Poison Tree dos-8

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  Sarik heard the false bravado in his words, but sometimes that was the only way to face one’s fears. Fake it til you make it, she thought.

  Meanwhile, as Lynzi and Jason discussed how to handle Maya, Sarik had to nd a way to explain to the child who had probably saved her life as well as Alysia’s that it wasn’t nice to kill people.

  “Are these people warriors?” Jeht asked after they left the room.

  Maybe that was the answer.

  “Yes,” she said, “but not in the way you think. There are ways to be a leader, and to protect your people, that don’t rely on violence and brute strength.”

  She had been thinking that if the cubs could not return to the Mistari, she needed to convince them that they didn’t need to be warriors. That wasn’t the right approach. It was too late to convince them that they didn’t always need to be ready for battle, but perhaps it wasn’t too late to make them see that not every battle involved claws or a blade.

  Maybe, along the way, she could finally convince herself of the same thing.

  CHAPTER 13

  ALYSIA SAW CHRISTIAN go down but couldn’t spare any attention to see how badly he was hurt. Tristes were tough to kill—most people weren’t crazy enough to try. At that moment, she had to put all her focus on the two vampires who were flanking her.

  And then there was one, she thought as Christian reached out and dragged one of them away from her. Judging from the bloodsucker’s shriek, Christian used more than his bare hands. Tristes were famous for making vampires their preferred prey, and an injured Triste was probably in no mood to be gentle.

  Alysia saw the sniper just past where Christian was grappling with his vampiric target, and managed to throw her opponent in front of the next bolt that came her way. She followed him down with a stake, but the archer reloaded too quickly; before she could get under cover, she felt the impact in her esh. A steel-and-aluminum shaft shattered her kneecap on its way to burying its head in that vulnerable joint, sending black pain through her.

  She was more aware of shadows and movement than she was of events in the next few seconds while she struggled to breathe, to somehow get her body ready to fight.

  She looked up again to nd Christian standing, facing the direction where the archer had been a moment ago. The attacker must have decided flight was the better part of valor.

  Thankfully, he didn’t see what Alysia saw, which was Christian stumbling back so he could lean against the car and slide slowly to the ground, gray-faced. The blood on his lips spread further when he tried to talk and ended up coughing instead.

  It took all Alysia’s willpower to move herself closer and not scream as the bolt in her knee shifted. The distance couldn’t have been more than a couple feet, but the move sapped all her energy. By the time she reached Christian, she was ghting nausea and breathing heavily, struggling just to stay conscious.

  Don’t you dare pass out, she told herself. You wil not wake up in a better place.

  Christian reached over, and the instant his ngertips touched her cheek, the worst of the pain receded. The uttery sensation in her chest remained, as did the pulse of adrenaline and the bolt that had completely punctured her left knee. Her good knee. He had been able to take away her body’s reactions, but not the injury itself.

  As she examined the bolt high in Christian’s chest, she said, “If you were still human, I’d say your only chance with that injury is a damn good witch.”

  How well could Christian heal these days? How fast? And how well could he ght once he was done? Because the vampire with the crossbow might have run for now, but he would be back, probably with reinforcements.

  “Pull it.”

  At first, Alysia could only stare. “You sure?”

  When he nodded, she tried to remind herself that he knew what he could take far better than she did. It took a moment to get in a position where she had leverage, but then she reached forward, braced her opposite hand next to the wound, and yanked on the shaft with all her strength.

  She could feel it fighting her. The tip was barbed; it tore flesh as she ripped it out. After it was free, she instinctively slapped a hand over the wound, trying to staunch the ow of blood as Christian hunched over, his breathing full of rattling and gargling sounds that gradually lessened, until within a minute he was able to look back up.

  His wound wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t bleeding anymore.

  While Christian leaned over, Alysia watched with a curious detachment as he snapped o the front of the bolt set in her knee, a move that should have caused agonizing pain, and then tugged the remainder of the shaft from her body before pushing himself to his feet.

  Alysia looked at her wound long enough to convince herself that it wasn’t gushing blood like it should have been and then accepted the hand Christian o ered to help her stand.

  The pain was gone, but the tendons or muscles or whatever were in the knee had been sliced up; there was no way her left leg would support her. She prayed Christian had some kind of a plan.

  Thankfully, the recent storm had made an icy mess but had left little snow behind. They left no obvious tracks in the frozen ground as they limped together into the woods, Alysia leaning heavily on Christian to walk.

  “If we cut through the woods this way, I think we’ll get back to the gas station we passed,” Christian said. “I can veil us so we won’t be easily spotted.”

  “Isn’t that the same technique that totally failed on Lynzi?” Alysia asked. She didn’t want to be critical, but she did want to be realistic.

  “She’s one of my kind,” Christian replied. “Harder to hide from. I—” He paused and leaned against the nearest tree for a minute before continuing. “I can keep us hidden from vamps and humans without using too much power.”

  He hadn’t o ered to heal her again. He could keep them hidden, but he didn’t have any extra magic to burn.

