by Annie Bellet
“Jade, seriously? We’re a bunch of shapeshifters and a sorceress camped out in the wilderness in a shelter grown by a druid, all because your evil ex-boyfriend is trying to raise an ancient god so he can eat its heart and attain phenomenal cosmic power.” Harper folded her arms across her chest and made a face at me as she finished speaking.
“Okay, good point,” I said. Right. Out with it all. “I set up the contingency with Iollan before the fight with Samir in case we were in over our heads. I didn’t tell you guys because I knew you’d probably be pissed about the idea of running away.”
“Damn right,” Harper muttered. “So you ran before things even got going. Who wouldn’t be pissed about that?”
“Let Jade speak,” Rose said, touching Harper’s arm gently. She and Harper were seated directly across from me.
I toyed with my mug for a moment, not wanting to meet Harper’s eye. There was nothing for it but to keep going, as Rose said, and hope they understood. Hope they even believed me.
“That’s what you remember,” I said as I looked up and met Harper’s angry green gaze. “But that isn’t how it went down. We did fight.” I held her gaze while I recounted the events, trying to maintain clinical distance from my memories. “Junebug got shot out of the air. Then Samir hit Iollan with a spell and ripped out his throat. Alek took a spell meant for me. It ripped his chest open. A giant bear killed Ezee and Levi. Everyone was dead or dying. Even me.”
I stopped and took a deep breath, looking upward at the tangle of branches.
“Samir ripped out my heart,” I said. I had told Ash all this, but it still wasn’t easy to say aloud. “He had it in his hand. I still had the ley line magic. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I turned back time.”
I looked around at their faces. Ezee had his head tipped to the side, considering. Levi and Junebug were holding hands, both of them looking at me with raised eyebrows. Rose nodded, seeming to accept this. Harper shook her head but the gesture was more contemplative than negating. I turned my head and looked at Alek. His ice-blue eyes looked down into mine and he nodded slowly.
“That makes sense,” he said, his voice soft.
“It does?” Ezee asked.
“The Council of Nine told me once that if I stayed with Jade, I would die. I saw myself with a mortal wound in my chest. So yes, this thing makes sense.”
“That’s why you told Iollan to get us out?” Harper said, half question, half statement. She looked like she was working something out in her head. “That’s why you couldn’t do anything. You had used too much magic already.”
I didn’t tell her that I’d had Iollan getting them all out before I turned back the clock. Better she didn’t know that little detail.
“It was worse than that,” I said. She’d given me the perfect opening to explain why I’d been gone so long. “I only turned back time a couple minutes, but it totally wrecked me. It burned out my magic. I couldn’t use any magic at all. I couldn’t even feel it.”
“That is why you left?” Alek said. I loved him for the lack of reproach in his words. I had hurt him, I knew, but he was able to comprehend why. Alek would never judge me too harshly for having to make tough calls and tougher decisions.
“I needed to get my magic back,” I said. I filled them in on the rough details, though I savored the look on their faces when I mentioned I’d met Alek’s sister.
“Kira?” Alek said. His eyes narrowed to slits. “She is still angry?”
“Yeah,” I said. I figured I’d ask him about what he’d done, why he had killed her friend, and hear his side of the story, but not until later. Much later, at this rate. We had way bigger problems. “She helped me, though. We broke my biological father out of prison. Then I followed him to a magical pocket of time and space and he helped me get my magic back.” I hand waved the Veil and explaining it. There just wasn’t time, and I wasn’t even sure I knew exactly where we had been or what was happening.
“So you are stronger, faster, better?” Levi said with a grin.
“Oh, it’s better than that.” I took a deep breath and smiled slowly. Then I told them the rest.
Being back with my friends, sitting next to my lover, and knowing everyone was safe? Worth everything.
Getting to tell my friends that I was a freaking dragon? Priceless.
In the excitement and explanations that followed, I conveniently forgot to mention the whole “can’t kill Samir or else magic apocalypse” thing. Whoops.
