River of No Return

by Annie Bellet

  Nobody I loved was getting hurt on my watch. Not if I could help it.

  “Jade,” Alek said, his pale brows raised in an unasked question.

  “Take the car, meet me there,” I said. I didn’t wait for him to answer. I threw open the door and ran out, leaping off my upper landing in a smooth motion.

  Flying is easy in theory. You just have to convince your brain that breaking laws of physics is no biggie and then just not fall down. Magic coursed through my veins and I used it to push against the ground and the air, giant invisible wings holding me aloft. I used the magic to push myself higher, moving faster and faster until the world was a blur and my eyes watered from the freezing air rushing past.

  I picked a straight line to Levi’s shop and home, crossing Wylde in broad summer daylight, hoping speed and height would conceal the flying woman from the people below. In the end it wouldn’t really matter if the whole damn world saw me. Levi and Junebug were in danger. And I hadn’t saved May just to let her die to a bunch of unknown assailants.

  The First had brought his war to my town and I wasn’t about to let him win any more battles here.

  Levi’s shop and garage were outside Wylde proper by a couple miles. I flew straight at it, buildings and trees whipping by below me. I squinted against the wind, watching for the obvious sight of Levi’s shop’s bright orange metal roof. His and Junebug’s house was right behind the garage, tucked into a pretty stand of quaking aspen that formed a natural visual barrier between the commercial land and their private home.

  The trees also did the trick for concealing anyone around the house, unfortunately. I spied the orange roof and dropped from the sky. I made the split-second decision that I’d rather approach the house on foot than risk trying to land among potential enemies. Two large SUVs were parked blocking the driveway between shop and house and, as my ears recovered from the pressure change, I heard more gunfire and shouting. At least someone was still alive. Finding my feet, magic still burning in my blood, I formed an invisible shield in front of me and raced around the side of the garage.

  Levi’s house was a ranch-style one level home laid out in almost an L shape. He’d built a porch around the front side. The big picture window that looked into the living room was smashed open and the front door hung askew on its hinges. A white man I didn’t recognize at a glance lay dead in a pool of blood in front of the porch steps. As I skirted the body, a huge wolf sprang at me from where it had been crouched in the shadows of the trees.

  I pivoted and thrust my shield out, swinging the magic like a blunt weapon. The wolf deflected off the shield with a crunch as it took the blow face first. The impact nearly took me off my feet but I pushed forward, letting momentum hold me upright. I didn’t have time to deal with a single wolf, not when two more gunshots rang out from within the house. I let go of the shield spell and turned the power to a focused blast of flame instead.

  The wolf, thrown off by the unexpected impact and likely with its jaw broken, didn’t even try to dodge. The white-hot flames burned through its neck and chest and the shifter collapsed. Burning hair and flesh scent made me gag as I sprinted up the steps. I’d never get used to killing but leaving an injured opponent behind me seemed unwise. Plus Harper’s accusations of being a Kenobi were still ringing in my head.

  The living room, usually a place full of art and color from Junebug’s studio and Levi’s Native art collecting habit, was trashed. A fight had gone down here and there was an alarming amount of blood spattered across broken pottery and torn wall hangings. A shifter wolf, half its head missing as though from a close-range shotgun blast, partially blocked the path and view into the kitchen.

  I drew the Alpha and Omega, the dagger elongating to short sword length without me even having to ask or try to impose my will. There was no way to move silently through the wreckage so I settled for speed, trying not to wince as blood and other things I didn’t want to think too hard about squished beneath my sneakers as I climbed over the wolf corpse.

  The kitchen off the living room was empty but the hallway behind had a man with a gun. I charged him, magic shield in front of my outstretched left hand. He fired the gun, bullets ripping into the walls to either side as the shield deflected them. The impact barely slowed me. I thrust with the Alpha and Omega, not caring what part of him I hit. The sword would kill with a scratch.

  The blade cut into his thigh as I smashed the magic shield upward to deflect his gun hand. The man’s brown eyes met mine as we stood frozen for a second.

