Fate Succumbs

by Tammy Blackwell

  “Yeah, it’s like Dumbledore’s Army, but instead of going against an evil witch cum temporary headmaster, we oppose an evil Seer cum temporary Alpha.”

  “Temporary Alpha?”

  “No matter what, she’s not going to hold that spot for long.” I knew the position itself was corrupt, but I couldn’t image a more vile person than Sarvarna in the spot. She had to be removed from power, even if it meant I was going to have to kill her. I might not be ready to do it now, but Liam would get me there. Of that I had no doubt.

  “You know, I’m not really sold on ‘Liam’s Army’. How about ‘The Jedi’ since it’s this whole rebellion against an evil Empire thing?”

  I snorted. “That’s what Jase wanted to call it.”

  “The guy has good taste.”

  “Well, he certainly chose a good mate,” I said. “Couldn’t have chosen a better one for him if I had accidentally made him declare himself to her myself. Oh wait. I did do that, didn’t I?”

  I got to see Alex’s completely shocked expression yet again. “Jase and Talley? Seriously?”

  “They seemed pretty serious to me.”

  Alex leaned down to talk to Nicole. “You’re right. All the really interesting stuff happens after you die.”

  His words were light, but they sat heavy in my heart all the same. True, these dream meetings were better than nothing, but I missed him. I wanted him with me in the real world. What would this have been like if he had been by my side? Would he have been the one to save me from the Alphas? Would he be the one absconding with me? Would it be his job to teach and train me? Or would all those responsibilities still have fallen to Liam? And if so, would Alex have come along for the ride?

  Of course, if Alex hadn’t died, there was a good chance none of this would have happened. The exact cause of my ability to Change was still very much up in the air, much to my chagrin, but most every theory centered around the night Alex died. If he was still alive, I would probably still be a normal, boring human, and the Alphas would have never known I existed.

  And they would have gone on terrorizing the Shifters of the world for God knows how long.

  That’s when I had a revelation. I was already beginning to accept my life as a Shifter, but at that moment, I was happy I Changed. I might not be looking forward to the battle ahead, but it was one that needed to happen. Some things are worth fighting for. For me, this was it.

  “I’m going to do it, Alex,” I said. “I’m going to Challenge Sarvarna.”

  His hand froze on Nicole’s neck. “Now?”

  “No, your brother has made it abundantly clear I’m not ready yet, but once I am…” In my head I saw myself on a field with tall evergreen trees and a winding stream. The ground was littered with the wounded and the dead, and in the middle I stood in front of Sarvarna, her knife lodged in my stomach.

  No, I told myself. It’s not happening. Talley said it was a future not set in stone. Or maybe that was The Terminator. Either way, I had to believe that. I had to believe there was a way I could come out of this in one piece. And if there wasn’t… well, I had to ensure there was a back-up plan, someone else to swoop in and save the day.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Alex said, snapping me out of my thoughts.

  I looked into the grey eyes I would never forget no matter how long I lived. “Don’t I? Isn’t this the destiny you’ve been pushing me towards?”

  ***

  I was jerked out of my dream. You know those times when you wake up from an accidental Sunday afternoon nap by a ringing phone, and because you’re so confused and discombobulated, your heart beats so hard it literally makes your chest hurt? Imagine how much worse it would be if instead of the familiar ring of your cell phone it’s the sound of a horn and some random stranger’s scream that wakes you.

  “What the Hades?” I asked, my fingers digging into the first thing they could reach.

  “Some idiot on a motorcycle cut in front of us,” Liam said. He motioned towards his thigh. “You know, that kind of hurts.”

  I looked down to see my fingernails embedded in the denim of his jeans. “Oh, sorry!” I jerked my hand away as if his leg was scalding hot. “So sorry. I was…ummm…”

  “Asleep and awoken suddenly by a potentially deadly near-accident? Yeah, I get it. It’s not a problem.”

  Of course it wasn’t. There was no need for me to be embarrassed, which is exactly what I tried to explain to all the blood rushing up to the surface of my face and neck.

