Court the Fire (Son of Rain #3)

by Michelle Irwin

  “THERE’S NO way to make you stay with us, is there?” Eth asked after I’d showered and changed.

  Dragging my fingers through my hair, I leaned my head forward between my knees. “How can I? I don’t believe in this life anymore, Eth. I don’t trust the hierarchy or the information we’re given. I can’t even consider hunting people like Evie ever again.”

  “Man, what did you see when you were overseas?” He wisely chose to stay quiet on the issue of whether Evie was “people.”

  “The truth.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  My mouth twisted. For a moment, I wondered whether I should show him. Then I recalled his words at the top of the outcrop. “Not while I know you’re not willing to see it.”

  He frowned. “Try me?”

  “I can’t. There’s too much at stake.”

  “Like?”

  Evie’s life. Toni’s trust. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Can you just promise me one thing?”

  I couldn’t promise anything without knowing what it was, and he seemed to realize that.

  “Just wait until morning before you go anywhere near that cliff again.”

  “We’ll see.” In truth, I planned to wait as long as it took for him to fall asleep, and then I would turn straight back around using the GPS location I’d saved as a guide. If I approached from a different angle, it was likely I’d be able to get to the bottom of the cliff without having to try to climb down. It wasn’t entirely sane in the darkness, but it was the safer option. The alternative was waiting until the sun had come up and leaving Evie there on her own all night, and that wasn’t even worth considering.

  “It’s not safe out there at night. Fourteen people have disappeared recently.”

  “The missing campers?” I recalled the news piece I’d seen while Evie and I were getting gas. “I thought there were twelve?”

  “Twelve people are officially missing, but we’ve lost two men as well.”

  And I’ve left Evie there by herself? I stood. I didn’t care about waiting for Eth to sleep. If he supported me even a little, he’d understand that I had to go. Now.

  I’d just reached down to grab the GPS out of the pocket of the jeans I’d been wearing earlier when cold steel hit my wrist, and the click of handcuffs echoed through the room.

  “What the fuck, Eth!” I yanked my arm upward, but all that got me was a sore wrist as the other end of the set of cuffs was already attached to the headboard of the motel bed.

  “If you behave, I’ll let you out in the morning.”

  I growled. “That might work for your whores, but I’m not into this sort of kinky shit. Let me out.”

  He shrugged and moved back to his bed on the other side of the room—outside of the area of my reach. “I’ve got to keep you safe somehow. Here’s some light reading for you while you wait.” He threw a newspaper at my feet, the headline screamed of the death of a mother and her son, the photo of the culprit was Evie’s. It was the same one Lou had tried to show me earlier, and I was just as disinterested as I had been there.

  “Goddamn it, Eth! Unlock me now!” I tugged at the cuff. I wasn’t going to stay silent while he tried to convince me, once more, that she was evil, not when I knew different. I would never doubt her again.

  I spent the next hour alternating between shouting blue murder at my traitorous brother and trying to find something to use to pick the lock of the cuffs. Unfortunately, Eth knew all of the tricks as well as I did. The bed was secured tightly to the wall, and I was secured to it. Eventually, I gave in and fell into a fitful sleep where I was forced to relive the dream I’d had in Canada of the wendigo consuming the fiery maiden that Evie had become in my visions.

  When I woke, hours before dawn, I began to scour a nearby map for an easier way to get to the bottom of the cliff—to the place where I was certain Evie would be waiting for me.

  The sun was barely creeping up over the horizon when I began demanding Eth let me free again. He couldn’t use his bullshit excuse about not having enough light any longer. Grumbling about having to get up so early, he placed the key on a side table just out of my reach and went to grab some breakfast.

  Keeping the key in my sight, I maneuvered myself until I could reach the side table with my leg. Balancing carefully, I drew my foot across the small table, trying to hook the key with my toe and drag it closer to me. The risk was that I would kick it further away, but considering all that meant was that I’d have to wait for Eth’s return, it was worth it.