  “No,” he said, his expression a mix of shock and pain. Then he crumpled and fell backward, sprawling in the narrow hallway. Dead.

  I shoved away any guilt over using the sword, for this man was trying to kill people I loved and would have killed me, but a part of me still hated the ease at which death came, the ease with which I could deal it out. It was easier when the sword turned things it killed into dust, but apparently it didn’t feel like doing that today. Another reason to prefer fighting zombies, I guess. Smell and all.

  I hadn’t spent a lot of time in Levi’s house but I knew there was a door to the house garage as well as a bathroom and then a spare bedroom in this hallway. All the doors here were shut. I used magic to push the man’s body out of the way and threw open the door he’d been standing closest to.

  The bedroom was empty of combatants but the huge hole where the windows used to be told the story. A human male I didn’t recognize was sprawled across the doorway, his throat torn out. A giant wolf’s body, its neck ripped open and its body covered in gaping wounds, lay curled in the middle of the room, almost obstructing my view of the body half beneath it. His jaws still full of wolf fur and flesh, the massive lion lay dead in front of the window, his body rent with bullet wounds, torn from bites, and a huge chunk of flesh missing from his visible flank.

  I knew that lion. He’d carried me and terrified, stolen children safely away from Not Afraid’s cave. He’d protected those kids, risked his life to try to save my former people.

  Carlos.

  I knew he was gone even as I reached to feel for a pulse. I blinked against the threat of tears. Carlos was dead. My friends might still live if the snarling coming in the window was any indication. Grieve later, I told myself. Fight now.

  I skirted the bodies to get to the broken window and saw the battle beyond. Behind the house was Junebug’s kiln and studio, as well as the woodpile and a wide, cleared area of browning grass. The fight had spilled out into the open there and didn’t seem to be going in my friends’ favor.

  Junebug knelt on top of the woodpile with a rifle in her hands that I guessed was out of ammo from the way she held it like a baseball bat instead of ready to fire. May was crouched beside the kindling box in human form, bleeding from her right shoulder, a kitchen knife in her left hand. The blood on the knife said she’d made use of it.

  The wolves were focused on Levi in his wolverine form, circling him as he crouched. A wolverine the size of a German Shepherd is no joke, but these were shifter wolves, which meant they in turn were more like small horses. Levi was already bleeding from a gash on his side.

  I jumped through the broken window, ignoring the sting as my leg caught on some broken glass. I staggered gracelessly away from the house, managing to catch my balance, just. Purple fire encircled my left hand and blue fire lit the Alpha and Omega as the sword lengthened to long-sword form. These wolves had killed my mate’s mentor and friend. They were definitely looking to kill my best friend, and likely his pregnant wife, and May also.

  They picked the wrong fight and the wrong damn town.

  “Hey you mangy assholes,” I yelled. “Who wants to die first?”

  My words did the trick of distracting the wolf-shifters away from Levi.

  One of the wolves shifted and held up his hand as though that could stop me from obliterating him.

  “Stop,” he said. He was a tall white man with tanned skin and a confident sneer to his face I hated instantly. “Our fight is no
t with you. The First would like to…”

  Whatever else he would have said, I didn’t care. Maybe if he hadn’t attacked my friends. Definitely they shouldn’t have killed Carlos. The time for talking was long since as gone as the pile of bodies behind me.

  I turned him into a pillar of purple flame as I strode forward. I poured out my magic recklessly, anger and grief fueling my power. Levi took the distraction as opportunity, leaping onto the nearest wolf. His jaws stripped fur from flesh.

  The other wolf charged at me and launched itself into the air with a snarl. I whipped the sword up as I dodged to the side, letting go of the fire. The blade caught the wolf along the jaw, a glancing slice that with a normal weapon would have hurt but hardly deterred a shifter. Blue flames licked over the jaw and face of the wolf and it howled as it twisted away from me. The wolf fell over like someone had yelled “timber”, crashing into the ground, dead where it lay.

  Levi was still growling and ripping at the twitching body of the wolf he’d attacked.

