by Jayla Kane
“Better not or it’ll be your ass, Hunter Black,” Zelle said. She’d peeled one eye open, and the brown of her iris looked like it was simmering as she stared belligerently up at him. I’ll say one thing for Zelle, she was definitely fearless. Grown men wouldn’t look at Hunter that way if they had a lick of sense.
He nodded, just once, then gazed down at me and his expression softened. “I’ll text you later,” he said quietly, and then, in a rush of wind, he was gone.
“Holy shit,” Raven muttered as we all looked around at the empty space, as if he’d somehow pulled a magic trick and would walk in from a hidden trapdoor or something. But he wouldn’t, I knew; he was gone. I didn’t know where, but he wasn’t at the Warfield mansion any more.
“Is that how he’s going to take you there?” Zelle was incredulous, staring at the spot where he’d stood. “That’s… That’s…”
“Awesome? A good way to avoid the Guild, since we won’t be sitting in traffic somewhere?” She bit back whatever protest she was about to make, considering my words. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
“It’s terrifying,” Raven said bluntly, looking at me. “Is it safe?”
“Yes,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel. “He got here, didn’t he?”
“Still,” Raven started, but I shut her down with a look, then projected a thought towards her I knew she wouldn’t ignore.
I can’t do this, Raven. I want to go.
Okay, she said, her shoulders still tense. Okay. Zelle watched us, but she didn’t ask. I guess she was finally tired of arguing.
And I finally had something to look forward to. After all the sitting around, trying to be normal and failing miserably, I had something besides the past to keep me preoccupied. Two weeks was far too long, but I knew it would be worth it.
I managed to give them one of my old smiles before I left the library and made my way to my room. Sarah and Anna were going to help me forget myself for the rest of the day in a haze of hot chocolate and Netflix; I didn’t have an appetite any more. Not for real food. But sugar and brain-rotting television shows would keep me off the edge of crazy for another 24 hours.
I hoped.
And then my phone pinged, and when I looked down and saw his text, I knew I could do this. I could. Good to see you, miss.
So simple. So sincere.
Such a long time to wait until I saw his face again.
I called Sarah’s name and made my request, then vanished in my own way, locking the door behind me and trying to forget about everything but whatever garbage I had lined up in my que. When I dozed off that night, it was only seven o’clock; it didn’t matter.
One day down. Thirteen to go.
Chapter Two
Hunter
I jumped back to the old garage and looked around; I could tell no one had been here since I died. It was boarded up, a courtesy I was sure my dad’s old friends showed him while he mourned. The two by fours were too straight, no tell-tale divots in the wood where a shaky hand tried again and again to get the nail in. He hadn’t done the work himself. That was basically the by-line of my father’s entire life.
Did he really miss me? I didn’t know. It seemed like he would, in a sense; I did the work, paid the bills, made sure he was fed. But now the Warfield estate would handle all of that, a collection of attorneys and accountants Jake called to action with a whisper, my death on his doorstep the unofficial reason. Molly was safe, pampered even; Tristan and her worked up a special ward that allowed her to tell me when she was in real danger using a one-word incantation. She only had to whisper and I would be called to her side, no matter where she was. That took some serious mojo, Tristan explained, but with a little added juice it would be nothing for us. Sure enough, once we all made a little cut in our palms Jake and Tristan held hands, enclosing Molly and I while we held hands, and that was it; I felt weird, weirder than I expected given all the shit I’ve seen so far. But having a dude at your back whispering away while everybody’s holding hands was some new shit for me. It stung when it took hold, which surprised me, but Tristan said it was a Binding and that was to be expected. Jake shrugged it off, so I did too. I just fucking hate magic, I guess.
Which isn’t strange, given what it’s done to me and the people I care about.
I didn’t go inside. I just used this as my new pushing off point, because when I was still learning how to jump it was familiar. I knew every dip in the driveway, laid the concrete myself with Jake two summers ago. I knew when the shadows would be long and no one would be around. It was safe.
