Collision Course

by Helena Maeve

  This was why she didn’t interact with her so-called kind. They were unpredictable, scheming bastards and they didn’t function according to any rules she understood. A first-strike sense of justice had decimated her first pack and blind devotion had killed her second. She should have stayed well away from the likes of Neil Riccard, should have known that he’d attract a coterie of people just like him.

  A grinding noise echoed from the other side of the door, jolting Eve out of her reverie. She jerked upright, her claws elongating as she readied against a possible assault. No, not possible. Likely. Whether they came at her with soft words or syringes filled with strange drugs, it was all the same. They all wanted to pry her head open and see what lay within.

  She heard the latch release before she felt the first gust of cool air on her cheeks, before she scented the grime and rot of the city.

  Neil appeared in the doorway half a second before she could make a run for it.

  “Let me guess,” Eve ground out, “you’re in this together? Fuck, I should have known.” He had probably only shown his face at the museum to size her up.

  That he had saved her life didn’t seem immediately relevant. The lab coats, too, had kept her from tearing the flesh from her bones. That didn’t make them saviors.

  Neil held up his hands. “Calm down. I’m here to get you out.”

  “And you won’t if I’m all hysterical, is that it?” Eve took a tentative step closer, half expecting to see Neil retreat. She knew she looked a sight with her claws out and her fangs showing. Shifting wasn’t a matter of fashion or style, but it damn well gave her the upper hand over lesser predators.

  “Is that what you think of me?” Neil asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe I’m feeling a little delusional.” Two could play this game. Eve’s appetite for venom had doubled since they’d last seen each other. She didn’t hesitate to growl when he didn’t move from her path. “Where’s your littler brother? Leave a girl hanging like that and she’s ripe to get bored…”

  Neil heaved a sigh. “He and I had a talk. He’s agreed to let you go.”

  “How magnanimous.”

  “Said you were threatening to kill people if they didn’t point you in my direction,” he added, as if Eve hadn’t even spoken. “Is that true?”

  “He embellishes. Runt of the litter syndrome, what do you expect?” If she kept it all derisive and aloof, maybe Neil wouldn’t see how her hands were shaking. Weaknesses of any kind were to be concealed from an enemy under pain of death—her pack had taught her that.

  Since when is Neil your enemy? asked a voice at the back of her mind. Since when do you deal in enemies?

  Eve inched forward cautiously, until there was nothing between her and Neil but for a palm’s width of empty air. “Get out of my way.” To her surprise, all it took was a request. Neil moved aside with a lukewarm smile and a sigh that had no business sounding so exasperated. The corridor outside was brick and cement and smelled faintly musty. A solitary light bulb dangled overhead. “Are we underground?”

  He nodded. “You’re technically in my house. Well, under it. In the backyard.”

  “You boys have been busy…”

  “Actually, my grandparents built a bunker here in the forties, soon as they heard that the government was interning anyone who behaved suspiciously. Came in handy during the Red Scare, too.” Neil pointed down the hall to the right of the cell. “Stairs are over there. Keep going until you hit the surface. Felix brought you in through the house?”

  “I don’t know. He put a hood over my head.” And if Eve had reacted a little strongly to the indignity of being so treated, she figured she was allowed. After all, it wasn’t every day that some asshole got the better of her. “I had a backpack when he grabbed me. You have any idea where it is?”

  To her dismay, Neil shook his head.

  “Fuck.” Five grand and her ticket out of this godforsaken town both lost in the blink of an eye. “Your asshole of a brother must’ve taken it. Any idea where I can find him?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Neil said, which largely predisposed Eve to do just that, “but even if I did, I don’t think I’d tell you. I’ll talk to him myself when he gets back from his rounds—”

  They were in a narrow corridor that may or may not have been warded to the high heavens and yet Eve didn’t spare more than a passing thought for her own security as she rounded on him.

  Neil anticipated her. “Would you give up your pack if I wanted to avenge myself of some perceived slight?”

