River of No Return

by Annie Bellet

  “Ethan, I want to go home,” she said, speaking to someone on the other side of the bed.

  “Rest,” a man’s voice said. “They want one more night for observation, then I’ll take you home, I promise.”

  I rose to my feet. A white man with a tired face and shaggy brown hair sat in the chair. His dress shirt and slacks were rumpled as though he’d spent the night there. Even as I watched his face changed from concern to rage as his watery blue eyes suddenly focused past the woman and onto me. The woman disappeared.

  “Hi, Ethan,” I said.

  “Get out,” he snarled. He thrust his hands toward me and a wave of force slammed me into the window.

  I yanked on the red cloth, tugging the threads of our interwoven magic. He wasn’t going to shake me that easily. The cloth line pulled me through the wall as though it were paper and I stumbled as the tension broke.

  I was in a library. Tall shelves lined the room and antique-looking hooded lamps lent a soft, golden glow to the room. I knew this library.

  “Enough,” Ethan said, materializing out of the shelves.

  Stone walls shot up around us, boxing us in. The red cloth fluttered in my hand as the cotton-candy scent faded back.

  “That your memory or mine?” I asked.

  Anger twisted Ethan’s unremarkable face. He really did have a talent.

  “You want to see something?” he said. “Let me show you what I’ll do to them.”

  With a wave of his hand, one wall fell and we stood in a cabin. The walls were wood, uninsulated, with heavy denim curtains imperfectly shutting out the daylight. A folding metal table stood in the middle of the room with an unconscious man on it.

  Johnny, aka Halfheart. Ethan moved to the table as my vision blurred. I wasn’t just seeing now, I felt another heart beating, thoughts not my own flitting like birds at the edge of my consciousness.

  I couldn’t look away as Ethan began his spell, using his magic to cut and dice at Halfheart’s unconscious mind, reaching deep until he found what he wanted. A glittering thread pulsing in time to the beat of the shifter’s heart.

  “It was an accident the first time,” Ethan said. His voice sounded far away again, as though coming down a tunnel. His tone was calm, measured, almost disinterested, but I sensed the rage living underneath. “I thought maybe if I knew how they worked, these animals, I could find a way to harness their healing power. But you cannot make a shifter. They are so far from human even if they walk upright and speak human words. Just look what happens when you take away the beast, when you free the man…” He trailed off.

  I knew because I was inside Ethan’s mind that he was going to cut that thread. I knew he was going to do it because he could, for all he’d stumbled upon how to silence shifters because of his search for a cure for Helena. He had made Halfheart into a bomb aimed at reaching me because Halfheart knew who I was, but he had severed the wolf from his beast because of who Ethan was. What he was.

  “You are the least human thing here,” I said as I coiled the tattered red strip of cloth around my left hand.

  “I am what I must be to save her. What would you do, Jade?” he said as the table and man faded away, leaving us once again in a bare concrete box. “Or perhaps I should ask what wouldn’t you do to save the man you love? I will live forever and Helena will die, wasting away, rotting. What use is all our power if we cannot save the one we love?”

  “You didn’t destroy Halfheart out of love,” I said. My left hand felt like it was melting but I pushed away all thoughts of pain.

  “I don’t expect someone who loves a beast to understand,” Ethan said, his ugly sneer back. “But you do love, that’s real, I feel it in you. It fuels you the way it does me, even so. Give me Samir’s heart and I swear to leave you in peace. I need his heart. Look at me. See the truth in what I say.”

  I saw the truth, but perhaps not as he meant me to see it. I saw into the twisted, ugly heart of him, recognizing now as I grew more familiar with the feel of this strange mind-meld that the ugliness that kept shining through was how my own mind perceived what he’d done, who he was.

  Ethan thought he loved Helena but it felt like obsession, not love. The fleeting glimpses of memory I caught flashing around us, images that came and went like shadows on the walls while Ethan stared at me, apparently oblivious, these showed me who he was, showed me the pedestal he’d placed his apparently delicate, ill lover on.

  He didn’t want to protect her. He wanted to defy the world and play god, and so far he had failed.