I wanted to see if I could make it all the way home. Well, such as it was; I was trying not to get too comfortable in Tristan’s hide-out. I watched the shadows stretch a little farther and closed my eyes, concentrating on the way the pine needles smelled when the wind swept down through the trees, the sound of the woods, the crackle of magic in the air surrounding his little house. The faint scent of what I knew now to be wolves, mingling with the promise of snow. The gold and grey tones in the sky, right where the sun sank behind the mountains.
When I opened my eyes, I was there.
It barely took any physical effort at all. I immediately dug around in my pocket to find the book Tristan handed me before I left, a tiny little leather-bound thing with an embossed wolf’s head on the cover. Sure enough, it was unharmed; we suspected as much since I didn’t tend to show up places naked, and if my boots could make it through a jump it seemed a book could too. I pulled out my phone and texted him; it took me ages to text people. My fingers are fucking huge and I’m goddamn dyslexic; you’d think voice to text would make it easier, but I’m paranoid about tracking so I use a burner and the only times I ever tried, on school equipment back in the day, my accent butchered the commands anyway. No problem. Next? With Baby, I made a real effort to write something remotely charming, because that’s what you did with a girl you liked, right? With Molly I just called; our conversations usually lasted about thirty seconds. But Tristan and I were strangers with an even stranger intimacy between us, abilities that shouldn’t exist and a shared space we shouldn’t have to share. He wrote me back right away.
Come get me. Let’s give it a try.
I don’t know if he was really that brave, or just had a deathwish after all the shit he’d been through. He was hard to read, but his cabin gave me more of an idea about who he really was—neat, bookworm, but real fucking butch. There were no amenities in the place when I first got there beyond hot water, and even that was dependent on firewood he chopped himself. He ordered a bunch of solar panels and a system that he had sent to town, but before me he hadn’t bothered to heat the place with anything but a fireplace… And Baby, I suspected, was his real motivator. That was something else I sensed about Tristan—I couldn’t say I knew it for sure, but he… He respected love. I don’t want to say romance, because there was too much melancholy in the way he handled things. I just got the feeling. There were only three things in that cabin he took with him when he left it to me: two books and a photograph. It wasn’t a girl I knew personally, but she looked a hell of a lot like I imagined Zella Keller would have, five or six years ago.
I took a deep breath, concentrated on the foyer, the big entryway where Raven zapped me, and closed my eyes. In the space of another breath, I was looking around at the double staircases and Tristan’s surprised face, his eyes twinkling with amusement. It was a good look on him. “Well now,” he said slowly, as if I’d done some particularly tricky magic. “This will come in handy, Mr. Black. Yes indeed.”
Oh goodie. Another magical motherfucker with big plans for me. “Handy for what?”
“For escapes primarily, I suspect,” he said, walking down the rest of the stairway and studying the place where I stood, as if it would give him some new information. It was the place where I died, but I didn’t realize it until his eyes met mine. “I hope. I have other ideas, but I would very much like to avoid—”
“Let’s see if this works,” I tol
d him, glancing down the hall, “and then you can tell me all about the things you want to avoid.”
He nodded, understanding instantly; Leo was under house arrest, as Jake put it, but no one was under a gag order. It would be too easy for Baby to happen to see me and call my name instinctively. I’d have to let Jake know what we were up to soon, so he could find a way to work that into a protection spell. Tristan and I stood there awkwardly for a moment, and then he sighed. “I understand you held her in your arms?”
I hadn’t thought about it when I did it; I just had to get her out of there. When I kidnapped Baby I made about a dozen small jumps, one after another, to get her down to that cell. When I took her out, I went straight here; it was about four miles as the crow flies. And unfortunately—well, fortunately, in that moment, because I couldn’t have handled any distance between her and I—I had indeed been holding her in my arms when I did it. “Yes.”
