The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  She was about to shut the water off when she heard the click of the bathroom door latch. Which she could have sworn she’d locked. Just a push-button lock, so probably the catch inside was broken. Great.

  “Ricky?” Emma kept a cautionary hand on the shower curtain to hold it in place.

  “Not Ricky,” came the reply. Oh, sweet Jesus. Telly. Her heart leapt into her throat. It wasn’t that he frightened her; it was that he frightened her and she was naked. At least the shower curtain was a nice solid shade of beige. She swallowed past her pulse and managed to sound angry when she spoke.

  “What the hell are you doing in here? Can’t I even shower without one of you annoying the shit out of me?”

  Telly laughed; then Emma heard the clank of the toilet seat as it hit the cistern. She listened for a moment, and then… Was he serious?

  He spoke as if reading her mind, amusement filling his voice. “I really needed to go.”

  “Oh, Jesus, you couldn’t just wait?” Emma leaned her head against the tiles and ground her teeth.

  “I didn’t know how long you’d take. Besides, you might have crawled out the window and been halfway to Mexico by now. Then I would have been waiting a long time to go.” He punctuated this with the flush of the toilet, which consequently made the cold water of the shower drop out. Emma bit off an angry squeal and pressed herself up against the tiles to avoid being flash boiled.

  “I’m too big to crawl out the window,” she retorted as though she’d thought about it, cursing herself that she hadn’t. “Anyway, would it help to be on my way to Mexico?” Now there was a thought. Telly laughed, a knowing laugh. It set the skin on the back of her neck to crawling.

  “No,” he said, “Mexico is definitely not where you want to go.” For some unknown reason, this really gave Telly a case of the chuckles. Emma got the feeling he wasn’t just thinking about tight border security.

  “If you’re done, maybe you could leave. Y’know, let me get out of the shower in peace.” She waited, clutching a piece of shower curtain in one fist, half expecting Telly to whip it aside and fix her with his disturbing gray eyes. He didn’t, but he didn’t leave, either.

  Finally he sighed. “If you want to get out of the shower, I can close my eyes and hand you a towel, but we need to talk and we need to do it without the other two getting in the way.”

  Emma hung her head. “Like they’re not just going to barge in here when they get sick of listening through the door,” she said. “Like they can’t hear anyway.”

  “It’s locked, and they’re too civilized to kick it down.” Right, civilized. The only reason she thought Anton civilized was because she now had Telly to compare him to — it really hadn’t been her first impression of the guy. Besides —

  “The lock’s broken,” said Emma.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Emma took a deep breath. She knew she’d locked it.

  “Then I guess I don’t really have a choice,” she snapped, and shut the water off. “Hand me a towel, and you’d better close your fricking eyes.”

  9

  Glowering, Emma peeked around the curtain just enough to see Telly standing a few feet from the shower, facing the direction of the bathroom door, a towel in his outstretched hand. His eyes were firmly closed, but the faint smirk on his foxlike face suggested he could see her naked anyway — X-ray vision maybe.

  She snatched the towel from his hand and wrapped it around her body, tucked the corner of it, then rolled the top down to secure it. Still wet all over because she hadn’t dried off properly, and her hair clung to her neck and shoulders, but she was covered. It was a start.

  Telly opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder as she started to wring her hair out. The smirk slid from his face.

  Emma stifled the urge to hitch her towel up even higher over her chest — if nothing else, it would just leave more leg exposed. Instead she gestured towards the toilet. “Have a seat.” At least he’d put the lid down. She moved over to the wash basin where her handbag still sat, and pulled a travel sized hairbrush from it. This would hurt, she knew, but it had to be done.

  Telly watched her with apparent fascination as she started detangling the ends of her hair. It usually hung to just below her shoulders, but was longer when wet, so she had to take a big handful of it at the nape of her neck and flip it over her shoulder to slowly brush the tangles out.

  She’d worked her way up to the mid lengths, steadfastly ignoring Telly’s eyes on her, by the time he seemed to get bored with watching.

  He stood up and crossed the few steps to the basin. Emma paused, watching him, but he simply leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his bare chest. His skin looked very dark against the off white of the tiles — dark and smooth. Did shapechangers wax? Then she noticed his face was just as smooth, not even a hint of stubble. It gave the impression of boyishness, especially coupled with his height — he was only a couple inches taller than her — but there was nothing boyish about the deep creases at the corners of his eyes, or the leanness of his face, or the corded, sculpted tone of his body.

  Unlike with Anton, it was hard to appreciate just how attractive Telly really was. The strong lines of his jaw, the high cheekbones and impish nose, they simply weren’t enough to distract her from what her gut told her lay just beneath the surface.

  The way he studied her, she wanted to ask him if he believed the so-called prophecy, but he was the one who’d insisted they talk. She suspected she knew his tactic; keep quiet and spook her into talking first. But he didn’t know her well enough. One of the advantages of being badly socialized as a kid: she was good at silence, and she could take it just as good as she could give it. So she settled into brushing out the rest of her hair.

  It took him a full minute. Then he shrugged and spoke. “I don’t just believe in the prophecy. I know it to be true.”

