Finding Insight

by Katherine Kim

  “He’s been cursed with visions, Livvie.” David’s calm was back. “He was clearly in close contact with a powerful spirit, which means he’s been tainted past saving.”

  “Every human can be saved, David, you know that!” Olivia was trying to get closer to David, and Sebastian wondered what she was trying to accomplish now. This was an interesting development, the hunters turning on each other. He certainly wasn’t going to complain about it. If Olivia could take out David, Kai could certainly distract Olivia long enough to get Gabe away.

  “No, Olivia, I don’t,” David sounded tired now. “Humans who get too close to a monster must be put down like the monster itself. That’s all there is to it. Otherwise we will never stomp out the evil in our midst. We will never reclaim the planet for humanity. We’ll never be free.”

  “David, no.” Olivia was pleading now. “That’s not even slightly true. Those humans are just as much victims as any that get attacked. Let’s just go. If you got a vision already, you got what you wanted. Let’s just go now and leave him here. He’ll get himself out, or housekeeping will find him or something, and we’ll never see him again. It’ll be okay, and we’ll just go.”

  “You know better. He’s cursed with visions, Olivia. He can seek out a witch or a monster and send them after us. Especially now. He says there are monsters nearby us here. One will try to bring me down, personally. Bastard won’t get close enough, though.” There was glee in his voice now. Sebastian inched forward, creeping close to the door.

  A movement near the back of the car caught his attention and he saw Kai slide around the back to crouch by the rear tire, one hand braced lightly on the edge of the tread. He met Sebastian’s gaze and nodded, then his eyes flicked up to the door. Sebastian wondered what his brother was seeing with his otherworldly sight. It wasn’t a skill he’d used often until just recently, but since their last encounter with a hunter, Kai had made a point of practicing, and Sebastian hoped it was paying off now.

  “They seem to have carved a couple ward runes into the door frame, but we can get in without any trouble, I think,” Kai whispered. “Just not while we’re casting anything.”

  “This is too much, David,” Olivia’s voice brought his attention back to the crack in the door. “Humans aren’t disposable. Our job is to save them, not to harm them. This is how your cousin ended up in trouble! She kidnapped that human girl, and her idiot partner shot up that club and murdered some woman. If they’d just gone after the monster that had dragged that poor girl all over North America, then nobody would ever have even known or cared. But they went after the girl and now look! Kidnapping, fraud, attempted murder! That’s all because she steamrolled her partner and went after humans, not just monsters!”

  Olivia’s voice had been rising steadily and she was nearly shouting when she finished. She had also gone back to pacing. David must have put the gun down somewhere.

  “Olivia! You’re missing the point! The fact is that some humans are beyond redemption. If the girl had been taken against her will, had been fighting to free herself from the control of that thing they were hunting, then that would have been different. She could have been saved,” David said, his own voice rising a bit. “But she didn’t. You remember what Suzy said about her target before it all went to shit. That kid was raised by the monster for years. She calls him Dad for God’s sake! There was no saving that girl. And there is no saving this boy, either. He has lived too long with the curse. He told me the other day that he didn’t want our help anymore. I heard him talking to a fox the other day! Today he said that he wasn’t broken after all, that he was special.” David’s voice was full of venom now. “He didn’t want to get rid of the visions because they were a part of himself, part of what made him a unique individual, and he just kept going on about it! I don’t know where he picked that shit up, but it’s dangerous and I won’t let him wander through the world free and able to destroy lives. After I deal with him, we will go after the monster ourselves and deal with him and the girl, and even if my cousin ends up in prison, she’ll be satisfied because her mission will be finished.”

  “That’s insane. I am not going to be part of this. I teamed up with you even though you seemed a bit rough because you also seemed like a good man who wanted to protect humanity, not a lunatic on some sort of crusade. I refuse to hunt innocent humans.” Olivia’s voice was sharp now, and when she stormed back into Sebastian’s view she carried a small duffel bag. “I’m just glad I didn’t get too comfortable. I’m gone, David. Go on your crazy revenge quest on your own.”