  “Stop.” Ethan glared at me. He threw his hands wide and the cotton-candy threads returned strong enough I could feel them again. I snatched at his magic, the cloth in my hand spiraling out into wall beside me.

  “Look up,” I said as I opened a pit beneath Ethan’s feet.

  He fell. I yanked on the red cord and hit the wall face-first. Whatever he had done, I was locked inside. He’d closed me off from his mind.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “There is no spoon,” I whispered to myself.

  Then I channeled my best impression of Kamala Khan and pulled my fist back.

  “Embiggen!” My fist as it swelled to many times its normal size as I slammed it into the wall. Once. Twice. A crack appeared. Three. Four. Slam. Slam.

  Then the wall crumbled and I was back in the library.

  Ethan stood examining a small leather-bound volume. As I watched the shadows flickered and Noah Grey, the Archivist, stepped out into a pool of lamplight.

  “Sit down, Ethan Watts,” the vampire said. “I believe we can help each other.”

  Twice more Ethan broke into the memories and twice more I ejected him with extreme cartoonish prejudice until I had seen enough. The third time I let him wall us off again.

  Noah Grey wanted Samir’s heart. His given reason was that he didn’t trust any sorcerer with it. He’d told Ethan the truth, that destroying Samir’s heart would bring the apocalypse and end the world as we know it. I had that information independently from sources I trusted far more than the vampire but Ethan seemed to believe him as well. Or not care.

  Because what Noah promised the young sorcerer in return was impossible.

  “The vampire is lying to you,” I said.

  “You have Samir’s heart,” Ethan said. “I’ve seen glimpses. I can feel it. Show me.”

  “You aren’t fucking listening to me.” I slammed my palm against the smooth concrete wall. I was starting to feel sorry for Helena and not just cause her boyfriend was a megalomaniac serial killer. “Noah can’t turn anyone into a vampire. No vampire can.” Except the mother of all vampires, I added mentally, hoping he wouldn’t catch that thought.

  “That’s bullshit,” Ethan said. “How would you know that?”

  I saw no reason to not tell him most of the truth there. “Because I met a necromancer who has probably forgotten more about vampires than we’ll ever know. He was pretty freaking adamant that no normal vampire can make a new vampire.” Skirting dangerously close to the truth but I had a thin hope that if I could get through to Ethan, to show him Noah’s lie, he would back down.

  Not that he was going to get away. I’d seen too much of his mind now. As much as I dreaded killing anyone, the First maybe excepted, ever again, Ethan wasn’t going to stop. Desperation to save Helena might have started his experiments, but it hadn’t given him the complete lack of empathy and ethics his torture of shifters displayed. It was an excuse, not a reason.

  “That is my problem to deal with,” Ethan said. “Even if I believed you, which I do not.”

  Even as he spoke the words my vision doubled again.

  Ethan did believe me. I felt it the way I’d felt the joy in his intention to sever Halfheart’s wolf. He believed me and he didn’t care. He wanted Samir’s heart. To him, if Noah was lying, then the power in Samir’s heart would open other potential paths to save Helena. Even if it ended the world.

  He’d asked me what I wouldn’t do to save the one I love
d. Looking deep into Ethan’s twisted psyche, I found no answers for myself, only a horrible doppelganger of what I felt for Alek. A love rotted to its core.

  All those years of running around, tracking down and eating the hearts of sorcerers and somehow my evil ex had missed this piece of work. Another reason to curse Samir, I decided. Couldn’t even count on him to scoop up all the other monsters.

  The concrete walls fell away to a snowy field as gunshots rattled in the trees. Samir and I were pressed eye to eye, our lips almost touching. His blood cascaded over my hand as I pushed the Alpha and Omega into his chest. The snow beneath me should have been cold but felt only soft, crunching slightly as our weight shifted.

  “Did I ever tell you the story of the scorpion and the frog?” Samir murmured.

  I squeezed my left hand, embracing the razorwire feeling of my magic burning there.

  “Goodbye, Ethan,” I said. I dropped the anvil on us both and all the air and all the light went out and out and out…

  Alek spun in the air, struggling to keep his feet as the magic wrapped around him released him without warning and he slammed back to the unstable earth. He turned in time to see Jade swallowed by the roaring landslide of rock and debris. He flattened his ears and slitted his eyes against the rising dust, ignoring his desperate instinct to leap after her.

