The Big Game

by Sarah Jaune

  No.

  “But—”

  “And don’t forget, Eli,” Ivy said gently. “You were not good to your older sister. She was fifteen. She was a year younger than you are now and responsible for your lives. From what you’ve told me, she had bruises on the day you escaped, so she’d just run from being abused. Maybe the best path for her was to heal away from you.”

  It stung, but not as badly as he would have expected. “She was in a bad situation and had to make a quick decision.”

  “You left the oldest son in New Orleans,” she reminded him. “You didn’t even talk to him and judged him a lost cause. Naomi could have left you in the same situation. She could have decided it was too late to save you, but she didn’t. You owe her a lot.”

  Eli opened his mouth to say that he left the oldest son, but not the oldest child, in New Orleans because he’d beat the crap out of his big sister, but… he dropped his head into his hands and pressed hard against his eyes, willing himself not to cry.

  Arms came around him and Ivy held on while he pulled himself together. He didn’t know the full extent of what he’d done to his sister, but he knew enough to know she would have had just cause to write him off and leave him in Chicago. She could have escaped with just Beth, and he’d have been left to deal with Campbell’s full rage.

  She’d taken the chance that he’d blow up on her again. Naomi had risked that he’d freak out, attack her, and ruin their entire escape plan. She’d done that for him. The easier path would have been to leave him behind, just as Eli had left the teenager in New Orleans. Eli had assumed that he’d already chosen to follow in his father’s footsteps, and that he wanted the power. He hadn’t been willing to risk the secrecy of the Guard to an unknown person, who had beaten his sister bloody.

  He saw again the blood all over his hands, and an image flashed into his head of Naomi, clutching at her side, while streams of red dribbled down her shirt and onto the floor. He heard the clatter of metal as he dropped something.

  Then it was gone again.

  Ivy ran her fingers through his hair and held him tight. “This is what you wanted, right? You want to own up for your mistakes and be a better man. Naomi wanted that for you. She… she’s maybe afraid of you, still, I don’t know. She’d have plenty of reasons to be afraid of you, but she didn’t abandon you. You were a victim in this, and so was she. She did the best she could at the time. It might not be perfect, but it was what she could do.”

  “She still doesn’t want to see me,” Eli said with a hitch to his voice. “That’s what Thane was implying.”

  “That and the Guard doesn’t tell each of the families where everyone else is located,” she said. “It’s for our safety that we’re kept apart, so that if one family is discovered, the rest can’t be located.”

  The phone… “They must call someone who arranges all of those pieces.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Ivy replied. She glanced over at the bag, then back to Eli. “Let’s stop for today. I think we’ve both had enough of digging into our pasts. It doesn’t change anything, and we should take some time to let all of this sink in.”

  Eli didn’t even have enough energy to say that he thought it was a good idea. He lay back and let the heat of the sun warm him as his head was cushioned in the grass. It was a good way to remind himself that he was alive, and there were no wendigoes about to jump out at him.

  He had other skeletal, dead things in his closets that might just prove to be worse.

  Eli didn’t even move when Ivy lay down next to him and melded their hands together, interlacing their fingers. He thought about his sisters, and his baby brother. He wondered where they were, and thought that maybe they might be missing him as well. He loved his family here, but it wasn’t like one could replace the other.

  When he saw Naomi again, if he ever saw her, it would only be after he was sure he had his inner demons worked out, and he could say to her with a clear conscience that he was sorry, and that he was the type of brother she would be proud to have. She’d shown courage that Eli had to respect.

  He wouldn’t do it for Naomi, though. He’d do it for himself because Eli wanted to be the best he could, and he absolutely wanted to make sure he was nothing like what his father had wanted him to be.

  That was, he decided as he closed his eyes and started to doze off, the best form of revenge ever.

  To be happy and whole, despite the family he had been born into.

  EPILOGUE

  The headache that was building behind Daniel Kauffman’s tired, blue eyes as he held the receiver of the phone a good six inches from his ear was definitely not going away any time soon. The voice on the other end of the line bellowed again in rage, but Daniel ignored it has he ran a hand through his chestnut hair which was liberally streaked with gray now. It had been an extremely long week and was looking to be another set of headaches heading into the next one. “No,” he interjected firmly. It was best to stay calm, but firm with the insane. “Hunt! Hunt!” Daniel shouted into the phone, making the pulse in his temple throb. “Campbell!” he tried again and finally silenced the man on the other end. “If it were me, you would never let me into Chicago to search.”

  Campbell spent the next minute swearing loudly, using every bad word that Daniel knew, including a few he didn’t. “I need my son!”

  “I am assuming you mean the youngest one, because I know you have given up on Elijah as a proper heir,” Daniel interjected. “Your oldest son is here, in my zone. He hasn’t left the zone, Campbell. I have reports from his school that he has been in attendance regularly. Their principal is in my pocket.”

  “He’s lying to you!” Campbell screamed in outrage.