  Emma narrowed her eyes at him. It was not the first time Telly had voiced an answer to a question she’d barely even phrased inside her own head, though none of the other times had been so obvious.

  “So you read minds? That’s just great. Not only can you invade a locked room, but you can invade my mind as well. Fabulous.”

  “It’s not so much mindreading as educated guessing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Such language,” he said with a raise of one eyebrow.

  “Like your language is any better. “

  He grinned quickly and glanced away. “Granted. But I can’t read your mind, not exactly. I’ve just spent a long time reading faces, watching thoughts move across them.”

  Emma paused, hairbrush in hand. “How long?”

  Telly cocked his head at her question, seemed to consider it for a moment, then smiled at her. It showed her the white of his teeth, the tips of incisors just slightly too long to pass as acceptably human. It made her wonder just what he was. A shapechanger, that much was certain, but nothing like Ricky. Nothing like what she knew.

  “I’ll tell you one day,” he said, “but not today.” His smile sobered. “And don’t ask me what I am. I’ll tell you one day — or someone else will. Someday when you can better understand it.”

  Well, that was suitably condescending. Emma went back to brushing her hair, punctuating her words with angry swipes. “What if I don’t want to understand, someday? What if I don’t want to be a part of the world you’re bringing me into?” Except she already knew the answer to that question.

  Telly sighed. “You’re already a part of it. It calls to you, just as you call to us.”

  “What do you mean, I called to you?” Abandoning the hairbrush, Emma crossed her arms over her chest, mirroring Telly’s stance.

  His gaze turned hard and diamond bright. A muscle in his jaw twitched. Emma got the irrational feeling that memories stirred behind his eyes, or some other dark thought he tried to hide.

  Finally, his wide mouth curved into a smile that never reached his eyes and he said, “Your presence in the world, your exis
tence, it calls to us like a silent bell through time and space.” He acknowledged her confusion with another shrug. “To call means many things, especially to shapechangers. Don’t humans have words for which there are multiple uses, many meanings?”

  “Well, sure. Is that what I did with Ricky, earlier? Called to him?” She went to say something else, but didn’t know how to put it.

  As before, Telly seemed to answer her unspoken question just as much as the one she said aloud. “Not exactly. As I said before, I opened the call, opened the way.”

  “What do you mean, opened the call? If you did it, then what did I do?” God, this was too complicated.

  One corner of his sardonic mouth tipped up. “You weren’t listening too hard before when Anton was talking, were you?” Emma ignored that with a belligerent stare, waiting for him to continue. He ducked his head with a self deprecating grin, but when he looked up again, he was serious. “To open the call is to let some invisible part of you loose, to fling your senses outside of your body. We’re talking metaphysics here.”

  Emma gnawed her lower lip. Easier to think of it as studying for a test — catalog the information, don’t try to pick it apart too much. Just the facts. “How come I’ve never felt it before? Earlier, in my apartment, Ricky did it — opened the call. I would have noticed if he’d been doing that on and off the whole time I’ve known him.”

  “Ah,” he chuckled. “That’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.” When she continued to stare at him blankly, he glanced away. “Ricky has probably been trying to act as human as possible since he ran away from home. Blending in. Not wanting to be found. Easier if one doesn’t announce oneself in such a fashion.”

  It seemed too simple. But she moved on; she got the feeling pushing him would be like trying to push the river. “If I can feel it,” she asked, “then why can’t I do it?”

  He laughed, deep and hearty, but she thought the blue of his eyes got a little grayer. “You might be the fated one, but you’re human. Humans aren’t capable of opening the call.”

  She shuttered her gaze and looked away from him, pretending to study her own reflection. Why did she get this niggling feeling he wasn’t being entirely honest with her? She didn’t know him, hadn’t the slightest clue how to read him, didn’t even know what he was — and yet something whispered at the back of her mind that he kept leaving things out. What, she had no idea.

  She looked at him again. “Fine. But if I can’t open the call, how come I could call Ricky’s jaguar?”

  He shook his head, sending wheat blond hair over his brow. “You didn’t call the jaguar from Ricky’s skin — you called the change.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking. “It’s like the difference between opening the barn door for the horse to come out… And making it charge straight through the wood.” He said this last very slowly, as if unsure whether Emma would understand what he was getting at.

  There was a certain kind of logic to this, she realized. Just like biology; not obvious at first, but organically consistent. “So,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. “You can open the call, and you can call…the beast, and you can call the change — and they’re distinct, but not —”

  “Separate,” Telly finished with a tight, appreciative smile.

  She watched him carefully. “What happens when you call the beast without the change?”

  His face sobered.

  So. She could have killed Ricky if she’d fucked it up.

  She swayed. Telly reached out a hand to steady her. Her pulse jumped into her throat as his fingers touched her bare skin. His hands were large, rough and callused, and startlingly hot.

  She shrugged him off gently. The idea of accidentally killing her best friend with a magic she hadn’t even known existed until today made her feel pretty queasy, but she wasn’t about to faint. Not in front of him.

  He didn’t seem put out by it, just returned the hand to the graceful sweep of his bicep as he crossed his arms again. “You couldn’t have done it. You couldn’t have called his beast without the change.”

