Traitor's Son: The Raven Duet Book #2

by Hilari Bell

  Jase was under the car with a tester, tracing the flow of power from the starter to each of the batteries, when the electric motor whirred to life only inches from his nose. He banged his head on the pavement, then dragged himself from under the car. With all the panels open, he could hear the motor’s almost-inaudible purr as he stalked around to glare at the girl who leaned against the front fender.

  Raven still wore the flannel shirt, but with jeans and gel-soles beneath. The medicine bag was hanging around her neck.

  “What did you do? Tamper with the starter’s programming?”

  One fine brow lifted. “I wouldn’t begin to know how to do that. The pouch is here. You’re here. That’s why it’s running.”

  “Carpo! All the neo-hippie voojoo in the world can’t stop an electric motor. It just can’t!”

  Raven sighed. “You’re stubborn, I’ll give you that. Go watch what happens to your motor while I walk away.”

  Jase, who wanted to take a look at the motor anyway, went back to the trunk. Through the clear cover, he could see the inside of the cylinder spin. Then it stopped.

  His eyes flashed to Raven, but she was more than fifty feet from the car. Smirking, damn her.

  No one else was anywhere near.

  Raven walked toward him and the motor began to spin.

  She walked away and the motor stopped.

  She turned and drew near again, and the motor ran.

  She walked away and it stopped.

  The next time she came all the way back to where Jase stood, arms folded, scowling.

  “You could have tampered with the battery connections. Put in some sort of switch that cuts in and out on a proximity signal.”

  “Without your finding it? You’ve looked at every inch of that thing. About four times, by my count.”

  She was right. He would have found a switch, or any other device embedded in the system.

  “You’re wearing a damping field then, something that disrupts every kind of energy.”

  But it was when she walked away that the motor stopped. When she came near, it worked. All the other electronics in the house and the garage were fine. The Tesla’s controls lit. The diagnostic computer was live.

  Jase’s scowl deepened and she laughed.

  “Oh, come on. You can admit that I can change into a bird, and my enemies can stop sound, but I can’t affect a car?”

  Jase looked at the spinning silver cylinder.

  “How are you doing this?”

  “I convinced your batteries that whenever the pouch isn’t nearby they’re too cold to run.”

  “But they’re not cold. They’re warm.”

  “They think they’re cold.”

  “Batteries can’t think!”

  “Yeah, well, they don’t know that. Do you want me to walk back and forth some more to prove it?”

  Jase looked at the humming motor. She could affect his car. And if she could do that, maybe the rest of it was real. Those football players had been plenty real, and the idea of meeting them again sent cold fear sliding down his spine. But what if the world really was in danger? And he was the only one who could save it? Humanity was clearly doomed. Still . . .

  “What is it, exactly, that you want me to do?”

  ***

  Jase picked her up the next morning, in a Tesla that was running just fine now that he wore the medicine bag under his shirt.

  He’d tested it himself after she left. As long as he had the pouch with him, the car ran. When he left the pouch in his room, it didn’t. And he’d looked in all the places a proximity switch could have been spliced in, and found nothing.

  He’d kept a wary eye out for football players and not seen a sign of them. He must have convinced them he knew nothing. According to Raven, they’d keep looking elsewhere till he healed the ley. With magic. So he’d probably never see them again. Given the choice between fighting football players and losing his car, well, sometimes you had to take a risk.

  That evening at dinner he told his parents he’d be out with friends all day Saturday. If his father didn’t have a job for him, Jase often spent weekends hanging with Ferd or Mick or Brendan—they didn’t question it.

  Raven was waiting on the curb just before he reached the ramp onto Highway 1. The sun was shining today, and she was wearing a stretchie and using the flannel shirt as a jacket. The stretchie wasn’t as tight as the top she’d worn to seduce him, but Jase noticed that several cars slowed as they passed.

  He still couldn’t forgive her for hexing his car, but he felt a twinge of pride that a girl who looked like that was waiting for him.

  He’d left the top down, and she climbed nimbly over the low door.

  “Where are we going?” Jase headed for the highway, since he was pretty sure whatever was going to take place would be a nature thing, not a middle-of-Anchorage thing. And the sooner they were finished, the sooner his car would be free. If he tried his best and failed, surely she’d be willing to let his car go before she went to find someone else.

  “That way.” She pointed east. “We want trees for this.”

  On the highway the wind was too loud to converse in anything softer than a shout, so they said very little.

  Somewhat to Jase’s surprise, Raven told him not to turn off on Highway 3, which led north to Denali and Fairbanks, but he didn’t mind. Past Palmer, away from the cameras and speed recorders of the grid, the traffic thinned. Eventually, Jase came across a long straight stretch with no traffic at all and let the Tesla go.

  Some girls squealed when he punched the accelerator and the g-force threw them back against their seat. With the top up, it felt like riding a roller coaster. With the top down, Jase thought, it felt more like being fired out of a cannon.

  Raven threw back her head and laughed. Her hair writhed in the backwash, the tips flicking Jase’s face and neck till she gathered it up with both hands and twisted it into a thick coil.