  I leaned back and waited for the color in my cheeks to return to normal. According to the road signs, we were getting close to Indianapolis, our next stop. That meant I had been asleep for at least two hours. I took a moment to marvel at how time turned into a wibbly-wobbly ball when you were asleep. I could’ve sworn I was only on that beach with Alex for a brief period of time, twenty minutes max, but in the waking world hours had passed. Timey-wimey stuff, indeed.

  “I sometimes dream about him, too.” It wasn’t even a whisper, just a breath of words I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard. Nothing about Liam’s body or face said he'd spoken, they were still in the relaxed-and-bored-bus-passenger mode, but still I waited for more. It wasn’t until I turned away he continued. “Most of the time it’s nothing. We’ll be doing something really normal and lame, like sitting around watching television and then I’ll start noticing that something is wrong. Off. And then I’ll remember.”

  Still no change in position or expression, but the knuckles on the hand resting on the thigh I had just molested were turning a startling color of white. “Once I remember he’s dead, the dream is over. I never get to talk to him.” Finally he turned, and I really wish he hadn’t. I wasn’t prepared to deal with the pain in his eyes. “Not like you.”

  “I have dreams like that, too.” Of course, my dreams like that weren’t about Alex but the man I killed, but Liam didn’t need to know that part. “I think Freud would tell us they represent unfinished business, a need to communicate that one last thing we never will be able.” Not that I gave it much thought, unless you count hundreds of hours of obsession as “much”.

  “But you were talking to him,” Liam countered.

  “How do you know?” Could he reach into my head like Talley?

  Liam looked so uncomfortable I really thought he might be about to admit to keeping the fact he was a Soul Seer from me. “You said his name,” he told his knee. “And then… ummm… you smiled. And then frowned. And then… I don’t know. I could just tell you were having a conversation. You had conversation face.”

  “Conversation face? That’s a thing?”

  Without an ounce of humor Liam said, “It is when it’s you.”

  I wasn’t one hundred percent certain what he meant, but I felt confident it wasn’t a compliment.

  I considered what I was willing to share. My meetings on the beach with Alex were private. I didn’t want to share them with anyone, let alone someone who would have no problem telling me just how stupid I was for letting myself believe they were really Alex reaching out from beyond the grave. But my conversation with Jase was still swirling around in my brain. All of this came back to trust, and last night Liam had trusted me with his past. I knew without having to ask, it wasn’t one he easily shared.

  It was time for trust to become a two way street.

  “Sometimes I have these really vivid dreams about Alex. They’re like the ones before--”

  “The ones before?”

  “Before the accident.” That word still felt so wrong in my mouth, even though I now knew it to be the truth. “I had these crazy vivid dreams where I was standing on one side of the lake, and Alex the other. And when I say ‘crazy vivid’, I mean ‘could feel the wind and taste the rain’ kind of vivid.”

  Liam nodded like he understood.

  “In the dreams, that part of the lake was completely foreign to me, but it was where Alex took me the night he died.” It had been a date, our one and only. “I told him about how I ha
d seen it in a dream, and he seemed upset about it, but he couldn’t exactly tell me why.” Because he was in wolf form at the time. We managed to communicate surprisingly well for one of us to be without the ability to speak, but not well enough to discuss the finer points of dreams.

  “Now, when I dream about that same place, he’s there. It’s the same as before. Everything is so real it’s hard to remember it’s a dream.” In the beginning, those dreams had been my escape. In them, Alex held me in his strong arms and kissed me with his warm mouth. I was able to feel every brush of lips, taste the salt of every tear. “It’s not like the accident never happened, but it’s as if he’s come back to me. It seems like he’s trying to help the only way he can now, giving comfort and guidance through dreams.” I couldn’t look at Liam. “I think…” A deep breath. “I think they may be real.”

  He didn’t answer immediately, which made me think he was ignoring me. I should have realized, though, that Liam does that when conversations start getting intense. And while it may make the person having a conversation with him go a little bonkers from time to time, it was probably a good practice. I could use a bit more time to think before I speak quite often.