“Let’s…” Tristan did not like to touch or be touched; I didn’t get the feeling it would matter whether or not I was a six and a half foot part-wolf warlock or a Las Vegas Showgirl, he wouldn’t want to hold hands regardless. He came closer to me, and in the spirit of trust I just grabbed him and pulled him into a hug, as if we were real friends, the way Jake and I were. When I let go, we were already standing in the snow outside of the cabin. Took about half a second, even faster than when I’d done it before—maybe the magic could tell when I was trying to help someone, and busted its ass a little bit. No idea. But he stumbled backwards, the only time I’d ever seen him taken completely aback. I didn’t know if it was because I’d hugged him or because he suddenly found himself outside of the cabin.
We met here after I died and came back to life; he snuck off for a few days and drove me up to Buckeye proper, meeting me at a rest stop where he promised no one’d come looking. He was right. I felt the shift in magic as soon as I got to the place, like fault lines beneath my feet were coming to life; he explained that was the end of Guild territory and the beginning of the pack’s. They were locked in a cold war, basically, and had been for centuries. He kind of stressed the point that if we were all very, very lucky, it would stay that way.
I got a little hung up when he mentioned werewolves.
“I understand,” he told me, sliding into the truck beside me with a briefcase on his lap, “that sounds ludicrous.” This was a goddamn truck stop off of Highway 81, with burgers and lot lizards and over-priced gas. Werewolf Territory? What the fuck, man? He slid a look my way and shrugged as I pulled out of the lot and onto a smaller route leading up into the mountains; technically we were in the Poconos, but he said there was a lot of wilderness out there, and we’d be driving most of the day. “There are a lot of things that sound ludicrous and are perfectly happy to let you continue believing that, right up until they take a bite out of you. Werewolves aren’t subtle, at least. You will be surrounded, but…” He gave me another quick appraisal, his face blank, “I think you’ll fit right in.”
“Is that because of whatever the hell this magic is in me?” He didn’t seem offended by how much I hated magic, or disappointed, or whatever else the Rose and even Jake sometimes seemed to be when I talked about it. If anything, I got the feeling Tristan hated magic—and most of the people who used it—a hell of a lot more than me.
“Yes.” He was quiet for a minute, watching the buildings and cars thin out as we went deeper into the woods along the skinny highway. “The Ashwood Coven designed the Council positions to maintain itself—some are defensive, some are offensive, some are simply… An experiment, I guess, an idea they wanted to see come to fruition. I don’t really know. No one does.”
“Like me?”
“I doubt any of them teleported,” Tristan said, frowning, “or it would’ve come up in the records somewhere.” We talked off and on for a few more hours, about magic, and Jake, mostly. Finally we wound up on another state route about an hour before sundown. He raised an eyebrow and gestured for me to turn off the narrow two lane highway and up a winding road, towards the dim sparkle of a town through the trees, resting on a ridge. We drove higher and higher onto the mountain, and he mulled over his words as we went. When he spoke again I remembered our earlier conversation. “I doubt there’s any like us, Hunter. Doubt there ever has been or will be again.”
I was glad to hear it.
Tristan pointed out a couple shops and restaurants as we drove through the village, his dark eyes flickering with that same eerie shine Jake’s sometimes had. Sometimes he looked like a damn cat in the dark. The sun was setting over the tips of the pine trees as they ran along the edge of what appeared to be a hard ridge, right behind the line of buildings on the west side of the street; we were driving south now, clear through the tiny town, but heading up and up, into more chilly forest. “It gets cold here,” Tristan said absently. He explained about the solar panels, and told me he’d come back and help, that it would be easy since now he knew he didn’t need to drive.
“Can Jake come?”
“Maybe,” Tristan said, frowning again. He twisted his lip. “Another warlock might concern the wolves, though. You might want to hold off.”
“What about Molly?” I swallowed hard. Baby was my next immediate thought, but I didn’t want to rush her, either.
