Tamhas

by Ava Benton

  So did the ringing of my phone. I just about jumped to answer it, though my heart sank a little when I saw that it was Hank calling.

  “A Sunday morning phone call,” I said as I sighed when I answered. “Always a joy.”

  “Sunday is just another day of the week,” he was quick to remind me. One of his many favorite sayings. Always making sure I remembered that he worked straight through the week with the implication that I should, too.

  “Sure, sure. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Just got a call for what I think is going to be a pretty big job. Should take at least a few weeks, between you and the others I’ll bring in for it. But of course, you’re the first one I’m calling.”

  I rolled my eyes, but just a little. “You flatter me.” I dunked a tea bag into a mug of steaming water, imagining dunking certain parts of my boss into it instead. Not that Hank was really and truly my boss. I freelanced. I was my own boss. He hooked me up with the right jobs as they came in.

  “You’re the one who didn’t believe our last guy really went down with that boat,” he reminds me. “And you looked at the girlfriend right away. Even when I didn’t think it was worth spending the time, you watched her.”

  Yes, and he had more than a few choice opinions to share when I insisted we stay on her trail even when it seemed like the case was going nowhere. He conveniently left that part out.

  “I’m a genius. What can I say?” My eyes flitted over to where the last case’s folder sat on the table.

  Did I really want to go through another case while still wondering where Tamhas was? Once Emelie found him—and I knew she’d find him, that was never a question—what would I do? Why did I want her to look, if the endgame wasn’t to find him myself, personally, and twist his nuts a little?

  So to speak.

  “Hello?” Hank’s question was sharp. “Earth to Keira. Where are you, gorgeous?”

  I bristled at the pseudo-compliment. Men just didn’t get it. “I’m here.”

  “Well? Are you ready for a new job, or what? I have other calls I need to make.”

  I drew a deep breath. “You know what? I don’t think so. Not right now.”

  2

  Keira

  Are you freaking serious?”

  Emelie stood in the bedroom doorway, eyes wide behind those Buddy Holly hipster glasses of hers as she took in the sight of a suitcase spread open on my bed.

  I pretended not to notice how freaked out she was, going to the closet instead. “What?”

  “What? You know what. Keira, this is bonkers.” She sat in the chair I’d been in while we were on the phone, looking around in dismay. “I mean, this isn’t like you at all, babe.”

  “You know this means a lot to me. I’ve already told you.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “And you told me over the phone that you pinpointed a location.”

  “I know, but…”

  “But, I want to find out for myself if he’s okay. I know where to start now. Even if he’s moved elsewhere, I have a starting point. I can do anything once I have that.”

  She sighed, running both hands through her short, lavender hair. Probably my favorite of all the various shades she’d colored it over the years. “You don’t get it. I still haven’t told you where he sent the email from.”

  I snorted while folding tee shirts before tucking them into the suitcase. “Where? The deepest, darkest jungle? Antarctica? Should I pack warmer clothing?”

  It was clear that the humor in this was lost on her. “A mountain in Scotland. A literal frigging mountain, Keira.”

  “Scotland, huh? I knew he was Scottish. I don’t work for an investigative agency for nothing.”

  “Would you listen to me?” She got up, standing on the other side of the bed. A messenger bag was still slung across her body—she reached into it and pulled out a piece of paper. “See? I printed it out for you.” Her index finger jabbed at a red “X” she’d marked.

  Over a literal frigging mountain. Just like she said. There wasn’t a single building anywhere in sight. Just woods and a lake and a mountain, with a series of smaller mountains trailing behind it.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Don’t insult me,” she warned.

  “All right, all right. Chill.” I pushed aside a pile of clothes and sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the red mark she’d made. She knew her stuff. I wouldn’t have asked her to help me if she didn’t. But was I supposed to believe he was really in the middle of nowhere?

  “You see why I’m a little concerned,” she said, coming around to where I sat. “This isn’t like you, taking a chance like this.”

  “Oh, come on,” I murmured, only partly paying attention to what I was saying because I was still staring at that X. That red X. Why was he on a mountain?

  I closed my eyes and tried to recall what I saw when we’d talked online, the few times I’d seen his face and heard his voice. It was a room. Just a room he was sitting in at the time, nothing special about it. The wall behind him had been blank. I’d heard the whirring of computer fans. There was a lot of light, but I’d assumed it had come from the monitor.

  “Sure, you’ve taken chances before,” she admitted. “I mean, I still can’t watch your fights. I hate even thinking about you getting hurt.”

  How could I be annoyed with her when she put it that way? “I know you’re only worried because you care.”

  “Yes. That’s right. Which is why I hate the thought of you crossing an ocean to search for this guy. I mean, a mountain. He’s on a mountain—or, he was. Doesn’t that strike a warning bell somewhere in your mind?”

  “Of course. But there’s been a bell going off in my head all along. If there wasn’t one, I wouldn’t be concerned about what happened to him.”

  “He really made an impression on you, huh?”