  Okay, ouch. “Don’t you condescend to me! You don’t know anything about me,” Eve snarled. “Fact that we used to fuck doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.” And besides, Felix had stolen her money. There was no perception to that, just cold, hard deeds—the sort that ended with someone’s blood in the back of her mouth.

  “That’s becoming abundantly clear,” Neil sighed. He had the nerve to sound hurt.

  The stairs did lead to the surface. Eve spilled out into an overgrown garden with more weeds than flowers. The sky had gone from powder blue to a dark plum shade. A few wispy clouds were being chased by a bleak silvery swath slowly rolling in from the north. Eve could smell the ozone in the air. A storm was coming. She should have greeted it on the outskirts of town, beyond the barricades.

  Thanks to Felix, she was going to have to wait it out.

  “So what was it?” Neil pressed, climbing to the surface behind Eve and closing the hatch door on the underground bunker. It would figure that the Riccards had a shifter-sized cage in their backyard.

  “What was what?”

  “What was so important that you had to threaten a mauling?”

  Oh, that. Eve had set the thought aside as soon as it had become obvious that she’d walked into a bear trap. “I don’t remember.” It didn’t matter. Her willingness to make nice with Neil and fix past mistakes had bled away to nothing at all. She was a shifter. She didn’t play by a warlock’s rules and never had.

  “That’s a shame. You want something to eat or drink? I don’t know if Felix gave you anything…”

  “He didn’t,” Eve snapped, because she didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding. There was no worse insult than captivity for a creature like her. Any warlock worth his salt would’ve known that. Felix might have tried to reason with her instead of clapping handcuffs around her wrists and ankles and marching her into a clean room that smelled of antiseptic and nothing else. If he’d done it at all, it was precisely because he wanted to see her squirm.

  Neil sighed. “So… Tea? Coffee?”

  “You got anything stronger?”

  He welcomed her into his kitchen like an honored guest and poured them both a measure of whiskey. He even turned his back on Eve, probably banking on their shared history in the hopes that he wouldn’t pay the price for her wounded ego.

  He wasn’t wrong to gamble.

  Eve downed her booze only after she had seen him sip his. Poison was a sorcerer’s weapon of choice. It would be just like Neil to spike her drink.

  You’re confusing one brother with the other and both of them with one of your nightmares. Stop it.

  “You really don’t like this house,” Neil noted, the corners of his lips tipping up into a wry smile. “You never did.”

  Eve let her gaze flit over the wooden cupboards, the ancient stove squeezed into what might once have been a hearth. Nothing had changed since the last time she was here, if not for the man leaning against the copper sink, sipping at his single malt.

  “It was never the house I minded,” Eve lied. The house freaked her out. She could feel the power that loitered in this place from one too many summonings, incantations, wards, even if she couldn’t tap into it. But it was the people who had made their home here that truly gave her the creeps. “In light of recent events, I’d say I’m justified, wouldn’t you?”

  “Only if you think we’re all obstinate douchebags.”

  “I do,” Eve shot back and watche
d Neil’s expression metamorphose as the answer sank in. He actually seemed surprised. Did he think that being told she wasn’t good enough—never in so many words—would be easy to forget?

  She watched him nod, his shoulders sagging with long, ponderous breaths. He didn’t think that. Eve couldn’t read minds, but she could tell as much. “I closed another rift today,” he mumbled. “After I left your place. I mean, you probably don’t care about that—”

  “Another ghostling?”

  She cared. That was part of the problem.

  Neil glanced up. “No. Well, yes and no. A necromancer with a small army. Luckily, he had to step through first, before he could raise the dead, and once you kill the necromancer, the whole ghost train dies with him, so… Not a ghostling.”

  She could see the excitement in his gaze when he talked about it. This wasn’t just a job—this was a mission for Neil. No wonder he didn’t want to leave St. Louis. “Sounds like you didn’t get much sleep, either.”

  “I probably will, after this.” He held up his drink with a sheepish grin.