“I think she’d be alright,” Tristan said, mulling it over. “I’m sure she’ll be, after they… After they figure out where you fit with them in the pack.”
“I’m not joining any fucking pack,” I muttered, the idea of another magical alliance making me a little sick to my stomach. Would that turn me into a full-blown werewolf? Or would I be stuck in two different shitshows instead of one?
“You can’t join the pack if you signed the book,” Tristan said patiently, pointing out a tiny clearing with a dirt road veering off under the trees. We followed it up another forty degree grade, then landed in a muddy clearing, surrounded by pines. After another twenty minute walk, we emerged in front of the cabin.
When he left the next day, I started practicing longer jumps; we didn’t graduate to jumping with a person until after the meeting, and I was so damn happy to think it might be Baby I held in my arms next time I almost hugged him again.
It looked almost the same now as it had when he brought me here the first time; I was picky, though, in a way Tristan wasn’t. I liked things to be not just neat, but clean, so that’s what I did. Stacy’s influence, and if I was honest, a form of rebellion against my father’s slovenliness. So I’d deep cleaned the cabin in a way I would be ashamed to describe to another man, then went about buying a bunch of bulk stuff to stock up for winter. Everywhere I went in town, eyes followed me; the few that spoke warned me that this winter was supposed to be a hard one. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to spook me or not. I got enough food to last three months and started clearing out some of the lots in the back so I could plant some things in spring, then asked around about a mechanic position. I’d fixed three cars since I got here, but the townsfolk were just bringing them up to the cabin, not offering me permanent work. I was fine with it. The parts were easy to order and there was a junkyard just the other side of the Guild Line, which is what the locals called the place where the wards wore off.
They didn’t talk about stuff like that in front of normal people. There was a decent tourist trade here, apparently, although by the time I showed up everyone was battening down for winter. This was the coldest part of the range, a man mentioned off-handedly to me as I fixed his carburetor—well, a werewolf mentioned, I suppose. Tristan seemed to instantly register everything I’d done since I got here, the way I set up blocks to work on cars in the yard and arranged the mud room, the full cabinets and banged out rugs. I’m handy, but I’m not crafty, so it was just as bare as when he left it. No pillows on the couch, no curtains. No nothing, really, but a rough pinewood table in the kitchen that looked handmade. He ran his fingers over it while I turned to make him a cup of coffee, as if he were saying hello. Or maybe goodbye.
/> “This is still your place,” I called over my shoulder, but when I turned around he’d opened up his briefcase and pulled some papers out, his face stubborn as he sat down. “Nope,” I started, shaking my head, but when Tristan met my eyes I decided to listen to what he was about to say.
“If it truly makes you uncomfortable to own it, that’s fine,” he said in his quiet way. “We can wait to sign these. But the fact is that you need to stay here, Hunter. You need to be near people that will understand who and what you are, and will never, ever betray you to other warlocks.”
“They’re all the fucking same,” I said, shrugging as I sat down and shoved a mug across to him. “They’re all—”
“Warlocks are, sure,” Tristan said, taking it from me and closing the briefcase. “There is a reason virtually all of the breeds stick to themselves, and almost none, when the need arises, will ally with witches. They’re known as selfish to the point of monstrosity, to the point of insanity even.”
“Sounds about right,” I said, and sipped my coffee.
“It’s not free,” Tristan said, watching me. After a moment, he took a sip of his coffee too. “Not in the way you imagine.”
“I don’t imagine anything is free,” I said bluntly, and he nodded.
“I mean that I need your help. I want you to stay here and stay safe because I need you, Hunter. More than before, now that I know what you can do.”
“You didn’t before?”
“I thought you might be able to walk through walls, something like that,” Tristan said, shrugging. “Transubstantiation. I wasn’t sure how you got into the library. I knew you got in the mansion without opening the door, both times.”
