by Rob Preece
He turned and headed back into the bedroom where he and Danielle had slept.
She was still lying in the bed, her eyes closed, her breath soft and deep.
Her short blonde hair stood out from her head like crabgrass grown wild. One long leg lay across the bed, scraped and bruised from her battles. The thin blanket covered but didn't conceal her. To Carl, she looked perfect.
He bent and kissed her.
* * * *
Even asleep, a part of Danielle's mind was aware of what happened around her. Warders live too close to the edge of danger to let sleep control them completely. When Carl returned to the room, that part of her knew that she was no longer alone.
Still, her subconscious mind brushed away the warning. This presence wasn't dangerous, it assured her. She could continue to sleep in safety. After what she'd been though, she needed to recuperate, to replace her depleted energy.
Her subconscious's assurance made the surprise more complete. She awakened, panicked, to find something clamped over her mouth.
Danielle's reaction was immediate and forceful. She smashed both fists toward whatever blocked her breath.
A solid thump told her she'd connected. Whatever had covered her mouth vanished.
She inhaled deeply and opened her eyes just in time to see dark hair disappear over the edge of her bed.
"Carl?"
A faint moan was her only answer.
She pushed herself up. She couldn't have slept for more than a couple of hours, but she felt incredibly refreshed. Making love with Carl had filled her with energy and with a sort of bubbling happiness that she didn't even recognize.
That happiness faded when she peered over the bed and saw Carl slumped on the floor.
Carl had been trying to strangle her. Her mind reeled at the realization. Had sex just been his way of softening her up?
Only belatedly did the tingle from her lips reach her conscious mind. A tingle and the faintest touch of moisture. As if she had been—kissed.
"You idiot, Carl,” she growled. “Didn't anyone ever tell you to be careful when you wake up a warder?” She wrapped the scratchy blanket around herself and got down on her knees beside him. “Carl? Carl, wake up.” He was at least breathing, deeply and evenly. She patted his cheek.
"Everything all right in there?” Snori opened the door to Danielle's bedroom without waiting for an answer.
"Uh—"
"He told you, did he? Well, I think maybe you over-reacted just a—"
"Told me what?"
Snori stopped. “Oh. Uh, never mind. So, why did you deck him?"
Danielle opened her mouth to answer, then snapped it shut. Her imagination supplied an assortment of implausible conversation starters that could lead her to slug Carl, but she couldn't think of any she would want to review with the troll. “Let me take care of him and you can get ready somewhere else."
"Carl is my friend. I wouldn't want him to get hurt."
"I'm not going to hurt him.” Danielle knew her exasperation showed through but she couldn't help it.
"Really?"
Really. Joe Smealy had ordered her to terminate Carl and she wasn't going to do it. For the first time in since the start of her warder training, she intended to disobey a direct order.
"Just get out of here."
Snori nodded and headed out, closing the door behind her. Carl chose that moment to groan and open his eyes. “What—"
"Quiet.” She examined Carl's pupils and was relieved to see that neither was dilated.
"Our trainers used to come into the barracks at night,” she explained. “If we didn't awaken and defend ourselves, we washed out. I didn't wash out."
Carl managed a rueful smile. “So I'm lucky I wasn't badly hurt?"
She nodded. “Snori said you had something to tell me. Well, I'm listening."
His eyes evaded hers. A bad sign. Could he have a wife on the side? But that was impossible. His file hadn't mentioned even recent romantic involvement. Unless he'd found someone since they'd been in the zone.
"It's just speculation,” he finally said. “I don't feel right talking about it until I discover the facts."
That sounded more hopeful. He wouldn't need to find the facts about a secret wife.
Danielle shook her head. She might not be a warder any more, but she certainly didn't believe in old-fashioned pre-return-of-magic fairytales. Her fantasies about running away with Carl were just that. Fantasies.
"Whatever. In the meantime, do we have a plan, or are we just going to wing it?"
Carl pulled himself back to his feet, stretched gingerly as if expecting to find new broken bones, and then started tossing clothes to Danielle. “Snori has picked up hints that there is a major warder follow-up to last night's riots. They'll need to do something after the stupid stunt that Arenesol and I pulled off. Capturing me would be a start. So, at the minimum we can expect incursions. But Snori thinks that there may be more. Possibly even liquidating the entire zone."
"We wouldn't do that.” The we slipped out even though she'd just told herself that she wasn't a warder anymore.
"There've been reports of zones that just vanished."
"There are always crazy rumors,” Danielle argued. “But that doesn't make them true.” Some of the rumors had been horrible, though. Could she have closed her ears to them simply because she didn't want to hear the truth?
"It doesn't make them lies, either,” Carl reminded her. “We're going to head for the core until we figure out what to do next."
"All right. I guess we'll have to wait and see.” They had been too tired and too badly injured the previous evening to get far from the zone border. Finding the relative safety of the center of the zone could be a first step.
Goose bumps stood on her arms when she realized what she was thinking. She'd never thought of the zone's center as safe before. It was home to the worst of the impaired. Home to the most completely magical, she corrected herself. She had cast herself outside the pale of normal civilization. So much of what she knew, her thoughts, and her basic vocabulary, would be destructive rather than helpful in the new world she was entering.