Yosemite still hadn’t returned by the time we were all figuring out sleeping arrangements. It worried all of us, but as I’d told Ezee, the druid knew these woods and could take care of himself.
I was worried, too, that Samir had set a trap at the farmhouse he’d been using as a base. Junebug offered to fly into Wylde and scout around, but while her owl self didn’t mind the darkness, with the druid missing it felt unsafe. I was bothered that Freyda and her wolves were missing as well. They had gone to find Softpaw, apparently, but even so, that was over a week past now. Between that and whatever Samir was up to with all the mercenaries in town, things looked not great for the good guys.
But I was back. I was here and ready to fight. It wouldn’t go the same as before. I wouldn’t let it. Nor would I shut out my friends or refuse to let them help. They had done more these last few weeks to delay and threaten Samir’s plans than I had, after all. I had learned the value of trust and I wasn’t going to fuck up again.
At least, I wasn’t going to fuck up in the same way. No plan survives contact with the enemy, after all.
I pulled on Alek’s coat and went outside with him to take first watch. We wanted to be alone, and while it was cold, it was better than nothing.
“Moon is full,” I said as he wrapped his arms around me. I leaned back into his warmth and looked up past his face at the sky. The moon sailed through a sea of stars, not a cloud in sight. It made the snow-covered trees around us into a softer world of glitter and shadow.
“Not quite,” Alek said, dropping into Russian. His voice rumbled in his chest and into my back. “Tomorrow night.”
“You going werewolf on me now?” I said with a laugh.
“At home, in the forests, sometimes the moon is all I would have for light. I know it well.”
“I’m sorry I left you,” I said softly. “I had to.”
“I know,” he said. “You fight your way. I am just glad you came back to me, Jade Crow.” He tucked his head down beside mine, pressing his cheek against my cheek. I breathed in the warm musk of him, summer sunlight and vanilla spice. He was everything good in the world packaged up just for me.
“If I hadn’t come back right when I did, you would have died. Harper would have died. Maybe the twins, too,” I murmured. I hated to even think about it.
“But you did come back,” Alek said. “What worries me is that Samir left, as though he knew we would come. That trap was for us, I think.”
I felt as disturbed and confused as Alek sounded. It wasn’t quite a Samir thing to do. My ex seemed overly attached to the idea of wrecking my life and killing my friends as a way of tearing me apart before he killed me himself. For him to leave a trap he didn’t even know would get sprung meant things were in motion, meant he likely had to move on with his other plans.
It meant we were running out of time. Time’s up, let’s do this went through my mind. Only Samir would damn well be Leeroy.
“Whatever he is doing, it is soon,” Alek added, echoing my thoughts.
“I won’t run again,” I said. “It ends. Tomorrow I’m going to track him down.”
“Alone?” Alek said, his voice a murmur of damp fog over my skin.
“No,” I said. “Not alone.”
I twisted around and hugged myself into his warmth, pressing my face to his chest. I had turned back time for this moment, for all the moments I would have after this. I could kill Samir to keep them safe. To help remove the shadows and pain from Harper’s eyes. To alleviate my own guil
t. For Max and Tess and Steve and Todd and Sophie and Kayla and Ji-Hoon.
The people I loved who had died because of Samir was a list that was burned into my heart. I wouldn’t add to it. Not ever again.
Even if that meant breaking the Seal and letting magic back into the world. If it came down to a choice between that and letting those I loved die?
I would choose Samir’s death. Every. Damn. Time.
“It’s like living in your own freezer,” Levi said brightly as he dragged a side of bacon out of the snow piled up behind the druid’s grove.
“Complete with lack of showers,” Harper said as she brushed off a round of wood to sit on.
The day was clear, if cold, so we were gathered around outside. Rose had brought the camp stove out and was making coffee. I wasn’t normally a coffee person, but I’d been outvoted and drinking battery acid was small payment to see my friends smiling, alive and well enough. Junebug and Ezee had gone to look around. The druid wasn’t back yet, which had us all worried. I’d made them promise to stay away from Samir’s former camp and to stay away from town.