  Olivia flung the door wide open as she stomped out. Sebastian didn’t watch her leave. Instead, the moment the door was open and she was past him, he darted into the room to find and rescue his friend.

  24

  “Wait!” Kai’s voice was muffled slightly by the door now, and it was far too late to heed him anyway.

  “What the hell—” David choked out, his surprise at the invasion causing him to stutter. The hunter stood between two beds, holding his bag of food and gaping at the flash of fur that darted past.

  Sebastian looked around only long enough to find Gabe, lying on the floor by a cheap sofa at the far side of the room. He lay crumpled, as he’d fallen, half on his chest, one leg bent just enough to twist his torso to reveal the damp spot David had halfheartedly cleaned from Gabe’s illness. A damp towel was on the floor nearby, and it seemed that Olivia had at least tried to clean Gabe up a bit, even though she’d left him on the floor. The smell of vomit was still very strong inside the orange and cream room and it mixed badly with the hot greasy smell of the fast food.

  Gabe’s hands were pulled behind his back and bound with shiny silver duct tape that tugged on his skin, pulling it into wrinkles, and parts of his face were a hot red color that promised to change to a deep purple in the very near future. His left eye was already puffing shut.

  Sebastian wasn’t prone to anger. It was a sharp, itchy emotion and he didn’t usually give in to it. Life was too short to spend it that uncomfortable, and honestly, most people weren’t being cruel because they got off on it, but because they hadn’t yet made the connection between their actions and the real person who is hurt by them. Sebastian felt that the disconnect of empathy was something that could be fixed more often than not, but anger wasn’t the way to go about it.

  In this moment, however, a red haze obscured everything in the motel room, and he didn’t feel very forgiving or patient. He was burning.

  “Who the fuck are you?” David had recovered from his shock now and was reaching for the gun. “You’re no natural fox, that much I can tell. What kind of monster are you, then?”

  “Knock, knock!” Kai suited his actions to his words and tapped his fist sharply on the door frame as he pushed into the room himself. David spun to face this new intruder.

  “You with this thing?” David gestured at Sebastian who was growling loudly now, braced between David and Gabe.

  “That thing is my brother,” Kai kept his voice calm, but Sebastian could hear the familiar older-brother protective tone Kai took whenever someone took a potshot at Sebastian. “We would both appreciate basic manners at the very least. If you’re capable of them, at any rate, though I have my doubts all things considered.” Kai’s eyes flicked over to Gabe, crumpled on the floor, then back to David.

  With David’s attention on Kai, Sebastian turned to nose at Gabe. Rolling his eyes at himself, he shifted his form and carefully rolled the injured boy over. Gabe groaned, and with a further whimper started to blink back to consciousness.

  “I’ve got you, Gabe. Hang on, I’m going to sit you up and get your arms free,” Sebastian said. He tried to keep his tone reassuring, but his anger had too firm a hold. He knew he’d let it seep into his words when Gabe flinched. Then, though, Gabe relaxed against Sebastian’s arm, letting his friend hold him up and bear his slight weight.

  “I told you my friends would come,” Gabe said. Even though his voice was ragged and quiet, he s
ounded just a bit smug as he glared at David.

  “These things are nobody’s friends,” David snarled. He’d backed up to the bedside table, the lamp behind him lighting his back and making strange shadows fall over his face. He had the gun in his hand. “And they can’t help you now. This room is warded against magic coming in. They’re just bodies waiting to be destroyed now. Just like you.” He raised the gun to point it at Sebastian and fired.

  Sebastian looked at the hand he held up, flung out to shield himself and Gabe from the bullet and frowned with confusion. Nothing hurt, no blood seeped from a wound, there was no burn of damaged flesh. Gabe looked equally confused and just as unharmed. A flicker of heat snapped his attention to the space in front of him. David was staring at the same place, and as much as Sebastian hated to share anything with the hunter, they both probably wore the same expression of stunned confusion.