  “She is not,” Daniel said, not at all sorry for the lie.

  It actually amused him to no end that his daughter and Campbell’s son seemed to have effected some type of rescue for Elijah’s youngest siblings. It was true that the principal at the high school was keeping Daniel informed of his wayward child’s movements. He’d ignored her for most of her life, but she was proving to be interesting and potentially dangerous. When she was acting to thwart Campbell Hunt, who was a fantastically pompous, egomaniacal, insane jerk, Daniel wouldn’t stop her. He certainly had no love for Campbell, who had completely ruined his zone with his selfishness, but now that Ivy had wrecked his vacation home, Daniel would have to reconsider what he would do about the girl.

  Campbell was screaming again about his dead wife, the wife he didn’t love and certainly didn’t mourn.

  Sighing heavily, Daniel sat back in his leather office chair, which gave out a loud creak, and stared around his sanctuary. It was full of books, plants, and best of all, no children.

  He loved his children, at least the three he had in his house. He just wasn’t sure he liked them very much. They whined a great deal and demanded all manner of things. They wanted him to play with them, but that’s why they had a nanny. They wanted him to buy them things, which he would happily do if they’d only leave him alone for longer than a few minutes. That rarely worked, though. Overall, the children were proving to be more work than he had anticipated. Daniel was quite certain that his own father had never spent that much time with him, and he’d have appreciated the same courtesy from his other children.

  His mind flashed back to Monica Sandler, and he felt a twinge of ire fill his chest. She had wanted a baby, not him. He was destined to have children with his wife, whenever he decided he was ready to wed her. His marriage had been arranged for him by his father before his eighteenth birthday. It was all set, and Monica had known that.

  But he’d liked her brain. She’d been beautiful, as well, but he’d really appreciated that when he talked to her, he found someone who was just as intelligent, and just as success-oriented as he was. The difference between them, of course, was that Monica had no chance of ever attaining power or true success, while Daniel was set to be the Overseer of Portland. He had a younger brother, but his brother knew th
e rules. If he dared oppose Daniel, he would be dead.

  It was as simple as that.

  “Kauffman!” Campbell’s annoyed tone barked into Daniel’s ear. “I want to personally search their home!”

  “He’s a police officer,” Daniel said wearily. “I’d have known if two children had shown up in the town. That’s not something they would have been able to hide. I’m sorry that you lost your children again,” he lied, “but the fact is that they are not in my zone, and if you cross the border here, I will have you killed.”

  Click.

  Daniel dropped the phone back into its cradle and wished he’d never picked up the damn thing in the first place.

  He needed to stop thinking about Hunt and focus on the mess that Monica’s child had made in the forest. Daniel picked up the report and studied again the words of the men who had escaped. He had no doubt that Elijah had been there with Ivy, and that they had been part of helping the Bigfoot reroute the rivers. That had been a nightmare. He’d just perfected getting enough water into Portland so that no one died of dehydration, when the riverbed that he had marked to turn into a new factory, had flooded again, sending all of the wood shooting down into the ocean. That factory had been perfectly placed along the main freeway, which had run over the river. Real estate was key. That was what his father had always said. Products could be made and loaded onto trucks mere feet away, saving time, which saved money. Now it was all in ruins, like everything else he’d done.

  Daniel had spent years perfecting this plan. He’d forced his brother to help him with the rivers after the construction workers and engineers had planned out the new waterways. He’d adored his house out by the lake. Now it was trashed, filled with sludge, and his lake was drained. He could redo everything, but he had no doubt that Ivy would destroy it again. She’d sent a clear message that she wasn’t going to tolerate him redirecting the rivers. She’d had the help of the savages of the forest, who could be deadly if provoked.

  There were many things to consider, and Daniel Kauffman was, at heart, an extremely cautious man. Except for his mistake with Monica Sandler all those years ago, he hadn’t had a single slip up. He’d known something was wrong with her, even before they’d traveled to Chicago with that blasted professor he had hired. She was off, not right in the head. He’d guessed that she’d taken the elixir to test it, and he’d been right.

  But, she hadn’t been magical, and he’d wanted to see what would happen to the other Overseers when they took it. It was nothing to him to put water in his vial, nothing for him to magically make it disappear while appearing to drink it.

  No, Daniel had been right not to take what had turned out to be a cursed tonic. Just look at Campbell Hunt.

  The extra side effect, though, of children with multiple powers was something that Daniel hadn’t foreseen, and it was the thing that kept Ivy interesting.

  He hadn’t thought that Monica was magical in any way, but if there had been magic in her blood, from however far back, would Ivy have inherited it?

  Daniel scowled at the report. He hated the name ‘Ivy.’ It was so common, and trust Monica to name her daughter after a weed.

