to hold the wake on Sunday, right?” Harper said, handing Joel a can of Mountain Dew.
He cracked the lid and drank deeply. “Yeah. Not that non-wolves are supposed to know, you know. Geez guys. Jade isn’t even a shifter.”
“Small town,” Ezee said. “Can’t keep anything secret here.”
Except me being a sorceress. That was still mostly a secret. Everyone thought I was just a witch. Totally fine by me. Most people, my friends excepted, think sorcerers are evil.
Which might be true. I knew Samir was evil. Me? I wasn’t so sure yet. Given how things had gone lately, I figured I could go either way.
I shoved that depressing thought aside. “Well, I wish they’d buy more comic books,” I said, smiling.
“They still planning to fight it out for who gets to be the next alpha of alphas?” Ezee asked. Wolf shifters had a weird society, from what Harper and the twins had explained to me. They put a lot of importance and power into their alphas, with everything being run like a gang more or less. Not a thing I was a fan of, after how I’d grown up in a cult and all. Alpha shifters were just shifters who were much stronger than other shifters, sometimes with extra powers. Like Alek, though some of his powers came from him being a Justice and were given to him by the Council of Nine, the shifters’ equivalent of a ruling body or gods or whatever.
“Guess so. Glad I’m not an alpha. They are supposed to reaffirm the Peace, too, which I suppose is the real point. I’m keeping out of it. I just deliver pizza, man, and sometimes howl at the moon.” Joel laughed, finished his drink, and left with a hefty tip in his back pocket. I’d delivered pizzas for a while, during one of my lives while on the run from Samir. I always tipped well after being in the trenches of pizza service.
We filled paper plates and shoved dice and minis aside to eat. I asked Harper about the Peace, but it was Ezee who answered me, taking on a professorial tone that I knew from his wink was totally an affectation.
“Back in like the eighteen-forties, when everyone was coming west, a lot of wolves from Europe were coming here, making a name for themselves as hunters, trappers, guides, and such. They mixed with the local shifter wolves and formed pretty territorial packs. There was a ton of fighting between packs, enough that it got to the point where humans were starting to notice weird shit like people turning into wolves, and how many people were dying or disappearing.”
“Wolves are always territorial. It’s like they take the worst traits of wolf and human and combine them into something that resembles neither,” Levi said in a tone that made it clear what he thought. His shifter animal was a wolverine, but he was one of the most laid-back guys I knew besides his brother.
“This was bad, though, way way bad. The Council stepped in. Some say that’s when they created the Justices as they are today. I don’t know. But Wulf, who was still called Ulfr Leifson back then, brought together a huge Althing with an alpha from each of the major packs. To prevent the Justices and the Council from killing them all because they were risking exposure, he brokered a peace. Packs allow all wolves to pass through their territory, and allow non-aligned wolves, like Vivian, or Joel, to live within their territory.”
“Like Max,” Harper added. Her brother was a wolf shifter as well. He lived with Harper’s mom, Rosie, out on a bit of land beyond Wylde, at the edge of the River of No Return Wilderness.
“No fighting, no killing. It saved the wolves from the Council’s wrath and kept them from exposing themselves to humans,” Ezee said with a shrug. “So now that Wulf is gone, I guess they are going to see who is top dog again and reaffirm the Peace.”
“And you think sorcerers are weird? At least we just kill each other,” I said with a forced smile. Shifters had seemed so simple. Like people, who could turn into animals. I was learning though, as I slowly paid more attention to the people around me, that they were like any people: far more complex than they first appeared. None of my friends were wolf shifters, so I’d never really asked about packs and politics. Learn something new every day, I guess.
I’d just bitten into my second greasy slice, pineapple juice and spicy pepperoni sliding over my tongue, when a knock came at the back door.
“Probably Joel,” Harper said. “Bet he forgot something.” She jumped up again and disappeared.
I was halfway through chewing my third bite when she came back, a weird expression on her face as she slid through the door. I swallowed a lump of cheese and started to ask her what was up.
Then I saw the man behind her. Over six and a half feet tall, white-blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and a grim expression on his annoyingly still handsome face.
Alek. And here I was, my hair in a loose braid with pieces falling out, and pizza grease sliding down my chin and staining my teeshirt. Fuck me sideways with a chainsaw.
“Alek,” I said, regretting swallowing that last bite so quickly as it lodged in my throat. Or maybe that was my heart, which was trying to punch its way out of my chest in a fight-or-flight simulation.
“Jade,” he said, his voice low and soft. He raised one hand, holding up a plastic bag with a wadded-up shirt inside. “I need your help.”
The air seemed to go out of the room and I found it hard to breathe for a moment. Anger. Yeah, that’s what I was feeling. Hurt and angry.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem. Let me drop everything and rush to assist you, Justice. I’ll just get my coat.” I didn’t move.
A glance told me that my three friends were trying their best to turn invisible. Harper pressed herself against the wall to Alek’s left, as though her StarCraft teeshirt would blend with the Magic: The Gathering poster behind her in a sort of nerd wallflower magic. Levi and Ezee, both flamboyant in their own ways, Levi with his Mohawk and tattoos and piercings, Ezee with his silk shirt and pressed trousers, were hunched in their seats, frozen like bunnies sighting the shadow of a hawk. Nobody made eye contact with me.
I guess they would have fled if they could, but Alek’s bulk filled the only door.
“Do you know Doreen Reeves?” the bulk in question asked. He didn’t seem surprised I wasn’t rising to help him despite my words. I guess his lie-detection powers were still intact.
“Dorrie. She drives an Explorer,” he said with a tiny shrug. “Just fixed her check engine light last week.”
“She’s missing,” Alek said, his cold blue eyes back on my face, turning my skin hot beneath his gaze.
A weird feeling twisted in my gut. “She’s a wolf?” I asked, though it was half a question only. Town full of strange wolves. Woman missing. I watched a lot of Law & Order, I could do crime victim math.
“Yeah,” Levi said. His eyebrows pulled together as though the piercings in them were suddenly magnetized. “Shit.”
“Can’t your visions tell you where she is?” I said. I was half out of my chair though, holding myself down with an act of stubborn will. I already knew I’d help. I just didn’t want Alek to think he could waltz in here after over a month and snap his fingers for his personal sorceress bitch to come magicking for him.
Okay. That was definitely the anger speaking. It left a bitter taste in my mouth that drowned out the pepperoni and pineapple.
“No,” Alek said.
I waited, but he didn’t say more. Everyone was looking at me. I felt their eyes like physical weights pushing me out of my chair.
“Game’s postponed,” I said with an exaggerated sigh. “Don’t read my notes while I’m gone.”
“You do not have to come,” Alek said. “Just work spell like you did before, I can do rest.” His usually faint Russian accent stood out stronger, and hinted at his own emotions hidden somewhere under his totally stone-faced exterior. I couldn’t decide if that made me feel better or worse.
“Nope,” I said. “You get me or nothing.”
He held out the bag without another word.