But her training could be helpful, too. She knew how the warders would operate, what they'd be looking for. “We'll break up and head back toward Zang Boulevard. There's a market near the old Zang curve where we can rendezvous. Mike and Snori can leave first. You and I will follow taking an indirect route."
Carl looked amused. “Are you the boss now?"
"Somebody's got to be. I've had a lot more training in this than you have."
"Sounds like a plan to me,” Mike put in.
Danielle's skin still crawled when she saw the vampire. But she knew this was a conditioned reflex. Mike hadn't done anything to her personally—or was it vampirely? She forced herself to smile at him.
"You doing all right, Mike?” Carl asked.
"Except I owe my life to a troll. The other vampires are never going to let me live this one down."
"Yeah?” Snori demanded. “What about the other trolls? When I tell them I'm blood brothers with a vampire, I'll be a pariah."
"Sounds like you two are back to normal,” Carl said. “Unless anyone has a better plan, let's follow Danielle's. You two head out directly. We'll join you in what, three hours?"
He directed that last question to Danielle, deferring to her tactical expertise.
"Let's say four. We'll want to check out a few things."
Snori and the vampire nodded, then disappeared.
Danielle glared at the tattered remnants of her panties, then at Carl. “If you're going to do that again, make sure I have a spare pair handy."
"Are we going to do that again?” His face broke into a smile that made him look much younger.
"No promises,” she told him. But she promised herself that they would. She was walking away from the life she knew, from the life she'd been raised and trained for. And there had damned well better be some advantages. More sex with Carl
sounded like a pretty tremendous advantage. Lots more sex.
"And definitely not now,” she told him when he closed the distance between them and kissed her neck. “Besides, I'm gross and sweaty."
"I like you sweaty."
"Figures. Men are all weird."
"Call me the weird Were,” he answered.
It wasn't very funny, but somehow she couldn't help laughing.
They made a quick stop at a tiny market off Jefferson and bought new underwear, a pre-return-of-magic t-shirt advertising Nude Fishing, something that made no sense at all to Danielle but that offered a lot more protection than her grimy sports bra. She also bought a toothbrush and a couple of chocolate croissants. She wasn't sure whether it was the chocolate, clean teeth, or clean clothes, but Danielle felt a little more human. She couldn't say the same for Carl, though. His smile had faded almost as soon as they'd left their hideout.
Chapter 12
"Want to talk about it?” Danielle finally asked.
They'd been walking in silence for fifteen minutes, ducking out of sight when one helicopter swooped overhead, and keeping to the shadows whenever they could.
"Talk about what?"
She resisted the urge to slug him. “Let's see. One of your friends blew himself up and saved your life. Your entire plan to develop a cure for the magic virus has gone out of control, your investments in the zone were largely destroyed in the rioting and your chances of getting the money the network owes you are slim. Oh, and your girlfriend betrayed you to the warders. Other than that, I can't think of a thing."
"You did betray us?” His voice was harsh with accusation. “I was hoping Arenesol was wrong about that."
"Of course I betrayed you. What did you expect me to do? Try to help an illegal impaired breakout?"
"Is that what it was?"
"It seemed that way to me at the time.” She sat down at an abandoned bus stop, the Plexiglas and plastic structure still providing some shelter from the blazing sun and from the constant spying of warder choppers.
She patted the bench next to herself, but Carl ignored her gesture and paced in front of her.
"Does it still seem that way to you? Can you still justify it? All those dead elves."
And Joe had lied to her. She'd believed him when he'd said they would simply overawe the Tiger escape.
Carl's words only rubbed salt in the wounds Joe had left. Still, Danielle wasn't the kind to back off. “What do you want me to do, Carl? Grovel? I made a decision based on the information I had. Believe me, I'm aware of the consequences. I'll have nightmares about it for years. Would I do something different knowing what I know now? Sure. But it isn't as if you took me into your confidence. You treated me like an enemy, so why are you so hurt that I acted like one?"
He spun toward her, opened his mouth, then shut it.
"Can I make a suggestion?” she asked when it became obvious that he wasn't going to say anything.
"I'd love to hear it."
Sarcasm dripped, but she decided to take him literally.
"I can't undo what I did. I wish we'd both done a lot of things differently. But we're humans. At least I'm a human and you're a Were. That means that neither of us comes close to perfection. But we need to be honest with each other. If we can't talk about things, can't work them out between us, we're going to end up fighting all the time.” And they'd end up killing each other. She didn't want to say that.
"That makes sense.” His agreement was reluctant, but he did agree.
"All right. I admit that I made a mistake telling the warders about Arenesol's breakout. I didn't plan on a slaughter. We were just supposed to turn them back."
"We?"
She barked a laugh. “See, Carl, it isn't easy to break the habits of a decade of training. And that's how long I've been working to become a warder. Ever since—” she trailed off.
"Ever since what?"
She'd said they needed to be honest. Well, this was her first test. She didn't want to tell him about finding her mother—it was a personal memory. But she owed it to him. If he looked at her and walked away in disgust, it was better now than later. Wasn't it? Actually, she wasn't so sure.