Once I was fed, I was going to Wylde myself. No more hiding. It was time to be the hunter. I rubbed at my talisman, feeling the divot in the silver. It was a constant reminder of what I had almost lost.
“You smell like sunshine and flowers,” Levi told Harper. “Like… azaleas!”
“You smell like old bacon,” she said.
“That’s why Junebug loves me.”
“She’s a vegetarian.”
“Both of you stop or we won’t have any bacon. Bring that here,” Rose said, cutting them off before it could end in fists flying and someone being tossed in the snow.
Bacon was soon sizzling, making my stomach growl almost as loud as Alek’s. I held my metal plate in anticipation, breathing in the hot scent of cooking fat.
The screech of an owl broke the relative peace of the clearing. Junebug’s huge white owl form swept down into the grove. She shifted even as she landed, dropping into a superhero landing pose in the snow at the edge of the cleared space around the dome.
“Jade, come, please,” she cried out. Her hands had blood on them.
I dropped my plate and ran toward her. “What is it? Ezee?”
“No, Yosemite,” she said. “I think he’s dying.”
We ran. Junebug flew ahead of us, dodging trees. I used my magic to push myself up and stay light on the snow, running like freaking Legolas to keep up with the shadow of wings ahead of me. Alek had shifted to tiger and stayed even with us. Levi and Harper were dark streaks of speed in among the underbrush and evergreen boughs.
Not too far from the camp we came to a huge spreading oak. A druid’s tree if ever there was one. It reminded me of the one in the first camp, in Iollan’s first grove where the fight had gone so poorly. This wasn’t the same place—however, it was deeper into the wilderness and the ground beneath the oak was piled with rocks that, strangely, had no snow on them.
Iollan lay prone under the oak, half propped on its giant roots. Blood spilled out his mouth with every agonizing breath, turning his red beard almost black. Ezee knelt beside his lover, pressing what had been his own shirt onto a wound I couldn’t see on Iollan’s chest. Ezee looked up at me with wild black eyes as I ran toward them.
“Save him,” he commanded.
It was Max all over again. Time blurred for me and I saw Harper’s face instead of Ezee’s, her green eyes screaming at me to save her brother. I had failed Max.
I’m a sorceress, not a doctor, I wanted to say. But no. It didn’t matter. I would not fail again.
I knelt next to the druid. He was cold to the touch, but still breathing. His eyes were closed but his pupils were responsive to light when I pried one open. That was good, right?
“Move the shirt,” I said. “I have to see the wound.”
Ezee complied, spawning a fresh gush of blood as he removed the pressure. Blood pulsed from three neat holes in Iollan’s broad chest. They looked like such tiny openings, but clearly they went deep. His swirling blue tattoos glowed faintly.
“Do the wounds go through?” I asked.
“No,” Ezee said. “I checked beneath him when I got here. The bullets must be still inside. But he’s not healing.”
“He’s unconscious,” I pointed out. “Can he heal like that?”
Ezee gave me a helpless look and shook his head. He didn’t know.
With the amount of blood he was losing, I was surprised Iollan was still alive. But he was cold, which I recalled might be a good thing. Didn’t paramedics have a saying that someone isn’t dead until they are warm and dead? I summoned magic and used it the way I had with Alek when he was poisoned. I tried to look inside. Maybe I could see the bullets and somehow coax them out. Magical surgery. First time for everything.
I found three small, round metal objects. They looked like dark obstructions to my magic. Iollan’s magic was fighting them. I felt his power as a foreign thing, twisting in his body like vines pushing through bricks in a time-lapse video. His magic wasn’t around the bullets; they existed in a strange void inside him, sending out a pulse of rusty-feeling magic themselves. No, not magic, more like anti-magic. The druidic magic was unfamiliar to my powers and it tried to fight me, too. His magic shoved on mine, driving the tendrils I’d extended into the wounds out.
“There’re bullets in him. They are like musket balls or something,” I said. “His magic doesn’t want me poking around. I think the bullets are magic— or impeding his magic?”
“Cold iron,” Ezee said instantly, nodding. “Get them out?” He laid a hand on Iollan’s forehead. “His breathing is getting worse. Now, Jade.”