  I looked up at her, smiling. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  She chewed her bottom lip since all of her fingernails were already chewed to the beds. A habit she was never able to break. “What if he ends up being married or something? I mean, what would you do if you found where he lives and his wife answered the door?”

  “I’d ask her if she’s accepted Jesus Christ as her lord and savior and watch as she closed the door in my face.”

  She burst out laughing. “Be serious!”

  “All right. I’ll be serious. If he’s married, I won’t go to his damned house. I’ll find out in advance, because that’s what I do.” I tapped the paper with the printed map. “This is what you do. Finding people is what I do.”

  “One of the things you do.”

  “And I’m good at it,” I reminded her. “There’s nothing for you to worry about. Okay?”

  She sat back in the chair. “Right. I’ll believe that when you get back. No offense.”

  “Fair enough.” I resumed my packing. “And you’ll be the first to know when I get home.”

  “How long do you think it will be?”

  I shrugged. “A couple of weeks, I guess.”

  “Hank’s all right with losing you for a couple of weeks?”

  “He doesn’t have much of a choice, does he?” He wasn’t thrilled. In fact, he’d been pretty irritated when I told him I’d have to take time off. Once I’d reminded him of the fact that he wasn’t my employer and I could come and go as I pleased, he’d backed down.

  “You can afford to step away from work for that long? What about training?”

  I took a deep breath to keep from snapping at her. I didn’t want to hurt my best friend’s feelings, especially when she worked all morning on finding Tamhas for me. “Believe me, I’m okay. I know this place looks like a palace…” I spun in a slow circle, indicating my modest two-bedroom in sort of a shabby building, “but you know how affordable it is. And you know I don’t throw money around.”

  “I know,” she nodded. Yes, she did. We both knew what it was like not to have any money or power of our own. We wouldn’t al
low ourselves to rely on others. Not ever.

  “I’ll be fine. I promise.”

  She didn’t look convinced—in fact, she looked downright depressed. “I guess there’s nothing left for you to do but to go, then. I just hope you really, really know what you’re doing.”

  I went to her, crouching in front of the chair. “I do. This is going to be fine. But if I stayed here and never found out whether he was okay, I wouldn’t able to live with myself. And I’d be miserable.”

  “When are you leaving, then?”

  “Tonight, if possible. Tomorrow morning. I guess I’ll fly to…”

  “Edinburgh,” she finished. “It’s the nearest major city.”

  “Edinburgh, then.”

  She tried to smile, but it came out as more of a wince. “If you’re sure. This is just so unlike you.”

  “I wish I could explain so you’d understand. I guess I don’t understand it very well, myself. I just know I need to do it, is all.”

  She shook her head, waving her hands, like she was clearing away a bad smell from the air. “You don’t need to understand. I’m not here to judge you or give you shit, babe. Go do you. Just make sure you let me know you’re okay.”

  She even helped me finish packing.

  3

  Tamhas

  I’m starting to worry about you. I hope everything is all right.

  I have to ask: did I say the wrong thing? Piss you off? If so, I wish you’d just tell me.

  I was hoping I would’ve heard something from you by now. I still don’t know whether to chalk you up as a ghoster (is that what it’s called when somebody ghosts on you?) or to worry that something happened to you. I do hope you’re all right.

  I read message after message from her, each of them driving another knife into my conscience.

  It wasn’t my fault that I’d disappeared. But there was no way to explain that. She couldn’t know that we’d been kidnapped. Those that weren’t killed.

  Confessing to the kidnapping would’ve meant confessing how I lived. Confessing why I would’ve been kidnapped at all and what happened to me while I was there. Confessing who I was.

  I’d already taken far too many chances by maintaining a friendship with her at all.

  Owen would be back shortly to relieve me. I typed out a quick reply to Keira’s last email, dated nearly a week earlier. I’m sorry to have disappeared on you—it wasn’t by choice. All is well now. Thank you for caring, and I hope you haven’t written me off.

  Once I received confirmation that it was sent, I logged out and wiped the browser history. Not that Owen didn’t have the skill to look into my records if he wanted to, but there was little reason for it. We trusted each other.

  Which was a problem, since I had been anything but trustworthy.

  I hadn’t sent the email a moment too soon, since Owen entered the control center before I hardly had the chance to breathe. “How does everything seem to be working?” he asked, settling down in his customary seat.

  I took pains to sound as carefree as possible. The way an honest, trustworthy man would. “Fine. Fast, secure.”

  “Good.” He looked and sounded exhausted, and the stress lines which had etched themselves into his forehead during the process of doubling down on our security were still present. “Let’s hope this round of upgrades leaves us safer than before.”

  “We still don’t know how they found us,” I reminded him, for what seemed like the hundredth time. No matter how many times he’d agreed with me, allowed that there could’ve been any number of opportunities to suss out our location, he managed to find a way to blame himself.

  He let out a growl of impatience. “Aye, I know it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a strong possibility they traced us electronically. They knew just where we were—they landed helicopters here, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I remember,” I muttered. He hardly needed to remind me of that terrible day. Like something out of the worst nightmare I’d ever had over the course of a thousand years. “Even so, there’s no need to punish yourself for what happened. It’s a waste of time, a waste of energy.”