  The hike seemed to take forever. Alysia tried to ignore the way the numbness started to travel farther up her leg and the way her head started to spin. Pain was the body’s way of saying, We’re broken. Stop everything and help me. She didn’t have time to stop, and she couldn’t function with the pain, so she tried not to think how much more damage she was doing this way.

  “I can’t sense anyone except the human girl running the pumps,” Christian said, “but the vamps do have that nasty habit of appearing unannounced. We should move fast.”

  “A stolen car will be reported in minutes,” Alysia said as they reached the gas station, a one-pump, family-owned affair, “but we need transport. How are you at persuasion?”

  “I think I can manage. You wait here, watch my back.”

  Stay out of the way, she heard, but since she was hobbled and just about useless at that moment, she decided not to take it personally.

  She waited at the forest’s edge while Christian approached the gas station. As he walked away, she began to feel her body again, starting with a vague ache in her knee, like a deep bruise or the soreness left behind after unusually heavy exercise. It wasn’t intolerable, but it served as a warning.

  It wasn’t just for the sake of her own comfort that she hated watching him walk across the parking lot, though. She knew that few attackers would bother to take Christian on unless they were sure of a payout, which they would only get if they caught Alysia.

  Logically, that meant if they didn’t see her, they shouldn’t go after him. But logic didn’t always dictate these things, and it didn’t take into account the fact that Maya might still be holding a grudge against Christian and Alysia, who had wiped out almost a dozen of her brats six years earlier.

  Christian leaned in to irt with the cashier. Hopefully he could convince her to ignore the blood, hand over her keys, and then forget all about it. Meanwhile, Alysia watched for approaching vehicles. Christian would sense if anyone nonhuman approached, but that was little consolation when dealing with Bruja, and even a Triste did not have eyes in the back of his head.

  The driver of the B
MW convertible that pulled in at that moment was polite enough to have the top down, which meant Alysia recognized her instantly. She had been a member of Crimson back when Alysia had joined, and she still was, judging by Christian’s wary expression when she called his name and he turned to look at her.

  Alysia debated stepping forward, but waited. Christian looked cautious but not concerned, which meant he believed he could handle himself. Alysia wished she could make out what they were saying. The woman seemed to be asking questions, to which Christian gave terse responses.

  They both turned toward the next vehicle that approached, a beat-up truck in which

  Alysia could see the driver one moment but not the next: vampire. The fact that he had disappeared was not a good sign. Alysia immediately turned, putting one of the larger trees to her back as she checked around her, which meant she wasn’t looking when the truck exploded.

  She threw herself at and felt the double shock wave roll over her, rst from the truck and then from the pumps. Her ears registered pressure more than sound, and her skin was aware of a slap of heat, though she was far enough away not to get the brunt of the blast.

  Ash and debris were falling, but she started to vault back to her feet.

  The pain hit her like whiplash. All the agony of a brutal injury that had been ignored and further abused for more than an hour crashed on her. No warning. No buildup, which would have helped her mind tolerate it.

  She tried to draw the knife at her waist but wasn’t fast enough to avoid a boot to the head and the inevitable blackness that followed.

  She was walking down stairs. Everyone else in the house was asleep, but she wanted a drink of water. It was dark, but the path was familiar.

  There was a noise in the living room.

  Don’t look, she tried to tel her thirteen-year-old self, but of course a memory cannot listen.

  She went to look.

  She recognized him as the brother of one of her classmates. Why was he at her house at three in the morning? And why was he going through the box labeled “silver” that her parents had been fighting over for the last week?

  Don’t make a sound! Just turn away before he notices.

  “Andy?” she asked.

  He turned toward her with panic in his eyes. Even at that age, she could see the moment when he decided he had to shut her up.

  She ran. He fol owed her, and that was when she went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. He was more than a foot tal er than she was, but she thought that once he realized she had a weapon, he would run away. He was supposed to run.

  “Why didn’t you run away?” she asked the memory. “Why did you—”

  The memory shattered into reality as someone struck her. She struggled, ghting the impression that she was still grappling with Andy, and realized that her wrists were chained to the wall above her. She looked down and saw that someone had wrapped a bandage around her knee, and it was stained dark red. Seeing it made her queasy, and also made her realize she wasn’t feeling as much pain as she should have been. Someone had drugged her, either chemically or magically.

  “What—” She started to ask a question and discovered there was something wrong with her jaw. She was really not looking forward to what it was going to feel like when she started feeling pain again.

  “I have one simple question for you,” the man in front of her said.

  She struggled to focus her vision and realized at last where she was, and who was with her. She was in one of the private rooms at the back of the Onyx Hall. Once upon a time, it had been a dressing room. There was even a shiny, framed painting left on the far wall, its silver and gold embroidery glinting in the light, as if the room were still used for something glamorous.

  It wasn’t. The once-polished oor was scu ed and scratched, not to mention bloodstained, and the walls hadn’t been painted in decades. These days, Kral used this room as his own personal torture chamber. Just now, he was standing in front of Alysia with what she feared was her blood on his hands.

  Alysia tried to draw a breath, but it only made her head spin. Her ribs shifted in a funny way, suggesting worse damage than she remembered suffering before she was knocked out.

