by Lisa Ladew
Lynessa touched the mammoth tusk again, then the mood in the room popped like a bubble. She shoved the tusk into the box, the box into her purse and stood. “Yeah, I gotta get back to Duane. I’m glad you’re ok. Text me later.”
Okkk. When Nessa didn’t want to talk about something, she bolted. Cora knew this, and accepted it.
She walked out on the porch and watched her friend drive away with a casual wave. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains, casting long shadows where the light still hung.
Cora turned to go back inside and was struck with the feeling of eyes on her, someone’s gaze brushing her scalp as surely as would their hand. She whipped around and peered into the waning light, shivering in the balmy evening.
Nothing. Imagination. Insanity, probably. She stepped inside, the sound of her closing and locking the front door echoing through Cora’s home, making it feel more devoid of life than usual. Her delicate footsteps bounced off the walls as she made her way upstairs, ready for a bath and a good night’s sleep in her own bed.
Too late, she realized she’d forgotten to ask her friend’s advice on Cora’s upcoming tenure hearing.
Who was she kidding? She probably had a message waiting on her dead cell phone that said she was fired. Nessa just hadn’t known.
***
Coralie slept hard that night, her dreams full of swords as pens, swirling in the air, scrawling glowing green words that faded before she could read them.
Chapter 13
Jameson sped up the mountainside deep into the Natanhala Forest, passing the road that led to Tsigule Cliffs without his usual lingering glance. He didn’t have the time today. He was not a speeder by nature, but it had been a full day since he’d dropped the Steward off at the wilderness cabin, told him there was electricity inside, running water, sleeping bags and a cot in the closet. He’d promised to come back that evening, after he went to the Bear Claw to ask about the woman. (the switch).
His skin crawled and he shuddered, overcorrecting on a curve and gritting his teeth until he was back under control. No one at the Bear Claw knew who she was, and the waitress who had been working that day was off right now. He’d gone to her place, but her roommate said she was in the backcountry with her boyfriend, camping somewhere remote.
The Natanhala Forest spanned 390 square miles of thick forest and was one of the most biodiverse ecosystems anywhere on the planet. Jameson had been searching it as a wolf for years, looking for the Steward’s resting place. He knew as well as anyone he’d never find the waitress until she came out, so he’d given up and headed up the mountain, but then he’d been called out on a rescue. A child had fallen into a land crack, and supervising the scene had taken all night and most of the day. The little boy was fine, with his parents, and Jameson was desperate to get to the Steward.
He rounded one more curve, then turned into the rough driveway to the cabin, parking directly facing the steps to the small porch. He grabbed his shopping bag that contained hair clippers and a beard trimmer and headed around the back of the cabin, where something smelled good.
Carick was there, his shaggy hair covering his face as he enjoyed a damn good improvised campfire, spits of green plants and berries jammed into the ground. Carick himself was sitting cross-legged on his sleeping bag, a roasted fern fiddlehead disappearing into his mouth.
Jameson gestured to the bag under him. “Did you sleep out here?”
Carick’s words were clipped, as they had been since he’d screamed out his dismay over the edge of the cliff. “I don’t sleep.”
Right. Of course. Only in caves, for hundreds of years at a time. But not in beds, like normal people. He gestured at the fire. “You have electricity, you know.”
“Explain.”
Right. Jameson had almost forgotten. How to explain electricity? He headed to the cabin instead. “I’ll show you.”
Once inside, Jameson stood directly in the center of the room, under the big light bulb. He motioned to the light switch. “Hit that switch.”
Carick frowned hard and looked behind him. “You said there were no switches.”
“No. That lever on the wall. Move it up.”
Carick did so and the light flooded the room, causing him to shoot a glance at the covered bulb, wincing. “Like the sun.”
Jameson waited for the questions that would surely come next, but Carick only turned and levered his nails under the plate behind the light switch and yanked at it. In cracked easily and Carick flung the pieces to the floor.
“Whoa!” Jameson shouted and ran for him, just stopping him from sticking his fingers into the hole. “That’s live,” he said, watching Carick closely, afraid he would try again. “If you touch the ends of those wires, the bare parts, it will electrocute you, fry you.”
Carick stared at him blankly, although he looked like he’d heard the word, but couldn’t connect it with the light on the ceiling and the switch on the wall, so far away.
Jameson pulled his limbs in tight and mimed being electrocuted, shaking and groaning, realizing as he was doing it that Carick wouldn’t understand it.
Carick’s eyes narrowed, though. “Like the weapon the constables had. The one that made me unable to move, that sent pain coursing like nerve-fire.”
Jameson made a face. “You were tased?”
Carick nodded, his eyes lighting up. “Tased, yes. I have always been vulnerable to lightning, and your time has mastered it, stored it in tiny containers to use as a weapon!”
Jameson nodded slowly, feeling absurdly proud of the generations he had lived through. Yeah, they had. “Yes, and it runs through the walls. If you touch that,” he motioned to the electrical box the light switch sat in, “it will be worse than the taser.”
Carick shot to the center of the room, looking at every wall in turn.
Jameson laughed. “It’s not like that. You gotta get your fingers right in there.”