I closed my eyes. The druidic power didn’t want me there, but fuck it. I was stronger than it. I sent tendrils of power back into his body, using his wounds as my openings both physically and metaphysically. The vines writhed and twisted, growing thorns and attacking my magic, but I sheared through them.
“Careful,” Ezee said as Iollan moaned in pain.
I gritted my teeth. There was no choice but to cause more pain. Two of the balls had taken fairly straight courses into his body and lodged next to bone. The third, however, had bounced around and was buried far off course in muscles that were likely his diaphragm or something. I wished I’d paid more attention to those crazy anatomy charts in health class back in high school. That was a long-ass time ago, so it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Grabbing the first iron ball, I yanked on it, visualizing my magic as though it were surgeon’s tools instead of raw power. It popped clear of the wound with a gross sucking sound. I let it drop and reached for the second. That one came out more easily as the druidic magic inside him changed its course and began flooding the now iron-free wound.
The third one had no clear channel to pull it through. I wrapped my power around it but wasn’t sure how to draw it out. Iollan’s insides were a mess of blood, and even using magical X-ray vision, I wasn’t sure how to do this without more damage. The ball wasn’t that far away from the surface. Just a layer of fat and muscle stood in its way. No organs or bone blocking it.
“The way out is through,” I muttered. Praying to whatever powers might protect a druid, I yanked hard on the ball and ripped it straight out of him in a gush of warm blood that spilled over my hands where they rested on his chest.
“Goddamnit, Jade,” Ezee said.
I opened my eyes. “The iron is out,” I said. “Sorry.”
Ezee pressed his shirt back to the wound as I moved my fingers. “It’s still bleeding.”
“I’m not a healer,” I said. “His magic is working on him now. Anything I try to do to stop the bleeding might make it worse. His power and mine don’t play very nicely.”
“Move your hands, Ezekiel,” Alek said from behind me.
I rocked back on my heels and looked up. Alek had a giant snowball in his arms.
Ezee moved and Alek started packing snow around the druid’s che
st.
“Is making him cold a good idea?” Harper asked.
“It’ll slow the bleeding.” Levi came up behind his twin and laid a hand on Ezee’s shoulder.
Alek packed the druid around with a pile of fresh snow. The snow turned pink but not red. I wiped my bloody hands off in more snow as best I could.
“It’s working,” Ezee said softly.
I came back under the tree and saw that his magic had kicked in fully. Thick green vines sprouted from the frozen earth, shoving aside rock and dirt as they unfurled and wrapped Iollan in their grip. Within a minute he was covered from chin to ankle in thick greenery. His rough breathing slowed and no more blood sprayed from his mouth. His features relaxed into sleep.
There was nothing to do but wait. So we found seats on the rocks and waited to see if the druid would live.
Iollan opened his eyes after an interminable couple of hours. The vines slid away from him, leaving bloody but unbroken skin behind. His tattoos were just faded blue ink again, the animal patterns and dots and knotwork no longer glowing. His ruined shirt hung off his shoulders as he sat upright.
“I thought you were dying,” Ezee said. He took the druid’s hand and pressed the back of it to his lips.
“Not so easy to kill,” Iollan said as he laid a huge hand along Ezee’s cheek. “How did you get the iron out?”
“Jade did it with her magic,” Ezee said.
“Hi,” I said with an awkward wave as I came to stand by his feet. “I’m back.”
“Who shot you?” Ezee asked, not taking his eyes off Iollan’s tired face.
“Mercenaries. I’ll explain but I’m freezing.” He shivered—for effect, most likely, but he did look chilled.
“Can you walk?” I asked.
“Only one way to know,” he said.
Iollan got to his feet with Ezee’s help. It turned out he could walk, but it was slow going. I used my magic to wrap us in warmth. Maybe I’d call this spell Mordenkainen’s Space Heater? I was burning power like it was going out of style. Fighting Samir might have to wait a day or three for me to sleep and freshen up, but it was worth it to keep my friends alive.