  Treacherous as she’d proved herself to be, Jase found the idea of getting his hands into that silky hair so distracting that he had to slow down, because he wasn’t paying enough attention to the road.

  “Wow!” Raven shouted as the wind died back to its normal rush. “I didn’t know you could go that fast, in this form.”

  That was such a startling idea that Jase took his foot off the accelerator, and the car slowed sharply.

  “Is that what it’s like to fly?”

  “Yes. No. In a way. The sense of speed can be like that, particularly when you’re diving. But this car, it’s completely rooted to the earth. Flying is all about air. And sometimes you have to put a lot of effort into flying, and then it’s nothing like—oh, we’ve arrived. Pull off here.”

  Jase had expected . . . he didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t an ordinary pullout in the middle of the taiga.

  “I know they look sick,” Jase said, “but the tree plague hasn’t reached here yet. The icky woods always look like this.”

  Scraggly and misshapen, the treetops drooping wearily, this had to be the least beautiful forest in the world. One of his mother’s European friends had said that she’d never been to Chernobyl, but now she knew what it would look like. It was one of his first-grade classmates who’d dubbed them “the icky woods,” and for Jase the name had stuck.

  “I know the plague isn’t here yet,” said Raven. “The leys where it’s set in are so poisoned that it’s going to take more than one human to heal them. What we’re doing here is strengthening this ley so it can’t spread north. Once we’ve healed the leys that ring the plague, stopped it from spreading, we can work inward and heal the disease itself.”

  “Leys plural?” Jase asked. “We? All of them? I want my car back!”

  “Not you,” Raven assured him. “Other humans can do the rest. I told you, if we can heal one ley, open all its nexuses so the power flows strong and clean, the neutrals will keep my enemies in check so I can do the rest. Kelsa opened this ley from the central crossing all the way
to Alaska. Now the power’s building at a . . . sluggish point, right here. If you can free it, I think healing just two more points would leave it clear all the way to the terminal node.”

  “So if I can just do three of these healing things, the football players will leave me alone?”

  “Forever. I have the neutrals’ word on that.”

  She seemed to trust that a lot more than Jase did. And once the Tesla was running again, all these neutrals and enemies would be none of his business.

  “All right then.” Jase got out of the car and went around to help her. “What do I do?”

  Somewhat to his annoyance, Raven wiggled out of the low seat without his help.

  “First we have to hike a little way into the woods. You need to be able to touch the trees, and I’m afraid the traffic would distract you.”

  Jase had thought they might go hiking—New-Agey nature healing—so he’d worn waterproof boots, and put a pack with water and trail snacks into the trunk.

  “Let me get the car locked up.” A few pushed buttons later the Tesla was protected from both thieves and rain, and Jase was once more tramping into the wilderness on Raven’s heels.

  They hadn’t walked for more than ten minutes before she stopped, and looked around at the damp, mossy woodland.

  “We’re right on top of a nexus here, and the taiga—your “icky woods”—appears all over central Alaska. If you can reach it, heal the ley through these trees and plants, power should be able to flow all the way to the node once a couple of places on the coast have been opened.”

  “You said these trees weren’t sick.” A mosquito buzzed near, drawn by the warmth of his body, and he swatted at it. His repel-vacs were up-to-date, but sometimes Alaskan mosquitoes didn’t care. “Why do we have to heal them if the tree plague isn’t here?”

  Raven looked impatient, but her voice was serious when she replied, “It’s not so much that you’re healing the trees, it’s that in joining them to the power of the ley you’ll be freeing their power. The type of nature that you heal here will help to clean and invigorate the leys wherever they connect. This kind of vegetation, the sparse taiga, reaches all through the north of this continent and into Siberia. If you can heal this ley through the taiga, I’ll have a head start on more major leys as well.”

  This made no sense to Jase—but he hadn’t expected it to make sense. The sooner he tried, the sooner she’d release his car. “OK. What do you want me to do?”

  Raven sighed. “First, sit down.”

  She settled onto one of the mossy tussocks, and Jase eyed the one behind him dubiously. The seat of his pants wasn’t waterproof. He touched the moss, finding it soft and not too wet, so he seated himself facing the girl.

  “Now what?”

  “You have to . . . open communication between yourself and the trees, the moss, all the living plants around us. Once you’ve—”

  “Wait, communicate? You want me to talk to the trees?”

  “Not just the trees, though they’d do. And not just talk. You need to—”

  “You brought me here to talk to a tree?” Though given what he’d seen her do, maybe that wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. “Will it talk back?”

  Raven rubbed her temples, as if they were beginning to ache.

  “When I say ‘communicate,’ I don’t mean talk like we’re doing. You need to open yourself, your energy, and connect it to theirs. Once you’ve established a connection, your intent can affect that shared energy. You’ll probably need to use an incantation to focus it; most humans do. When you’re connected and focused, then you scatter a pinch of the catalyst. The catalyst will seal and amplify the connection, so your will to heal can become reality.”