But Carick was not reassured. He seemed to be trying to make himself as small as possible.
Jameson grabbed him by the shoulder and ushered him to the door. “That’s enough electricity for now. Let’s go back outside.”
Carick did not settle as soon as they were outside, like Jameson thought he would. He paced, tearing at leaves and branches that hung in his way from the trees trying to encroach on the cabin. Questions swirled in Jameson’s mind, but he kept them inside.
He sat down in the dirt opposite Carick’s sleeping bag to relax. He was in it for the long haul, now. He would sleep eventually.
***
Jameson jerked awake to Carick’s words. He sat up and brushed the dirt from his clothes and arms, eyeing the blazing campfire and Carick sitting on a stump on the other side of it. The stars overhead said it was after two in the morning. Jameson hadn’t realized he’d lain down.
“Say it again,” he said.
“Carick obliged, his eyes glittering black across the fire. “She said they would disappear in crisis. The houses. Said they were smart enough to do it. Alive enough to want to be in charge of their own destiny.”
Jameson scrubbed a hand over his stubble. Almost two days worth now. Normally he shaved twice a day, to avoid five o’clock shadow. “Who said that?” So there were houses that were alive. Not any stranger than vampires. Men who didn’t sleep. And his own personal favorite, people who turned into animals, especially wolves.
“Palladium. The firstborn switch.”
Right. Jameson had heard the word before. When he was a pup he’d even heard a young switch at the Five Hills market use her name like an oath. Like Palladium was some sort of a Goddess to the switches. She was also supposed to have been the most powerful switch to ever live, despite her petite size, the fastest and the most ruthless; hunting vampires even when pregnant and with babies on her back through her long life.
Carick stared at him. “She was talking about Resperanza, the coven house that stands in that field at the Tsigule cliffs.”
Jameson shook his head. “No hou
se has ever stood there, my whole life.”
“You went as a child? Before the Reckoning?”
Jameson shook his head. “No.”
Carick looked up at the stars. “I swear to the Well those coven houses disappeared when it happened. Otherwise you would have had to stumble upon one in searching the forest for me. They’re invisible to humans but would appear when a covenbound approached, unless they went into hiding.”
Jameson glanced up. The Well? That was a new one on him. Some old constellation? “I thought Tsigule Cliffs was where your cave was. I’ve been drawn to that exact spot hundreds of times over the years.”
Carick frowned and turned black eyes on him again. “Drawn? Explain it. The Instinct?”
Jameson couldn’t answer that. His Instinct was murky, hard to hear most times. Had it been what had drawn him to the cliffs of the evil wind?
Carick dismissed him before he came up with a definitive answer. “Only the covenbound are drawn to their covens, not the coventwined, which is what you are. You don’t belong to a particular coven, but rather all of them and none of them at the same time.” At Jameson’s nonplussed look, Carick explained.
“Coventwined are those who are actively engaged in the war with the vampires. The Steward.” He jerked a thumb at himself. “The Keeper.” He jabbed a finger at Jameson, then held up his hand with finger and thumb popped, putting out more as he spoke. “All switches in a coven, which is never more than three, and all shifters in a coven, which can be as many as eleven.” He popped out the fifth finger. “The Protector.”
Then he held up his other hand, all the fingers extended. “Some count the covens, the houses themselves, as members of the coventwined, albeit mischievous ones. I never believed it, until now.” He dropped his hands. “The covenbound refer only to the switches and shifters within the group, as they could not leave breath for bone, nor bone for blood.”
Jameson shivered. They had so much to talk about. He chose his question carefully. “I can’t be covenbound?”
Carick shook his head. “A Keeper never has been so. The Keeper mates a shifter, if he mates at all. He is too important to be distracted by rutting with switches after every Undoing.”
Carick’s sour face said he did not want to be talking about this, but Jameson had to hear more. Had heard rumors, and here was someone who knew. He’d met a few switches as a pup, but only underage or inactive ones. He remembered listening to the stories his uncles used to tell in the evenings, sitting on the porch after they thought all the pups were in bed. Stories of lovely females, so fair and sweet a shifter would give everything they had to mate one. But so deadly even her lovers didn’t turn their backs on her.
What he wouldn't give to be with a female like that. Every additional year he lived, the more he yearned for that unpredictability. If there was one thing he'd learned in his long life, it was that an untameable female would keep him young, breathe life into his years. His only real vice was bedding women under twenty-five, something he rationed to himself like it was a drug. Sometimes older women, over forty-five, worked also. Ones who had seen enough of life to decide it was only about pleasure, who were shameless in their demanding-
Carick snapped a finger at him and snarled in a very shifter-like way, like he knew exactly where Jameson’s mind had gone and did not like it.
Jameson spoke roughly, although he didn’t want to. “I need to know what you mean by rutting.”
Carick frowned. “William never asked such questions.”
Jameson picked up a stick and flung it into the fire, just for something to do, so he didn’t have to look at Carick. “William had all the answers, didn’t he. Was trained.”
Carick stared at him for a long time, then nodded sharply. “Mark my words, as I’ll not retell this.”