  A low knock, one that signaled the arrival of his most trusted advisor, came at the door. “Enter,” Daniel called out as he watched the tall, thin black man in his impeccably tailored charcoal gray suit enter the office and close the door silently. He walked purposefully over to the chair in front of Daniel’s desk and sat. The lines were creeping in on his face, as sure as they were on Daniel’s, but Daniel rather thought that it made his confidant more distinguished, whereas Daniel simply felt old. He saw that he’d recently come from a haircut because his neatly trimmed black hair was shorter than it had been two days previously. “I have word, Overseer,” the man said in his low, melodious voice. It was almost like he sang every word, as they flowed genteelly from his mouth. “The dam is beyond repair at the lake, and the inspectors are saying that there is structural damage to the cabin. The water was so heavy it shifted the house off of the foundation.”

  Daniel’s headache intensified. He’d been afraid of that.

  He’d loved that cabin. It was big, and he could bring friends. Then, if he wanted solitude, he could escape them all in his suite of rooms on the top floor of the cabin. It had been the perfect place to escape from his family and the pressures of being the Overseer. It was annoying and frustrating, but still… “How far up did the water go?”

  “Nearly to the top,” the man replied evenly.

  Daniel whistled in appreciation. “She’s powerful.”

  “Very,” was his companion’s only reply.

  “So, what do we do about her?” Daniel wondered aloud.

  One dark brow arched for just a moment, before settling back into his normally placid expression. “I have a suggestion, if you would care to entertain one.”

  “I would,” he answered immediately.

  “She could challenge your seat,” his advisor offered. It was a conversation they had had before, but Daniel did not get impatient. There would be a point to this. “If she proved to be the most powerful of your children, it would be prudent to keep her close to you.”

  “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” Daniel said as he nodded thoughtfully. It was that exact strategy that he’d used with Campbell Hunt, and all the other loony tunes who had taken the elixir, because he liked being on the Overseer’s council.

  The man inclined his head. “Indeed. If she proves to be powerful, she might be useful. Thus far she hasn’t made any overt threats, except this. This attack was to put back what you had changed. She did no more, no less.”

  “Except for the house that she flooded,” Daniel muttered dryly, but the point was well taken. “She isn’t interested in me or my seat at the moment. Her motivations appeared to be to help the Sasquatch.”

  “Indeed.”

  Daniel chuckled as he picked up a pen and tapped it on the wooden armrest of his chair. “She helped kidnap the Hunt children.”

  An amused smirk crossed his companion’s countenance. “Did she now?”

  “I had word from her principal that she and the boy were gone,” Daniel explained as the humor of the whole situation lifted his darkened mood. Anything that pissed off Campbell Hunt was sure to amuse Daniel. He loathed the man. “A week later, I have word from Hunt that his babies were gone. Then, their car reappeared in Redmond, according to my sources, but they did not go back to school.”

  “Is that the car that they stole from Hunt when he kidnapped them?” the man asked calmly.

  Daniel nodded dismissively. It didn’t bother him in the slightest that Hunt’s child would steal one of his cars. “I assume that’s when they went into the forest to help the savages.”

  “It is an unfortunate loss,” the black man said slowly, “but I would like you to consider letting it stand for a while to see what she does. I am concerned that if you retaliate, she might flee. If you want retribution, you would need to have her imprisoned or killed, and it is unlikely that the Hunt boy wouldn’t be able to break her out of whatever prison you put her in.”

  “I don’t want to kill her,” Daniel said, although he still wasn’t sure why. He thought it might be possible that he would pick her as his successor, if she proved to have two powers. That would be a boon to the Portland Zone, and one he could not overlook. Plus, she wasn’t a whiner, unlike his other children. He nodded slowly. “Yes, we will leave her be and see what she does. If she leaves me alone, I shall leave her alone. You are correct. I do want her where I can watch her.”

  For now, that would be his plan. “Is there word yet on my dragon?”

  Daniel had always wanted a dragon.

  “It is being delivered this week,” his companion said as he held back the sniff that Daniel knew he wanted to make.

  Amused, Daniel offered, “I think the dragon will be an interesting addition to the zone. It will certainly be an interesting deterrent.”

  The man
didn’t reply. He knew his place, and his place was not to argue. Even though he didn’t approve, the man would help facilitate the dragon. It was Daniel’s decision. He was the Overseer, and what he said, went. Sometimes, in instances like now, Daniel liked to remind this man about his role in the zone. It was always preferable for people to know where they stood. They were not friends. Daniel’s ‘friends,’ if one could call them that, also knew their place. But he chose those men because they didn’t have the brains to argue with him. This one did. He appreciated the man’s brain and his insight.

  As long as he was kept in check, things went smoothly.

  That was how Daniel demanded his world to be ordered.

  And he was always obeyed.

  The jumper shook his head in disbelief, still unable to comprehend the ways of these men of power. He had been studying Daniel Kauffman closely for months now, and still he understood very little about his ulterior motivations. He had, however, come to appreciate just why Kauffman did not work with the other Overseers, unless he absolutely needed to.