  The landslide was death for him but not for her. His head knew this. His heart screamed at him to act, to save her. Screamed that he was failing yet another person he loved.

  Alek took that rage and sprang up the hillside. Shale slid under his paws and slowed him but he powered toward the trees. A bullet grazed his side. He rolled the pain of that into his anger. His world narrowed to one thought.

  Kill.

  The first human he reached tried to swing a gun at him but Alek moved with preternatural speed, emerging from the swirling dust and into the waning sunlight like an avenging ghost. Human flesh and cloth were nothing for his teeth. He shook the corpse once and tossed it aside.

  Wolves swarmed up the slope now that the worst of the landslide was below them. The humans had too many targets to shoot and Alek found it easy to keep moving. A grey-furred wolf charging up the hill beside Alek howled with pain as a bullet found its side. Alek leaped over the fallen wolf and in three huge strides reached the gunman, showing him no more mercy than he had the last.

  Half a dozen human corpses littered the hillside before the gunshots stopped. Alek caught another as he reached the trees. He tore into that human’s retreating back, bringing him down as his claws severed the human’s spine with a crunch.

  Stillness settled slowly over the landscape as the rockslide found the bottom of the canyon and finished its run. No more humans moved. No more guns fired.

  Alek shifted to human, scanning the direction the man he’d just killed had tried to run. The small stand of firs was only a few trees deep. Beyond it the hillside continued to rise. Nothing moved there. No sign of the enemy sorcerer. Alek doubted he was among the fallen.

  Jade.

  Alek moved as quickly as the unstable, rocky ground would let him. The landslide had carved a deep trench down the hillside in a nearly perfect line, more evidence it wasn’t caused by natural means. A huge pile of boulders and gravel and dirt rested below, smaller rocks and debris still shifting and settling. A large fox leapt up onto the shifting pile, sniffing around one of the bigger rocks. Harper was alive.

  No sign of Jade.

  Bile rose in Alek’s throat as he fought the panic wrapping icy fingers around his heart. She was a sorceress, he reminded himself. She was immortal. He hadn’t failed her yet.

  “Alek?” Aurelio approached him, cutting across the hill as Alek made his way down.

  “How many did you lose?” Alek growled. There were fewer wolves than before.

  “Three,” Aurelio said. His voice was flat, his expression focused.

  Alek knew the look. The appearance of a leader who knew there was more fighting to be done. Who knew the grieving had to wait.

  “Watch the hill,” Alek said. “They might return. Do not trust your eyes.”

  “Is Jade…?” Aurelio did not finish the question.

  “She is under there,” Alek said. He ignored Aurelio’s raised eyebrows and resumed picking his way down to the canyon floor.

  Harper shifted to human and crouched on the pile of stone and dirt as he approached.

  “I can’t hear her,” she said, her green eyes bright with unshed tears. Panic threaded her voice. “I saw her go under but nothing is moving anymore.”

  “Jade is immortal,” Alek said, keeping his voice calm. It helped that Harper was panicking. Alek had always found it easier to stay sane in dangerous or stressful situations if he had someone he needed to care for. It kept his mind from all his failures. From tallying the dead.

  He had learned long ago that there was no purpose in dwelling on those who were beyond help, but the knowledge never made the pain less. His heart was still raw from failing Carlos, the man who had helped raise him, the closest Alek had ever had to a father in his life.

  He had failed Carlos, but Jade was here, not gone. He just had to get to her.

  “Move,” he told Harper.

  She scrabbled down off the pile of debris. Alek shifted, his senses sharpening as his tiger took over. He started at the leading edge of the pile where the initial cascade had settled and dug his paws into the loose stones and dirt. Sharp edges stung him but he ignored the discomfort as he began to shift the pile, his sensitive nose hunting for any sign of his mate.