  “Levi,” Junebug said as she scrabbled down from the woodpile. “He’s dead.”

  “There were at least two others,” May said, standing up, her eyes flicking around the yard and examining the shadows beneath the aspens. She leaned heavily on the kindling bin as though she didn’t trust her legs to support her.

  “Dead,” I said.

  “Car,” Junebug said as Levi left the wolf’s corpse and crouched beside her.

  “Harper and Alek,” I told them. I hoped I wasn’t wrong. “We’re back here!”

  I heard a car door slam. I readied a shield just in case it wasn’t friendlies. We waited, no one moving.

  Alek rounded the side of the house, gun drawn but pointed toward the ground. Harper was close on his heels in her fox form.

  “We got them all, I think,” I called to Alek, hoping he wouldn’t turn toward the house, wouldn’t look through the gaping hole where the window had been and into the bedroom. Wanting to save him from grief for even seconds longer.

  Harper shifted to human. “Vivian should be behind us soon, she was grabbing some first aid shit.”

  Alek slid his gun into the holster and his shoulders relaxed. I willed the Alpha and Omega back to dagger form and put it away as I walked toward him. I’d almost reached Alek when he looked around again and then down at me.

  “Where is Carlos?” he said softly and I knew no matter how much I loved him, there were some kinds of pain from which I could never protect him.

  “He died saving me,” May said. She didn’t even wince as Vivian put another stitch in the wound in her shoulder.

  Vivian had come behind Harper and Alek, and Sheriff Lee showed up not long after. The gunfire had been called in, but the sheriff had been able to deflect human interest in it after Vivian called her on her way over and gave her the quick scoop on the situation as she knew it. Rachel said she’d write Levi up for testing a new gun out without giving the office warning and that would be that.

  Which still left a pile of bodies and a lot of pain.

  Alek had carried Carlos’ body out of the house to the stand of trees, and covered it in a bright yellow and green quilt Junebug gave to him. My mate had pushed me away gently with a sad shake of his head and I left him to stand guard over his friend. It was a sign of Alek’s grief that he hadn’t even noticed the deep cut on my thigh where I’d lacerated myself with the window glass, but part of me was glad for his distraction.

  I hadn’t been as lucky with Vivian who had insisted on cleaning the already healing wound and making sure all the glass fragments were out. May hadn’t been lucky either. Apparently her snow leopard form had taken a few bullets and she couldn’t shift to heal since her other half needed to heal, so she was getting good old fashioned stitches for the moment. Since the house was a disaster zone of corpses, we were in Levi’s office off of his shop and garage.

  “He was a protector,” I said, trying to find the words and knowing that nothing would be adequate. I’d barely known Carlos. “He’d be glad you lived.” I felt in my bones that was true from everything I’d seen of him.

  The dark grey rings around May’s irises had expanded, pressing the golden-brown inner ring to a single band around her pupils. Pain was etched in her face, the kind of pain that went beyond physical wounds.

  “All for nothing,” she murmured. “Because a madman wants us dead.”

  “And that madman failed,” I said, hollow as the words sounded. But I couldn’t let her sink into despair, not now. The First was firing shots, his people had come to my town, hurt my people. This might be a shifter war in the making, but now the bastard had poked the dragon, kind of literally.

  “Freyda is on her way,” Rachel said from the doorway. She’d stepped out into the garage to make a few calls. “She’s bringing people to help clean up.”

  “May needs to rest. Levi, too. I’d tell Jade to rest but she’s going to ignore me,” Vivian said, handing out glares to all of us.

  Levi was back in human form, one arm in a sling and the other curled around Junebug’s shoulders. They were cuddled into an overstuffed paisley chair that had seen better days sometime back in the seventies. Levi just nodded at the vet, which showed how tired he was.

  “Not letting him go anywhere yet,” Junebug said with a wan smile.