  “What would you suggest I spend my energy on, then?”

  I tapped the table with my forefinger. “This. Now. Keeping us secure and undetected in the present. I’ll do everything I can to help you with it. You know this.”

  “Aye,” he grinned. “And it would be helpful to me right now if you’d get out of here, so I can work in peace. You know I hate feeling as though I’m being watched.”

  “All right. I’ll leave you to your logs or whatever it is you pore over.” I knew very well what he did in there all day: records of incoming activity. If anyone attempted to find us, to hack our servers in order to assess our location, he’d be the first to know.

  Would that it had helped before.

  We’d already spent hours talking about it after our return, while Klaus and I had assisted him in setting up a more secure system for both physical and cybersecurity. It seemed as though he needed to get it off his chest, like he wanted someone to understand how difficult Gavin had made it for him to properly secure the clan’s location.

  “He didn’t believe we were under any threat from the outside because of the enchantment placed upon the woods,” Owen had explained one day while we worked. “I told him time and again that I wanted to upgrade our systems, but he was so certain that we couldn’t be reached even if someone were to discern our location.”

  I could almost hear Gavin saying those very words. A good man, a fierce dragon, someone who had led our clan through centuries of peace. But stubborn, too. Obstinate. Never one to take the advice of others easily. Perhaps he might have, one day, had his life not been ended by one of the very people he’d been so certain would never find us.

  Alan was not going to be accused of making the same mistakes as his predecessor.

  Rather than going to my room or spending time with the clan in the common room—I heard a movie playing in there, a musical by the sounds of it, and nothing could repel me easier than that—I turned left and walked down the tunnel toward the cave entrance.

  I needed to fly. I needed the chance to get my thoughts together in peace.

  Or the chance to stop thinking altogether and indulge the less rational, more instinctual side of my being. I’d long since grown tired of thinking.

  Even about Keira, someone who I’d thought about endlessly. Both in the year prior to the kidnapping and during my time on St. Lucia, she’d been at the center of my waking thoughts.

  When she wasn’t at the center of my dreams.

  My dragon understood this better than I did, since it made little rational sense to jeopardize myself by continuing our relationship—if that was what it was. I’d never experienced one, but it seemed as though we’d forged a bond.

  I should’ve left her alone. I shouldn’t have pursued our friendship or relationship. I shouldn’t have kept writing, and I certainly shouldn’t have chatted with her over Skype and I sure as hell shouldn’t have written again.

  Even if it was to relieve her concern for me.

  So I told myself.

  I could barely wait until I was outdoors—a typically dreary day, with low gray clouds and a definite dampness in the air—before stripping out of my t-shirt and jeans and allowing the shift to take place. My dragon was fairly screaming to get out, to unfold his wings and fly.

  And so he did.

  He hardly wasted a moment, taking off the very instant the shift was complete. The freedom of flight, the sensation of air rushing past me and over me, catching it under my wings and using it to propel me higher and higher.

  I’d never grow tired of it, no matter how many more centuries I was fortunate enough to spend on Earth. Flying. Shucking my human form, powerful though it might have been. Still not as powerful as the dragon’s.

  I circled the arrowhead-shaped peak, climbing higher all the time. The clouds were nothing but fog at that height, threatening to break
at any point and leave me in the sunshine.

  Even flying, something as critical to me as breathing, couldn’t wipe the thought of Keira from my mind. If anything, she was more important than ever. Because it was my dragon who made it impossible for me to forget her. He’d plagued me for months with thoughts of her, memories of her. Things she’d said, times she’d made me smile and even laugh. The way she’d touched my heart more times than I could count.

  He wouldn’t leave it alone no matter how I’d tried to ignore him.

  Just as he wouldn’t leave me alone then.

  We need her. Find her. The same two sentences—two demands—again and again. Find her. We need her. If anything, his obsession had only grown stronger in the months during and after the kidnapping.

  We could have died, after all. And the looming threat of death, even for a dragon, tended to shed a different light on certain matters. Such as who we wanted for a mate. It was her. It would always be her.

  But she was on the other side of the world, or might as well have been.

  The dragon cared little for concerns such as this. Find her. She is ours. We need her. There is no time to waste. As though there was an emergency, as though we were running out of time. As though another threat waited just around the bend, another potential catastrophe.

  No amount of flying would erase the obsession. I wished it would, somewhere in the back of my mind where my human consciousness lurked behind the dragon’s consciousness. I wished he would forget her, because that would make it easier for me to begin the process.

  Not that I wanted to. I wished for nothing less than I wished to forget her. She’d been like a breath of fresh air. Like breaking through the clouds and feeling the sun on my scales.

  I had functioned perfectly well without her for a thousand years.

  Only because she hadn’t existed. And I hadn’t known of the presence of a creature like her. I hadn’t known there could be such sweetness in simply reading the words another person had written to me. Or of the way the sight of a certain name on a screen could lift my spirits.