by Bonds (epub)
20
One month later…
The doctor poked at the campfire with his walking stick. Flames licked its tip, blackening the wood, and snaps and snarls curled into the air, riding on the updraft. He said the fire hardened the end. Made it a better tool. She’d seen him spear a snake with that pointy, black thing, so yeah, she believed him on this one.
She still didn’t remember how they made it around to the back of the building after the explosion. How he managed to carry both her and Dawn, and to close the car’s broken and warped door. He got them out before the fire department showed up. And drove three hours away from the city with a bone protruding from his leg.
He’d set her broken arm with a stick not all that different from the one he now poked at the fire, all while apologizing because he couldn’t finish healing her right away. He had to mend his leg or he’d have to break it again to reset the bone. He set Dawn’s back leg, too.
He ended up eating all the food he’d stuffed into the backpack pretty fast, so his body could recuperate.
They’d been hunting. Stealing, also. They left off the Burner cell phone, thinking that at least for now, it was the smart thing to do. Until they both walked properly again.
Daisy watched the fire, thinking about how they’d become this little family, a dad, his adopted daughter, and their pet attack dog, living out in the hills without human contact. Because human contact meant connections. And connections meant every time they tugged on a thread of the universe, the entirety of the fabric vibrated.
Some Fate, somewhere, always had a hand on the fabric. They’d feel—see—the ripples.
“It might be time to move on,” Daisy said. They’d been in the same place a couple nights.
The doctor nodded. They hadn’t gone far outside of San Diego. He said for continued access to supplies, but Daisy knew the real reason. He didn’t want to leave his family.
Sometimes she’d wake up in the middle of the night, alone by the fire. He’d be up on top of a hill, watching the city, Dawn watching him.
“Yes. It is time to move on.” His body did the same slight twitch it did every time the decision-switch flipped in his brain, but this time, the strange green sunburst in the center of his eyes flared.
Firelight played tricks sometimes. He said Shifters never carried all three abilities—healing, enthralling, morphing—but sometimes she wondered.
He poked at the fire again and the scent of ash filled the air. “Wyoming,” he said.
They’d been arguing about where to go for a month. The two Fates got away, but the doctor was sure they’d been injured. They’d want revenge.
The most likely target was Daisy’s mom.
So if Daisy wanted help, she needed to find her father.
The moment the doctor held up the ring, he said he knew who it belonged to: Rumor had it that the husband of one of the dragons was of royal Russian descent. The crest on the ring was the royal crest of the Tsar’s family.
The doctor let her draw her own conclusions.
The idea that she might have a literal dragon woman for a stepmom intrigued her—and terrified her. What if the dragon didn’t like her? What if it decided I’d make a nice snack? The doctor told her that was silly, though she could tell by how his shoulders tensed that he didn’t think it was as silly as he let on.
But if the dragon woman’s husband truly was her father, it meant that he couldn’t activate her. He might be an immortal, but the doctor said he was a normal.
Turned out that a couple of the truly powerful healers could make regular people live forever. When she asked if the doctor had ever turned anyone immortal, or brought someone back from the dead, he didn’t answer, only stared at the sky for a long moment.
On the first night that she’d been conscious enough to sit up and eat, she’d pulled the cord out of her purple silk bag and used it to tie the ring around her neck. Now, she absently twirled it around her finger, the cord twisting up, and wondered if setting off for Wyoming—and the home of the dragons—would solve some of their problems.
Or if it would cause more. The possibility that her maybe-stepmother might not like the idea of a seventeen-year-old stepdaughter she didn’t know about made Daisy think perhaps she should vanish with the doctor. Keep an eye on him.
She could do that, for his daughter.
The doctor poked the stick into the ground and pushed himself to standing. He teetered a little. He obviously continued to hurt, though he’d never admit it. Daisy suspected he considered his continuing pain a sign of his weakness as a healer.
He didn’t talk about it, but she wondered. He’d healed her car accident wounds fast. And he’d kept her alive after the explosion, even driving with his injuries. Part of her wondered just how badly she’d been hurt. Just, exactly, how much of his abilities had he used to keep her and Dawn alive?
He wouldn’t talk about that, either.
When the doctor stood, Dawn stood with him, wagging her tail and looking for a scratch. He rubbed her head and a faint smile twisted up the corner of his mouth. The dog had done wonders this past month, for both of them. She guarded and helped hunt. But she also alerted Daisy to the times the doctor’s issues raised their heads, or when he seemed too down and needed to talk.
Every day they’d been out here, she thanked the universe—and her mom—for giving her Dawn.
“Before we go,” he said as he dumped water on the campfire, “I want to see my family.” He paused for a second, looking out over the hills. “Even if they don’t see me.”
“Okay.” The Fate had been specific, but Daisy didn’t care. He needed to know his wife and daughter were safe, otherwise he’d fret. It would eat away at his mind and he’d do something rash. And he wouldn’t be able to hide anymore.
So she helped him to the car. It looked terrible, but if no one paid attention, they’d see only a kid driving a beater with the windows rolled down, her dad in the passenger seat, and not think twice about it.