  I tested my leg and found it ached but was just fine for the basics like standing and walking. My jeans were another matter but there wasn’t much I could do about the rips and bloodstains at the moment. At least my phone had survived for once. Score a point for buying the most robust, basic cell phone and case I could find. Advertising for it said it could live through an apocalypse. I hoped I’d never test that.

  Harper was outside, pacing. I felt her frustration. There was very little either of us could do at the moment.

  “Hey,” I said. I stood awkwardly in the shadow of the building, feeling like a teenager who has just learned they have hands and doesn’t know where to put them while they talk to the cool new kid at school. The bedroom, our conversation about Samir, it all felt like weeks ago even though it wasn’t even hours yet.

  “You ok?” Harper asked, looking me over.

  “Yeah, just a flesh wound,” I said, trying to get a smile out of her.

  “It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?” she said. She had an expression like somehow this was my fault, though I knew intellectually I was probably reading way too much into it.

  I was saved from having to answer by the arrival of Freyda and her wolves. They came in two trucks. Freyda got out of the driver’s side of one truck and waved a greeting as Rachel came out of the shop behind us.

  “I want you to look at the bodies,” the sheriff said, not wasting pleasantries or time. “See if you recognize anyone from your run-in the other day.”

  Harper and I followed Rachel and Freyda as her pack started pulling tarps and ropes from the trucks.

  “This one,” Freyda said as we reached the human male lying in the pool of blood by the porch steps. “This was the one who forced us to shift. I think he was the leader.”

  “Good thing they shot him first,” Harper said. “Junebug is pregnant,” she added as we all gave her questioning looks.

  “Levi told you then?” I said, relieved that I wouldn’t have to worry about slipping up and mentioning it. Harper was right, if this guy had forced Junebug to shift, it would have killed the baby.

  “Of course he did. He’s my friend. Friends tell each other important things,” Harper said. She glared at me and walked back toward the trucks without another word.

  Oof. I’d walked into that one face first. Apparently we weren’t okay yet.

  “At least we got the leader,” I said, trying to diffuse the weird tension. I ignored the look that Freyda and Rachel exchanged.

  “Let’s go take a look at the rest and figure out how to handle making all this go away,” Freyda said. Her smile was understanding and gentle and I suddenly couldn’t handle either at the moment.
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br />   “I’m going to go check on Alek,” I said. I walked away from them and circled the house, taking deep, calming breaths.

  Part of it was uncertainty with Harper, I knew. Part was that I was exhausted still. I’d been burning magic like it was going out of style, I’d not gotten proper rest thanks to that damn sorcerer fucking up shifters in the woods and hunting Samir’s heart, and everything happening seemed to be pointing toward more battles to come. To think, a week before I’d been almost bored. Grass is always greener right?

  I found Alek kneeling beside Carlos’ covered body, his blond head bowed as though in prayer or deep contemplation. When he raised his face as I walked up to him, I saw his bloodshot eyes were the color of a winter sky—desolate and empty of all warmth. Ignoring the sharp pain in my leg, I dropped to my knees beside him and wound my fingers through his. His hand was even cold despite the warm evening air.

  “I should have been here,” Alek said.

  “What would you tell me? That we can’t save everyone? He died saving May. Saving Junebug and her baby, and Levi too.”

  “It is one thing to know with the head, and another our hearts.” Alek squeezed my hand and I felt some of the warmth return to his gaze as he turned his head to look into my eyes. “He raised me from an idiot teenager to be a Justice, to be a man. He saved me many times. Now he is gone and I can do nothing.”

  I tugged gently on his hand, pulling him so his weight leaned into me a little. Reminding him the only way I knew how that he wasn’t alone. He tucked his head against mine with a heavy sigh.

  “Freyda is here,” I said after a moment. “Whenever you are ready.”

  Alek nodded. We knelt, side by side, hand in hand, and held a quiet vigil for his dead friend.

  We buried Carlos in a stand of silver and green-leafed trees on Levi’s land. Freyda’s pack had wrapped up and taken away the other bodies. The only sign of the fight left was blood stains, a boarded-up window, and a handful of grieving shifters leaning on each other in the darkness.