  On my second attempt, I snagged it under my foot and dragged it toward me.

  I twisted and moved until I had the key in my hand. In an instant, I’d unlocked myself. Rubbing my wrist to relieve some of the pain from being secured overnight, I packed up the little I had and got ready to go search for Evie.

  Leaving the motel room, I eyed the cars in the parking lot. I walked a quick trail in front of them all, working out which ones belonged to Rain operatives. There was one Rain vehicle at the end that sat unlocked, and if I was a betting man, I would have put money on the key being behind the visor. I raced toward that car. The moment I slid into the driver’s seat, the passenger door swung open as well.

  “The way I see it, you have two choices. Take me with you, or have me on your ass with a team.” Eth slid into the passenger seat as if he already knew which option I’d take.

  I pushed Evie’s and my bags into the backseat. “Fine, but keep your mouth shut and no more bullshit stunts like last night.”

  He touched three fingers to his forehead. “Scout’s honor.”

  His statement reminded me of my promise to Toni, and the time she’d called my bluff. I called him out the same way. “You were never a Boy Scout, jackass.”

  He just grinned at me in reply.

  Once we were underway, he spoke again. “You know there’s no way she could have survived that fall, don’t you?’

  “I don’t care.” It was a lie, of course I cared. I was just certain that she had . . . somehow. She has to be alive. “I have to go back.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re willing to—”

  Without waiting for him to finish his sentence, I pulled the car over to the side of the road. “Get out!”

  He lifted an eyebrow at me.

  “If you’re not going to be helpful or quiet, then get out.”

  He held his hands up in surrender, and I pulled the car back onto the road.

  Eth stayed quiet for all of five minutes. “Listen, about Lou—”

  “Shut it!” I snapped. “Just shut it. I don’t want to hear bullshit and excuses. I’m not interested.”

  After another couple more failed attempts to get me talking, Eth finally seemed to get the hint and stayed quiet for the rest of the trip. When I arrived as close as I could to the side of the forest where Evie had fallen, I pulled the car over once more, threw the keys behind the visor, and took off into the forest.

  “Clay, wait!” Eth shouted from behind me. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

  He rushed to catch up to me and was at my side almost instantly.

  “Evie!” I shouted as I moved through the forest. Even if I couldn’t convince him to let us go, with the two of us against Eth, we’d be sure to be able to fight our way to freedom. He might even be lucky enough to survive the encounter.

  Eth hissed at me to be quiet. “It’s not safe around here.”

  “Well, you should have let me go last night, shouldn’t you?”

  “There’s something here.”

  “Yeah, Evie. And I’m going to find her.”

  I rushed away from him, trampling over the vegetation without care as I closed in on the spot I’d saved on the GPS. Before long, the sheer cliff face stretched above me. Seeing it from below in the soft light of early morning, it was hard to imagine Evie surviving the fall.

  Not fall. Jump. She jumped. She had a plan.

  Burned and smoke-stained rock covered the lower third of the
outcrop, rising to caramel and brown colored stone at the top.

  “Evie!” I called again, more desperate than ever to find her. My anger at Eth’s stupidity—at him handcuffing me to the bed during the night—rose, and I was barely able to contain my emotions as I called for her over and over.

  I hunched over the burnt bracken, looking for any signs that Evie might have survived the night. Tears stung my eyes as all the evidence I found suggested she’d been killed by the fall.

  Maybe Eth was right.

  Recalling the fireball the previous evening, and looking around at the resulting devastation that littered the area, survival seemed impossible. I questioned whether I’d been completely out of my mind to even consider that she could have survived.

  Despite all of that, I’d felt something deep within me that had told me she wasn’t dead, just like I had when I’d heard the news about Lou’s death—it didn’t feel real. My instincts had been right then, and I had no reason to doubt them now. My spirits were buoyed slightly when I spotted marks consistent with someone crawling through the debris.

