Ava's Revenge

by Teyla Branton

  “My family?” Frances asked.

  I smiled. “They’re waiting for you on the boat.”

  Without apparent effort, Ritter hefted the black bag like so much garbage, his stare still pinning Johansson to the wall. Then he grabbed Johansson and pushed him in the direction of the entryway. “The boat will only fit twenty more,” he said over his shoulder.

  “So we’ll need another boat.” That was a problem I could handle.

  “I’ll get the others from the kitchen and meet you out front.” Frances hurried from the room.

  “What about my client?” Smith asked when we were alone.

  Client. His training was showing. I laughed. “You mean Amelia?”

  “Yeeesss.” The reply was hesitant.

  For a moment we stood staring at each other in the ruined parlor. My eyes drank in his battered face, the rumpled clothes stained with blood. Now that I knew who he was, I didn’t know why I hadn’t recognized him immediately. Every word and action shouted his identity. The attraction we’d felt in the barn resumed with force: his and mine, our emotions twining together. The feelings rushed through me, singing in my veins and threatening to block out all rational thought.

  He was still waiting for further explanation.

  “That woman who was just here is Frances,” I said. “Miles, I came for her because of Amelia.”

  Smith stared, his battered face puzzled. “You know my name.”

  Miles Smithson to be exact. If I hadn’t already deduced it, his thoughts were practically yelling it at me now. “Yes. I also know you’re an attorney with Wellison and Durham. But now it’s your turn to answer a question. How did you know to come here?”

  He rubbed a hand across his chin, wincing as he touched a bruise. “Amelia wrote a letter saying she was leaving Savannah to come here to free Frances and her family. She was worried about making it in time, and Alabama is closer and the mail arrived fast. I thought I might get here in time if she couldn’t. I pulled a few strings so it would all be legal just in case Johansson had fake papers.”

  I had told Miles about Frances in my last letter, written and mailed on the trail to Mississippi. I knew he would share my outrage, but never had I imagined that he would abandon his busy practice to travel here to help me.

  “I knew where she stayed the last time she was here . . .” he began again, and then stopped. “Wait, are you with her? Is she at the hotel?”

  I heard the hope and understood that despite his attraction for me, he’d give me up forever if that was the only way he could meet Amelia. She meant a lot to him. More than she should. Knowing this made me want to tell him what his letters had meant to an old lady who wasn’t really old at all.

  “She’ll be on the boat.” What else could I say? He wouldn’t understand if I said that Amelia Mitchell was the name I’d made up for him and his siblings, an alias like a dozen others I’d used over the past century.

  “So what is your real name?”

  “Ava O’Hare.”

  He stared. “O’Hare. You’re related to Amelia then. O’Hare was her mother’s maiden name.”

  “Something like that.”

  “No wonder you seem so familiar.” He closed the space between us with several long strides. “Wait. The cut on your face, from your fight with Cardiff. It’s healing.”

  I nodded. “It is.”

  He studied me for a long moment, again waiting. He did that well—waiting. I could feel Ritter’s impatience outside the front door. He should have left already to retrieve Johansson’s papers, but I’d never get him to leave me alone with an unknown, not after what had happened tonight.

  “There isn’t time for that conversation,” I said. “Are you coming with us to the boat?”

  “Absolutely. This has been the most fun I’ve had since law school.”

  I knew it wasn’t really for me that he was coming, but for Amelia, and that only added to my anticipation. “If this is fun, you’re as crazy as I am.”

  He smiled. “No one is that crazy.”

  He hadn’t met Locke yet or the rest of the Renegades.

  I turned to go, but his hand grabbed mine. “Is there time for this? Because I’ve been waiting it seems my whole life.” He leaned forward and kissed me.

  I’d been waiting a lot longer. He’d taken years to become the man whose letters had first intrigued and then called to me. I kissed him back, opening my mind and letting some of the emotion run back to him. He wouldn’t understand what it was, but it might get his mind off the other me that he couldn’t wait to meet.

  “There’s always time for this,” I said.

  Part Four

  Present Day - Kansas City, Kansas

  The Greatest Revenge

  “MILES STAYED EVEN AFTER LEARNING the truth,” I told Erin Radkey in the hospital cafeteria, rubbing my finger against an ice-cold glass of lemonade. “We were married in less than a week, and he worked with us after that. Well, Locke went back to England to be with her son and to keep an eye on their descendants, but Ritter and I stayed, and our little band of Renegades grew. Ritter also kept track of Johansson until he was killed in a logging accident a few years later. Not long after, we began patrolling the West Coast as the territories were organized. We lost a lot of good people, but we did a lot of good and kept the Emporium from taking over the States.”

  “I wish I could have met Miles.” Erin put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. Her hair, once burned to stubble, was several inches long now. Only a week had passed since her Change, and I claimed three centuries, but we looked more like sisters than women separated by four generations. In actuality, Erin was my fourth great-granddaughter.

  “I wish you could have met him too.”

  Erin was silent for a long moment. “Do you miss him?”