  “What was the question?” she managed to ask. A throbbing ache in her jaw warned her that the pain was not very far away.

  “Where is she?”

  Kral spoke slowly, clearly, in a way that betrayed it was taking all his self-control for him not to snap her like kindling. Alysia had seen what it looked like when he didn’t bother with that self-control, and she really did not want to bait him, but she didn’t have the rst idea what he wanted.

  He was not going to like that excuse.

  CHAPTER 14

  “ YOU’RE UPSET, ” JEHT observed as Sarik led the cubs back toward the front of the administration building.

  The obvious reply, reminding him about the recent attack and the deadly ght that he had nished, would mean nothing to him. The less obvious answer, though, was much more complicated.

  “Are you ever afraid?” she asked him as they entered the lobby and paused.

  For a moment he looked o ended; she saw the defensive answer form on his lips and the way he looked at his younger brother as if concerned about his reaction. Then he paused, taking in Sarik’s expression. “Sometimes,” he whispered. “When the blue men captured us, and then you came, I thought you would kill us.”

  Jeht and Quean had been picked up by human police after they had been thrown out of their own tribe, casualties of a coup that had overthrown the king, their father. It had taken time for SingleEarth to hear about them, to nd someone who spoke their language, and then for Sarik to reach them.

  Quean said in a tiny voice, “Sometimes I still think that.”

  Sarik resisted the urge to pick the smaller boy up and hug him tightly. He still saw her as his queen. Such an informal display would panic him.

  “Sometimes I’m afraid, too,” she admitted. “I’m afraid now, but there is nothing I can do about it. Every time I try to fix anything, people get hurt.”

  “Is the woman from earlier someone you hurt?” Jeht asked. “Is that why she is hunting you?”

  “The woman who interrupted our meeting?” Sarik asked. Jeht wouldn’t have understood anything the woman said, only that she had shouted a lot. “She’s also afraid, I think,” she answered. “Some people get angry when they’re scared.”

  Jeht frowned. “She didn’t smell angry or scared,” he said. “She yelled like a tiger, like she was trying to frighten people, but her scent never changed except when she looked at you.”

  The words caught in Sarik’s anxiety like a shhook, tugging. Jeht was right—everyone in the room who spoke English had been focused on their own concerns and on the woman’s words. They had all acknowledged that her behavior seemed “o ,” but none of them had consciously considered her body language.

  “Mary,” she asked as they entered the lobby, switching to English to speak to the secretary, “could I see the lobby tape from when our visitor came in?”

  Mary pulled up the footage with a few clicks, then moved aside so Sarik and Jeht could see. Sarik watched and listened as the distressed woman who had come to look for Alysia paced and pleaded with the receptionist.

  “Why isn’t she here?” the woman demanded of Mary.

  “She had to leave on business, I believe,” Mary replied vaguely.

  Sarik wondered if Mary had been fully informed yet about Alysia’s situation, or if she was trying to make the situation seem less dire in an attempt to calm the woman.

  “I have to see her.”

  “She isn’t here.” Mary was obviously losing her patience. “Please, let me show you to the conference room. The rest of the mediators are there. Maybe they can tell you more.”

  The woman nodded, her hand unconsciously going to a necklace barely visible at her throat, and then followed the receptionist out.

  Sarik hit the Back button and watched the scene again, this time with
no volume.

  There was a moment when the woman looked up at the camera immediately upon entering, obviously noticing it and pondering its presence. In that moment, it was as if her gaze locked with Sarik’s, and she seemed familiar in a way that made Sarik’s heart pound.

  She was dressed in an attractive but conservative style. Sarik remembered thinking how her clothing and hairstyle made the distinct shade of her hair less striking. Add colored contacts …

  I know her.

  They had met in another lifetime, when this woman had been an angry sixteen-year-old girl. She had been dressed in form- tting black, with that burgundy hair cascading around her face, a perfect match to her eyes. Her gaze had xed on the other angry young woman in the room, the tigress who glared at the newcomer with a warning to stay away.

  Her name was Ravyn.

  And she had come into SingleEarth and asked for Alysia, and then she had seen Sarik and established in a few angry sentences that Sarik was a tiger before she stormed out.

  “Who is she?” Jeht asked.

  Before Sarik could answer, Lynzi emerged with her phone at her ear, saying, “We’ll be there within the hour.”

  Lynzi saw Sarik and waved her over as she continued toward the parking lot.

  “That was one of the local hospitals,” she explained. “They called us to say they had someone in who was healing unusually and might be more our kind of patient. I can’t tell for sure from the description, but I think it’s Christian. The doctor said there was a young woman with him, apparently human, also severely hurt and unconscious. Pandora probably already knows if her student is in danger, but I’m not sure she’ll bother to help

  Alysia, so I’m going. Jason is scheduling a meeting with Maya.” Her phone rang. She glanced down and said, “That’s Diana. I called her in case I need help at the hospital.

  Hello?” she said, answering the call. “Wait, is—”

  Lynzi didn’t bother to wait to hear what else Sarik might say. Humans were so fragile; minutes, even seconds, could matter if Alysia was severely injured.