  Because there, stretching thin and almost as clear as crystal in front of them, was his foxfire. Sebastian could feel the magic pouring from him, clean and strong, and he knew that his fire had somehow formed a shield for him, incinerating the bullet the instant it made contact.

  “How…” David whispered.

  “Well, a few things I guess you should know.” Kai’s voice broke into the moment. David’s head whipped around and Sebastian used the moment to finish sitting Gabe up to lean on the front of the motel couch. He pulled on his magic with his conscious mind now and a tiny flame of his foxfire cut through all four layers of the tape as easily as a knife would, and he carefully started to peel it away from Gabe’s skin. He was only somewhat successful. Gabe hissed several times, and Sebastian could feel the kid tensing under his fingers.

  “First, you and your girlfriend are really sloppy. You didn’t actually ward against any magic use inside the room. You warded against magic coming into the room. Active spells couldn’t cross the threshold, that’s true, but there weren’t any spells active when Seb and I came in, so your ward runes didn’t do anything. And you didn’t seem to protect yourself against uninvited guests of any sort, let alone spirits.”

  “Nice attention to detail, dumbass.” Sebastian huffed a laugh and dropped the strip of tape to the floor. He helped Gabe stand, then put himself firmly back between Gabe and David. David, for his part, now pointed the gun at Kai and sneered.

  “Won’t matter in a few minutes. I’ll just shoot you instead of the brat, then get out the door behind you to my truck where my real tools are.”

  Kai sighed. “You missed the part where we’re brothers, didn’t you? I could probably do that trick, too, if I thought long enough about how it worked. Well done, Seb, by the way. That was awesome,” Kai grinned. “I’ll have to tell Sarah what a badass you are.”

  David snarled again, wordlessly now and Sebastian was sure he tried to pull the trigger, but a ball of fire encased the grip instead and the hunter dropped it on the bed. Kai cocked his eyebrow and smirked.

  “Secondly, I learned how to deal with guns when the last hunters tried to lock me in a root cellar,” Kai paused when David roared. “Oh, did you know them? The monsters that murdered a number of random people whose only goal was a fun evening of dancing? The monsters who shot a woman in front of her daughter and husband? Who kidnapped that same child to try to catch and kill both me and her father? You know those monsters?”

  “He knows them. He’s family. One of them is his cousin,” Gabe said.

  “You are the monsters!” David screamed and launched himself at Sebastian, who was closer. David was incoherent, spewing out profanities and insults that seemed disconnected to one another. Still, he had spent his life training to fight and it showed. His movements were practiced and so fast they almost blurred together. He landed three blows to Sebastian’s body before anyone could even react.

  Sebastian, however, let the red haze surround him again, and the fourth blow never landed. He wasn’t a trained fighter— not a lot of call for martial arts when your arch nemesis is old plumbing, after all. And he wasn’t a full-blood spirit, there was far too much human in Sebastian for him to access all the abilities his ancestors had. But Keiko had been powerful in her own right and passed that down to her daughter, and then to Sebastian himself, which made him plenty fast enough to keep up with the trained fighter that aimed for his throat, hoping to incapacitate him.

  Sebastian knocked David’s punch away, spinning the man around slightly, and shoved him, hard. David lurched back and almost fell onto the bed when his leg hit the edge of the mattress. But the hunter was entirely lost to his rage and bounced right back, putting the full brunt of his strength into the attack. He realized too late his mistake and crashed into Sebastian’s foxfire shield with his full body.

  His screams echoed through the room and over them, they heard the thin wail of police sirens.

  “Seb,” Kai called a warning as the police cars screeched towards them. “That was the third thing. I called the police, and no doubt half the motel has now, too.”

  “Go,” Gabe said. He shoved Sebastian towards the door. “As animals. Get out of here and I’ll deal with the cops.”

  “But—” Sebastian wanted to stay, he’d handle whatever they tried to throw at him.

  “Look, call me a lawyer or something, but trust me now, okay? I know what to do. Just go. I’ll get back home somehow.” Gabe shoved him again. “You have to hurry. Please!” It was the panicked note in his voice that finally got Sebastian moving.