  My heart squeezed just a little when she asked. Miles was the first man I’d loved as a wife, but not the last. I’d outlived several mortal spouses and given birth to half a dozen children. Despite how hard it always was to lose them, I wasn’t against loving again. “I will always miss him, but we had a good life, and our posterity”—I reached across the table and took her hand—“has made me proud.”

  It had been too long since someone in my family line had Changed, and Erin and her younger brother, Jace, had given me new purpose. I believed Erin’s sensing ability would far outreach my own, and her dedication to her duty as a guardian of humanity would do more to help our cause than anything else we’d done in the past century. Jace would need a lot more experience before he’d come into his full usefulness as a combat Unbounded, but that he’d Changed at all bordered on miraculous. I felt rich with their presence. Even Chris, their older mortal brother, had joined our Renegade cell, bringing his two motherless children with him. We would have to bury them long before we were ready to let them go, but they made the battle worth fighting.

  Erin took a long pull of her lemonade; I hadn’t yet been able to teach her that it was best sipped. “You’ve done it then,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “When Chris told me his wife had been murdered by the Emporium, I told him the greatest revenge we have is to go about our lives, raising our children, and finding happiness wherever we can.” Erin’s gray eyes held mine. “Ava, you’ve done that. Gabriel is gone, and so are Miles and your children, but you went on, found a life, and you were happy.” Her smile faltered. “For a while, after we almost lost everyone, I didn’t really believe it was possible to be happy while the Emporium exists, but now with Ritter—”

  She didn’t have to say more. I understood. She had hope. “He’s different now,” I told her.

  Erin smiled a secret smile that told me something had passed between them. Maybe something good. But I’d have to wait to find out because Ritter was on his way now to our location. I wondered if she felt him yet, or if she needed more time to develop her new ability.

  Ritter strode into the nearly deserted cafeteria, followed by our Unbounded healer
Dimitri Sidorov, who was as close to a co-leader as I’d ever had. He’d been alive for a thousand years, and we’d been working together well over a century. Shorter than Ritter by a head, he was every bit as wide, and he exuded an almost animal attractiveness.

  He could kill or heal with a touch, but he was also one of the kindest men I’d ever known.

  “The room is ready,” Dimitri said. “They will begin to prepare your father as soon as your operation is underway.”

  Erin’s momentary surprise at seeing them told me she had been concentrating too hard on me to sense them coming. She jumped to her feet, her lemonade forgotten. “I’m ready.” After a bloody clash with the Emporium, her father needed a heart, and she was determined to be the donor. Only one focus point, so she’d survive and generate a new one. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to save his life.

  Ritter stepped closer to Erin, though they didn’t touch, and emotion between them flared, too strong for their mental shields to hide altogether. Ritter was still a killing machine and the best tactical leader I’d ever worked with, but Erin had turned his life upside down this past week. I believed he’d finally found what I’d wanted for him, something more than revenge to live for. I knew that frightened him even more than he hated the Emporium, but it was a risk he took because loved my granddaughter.

  Together they strode toward the doorway. Ritter was showing Erin a new pistol he’d arranged for her, the gift a mating ritual understood only by combat Unbounded and tolerated by the rest of us. Erin didn’t yet have a clue; she’d think the weapon came from our general arsenal.

  She also didn’t know, and he’d never think to tell her, that it was a temporary goodbye, a placeholder until he returned from London. No way was I getting in the middle of that. They would have to work it out for themselves.

  As we followed them, Dimitri’s hand brushed mine. I met his dark eyes, my breath catching in my throat. He was my best friend, and it had been a long time since I’d felt that way about a man, the first time for a man who was also Unbounded.

  Soon I would have a decision to make.

  Maybe it was time for a little more of the living kind of revenge.

  NOTE FROM TEYLA BRANTON: If you enjoyed Ava’s Revenge, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend and much appreciated. In the next pages, I have included a sneak peek of the next Unbounded novella, Mortal Brother. But if you haven’t read the full Unbounded series yet, please read The Cure (Unbounded Book 2) first! For your convenience, I’ve also included a bonus sample of The Cure, which takes place in time shortly after the last scene in this book (Ava’s Revenge). You can find out more about me and my books in the About the Author section following the bonus chapters, but I also invite you to sign up for free books and other subscriber exclusives on my website. Thank you again. Enjoy!

  THE END

  Sneak Peek

  THE MEN CRAWLING ALL OVER my plane were the first indication that something wasn’t right. Well, it wasn’t exactly my plane, but I was a Renegade, and it belonged to our group, even if I was mortal and wouldn’t live two thousand years like my Unbounded comrades. Besides, I was the only one who could fly the plane, so I considered it mine.

  I’d thought taking care of the plane in this little out-of-the-way airstrip in the Mexican jungle while my friends looked into an attack on the medical lab we funded here was little more than babysitting duty, something to keep me away from the real action. Safe. More than a bit irritating, but if staying behind meant staying alive, I’d deal with the irritation for my two children, who had been through more than any children should since their mother’s murder two months earlier. I’d nearly lost them, too, yesterday when the Emporium had attacked our stronghold in Oregon, so being safe wasn’t all that bad.

  Except now I’d bet the men trying to get inside that plane weren’t doing it for my welfare.