  “My great-grandmother was a Dream Walker,” he finally said. “She died before I was born, but my mom talked about her a lot. Sometimes, when she would have a particularly confusing vision, she would worry about it for days until the answer would come to her in a dream. She said it was her grandmother who helped her figure it out, that she came to her in her dreams. When I was a kid, I believed it absolutely. Of course her grandmother was able to talk to her in her dreams. It made sense, especially since I watched my dad Change into a wolf once a month and knew my mom could predict snow days.”

  I was disturbed at the idea of a child watching the painful and, let’s face it, grotesque, act of Changing, but instead I said, “You were in Canada. It couldn’t have been that hard. Don’t you guys have snow on any day of the week ending in ‘y’?”

  “As I grew older, I started having my doubts,” Liam continued on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I thought it was just her way of working through stuff, but now…” He blew out a breath and rubbed the back of his head. “What does he talk to you about?”

  “I don’t know… everything?” I tasted blood and realized I had just bit through the inside of my lip. “In the beginning, he was there every time I went to sleep, so we literally just talked about anything we could think of.” In those first weeks, they were the only normal conversations I would have. “Once I Changed, he came less often, and the conversations got more focused. We theorized on how I became a Shifter. He listened to what was going on and offered advice.” Not that it was easy to understand advice, but he did try. “He got grounded after The Great Escape and wasn’t able to visit me for a month, and the visits have been really sparse since then, but it’s still basically the same thing. I tell him stuff, he responds with less-than-helpful answers, and then I beg him to elaborate. He swears they won’t let him.” I tried for a smile, but fell short. “Today we talked about how I now know about the rebellion and my role in it.”

  Liam’s scowl wasn’t unexpected. “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Angels? Gods? The Fates?” Not that I necessarily believed in all of those. “I don’t know. He’s pretty cagey when it comes to that stuff. He said if he reveals too much his visitation rights will be revoked.”

  The traffic had picked up as the Indianapolis skyline became visible. Liam took a keen interest in the vehicles passing by the window over my shoulder. I couldn’t read his face. The ever-present scowl was gone and replaced by something less self-assured. Sadness? Confusion? Heartache? Disbelief? We weren’t close enough for me to know for sure, but they were all valid emotions. I had a healthy mix of each going on.

  “I’m glad he has you,” he told minivan full of middle school aged soccer players. “It’s good he’s not alone.” There was a tremor in his voice I would have attributed to unshed tears on anyone other than Liam.

  “I don’t think he’s ever alone,” I told him with complete honesty. “I get the feeling he’s usually with others and our time at the beach is supposed to be private, but Nicole always follows him there.”

  When Liam’s eyes met mine they were definitely wet. “Nicole?”

  I nodded. “That’s how I knew your sister’s name. She stays in wolf form, but she’s almost always there.” I smiled at the thought of the little wolf pup who wiggled when you scratched just the right spot behind her ears. “She’s happy. Alex is… Alex. He worries about me and you and everything that’s going on out here in the living world, but he still smiles like an idiot at the drop of a hat. I think if it wasn’t for us, for all this crazy mess with the Alphas, he would be very happy and at peace there, too.”

  Liam closed his eyes. “Thank you.” His voice was husky. My heart cracked straight down the middle at the sight of him. I wanted to wrap my arms around him to offer comfort, but thought he wouldn’t want it. Although, if I knew he would be kissing me less than twenty-four hours later, I would have chanced it.

  Chapter 14

  The whole sitting-by-the-bathroom-so-no-one-will-sit-near-us thing worked out pretty well most of the trip. The problem occurred when we changed busses in Minneapolis, and to be perfectly honest, it was mostly my fault.

  Okay, okay… It was all my fault.