  I was scouring the patterns in the dirt when footsteps approached me from behind. They were too heavy to be Evie. A tug on my collar, followed by Eth’s voice warning me that we had to go confirmed that it was him behind me and not the one I wanted to see.

  “She has to be around here somewhere.” I wanted to force him to help me read the tracks. If they were Evie’s, he’d be able to find her in almost no time. I was okay at tracking, but Eth was better. He’d had more one-on-one time with Dad than me. The only thing that stilled my tongue was the concern over what Eth might do if he found Evie even a few seconds before I reach his side. Would he take the chance to kill her?

  “It’s not safe here,” Eth muttered. I turned to look at him, and it was as if he saw something I didn’t. “If you hadn’t taken off like a bat out of hell, I could have at least grabbed some weapons. Now we’re out here unprotected. I don’t like it.”

  Whatever he thought was around only made me more anxious to find Evie and get out of there. “I’m not leaving without knowing what happened.”

  “She died, man.”

  “No!” The word rushed from me. It was impossible to even consider the possibility. “She didn’t die.”

  “Look at the evidence all around you. Remember, whoosh! Now let’s get back to the car so that I can at least grab my stuff.”

  I refused to listen to him. Instead, I tried to make him see once more my certainty of her survival.

  He knelt behind me, and rested his hand on my shoulders in a way he probably thought was comforting, but only made me want to pull away, especially when he uttered his next words. “I know you think you felt something for her, but she wasn’t human. You know we have to eliminate all threats to humanity. That’s done now. She’s no longer a threat to anyone.”

  I shoved him away from me, sick and tired of his bullshit attitude. Sick of his assumption that I’d only imagined the way I felt. Tired of his same old arguments, which were nothing more than meaningless rhetoric.

  “You don’t get to talk about her like that! Not anymore! Not ever again.”

  As Eth tried to right himself, I pushed to my feet. For someone who was so cautious about the danger Evie apparently posed, he completely missed the real danger he’d been in the previous evening. Between her proximity to him and the fire that sizzled just beneath her skin, there was a number of ways she could have killed him or Lou—or all of us if she’d wanted to.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” I asked.

  “Don’t get what exactly?” Eth’s voice was frosty in response to the anger in mine.

  I tried to tell him the numerous ways his life could have ended the night before. I could tell by his expression that he’d thought he was in control the whole time. He was so focused on trying to convince me that Evie was an evil beast, he didn’t—couldn’t—see how good she really was.

  “But—”

  “No!” I wasn’t willing to listen to any of his arguments, especially if he was unwilling to listen to mine. “You need to listen to me. She didn’t do that because she isn’t evil. The idea of killing the two of you was probably the furthest thing from her mind. It wouldn’t even have registered as a possibility because that’s just not how she thinks. Evie is a good person! And I don’t give a shit what you or anyone else thinks about her anymore.” My anger at everything Evie and I had been through coursed through my body, my hands shook, and my temples pulsed in time with my racing heart. It was almost a relief to let it all out, but I was panting by the time I finished my rant. I took a deep breath. “Okay?”

  Eth looked at me and blinked, as if uncertain how to process my tirade. He’d seen me angry before, most often at Dad, but he’d rarely been on the receiving end of my rage. He took a deep breath. “We do have to go though,” he said eventually. “I told you it wasn’t a coincidence that Dad and I were in the area.”

  We spent the next few minutes hashing out some of the issues that had been boiling just under the surface for years, things we hadn’t been willing or able to discuss on the phone. If I could get him to see, to understand that Evie was sweet and precious—and as far from evil as anyone could get—he’d be our biggest ally. When he tried once more to get me to leave without finding Evie, or at least confirming what had happened to her, I refused.

  “You’re willing to become another unexplained death just to find out what happened to her?”