  “More?” asked Diego Molina, the young Mexican who, along with his father, ran the airstrip. He put his hand on the pot of bad coffee sitting on the small table between us—the third pot since my arrival several hours ago. The coffee and the stale biscuits made me wonder if they were trying to poison me or simply weren’t used to entertaining. If it hadn’t been for the delicious smells coming from the attached kitchen and a promised dinner, I would have already retreated to the privacy—and comfort—of the plane.

  “He is probably sick of that swill,” a young woman said, appearing from the kitchen for the first time. She set a sweating can of beer in front of me and smiled. It was the first I’d seen of anyone besides the two men since my arrival. She wore tight, American-style jeans and a light blue tank top that hugged her small curves. She looked barely out of her teens and pretty in a dark, exotic way, with long black hair and eyes that were almost too large in her narrow face.

  Ignoring the can, I jumped to my feet and strode to the small open window, stopping to draw out a pair of binoculars from my backpack of survival gear so I could see better. Across the wide expanse of dirt that separated this small building from where my plane sat, the strangers were inspecting the underbelly of the plane, presumably trying to find another way inside besides the locked door. That wasn’t happening any time soon. Only our Renegades knew the combination to the hatches, and there was a handprint reader for added security. While they could eventually break the codes or drill through the mechanism, it would take time.

  “What are they doing to my plane?” My hand went to my pistol, which suddenly seemed inadequate protection against the half dozen men. Rough men, who looked prepared to do whatever it took to achieve their goal, if the rifles slung over their shoulders were any indication.

  Diego followed me to the window, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed nervously. “I don’t know,” he said, his accent thicker than ever. Turning, he rattled off something in quick Spanish to his father, César, who still sat at the table.

  The two men exchanged more rapid conversation, and then the older man stood and clumped to the outer door, pulling it open. A short time later, he was in the sedan he’d picked me up in and was speeding toward the plane. The men stopped banging on the lower hatch when they saw him coming. They clustered as they waited, and I thought it a promising sign when none of them attacked him as he climbed from the car.

  The goodwill didn’t last. We were too far away to hear anything said, but the violent gesturing told me the newcomers were angry. The pistol one of them waved around also spoke loudly of their intentions. Diego’s father nodded and lifted his hands in an obvious plea for them to wait. Then he returned to his car and drove back across the dirt.

  When César arrived, his wide, sun-darkened face was even darker with anger as he exchanged more words with his son. Diego looked the picture of a wounded child who had done something he knew he shouldn’t have.

  The girl’s head yanked back and forth between them as she followed the conversation, the flush rising on her face making her more compelling. She spoke to the men, and Diego answered her sharply. I was beginning to regret that I hadn’t paid more attention to learning real world Spanish. I just hadn’t needed it in my hometown of Kansas City.

  “What is it?” I demanded.

  César pointed at his son. “Diego mahk dee deal wid bandeets. Day loose men. Day are wanting plane or keel us.” His disgust was obvious, but his English was even more heavily accented than his son’s, and I had no idea what he was saying.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Bandits want your plane,” the girl said. “Diego made a deal with them, and they want it because the deal didn’t work out. They will kill us if we don’t give it to them.”

  “No way.” I slid my pistol from its holster, glad my Renegade training meant I carried extra magazines and more target practice in a month than most mortals had in an entire lifetime. “They are not taking my plane.”

  Cost aside, the plane was our way of rushing back a cure we desperately needed for the husband of Stella D
avis, one of our Unbounded Renegades. Bronson was dying of a rare autoimmune disease, and our lab here in the Mexican jungle had reported a breakthrough with a cure. But two days ago, the lab had been razed to the ground, and my team was tracking our scientists that we believed had escaped with the research. I wasn’t about to let my people down, especially after what had happened at our stronghold yesterday. It was more than just the life we’d lost. Far more.

  “You no understand,” Diego shouted, punching his fist in the air. “Your friends keel their men. They no leave. They will keel you.”

  I pointed my gun at him. “What deal did you make?”

  No one answered for a long moment. Then the girl said, “They were supposed to rob your friends.”

  That almost made me laugh. Against my younger siblings, Erin and Jace, and the experienced Renegades with them, an entire army of mortal bandits wouldn’t have stood a chance. Unbounded can’t be killed, not in the normal way. Head and heart and reproductive organs had to be completely separated. No two sections could remain attached or they would fully regenerate. Unique abilities made Unbounded even more powerful, but of course, these people knew nothing of Unbounded.

  “You sold us out?” I spat at Diego. What a creep! We’d paid them a small fortune to land here and to park the plane while we finished our business. The weaponry alone that we carried would have been attractive to any militant group, but I’d expected some honor in dealing with César, who I understood had worked with our Renegades in the past. Apparently, his son was greedy.

  The girl was still studying me. “All the men who attacked your friends in that big vehicle died, except two who were tied up.”

  Big surprise there. “Just give them back their money,” I said to Diego.

  He shook his head violently. “No. They want more. They want the plane.”

  “Geeve me key,” César ordered, holding out his big hand, palm up.

  I backed away. “There is no key. It’s numbers, and I won’t give them to you.”