  The thing about taking a bus across the great nation of the United States of America is it takes forever. Like an infinite amount of time, plus one more day. Sure, you think it’s going to be no time at all since there are only 3,000 miles from one coast to the other and you’re not doing any overnight stops, but what you are doing is a million and a half little stops. Thirty minutes in this small city, an hour or two in this big city, and ten minutes in every little town in between. So, by the time we got to Minneapolis we had been on the road for over twenty hours. I was tired. Cranky. And my stupid wig was so hot and itchy I considered asking the spaced out chick with evident track marks on her too skinny arms if she had any Xanax to share.

  As far as mistakes go, what we came to call The Minneapolis Incident was one of my more idiotic screw-ups, but I still contend that an insanity plea should be accepted considering the circumstances.

  I was in the bathroom at the terminal. I thought I was alone, but honestly I wasn’t really paying attention. All I knew was my head was going to explode if I didn’t take off the wig and the plain black knitted hat I had replaced my UK hat with back in Indiana. So, I did. I sat them both carefully on the ledge of the mirror, leaned my head over the sink, and ran some gloriously cold water over my head.

  When I straightened back up an older woman was staring at me.

  “Hi,” I stammered out. She didn’t say anything. She just kept staring at me, and I could almost see her matching my face and hair with the picture they flashed on TV for weeks. “Looks awful doesn’t it?” I grabbed a handful of paper towels and started rubbing them over my wet head so I could put the wig back on. “They said it would look different after it started growing back in, something about the chemo and chemicals and hair follicles and stuff, but no one said it would look like this.” Her expression didn’t change, so I just kept on rambling. “My mom won’t let me dye it yet because she thinks it’ll make the cancer come back or something crazy like that, so I’m still stuck with the wigs.” I lifted mine up to demonstrate. “I really thought I would be able to throw these away by now, but there is no way I’m going around with my hair looking like this.”

  The old lady turned around and left the bathroom without saying a word. Once I got everything back in place, I went in search of Liam.

  It didn’t take long since he was waiting for me on the bench just outside the restrooms. It wasn’t nearly enough time for me to finish my internal debate over whether or not I was going to tell him what happened. On one hand, we were trying this whole new honesty thing on for size. On the other hand, Liam was scary when he was mad, and this was really going to
piss him off good.

  On a third hand, or perhaps a foot, he still hadn’t told me why we were going to Fargo, so we weren’t really doing very well with that open communication thing yet, anyway.

  Yeah, there was really no need to tell him.

  The bus was crowded, more so than any of the others had been. Liam and I got on first and took our customary stinky seat. It wasn’t until almost everyone boarded that she climbed on and sat directly across from us. She settled herself into the seat, placed her bag of knitting supplies in the empty seat, and then turned to stare at me again.

  “Liam?” I said as quietly as I could without moving my lips. His lifted eyebrow told me to continue. “See that lady across from us?” A slight nod. “She may have seen me without my wig on.”

  Liam rolled his eyes to the heavens and took in a deep breath through his nose and then let it out slowly through pursed lips. “Follow my lead,” was the only warning he gave before grabbing onto my face and placing both thumbs over my lips. Then he leaned in and placed his own lips on the other side of his thumbs.

  What the Hades…?

  It took me a second, but I realized the wet smacking noise was coming from Liam’s mouth, which was separated from mine by less than half an inch. When he moaned out my name I knew he meant it as an admonishment for not joining in quickly enough, so I grabbed onto his shoulders, tilted my head, and attempted to make my own make-out noises.

  At first it was awkward and weird because, come on, I was fake making out with Liam freaking Cole. But then something changed. I don’t know what it was, but one minute I was feeling more than a little ridiculous and the next my heart was going all pitter-patter. Occasionally the corner of Liam’s lip would brush against my flesh and it would cause little electrical storms of sensation to travel from that spot all over my body. Being that close, his smell, which Wolf Scout has always appreciated, completely encompassed me. I found myself flicking out my tongue to see if his skin tasted as good. And then I might have sort of tried to suck his thumb into my mouth. Fortunately, somewhere between opening my mouth and actually doing something stupid, I realized what I was doing and jerked back.