She took a deep breath. “Early in the return of magic, before people really knew what was going on, I snuck out of high school. I was going to the mall with a couple of girlfriends and I stopped by our apartment to change first.
"My mother had lost her job, but she just slept all the time so I didn't have to worry about her. Now, I know that she suffered from depression. At the time, I just thought she was lazy.” Too lazy to care about me.
"I didn't bother checking on her when I got home. I was worrying about how much trouble I'd be in if she caught me, and didn't consider that she might be in trouble too. But I heard something in her bedroom when I was on my way out the door. So I decided to peek in."
Despite the decade that had passed, Danielle shuddered at the return of the memory.
Carl's eyes gleamed with sympathy. “Go on."
"My mother had remarried a couple of years before and my step-father was younger than she. I think I must have had a bit of a crush on him. I don't know what I was expecting when I opened the door, but it definitely wasn't what I got."
Carl nodded, waiting for her to continue.
"My stepfather was on top of my mother. I was embarrassed. I thought I'd walked in on them when they were having sex. Then I saw that his teeth stuck in her throat. There was blood—” she broke off.
"Your mother—"
"By the time the police got there my mother was dead. I must have screamed because my stepfather looked up. He—” Danielle swallowed. “He smiled at me."
She gasped a sobbing breath. The memory was vivid now. She could almost see that gory vampire face sneering, lust inflaming his eyes, his teeth dripping with her mother's life-blood.
"That was only a few days after the beginning of the return,” she told him. “I got away, called 9-1-1. And I watched when the police came. They didn't have silver bullets back then, of course. Let alone wooden stakes. He killed three cops before they brought him under control. He just took their bullets and laughed.
Carl stopped pacing and sat next to her, taking her suddenly cold hand between his warm ones. “It must have been terrible."
Terrible was only the beginning. They hadn't understood the return of magic then. She'd been locked in isolation for months while doctors waited to see if she had the infection. There had been plenty of orphans. Children whose parents had gone magic and vanished, children whose parents had been killed by the magical, and children whose parents the government whisked away in one of their crackdowns.
Danielle had been lucky. Joe Smealy had been one of the first cops on the scene. He'd taken Danielle under his wing and made sure she didn't get lost in the bureaucratic shuffle—or condemned as a latent. He'd worked to send Danielle to a government school for the dispossessed. Once there, he'd made sure she was tested as a candidate for the new warder organization.
Joe had done what he could, but Danielle couldn't forget her mother. She'd sworn she would avenge her, would live to protect others from the cruelty that had taken her mother.
And now she was breaking that promise, throwing her lot in with the magical. She hoped it wasn't just her hormones controlling her life.
"So it must have terrified you when I changed to Were that first time we made love."
She nodded, her throat suddenly too thick to continue talking. Carl's change had brought up all of the fears she'd spent a decade suppressing. But it was more than that. Even then, a part of her had recognized her own action as a betrayal of the man and system that had adopted her, protected her when her own family had abandoned her.
Carl, wisely, said nothing. Instead, he handed her a chilled water bottle.
She drank until it was gone.
"Anyway,” she handed back the empty bottle, “that's the sad story of my life."
"It is sad,” Carl told her. “It mu
st have been especially hard because of your conflicted feelings about your mother."
So much for Carl's good sense in keeping his mouth shut. “I spent months listening to a psychologist going on about Freud and Oedipus,” Danielle told him. “I don't need it from you."
"In that case, what do you say we get a move on it? Mike and Snori are likely to get worried."
* * * *
They met up with Snori and Mike right on time. The vampire and troll were trying too hard to look inconspicuous. Since the center of the zone was filled with people who were hiding from someone or something, they fit right in.
Snori waved them over to an outdoor table where he'd already ordered Turkish style coffee for them. Carl sipped at his politely. Danielle just looked at hers, then pushed it away. She couldn't stand the stuff.
"Any problems?” Carl asked.
Mike shook his head. “Smooth sailing."
"Except we ran into a couple of rioters who must have gotten lost on their way out of the zone,” Snori added, his words barely comprehensible underneath the laughter he couldn't suppress. “We, uh, helped them along to the border."
"After taking away all their loot,” Mike added.
Danielle shook her head. He could understand their action. But it was too much like Carl's attack on the guard post. Randomly striking back could be emotionally satisfying, but it didn't make a bit of difference to the reality the magical faced. Even if the looted goods were returned to their original owners, something Danielle suspected would never happen, they would simply be looted again the next time rioters descended on the zone.
They needed a fundamental change in the way they responded to the attacks. And getting that would require an alteration in the structure of the zone. As long as half the zone leaders were goons like Arenesol, and the other half were co-opted or paid by the warders, things would never get better.
Of course, first they had to survive.
"Any word on a warder attack?” Carl demanded.
Snori shook his head. “Still a lot of chatter on the encrypted warder bands. Does our pet warder have any information?"
Intellectually Danielle had known she was changing sides. But there was still an emotional charge realizing that she wasn't just being asked to ignore orders. Carl and his mob needed her to spy for them as she'd spied against them.