His neighborhood was nice, full of nice houses with nice curtains covering the windows and nice cars in the driveways. No chipped paint. No hanging doors. Just several happy kids playing ball in the streets.
Daisy parked the car on the far side of a secluded corner of a lot bordering a park, the driver’s side against the trees, and turned off the car. Across the open green area, visible through the slides and the swing sets, the Torres house blazed in the evening light, every window wide open and every interior fixture bright. Boxes sat on the front step. His wife had taken most of the curtains down in most of the rooms.
The garage was wide open as well, and empty.
She’d already loaded most of their life into the large moving van sitting in the driveway.
“Mira must have seen something. She must know,” the doctor mumbled. “She’s probably running from other Fates.” He looked old, all of a sudden. Worn. Like the weight of all this had finally settled onto his shoulders.
“You sure you want to do this?” Daisy asked. “See this?”
He didn’t respond. Daisy didn’t think he knew what to say. He slid down a little in his seat too, like the weight compressed his spine.
He couldn’t live like this. That damned Fate didn’t tell him anything other than he had to leave. How much contact could he have? How long did he need to stay away? Not knowing was slowly killing him. Right now, he looked like he wanted to bounce on the seat. Move up and down in that quick, almost-jerking way that guys do when they’re excited. The fast-twitch muscle movements that look like they want to grab something and wrestle with it.
Daisy could help. She didn’t know what to say to calm his hyperactivity, but she did know what to do. “I’ll go talk to her. Tell her you’re safe. Get news and come back, how does that sound?”
He stared first at her, then at the house. After a long moment, he nodded.
No arguing. No “be careful” or instructions or anything. Just a nod.
In the backseat, Dawn woofed once, to add her agreement.
“You stay here.” Daisy patted the dog’s head. “Keep an eye on him for me, okay?”
Dawn woofed again and dropped her head between the seats where she could nuzzle the doctor’s arm.
“Good girl.” Daisy patted the doctor’s elbow. They didn’t do a lot of touching. They both sort of felt the whole hands-on healing thing had been enough, so they’d been operating in parallel this past month. But right now, Daisy figured a touch would go a long way. “I’ll be right back.”
He nodded again.
Daisy opened the banged-up driver’s side door and swung her feet out to the still-warm concrete of the little park’s parking lot. A swing creaked in the breeze and the voices of playing kids floated in on the fresh air.
Daisy hoped that one of those voices was the doctor’s daughter. But deep in her gut, she knew none were.
His little girl had lost her father. And she was about to be ripped from her home.
21
A pretty blonde woman opened the door. An old bandana curved around her head, tied at her nape, and dirt smudged her cheek. A pair of blue rubber gloves covered her hands.
Her eyes looked swollen and red.
She’d been crying while she cleaned.
“Come in,” she said, as if she’d been expecting Daisy. She snapped the gloves off her hands and waved Daisy into the house, toward the back.
Daisy stepped into the hallway. The place looked like it had been inviting, when people lived here. The walls were all warm, harmonious tones, desert-ish, but not too much. In the living room, indentations in the carpet suggested they’d kept the furniture close, for good conversations.
Now, boxes lined the walls. A lovely abstract-patterned rug, rolled and tied, waited in the center of the room. Next to it, a little kid’s purple suitcase.
The doctor’s wife motioned Daisy deeper into the house, toward the kitchen.
A bucket of soapy water sat on the floor, next to an open and empty cabinet. She must have been washing out the inside.
“I don’t know how much information we should exchange.” Daisy stepped up to the kitchen’s island when the woman motioned her over.
The woman set her gloves down on the other side of the island. She looked at her hands for a moment like she expected to see cuts and scrapes. Then she sighed, and looked up at Daisy.
A tear clung to her lashes, but she didn’t hiccup. Nor did her lip quiver. This woman might cry, but she did it with dignity. “Do you know my name?”
Daisy nodded. “Mira.”
Mira nodded once. “Do you know who I am?”
She meant her heritage. What she was. Who she descended from. “Yes.”
Mira nodded once again. “Then you understand why we’re leaving.”
Now Daisy nodded. The doctor told her enough about his wife’s family to understand that the two assholes who attacked them at the building that exploded weren’t the only vicious Fates in the world.
“Were they in town, too?” The doctor fretted about his wife’s safety. Told Daisy that if her brother’s kids found her, they would do terrible things.
They must have been nearby, if she’d decided to run again.
Mira stared out the kitchen’s back window. “They were distracted by… something. I couldn’t read what. They didn’t sense us. No one came for us.” She paused. “Tell him my niece and nephews left the city empty-handed, and, I suspect, returned to France.”
But she probably didn’t know. Daisy had gotten the sense from the doctor that Mira’s brother’s kids were almost as good—and dangerous—a triad as her own.
“I will,” she said. “He wants you to know he will come back. When it’s safe.”
A half smile touched Mira’s lips and she blinked, looking up at the ceiling. “I wish I knew when.”
Mira’s present-seeing ability allowed her to understand that Daisy wasn’t a threat. And that they needed to move away. But not when she’d see her husband again.