  Harper, still in human form, started on her own edge. Two wolves joined on the third side. Slowly, rock by rock, handful of earth by handful of earth, Alek, Harper, and the wolves began to move the pile, to disperse it across the floor of the canyon, seeking the woman trapped beneath it. Glancing up as he shook his head to clear the dust from his face, Alek saw wolves crouched along the upper slope. Their bodies were almost invisible among the stones and brush. They kept vigil, facing the way the last gunmen had run, facing the top of the ridge where their assailants had fled.

  Alek reached one of the larger boulders and began to dig around it. The way it had settled, he was not sure anyone would be underneath, but the pile was taller than him on his hind legs and he was unwilling to leave a stone unturned.

  Live, Jade, he whispered to her in his mind. An image of her bloody, broken body haunted him, drove him to work faster, dig more even though his paws were not designed for it. But there was no choice. He had walked with her willingly into this trap and he would not abandon her now. He would dig her out, make sure she was safe, and then he was going to go find the sorcerer. He would bring Jade the man’s heart on a platter after he had torn the rest into pieces smaller than the grit beneath his paws.

  The boulder slid a foot and Alek knew he’d dug enough. He moved around to the far side and put his considerable weight against it. It took multiple hard pushes with his body nearly falling into it to get the rock to slide down the side of the pile. It crashed into the brush there and rolled a little way before settling again. One big stone down, more to go. No sign of Jade.

  Alek climbed farther up the mound, putting his nose against the loose earth revealed by removing the stone. He caught the faintest scent of blood and a stronger whiff of strawberry shampoo. He gave a coughing roar. Jade. He hoped she was beneath him, that perhaps she could hear him. He was coming for her.

  He shifted to human and scooped debris away, throwing it as far behind him as he could. Harper climbed up beside him.

  “I smell her,” Alek said.

  Wordlessly Harper started helping him move the stones and dirt. Grit coated them. Sweat ran down Alek’s back and face. His arms were scratched and bleeding as he used them to try to move more and more debris. He nearly skidded off the side twice as he dug, loose stone and soil tumbling into the depression he and Harper had made.

  “Dig, from that side,” Alek growled at the two wolves.

  Then the sp
ot they had been digging began to vibrate. Tiny stones rose into the air. The rock beneath his and Harper’s knees began to hum.

  A huge wolf-like creature appeared in front of them, almost hovering over the rock pile. Her fur was so black it seemed to eat the late afternoon sunlight. Her tail was long and thick like a snow leopard’s, her eyes the black of a night sky and full of stars.

  “Wolf,” Alek said as he felt a pressure on his mind. He recognized Jade’s Undying guardian.

  Wolf growled, baring her teeth. Her message was clear.

  “Move, everyone back,” Alek yelled as he scrambled down the rocks. He grabbed at Harper, pulling her with him. He dragged her away from the rockslide.

  “But Jade?” Harper said. “Is she doing that? We can’t just leave her.”

  “She’s doing something.” Alek realized only he could see Wolf.

  The giant pile of brush, dirt, and stone hummed louder. Large rocks split and cracked, becoming smaller rocks. Smaller rocks pulverized into grit. Grit turned to a river of dust that lifted and flowed away beneath Wolf’s growling, floating body. The air became choked with it, forcing Alek, Harper, and the wolves to crouch in the weak shelter of the brush, their arms protecting their faces.

  Then the dust wind settled. Alek squinted at where the rockslide had been. There was no sign of Wolf. Two huge mounds of sand framed a perfect circle plateau of smooth, sandy ground. In the middle of the circle Jade was alive and coughing.

  I was ready for the airless, crushing hell this time. I kept hold of my magic even though exhaustion burned through me and my world was darkness and pain. I reminded myself that air was for people who weren’t functionally immortal. My lungs disagreed, violently.

  A presence manifested right above me, a light in the darkness, though I was sure my eyes were closed. Wolf. I felt her like a tiny sun above me, her warmth telling me where to go. I was facing up, I was sure of that now.

  Rock to mud was a spell I’d done before but the sheer weight of stone and dirt on me was too much. Hanging onto consciousness with my body dying around me hurt to the point I had trouble keeping focus on the magic flowing through me. I had to get out. I had to move the mountain. Mud wouldn’t be lighter or easier to move off myself.