  “Jennifer will be with you as soon as she can get here,” he said, just before letting his magic blur his body. Kai was already outside, a coyote waiting for his fox friend. Together they slid into the edge of civilization that lay in the scrubby grass beside a truck stop parking lot and vanished from human sight.

  25

  “And you just left him there? By himself?” Sarah grumbled. She slammed the cupboard shut and stomped across to the sink. Sebastian slid down in his seat at the kitchen table and slumped over to stare at the dented wood surface. They sat in his apartment now, three hours after the police showed up to sort things out at the motel. They’d stayed there, in the parking lot for a long time, listening to see if they needed to intervene somehow, but Gabe seemed to be handling the situation with admirable skill, and Kai had eventually tugged his brother down the road behind another motel to shift back and get to the car.

  “Well, he was pretty adamant, frankly,” Kai chimed in from the doorway where he looked just as pleased about the situation as Sebastian. “What good would it have done anyone if we got arrested, anyway? Gabe was the clear victim in the room, and when the cops stormed in, David was raving about monsters and magic and…” Sebastian looked up and met his eyes. The anxiety he saw there matched his own. Sarah’s shoulders slumped for a moment before she got her irritation back to the top of her emotions.

  “And what, you’ve never dealt with that before?” The coffee sloshed over the top of the pot and splattered on the counter as she banged around, pouring three cups of the fresh brew.

  “It wouldn’t have been smart for them to get caught up in a second kidnapping investigation in three months, with basically the same M.O.” Jennifer chimed in as she came around the corner. “Hey guys, I’ve been on the phone with the folks up in Whitney and I think it’s mostly sorted out. Gabe told them that a good Samaritan had gotten him loose while David was distracted and then booked it when he heard the sirens. If you’re going to lie, stick as close to the truth as you can, right? Now you can tell me everything.” She sat down and settled in, notepad ready in front of her.

  “Well, you know the basics of how we found Gabe and all that, right?” Kai gave Sarah a weak smile of thanks when she thrust the coffee cup into his hands. Sarah glared back at him.

  “Yeah. I think I’ve basically got it through the guy waving the gun around. What happened then?” Jennifer asked. It was always funny to watch her put her lawyer hat on, Sebastian thought. His mind kept bouncing around between Gabe and the police and David, and the events that
had apparently started all this a few months back with Kai and Cassie’s kidnapping.

  “He tried to shoot Sebastian, who threw up an amazing foxfire shield that I haven’t been able to figure out. It was awesome!” Kai’s eyes sparked with the challenge and Sebastian had a moment of smugness that he had a skill his powerful older brother didn’t. “Then he tried to shoot me, but I heated the gun out of his hand, and then he launched himself at Seb, who took a few punches before he got his shield back up. David didn’t handle a full body burn very well, let’s just say. That was when the cops showed up and Gabe kind of threw us out.”

  “He told the police that he lives here, though. I heard him tell them he’d just signed a lease so he wasn’t sure exactly what the address was yet, and we got a call right after we got on the road again to confirm it,” Sebastian said. “We told them that we’d be happy to come get Gabe or do anything else necessary since we liked the kid and we all lived and worked here, but they just gave us the normal run around.”

  “Well they would. You’re not exactly family, legally speaking.” Jennifer made a few notes and then looked back up. She was about to ask something else when they heard the front door open and close.

  “Hello? I figured I should come let you guys know I’m okay. Is it alright that I’m here?” Gabe’s voice carried in from the hall. He sounded exhausted and there was an edge of pain in his voice that had Sarah leaping into action.

  “It’s perfect! Come in and sit down. Let me see. Doc will be here soon, she ran back to the Apothecary for some things when we got the quick version of what happened.” Sarah hustled him into the kitchen and Sebastian stood to give him a place to sit. Kai was already rummaging in the refrigerator for leftover pizza to feed him. Gabe just sank into the chair and curled over to rest his head on his arms on the table top.