  I was just starting to wonder if he would ever get it when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. At first, I thought it could have been a hallucination—a flicker of red and gold hair, catching and reflecting the sun. But then, as she stumbled out of a cave in the rock face, the morning sun kissed against her honey-gold skin.

  Seeing Evie alive, against all the odds, made me feel so light that I might have been at risk of floating away if I wasn’t anchored by the weight of her name on my lips and of the need to hold her close, and prove to myself that she was safe.

  I thought my name would be the first beautiful word that I’d hear from her to confirm her safety, but instead she turned away from me almost instantly and held her hand out in a clear gesture indicating I should stay where I was.

  My confusion over her ordering me to stay away was a palpable presence in my body. As I tried to find out what was wrong, she turned toward me and took a step. When she moved, her ankle buckled beneath her. That small movement forced me to pass a more critical eye over Evie’s body, and I saw a litany of small cuts, angry purple bruises, and new blisters.

  “Stop,” she demanded in a whisper.

  “You’re hurt.” Ignoring her request to stay back, I rushed to her. I was anxious to get her somewhere safe, somewhere I could apply first aid to her wounds, and then a special brand of healing to her heart. Looking over her relatively minor injuries, I was amazed. Considering how high the leap she’d made was, she should have been far more injured than she was, not that I was going to complain.

  “Clay, there’s something in there,” she said, taking another glance back at the cave as I bundled her into my arms.

  I didn’t care about whatever was in the cave though. Considering the things I’d hunted in my life, anything that had left Evie unharmed overnight wasn’t frightening to me. Instead, I was desperate to find out how she managed to survive, but I settled for an easier question for that moment. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be now, just get me the hell away from here. I don’t trust—”

  She cut off, and although I wondered why, I was more than happy to comply with her request to get away from the area.

  “You are going to let us go,” I spat at Eth as I helped Evie past him.

  She stiffened in my hold, and I thought it was because she worried about my brother, but then she whispered my name in a voice quivering with fear. I twisted to see what had caused her concern and at once caught sight of a hideous beast creeping out of the system of caves that had been her hidi
ng place.

  Eth and I spoke one word in almost perfect unison. “Fuck!”

  In one second, everything had become as clear as crystal. The fourteen deaths, the claw marks in the bark, the reason for Eth’s instinctive fear of the area.

  With slow, deliberate movements, a wendigo extracted itself from the cave and drew itself to full height as it surveyed the scene in front of it. Despite having no nostrils or eyes, the thing sniffed the air and looked around, sensing the prey nearby—sensing us.

  “Wendigo,” I murmured before turning to Eth to work out a plan.

  “The flares are in the car,” he said. “We won’t get to them in time.”

  Shit! I should have paid more attention to his concerns before rushing in to try to get Evie. By being in such a ridiculous hurry to find her, I might have damned the three of us.

  Without weapons, the wendigo could finish us all off with barely a second thought.

  Briefly, the idea of Evie’s fire rushed through my mind, but with one look at the horror on her features, I couldn’t ask her to do anything. Not only was she too afraid, but I also couldn't have her risk her life that way. I couldn’t relive the emotions I’d been through over the last twenty-four hours. The most important thing to do was get her out of there, or I risked my horrific, wendigo curse-inspired dreams in Canada becoming prophetic.

  Before I was able to come up with a plan, the creature disappeared with the speed they were known for. While watching for movement around us that would signal an attack, I did my best to offer Evie a rushed explanation about what it was, trying to alleviate her concerns even as I desperately examined every possible option we had for escape.

  I was halfway through my explanation when my world went black.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FOR A SECOND, I couldn’t remember where I was. My head pounded in time with the slow beat of my pulse. The acrid taste of blood soured my mouth, and my tongue felt three sizes too big. Certain I needed to be doing something important, I tried to move, to lift myself up or shake my head . . . anything. Only, I didn’t have control of my body. Pushing through the darkness, I opened my eyes and attempted to fight off the grogginess.