  Jase looked around dubiously. Dark scrawny spruce trees. Little bushy things. Yellow-brown moss and swamp mud, because the taiga was a swamp.

  “Open myself how? Stop scowling like that. I’m willing to try, but I just don’t get it!”

  She did her best to explain, and he continued to try for the next two hours, but he never got it. He’d never been more glad to get into the car and drive a girl home in his life. And at least his abysmal failure as a magical healer meant that he didn’t have to search the shadows around his garage for lurking football players. But it still felt like failure.

  “I told you to find someone else,” he said. He wouldn’t mind at all, as long as she let his car go before she vanished.

  “No,” said Raven. “I think I tried to start you out too fast. Baby steps, that’s what we need. And for you to be less frustrated.”

  “I have a feeling I’m going to be frustrated for a long time,” Jase said gloomily, and didn’t even think about the double meaning till Raven laughed.

  She said she’d come and get him first thing tomorrow, to start whatever “baby steps” she had in mind. When Jase got home, he told his parents he’d be gone the next day and went to bed still frustrated by his failure. And in other ways as well.

  He was ready to hide at the first flicker of the shadow, but instead someone knocked on the inside of his closet door.

  “Who’s there?”

  It wasn’t exactly an invitation, but he wasn’t surprised when the old woman stepped out of his closet.

  “The energy of the catalyst has changed. It’s so corrupted I can’t find it at all. But you’re closer to it, aren’t you?”

  The pouch was back in his desk drawer, which Jase supposed was closer than the garage—but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. It had worked on the football players, after all. “And I think you’re the one who sent . . . something to hunt me, didn’t you? In my dreams? Well, I want it to stop. Call it off, whatever it is.”

  She stood perfectly still in the center of his room, but her expression put Jase in mind of one of his grandfather’s dogs, sniffing scents on the wind.

  “Yes, you’re bound into it now. I can sense that much, at least. He found you.”

  “That boy you told me about? I haven’t seen him.”

  The dark old eyes were fierce. “You’re ly—oh. Of course he’d change. You’re not a liar, boy. You’re an idiot.”

  “Thanks,” said Jase. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t—”

  “That’s why you’re an idiot,” the old woman said. “But you don’t have to die for it. Tell me where you are, where the pouch is. I’ll come get it, and you’ll see no more of any of us. In dreams or out of them.”

  Realization dawned. This wasn’t just a dream. “You’re a shapeshifter! You’re . . .”

  One of Raven’s enemies.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. Jase prayed she was reading his expression, instead of his mind. “But Raven’s no more your friend than I am—though I’ve no doubt she’s prettier. Did she tell you what happened to the last human she talked into carrying that dust?”

  “The girl who threw it over the border fence? Raven said she’d been arrested, though she was released later.”

  “She was arrested. And it saved her life. Because if she hadn’t thrown herself into the custody of human guards, she’d have been killed by our ambush just four miles past the border. Yes, we’d have killed her for the dust she carried. And if you use it, we’ll kill you too. Spare yourself, boy. Spare your parents that grief. Tell me where you are, and let me take that pouch off your hands.”

  No one had ever threatened to kill him before, not someone who meant it. The memory of his face slamming into the asphalt parking lot returned, vividly, and his cheekbone throbbed again. Jase clasped his hands around his knees to hide the fact that they wanted to shake.

  “If you’re willing to kill me, I’d really be an idiot to tell you where I am. Besides, Raven says that if the leys aren’t healed the tree plague will spread through the world and everyone will die.”

  And if he gave away that pouch, his car might never run again.

  The old woman snorted. “What nonsense! Do you real
ly think the world could be destroyed by a few sick trees?”

  “It was almost destroyed by a few degrees’ change in temperature,” Jase said. “Not that long ago. I’ve taken biology. This planet’s atmosphere, its oxygen, comes from the forests. They say the tree plague won’t spread out of the Tropics, but if it did we’d be in real trouble!”

  “But your own scientists say it won’t spread far,” the old woman pointed out. “Why not trust them?”

  “I might trust them,” Jase said. “I don’t trust you. Get out of my room.”

  Or did he mean out of his dream? In either case, he was going to do something about it.

  Jase had given up on golf years ago, but the putter his father had told him to practice with was still stuck behind his dresser. Jase got it and stood before the old woman. She was shorter than he was, and had to be much weaker, but she didn’t look frightened.

  “Go,” said Jase. “I’ll use it. I swear I will.”

  “You think that can hurt me? You’re dreaming.”

  He was dreaming, wasn’t he? It wasn’t as if she was a real person, who might actually be injured. So Jase swung the putter with all his might, and almost fell over when it passed right through her.

  The old woman smiled. “Your weapons have no power here. Mine, on the other hand . . .”

  She stepped forward and slapped him, hard enough to rock his head to one side, hard enough that Jase woke up, standing in the middle of the room with his heart pounding.

  The closet door was closed. The old woman was gone. But his face still stung from the force of her slap.

  Chapter 6

  Jase slept in next morning, and woke up still debating whether or not to tell Raven about his dreams. On one hand, that old lady was one of her enemies. On the other hand . . .