“Right.”
“You’ve heard of the Prowl?”
Jameson had, but he wanted the full story. “Explain it to me like I’m five.”
Carick scowled, but after a heavy pause, he finally spoke. “Switches are a being unto themselves. Their creator could not control them, not even at the moment of their creation and through their childhood. The original five switches were the strongest, the wildest, and each subsequent generation changes slightly, influenced by the shifters they mate with. They have evolved in other ways too.”
His voice turned hard. “The vampires in the early days lived in nests like snakes, twined together, with several lookouts around each nest. A switch and her covenbound shifters would hunt in the forest for a nest; they called this hunt and its kills the Undoing. In those days finding one vampire always meant there were more around, but a switch’s magic could start to wane after the fifth or sixth kill. A switch who found a nest larger than that had to retreat, wait for reinforcements, lest the Undoing be incomplete or her risk too great.”
“This meant she had to stay away from the nest and exercise the ultimate discipline over herself. Get too close and she was absolutely unable to control her actions, to stop herself from killing as she was born to do. Her shifters would have to pull her out rather than allow her to overspend herself, and the vampire survivors would escape, move on. Losing vampires when they are on the verge of a kill is agony for switches. Physical and mental agony.”
Jameson tried to imagine the world the Steward described, and couldn’t.
Carick went on. “Eventually, future generations evolved to the point where slaying each vampire would raise their energy, not lower it. Over time they garnered so much energy and magic with each kill that they could not come down from the Undoing without help.”
Carick frowned and stared at the sky, looking for answers in the stars. “There is only one way to bring a switch down after an undoing, or indeed, a simple vampire kill, and that is called the Prowl. It is through the assistance of the covenbound that she comes back to herself.”
Jameson didn’t dare say a word lest Carick stop talking. He looked like he hated every word he was speaking.
But the Steward continued. “The shifters have to let her discharge her energy. They can do it in one of three ways, but almost no switch will choose the first two. The energy and magic are rarely completely spent. Those two ways are fighting with the shifters, and running with the shifters.”
Jameson swallowed hard. The third way…
Carick kept his face averted. “The last way is the rutting. Sex with covenbound or heartbound. It can last days and destroy mountains, but shifters and switches covet it.”
Jameson nodded, trying to control his own misplaced eagerness. This jibed with the impressions he had gotten in his youth. All of his male relatives had wanted to mate a switch. Female shifters, of which there were never a lot, had resented switches because of that fact.
Jameson lay back down and watched the stars move overhead. “Heartbound?” he asked, even though he knew he could probably figure that one out.
“A shifter who kisses a switch with his heart on his lips is said to be heartbound. One who loves and wishes to mate that switch. Your wolf-of-war? All heartbound shifters have some like manner of beast inside them, triggered by the bond to their switch, that bursts forth if she is in danger. They grow enormous, become as aggressive and ruthless as the switch herself. Doing so conveyed an evolutionary advantage to both switch and shifter and ensured this trait.”
“So my beast of the bond, my wolf-of-war, that has nothing to do with being heartbound?”
Carick shook his head in confirmation. “The Keeper and the Protector have the ability from the moment they take their roles.
Jameson let that sink in. “What’s our next move?” he asked, although he knew exactly what Carick was going to say.
“Find a switch.”
Jameson nodded to the sky. But Carick spoke again, surprising him this time.
“Find a switch and figure out how to get those covens to come back.”
“What, she talks to the boulder or something, and the houses hear her?”
Caric
k shook his head. “I’m certain it will take more than that. Something will have to happen, something big that signifies switches and shifters are hunting again, that the threat is over, that the houses are truly needed and will be protected and called on to protect.”
Jameson stared at the stars and tried to imagine what could possibly happen to signify that.
Chapter 14
Cora woke the next morning feeling restless and untethered, like when she was getting ready for a vacation to someplace new and couldn’t wait for it to start. Her phone, now charged, had no messages from work on it.
Coffee was the first order of business, as always. Once her extra-large mug was full, Cora stepped out the back door. She loved coming out to the flagstone patio in the mornings, chatting with her retired neighbors as they tended their gardens, breathing in the fresh mountain air before it reached late-summer’s sauna temperatures. Her neighbors were her favorite company, besides Lynessa. Something about their fastidious nature and their predictable routines appealed to her.
She hadn’t taken two steps before something caught her eye. Boot prints, big ones, in the flowerbeds next to her kitchen windows. Cora stepped closer, examining the prints with worry growing in her heart.
Next to her size six shoes, the prints were enormous, their soles deeply corrugated in the manner she associated with heavy work boots. Had she seen that pattern before? In her classroom, maybe, where she often saw the bottoms of her students’ shoes? No. Must be one of her neighbors coming to check on her when she’d been gone all weekend, but she couldn’t remember ever seeing such big, sturdy shoes on any of them.
She checked the door as she retreated to her kitchen; no scratches or any indication anyone had tried to get inside. All the windows on the first floor were locked. Cora took a deep breath and laughed at herself. It was nothing. She wouldn’t imagine anything that wasn’t there. She was sane. Maybe.