  “How do you know? Not even by accident? According to Anton, I’m not even supposed to know how to call his change.” She stuffed the hairbrush into her handbag, into the large main compartment that held the gun, and then zipped the whole thing closed. Rubbing her face with both hands, she turned around to rest her butt on the edge of the sink, wet hair hanging in thick strands like a curtain either side of her face. Still wet enough to drip water onto the tiles at her feet — tiles grimy with dried blood, muddy red and brown from being walked on by wet feet. She closed her eyes against the sight of it. It didn’t make her feel ill, but it would, if she thought about it too much.

  “You called his change because it was needed,” Telly said. “Your intention was to save him. Your body, your mind, your heart acted on instinct. Instinct demanded one path, one course of action if you were to save his life. If you wanted to do other,” and here Telly’s face became hard, though his voice stayed even and conciliatory, “not only would you have to want it, to have it be your intent, but you would need the experience and the sheer force of will to make it happen. Since you love Ricky, I do not think you could ever summon the power necessary to destroy him with his own beast. That kind of power is fueled by hatred. Or madness.” He shrugged. “It’s violent, and can only be summoned by violence.”

  Emma opened her eyes and looked at Telly. Not comforting, not coming from him.

  “I want to know why that happened to Ricky. If it could happen again.” Something horrible occurred to her. “Did one of those — those maidens screw with him, like a curse or something?”

  Telly shook his head, face grave. “No.” His eyes narrowed. He flashed her a tight, grim smile, and there was no humor in it. “No, Ricky did it to himself.”

  “What?” She straightened up too quick, almost lost her towel. She clamped her arms to her sides to keep it up and readjusted it, ignoring the way Telly’s eyes flicked down the length of her body. “He couldn’t have done that to himself. It was horrible. I felt it, he would have died.” She pinned Telly with a look that demanded he explain himself, and she even managed to hold it there without withering. He was a hard man to stare down. But she had her heart set on it.

  “Emma, nobody here could have stalled Ricky’s change in such a way, and the enemy is too far behind us. You need physical proximity to pull that off.”

  “But it can be pulled off?”

  “Yes, but —”

  “Great, just great. You guys are one seriously screwed up bunch, you know that?” Her face flushed hot. “Ricky never gave me any idea you all had so many ways of causing each other pain, just using the part of you that makes you what you are.”

  Telly’s eyes hardened and his features emptied of what little emotion he’d held there. “You have no idea.”

  She swallowed, her eyes on Telly’s feet where they poked out from beneath the ripped cuffs of his jeans. She made herself look up again and meet his gaze, because she couldn’t keep letting herself be cowed by the fact that Telly was scary. Scary he may be, but she was stuck with him for now.

  Telly seemed to paint the emotion, the humanity onto his face, with the slow blink of his eyes. “Ricky went too long without calling the change.”

  “What do you mean?” Emma’s voice sounded harsh to her own ears; too bad.

  Telly sighed. “Ricky is just old enough, just experienced enough, to be able to suppress the change with little difficulty. Unfortunately, he’s still too young to be able to withstand the side effects of holding it back, even though he can do it. It’s a dangerous time, and he’s been without the guidance of his own people for so long… I don’t think he had any idea what was happening to him until it was too late. He was caught off guard by strong emotions, and they triggered the change.”

  Emma shook her head. “And?”

  “And… The mind forgets what the body remembers.” Telly looked tired. “The body cannot change without the mind, but sometimes,
it tries.” He smiled what might have been a reassuring smile at Emma, but the flash of all that white just made her nervous. On top of how she already felt, it was definitely not reassuring. Nor was the concept — the memory — of Ricky’s body trying to turn itself inside out, while his mind struggled to remember how to work the change.

  Don’t think about it — concentrate on something else , she told herself with a deep breath.

  “He told you that while I was in the shower,” she said. “That he’d held back the change?”

  Telly shrugged. “He told Anton.”

  Emma recalled Anton frantically questioning her as Ricky writhed and screamed before them. “Did he say how long he went without changing? How long does it have to be?”

  Telly hesitated. He seemed reluctant to answer her, but answer her he did. “Almost five months.”

  Good lord. Emma didn’t know much about shapechangers, and Ricky had always been private when it came to it, but she knew it had to be unnatural for him to go so long without changing. Of course, she’d been raised on Hollywood werewolves, fictional creatures who couldn’t help but change every single month, so even though she knew that wasn’t the reality, the number still shocked her. Five months? This meant all the times she’d thought he was out, in jaguar shape, she had been mistaken. He hadn’t exactly lied to her, but still…

  “I don’t understand why he’d do that. I never had any idea. He kept it from me.” She tried not to feel betrayed, and failed. Why did this make her feel, more than anything else, like her life was falling apart?

  Telly shifted position beside her. His voice gentled, startling her. “Changing from one form to another can make you easier to track, either by scent or magic. If Ricky didn’t want to be found for some reason — for instance, to protect you from the other jaguars — it would explain why he suppressed the change. Even if he didn’t want to believe they were searching for you, part of him knew. It was his way of protecting you.”