“He wishes he knew, as well.”
Mira nodded again, but this time, she continued looking at the floor. “Beware of Fates.”
“Do you see something?” Daisy had learned as many hiding-from-Fates tricks as she could from the doctor, but they might not be enough.
“Present-seer.” Mira shook her head and tapped her temple. “But I have a feeling.”
So Mira didn’t know for sure. And she wouldn’t know the answers to any questions about Daisy’s father, either, so she left the ring where it was, on the cord and tucked under the collar of her shirt.
This wasn’t about Daisy, anyway. This was about giving both the doctor and the woman on the other side of the island some peace. “Your daughter?”
Part of Daisy wanted to meet little Rysa. Part of her wanted to give the girl a hug, and receive a hug, one that she could then take back to the car, for the girl’s father. One he so desperately needed. But another part of her remembered about connections and threads and Fates jabbing their fingers into vulnerable eyes.
“She’s in her room. Packing.” Mira looked up at the ceiling again. Her eyes did the staring-at-the-inside-of-my-corneas thing Fates did while using their seers. And she said exactly the words Daisy needed to take back to her husband. “I will make sure she’s in a place where she will prosper. I will protect her to the fullness of my abilities for as long as I am capable. I will keep her safe.”
Upstairs, something banged on the floor. Mira grimaced, her face twisting into the flummoxed mom look Daisy sometimes saw on her own mother’s face.
Mira blinked, her seer tell showing again, and shook her head. “I don’t see her. Your mother. But I hope, for your sake, she still lives.”
Daisy didn’t answer. What could she say? All she had was the hope that the reason one of the most powerful present-seers on the planet was blind to her mother’s location was because she had a talisman that protected her.
“Come.” Mira motioned Daisy toward the living room again. “Not everything is packed. There must be something you can take to him.” She walked around the island and her fingers grazed Daisy’s elbow.
She touched the same way Daisy had touched the doctor minutes before. To comfort. To say that she had this, and Daisy didn’t have to worry.
And neither did Mira’s husband.
They stopped in the center of the room among the boxes and the cleaning supplies. Daisy didn’t think they had much left to take out to the truck, and would probably leave tomorrow.
She didn’t ask. To limit connections.
Mira tapped her fingers along the boxes, her eyes doing the seer-tell again, but she didn’t open one. Instead, she stopped in front of the little kid’s suitcase. Kneeling, she ran her fingers over the purple nylon fabric and popped the latches.
Sitting on top of a set of little girl jeans, tucked next to a pair of little girl pajamas covered with comets and stars, rested a small, wingless, stuffed dragon.
Daisy stepped back. “Not that.” Not little Rysa’s toy. Not her soft friend and her comfort.
Mira lifted it out of the suitcase anyway. It looked well-loved and often cuddled. Along its side, its soft fur had been pressed flat. One foot twisted slightly, as if Rysa preferred to carry him by holding him with his back paw in her fist.
The seams where she’d cut off his wings had been sewn up more than once. The last time looked as if Rysa did it herself, carefully going over the hole with colorful embroidery thread, to add patterns to the little beast’s back.
“I can’t take that.” Daisy stepped back again, and held up her hands. She couldn’t steal a little girl’s heart.
This time, Daisy swore she felt Mira’s seer. Music played along the edge of her mind like chime
s somewhere far away, in the wind. She didn’t hear it, or see their notes, but they were there, pressing, somehow, against her mind.
A little girl’s voice floated down from upstairs. “Mommy?”
Mira thrust the toy at Daisy. “It’s important. Take it.”
“But—”
Mira’s face changed. The sad woman, the mother who had let Daisy into the house, suddenly became a Fate. Her back straightened. Her eyes narrowed and hardened. Mira was not to be disobeyed.
Because disobeying Mira was to disobey fate.
“We are bound to this path.” She thrust the little dragon at Daisy again. “Go!” Her hand whipped at the door.
Daisy took the toy and stuffed it into the inside pocket of her jacket. The same pocket she’d carried her kangaroo.
From upstairs: “Mommy! I’m done!”
Mira pushed Daisy toward the door and across the threshold. “She’ll be okay.”
“Mira.” Daisy held the door to keep the other woman from slamming it. “So will he.”
The Fate look vanished from Mira’s face and the woman returned. The mother and the wife who’d been crying. She nodded once.
And closed the door.
22
Now….
“Whoa.” Gavin sat back in his chair and shook his head. “That’s cold, Daisy. Stealing a kid’s favorite toy.”
“I didn’t want to take it.” She ran her finger around the rim of her bleach-tainted coffee mug. “Didn’t have a choice.”
Daisy frowned. Fates and their manipulations. Not one of them seemed to care to look for alternative solutions.
“And you didn’t ask about your dad?” Gavin seemed incredulous. As if he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t taken advantage of what, to him, seemed a brilliant opportunity.
But one needed to be careful with Fates. Daisy shook her head. “No.”
He chuckled. “So you thought—what’s his name? Derek? Was your daddy?” AnnaBelinda and her husband had yet to set foot in Minneapolis, so Gavin had no idea who he was talking about.