  “Still a lightweight?”

  “Not really, but I don’t often drink wine and hard liquor all within the same twenty-four hour stint. I’d probably sleep a lot more if I did.”

  Eve struggled to cling to her anger, to remember that she had already made her peace with leaving St. Louis and everyone in it. It didn’t stick. She’d had days when she’d had to dig deep to think of a reason why she shouldn’t go on a murderous rampage across town. She’d never had to struggle to remember why she wanted to leave it—until now. Funny what a half-decent lay can do…

  “Are you going to invite me into your living room or are the likes of me only permitted in the kitchen provided they don’t touch anything?” Testiness came easier to her than resignation, so she chose to focus on that.

  “Sure,” Neil said and seemed taken aback. “I just. I figured you’d want to be on your way. But of course, you’re waiting for your bag…”

  Eve bit her tongue against saying that she’d gladly get out of his hair if he only deigned to summon his brother. Then again, what if Felix chose not to answer? He was just as much warlock as Neil. He could resist the pull of summoning if he wanted to—which, come to think of it, could only mean that Neil had come to her apartment knowingly.

  She dropped to the couch with an unceremonious thump, ignoring the framed photographs of scowling ancestors on the walls. If only they knew the vermin that was sprawling all over their family heirlooms. Why, they might croak all over again.

  “All this is worth staying in St. Louis for?” Eve asked, waving a lackadaisical hand at the whitewashed walls and heavy, mahogany furniture stuffed full of trinkets and grimoires that would bite her fingers if she even dared stroke the spines.

  Disparate armchairs and tables carved in a variety of woods and styles crowded around the small, nineteen-fifties TV ironically—or perhaps not so ironically—connected to a Wii game console.

  “Yes,” Neil said blithely. “Of course it is. My family has lived in this house for eight generations. I can’t just—”

  “Leave it to save your neck? Your bloodline? As far as I recall, your family was in rather grave danger of going extinct, never mind losing its seat of power.”

  “A lot has changed in ten years.” Neil scowled.

  “Oh? You’ve fathered a dozen illegitimate sons and daughters, have you?”

  The scowl threatened to become a smile, for all that Neil tried to conceal it by staring down his crystal tumbler. “No…”

  “Didn’t think so.” Neil wasn’t the type. He was in love with the idea of family, even if he seemed to have forgotten what it was actually supposed to be like in real life. His own had been rife with trials and tribulations—and, in the end, with unfortunate, tragic casualties, some more bizarre than others.

  If Eve hadn’t known better, she might have thought they were cursed. The truth was that the only sorcerers powerful enough to weave a curse like that and have it last for generations were the Riccards themselves.

  Had it been Eve standing in Neil’s shoes, she would have fled St. Louis through the first window of opportunity. Even standing in her own shoes, she’d still done it—only to return, tail between her legs, when all other doors had seemed padlocked.

  “I did think I’d be married by now, though,” Neil said pensively as he swirled the dregs of his whiskey. “Maybe even a dad.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those guys—the ones who plan out their whole life like it’s a board game.”

  “Nah,” he scoffed. “I just… That oracle—”

  It was Eve’s turn to dismiss the topic before it was even brought up. “Please, that idiot didn’t know her ass from her elbow. If she was good at her job, she would’ve predicted the shit we’re in right now and told us what to do to avoid being blown to smithereens.”

  “Maybe she did know,” Neil mused. “Maybe she just didn’t tell us because she knew we wouldn’t believe her. Cassandra’s dilemma—”

  “This isn’t the Trojan War and we’re not stupid. I could come to grips with you turning water into wine, I’m pretty sure I would’ve been able to grasp the intricacies of a giant asteroid on a collision course with the Earth.”

  “Hey, the wine was a one-time thing,” Neil protested.

  “Pretty amazing, though.” Or at least that was how Eve remembered it registering as a teenager. She smiled at the memory. They had done it behind the Arby’s one school night, when they were both supposed to be home doing homework. Neil’s first coup de grace. After that had come the silver necklace that became gold and rhinestones before melting into a puddle of blue-black goo, the piñata filled with spiders for her awful cousin’s birthday—necessary because the cousin was truly awful—and all the other tricks that had seemed so incredible and devolved so quickly into dust.

  That was the thing about Neil’s enchantments. They only lasted for so long before they morphed into something terrible, or at the very least downright disgusting.

  “Where did you go?” Neil asked softly, tilting forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

  “What?”

  His voice was gentle despite Eve’s quick-fire defensive maneuvers. He knew her well. “Just now… You were elsewhere, I could see it on your face.”

  What could she say? I was remembering the good times? “Wondering how we got to where we are now, considering where we started.” The whole star-crossed lovers thing had been good for a while. Neil had filial piety down pat, but for Eve he had bent the rules and spat in the face of convention. And Eve had neglected her pack for him. When she should have been running with other shifters her own age, she had begged off to meet Neil for secret rendezvous. The worst thing about it was that even now, when her pack was dead and buried, she still didn’t regret it. Guilt chewed at her from within, like a cancer.

  “You left,” Neil recalled, hitching up his shoulders.

  “So did you.” After she had, admittedly, but he hadn’t answered her summons. He had turned the page long before she had.

  And now here they were—both of them alone. Neil could dream of family all he wanted, but shifters were supposed to mate with their own kind and form bonds that lasted a lifetime. Eve had missed the boat on that. Maybe that was why she’d gone looking for him this morning.

  Neil broke the silence after a long moment. “I guess we both did what we thought was right.” It didn’t seem to console him to admit as much. It did nothing for Eve, either.

  “That offer of dinner still good?” she asked, gracelessly changing the subject. “Not for nothing, but your irresponsible baby brother forgot to feed me, too. Hope he doesn’t own any house pets…”

  “Mother wouldn’t have allowed it,” Neil said, playing into the attempt at levity. They both knew his parents’ opinions on shifters—namely, that they were they scum of the Earth—and other animals—that they were best used as tools in spell-casting, no more important to the task at hand tha
n a chalk-drawn pentagram or a salt circle.

  Life had very different meanings for the Riccard family depending on whom it belonged to. Their own kin always ranked far and above anyone else. Something told Eve that for all of his youthful rebelliousness, Neil wasn’t all that different from his ancestors. She followed him back into the kitchen and replenished her drink, as if burning thoughts out of her mind with liquor had ever worked in the past.

  * * * *

  Dinner wound up being a modest meal of salted fish and homemade bread shared at the kitchen table. Once they’d finished, Eve offered to do the dishes while Neil scooped ice cream into bowls. His freezer was large enough to conceal a couple of dead bodies—mercifully, he had chosen to fill it with vanilla and strawberry frozen nirvana instead.

  There was a strange ease of domesticity in the way they orbited around each other in the kitchen. The space was large enough that they needn’t have been so much in contact, but when Neil needed a paper towel, he inevitably seemed to brush against Eve’s side and when she had to restore the washed and dried glasses to their place in the cupboard, she couldn’t help but nudge him with her hip. Or rather, she could. She just didn’t want to.

  If there was any value in honesty, it was in admitting that she knew what she was doing when she snagged a hand around Neil’s wrist and brought his ice cream-slicked thumb to her mouth.

  “I don’t think we should,” Neil breathed, glued to her pink, rough tongue as Eve licked his finger clean.

  “Why not?” She wanted to. It was easy to want Neil when she knew what she was getting into. “Is it because we’re in your house? I’m not afraid of ghosts…” The poltergeist at the museum had been a nuisance, but endorphins made it hard to recall just how badly she’d panicked at the sight of it hovering in the Paleolithic exhibit.

  He caught her hands in his and she was pleased to discover that his palms were warm, the pads of his fingers soft and delicate. There were no callouses from climbing trees or fighting encroaching shifters off one’s territory. “The last time we did, you made it sound like I forced you.”