by Judy Teel
My panic receded as a warm glow of pride spread through my chest. I could have kicked myself for it.
"I'm going now," he called, laughter underlying his voice.
I waited until only the silence of the forest surrounded me and then hopped my way into the clearing that their fight had made. Spreading my wings, I jumped into the air, flapping them hard as I did. Of course now that he wasn't there to see me, I made a smooth exit.
Back at the rocks where I'd left my clothes, I quickly shifted and dressed, glad to be human again.
"Are you done?" Mehk said from behind a boulder near the creek.
My heart leaped into my throat, and I had my gun in my hand so fast, that I wasn't sure which one of those things happened first. He came out from behind the boulder and I had a moment of shock, followed by marginal relief as I realized that somewhere along the way, he'd found some vines and wrapped them around his hips.
"That's a great way to get shot." I angrily shoved my weapon back in its holster. Turning around, I stomped down the path back toward the compound. Mehk caught up and I could feel his gaze on me.
"It'll be back," he said.
"Murderous prehistoric crap always is."
"It was created to be highly adaptive. We have at the most a day before it attacks again. When it does, it'll be ready to combat your ability to fly."
"Is it sentient?" I asked, stepping over the trunk of a fallen tree without breaking my stride.
"Not precisely. But it's highly instinctive. As fast as any Were, impervious to most types of magic and created for only one thing — to make vampires the dominant paranormal race."
Above the trees, loomed the bare gray rock face that marked the cliff of the compound. I slowed down and came to a stop. "I'm not sure what kind of reception we're going to get."
Mehk smiled broadly. "A feast, I expect."
"Demon-Weres are hated and feared now. Killing us is probably higher on their list of priorities."
"Julia said the same thing, but I was hoping..." His brows lowered. "We were designed to protect them. Without any thought for our own safety. Doesn't that mean something?"
My stomach gave a squirmy lurch. How many times had I done exactly that? Charged in to protect someone, never thinking of the danger to myself?
I glanced at Mehk. We might look completely different in our Were forms, maybe because I was only half Demon-Were, but maybe I could consider that we might be from the same general genetic pool.
A breeze sifted through the trees. From the left, I heard the clanking of the bones along the path that led to the fortress. I stopped and contemplated the swath of destruction in front of me. "What do you mean, 'designed'? Like the Tor?"
Mehk stooped down to gently straighten the bent stem of a small white flower. "Twelve times, volunteers from the four races of Weres held their form in the Fourth World while linked to practitioners in the Third. Wolf for courage, panther for agility, rat for cunning and dragon for immortality. Together they blended a new race that could protect them all."
"Sure, okay," I said, wondering what the best way to approach the compound might be. Walk right up? Sneak around a bit to see if we could tell what the mood of the place was? Hide until morning and then— "Wait, did you say rat?"
Mehk stood up and brushed off his hands. "For cunning."
"Ew."
He smiled. "That's what your mother said too."
I started to launch a rude reply and then the doubt I'd been holding onto so hard slipped. The desperately lonely orphan still inside me wanted Mehk to be her father, as miraculous and unlikely as that would be.
I looked up at the Bone Clan cliffs looming in the distance, staring at them until they weren't so blurry and my throat didn't feel so tight. Then I stalked off toward an uncertain reception.
* * *
In the end, I decided that Mehk was right. At least about one thing. We'd risked our lives to save the compound. If they had an issue with what we were because of it, then they could shove it.
Marching up to the Bone Clan gate, I stopped in front of it, Mehk beside me. After a moment, Jesse slunk from the shadows and sat down on the other side of me. Might as well get all the shocks over with at once and move on, right?
"We're back," I shouted. Lame, I know, but between shifting and battling bugs, my energy was starting to go and it was the best I could come up with.
"Who's there?" Bald Guy said, trotting up to the gate. When he saw it was me, relief flickered over his face. I took that as a good sign.
"Are you going to kill us?" I asked, just to be sure.
"The vote's still 50-50." He picked up two bundles that sat next to the inside of the gate. Gauging the distance, he stepped back a few paces and then launched them over the wall one at a time.
"That looks like a defense weakness to me," I commented as I picked up one bundle and Mehk got the other. "You should report it."
"You want to freeze to death, go ahead."
"Hope you like camping," I said to Mehk and Jesse. The wolf cocked his head. "At least you won't mind," I added.
"Sounds like you might," Mehk commented.
I shrugged. "Not really into the whole outdoorsy scene. Unless pizza and cups of coffee can grow on trees."
"I can help with that." Mehk gripped my shoulder and everything around me went white. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the wide stone basin of the fountain in the middle of the ruins. Except they weren't ruins. A full-blown medieval-style village of orderly stone cottages with thatched roofs spread out around me, including carefully tended gardens between each of them and a blue sky overhead broken only by a few white puffy clouds. Beyond the low stone wall of the perimeter, the mist of living colors that marked the fourth dimension swirled.
Panicking, I sprang away from the fountain and did a quick body check. Shirt, jeans, boots — everything was exactly where it had been. Even my gun was strapped to my thigh. We hadn't shifted. So how the hell had I gotten here?
I spun around, looking for Mehk. One of the cottage doors opened and he stepped out wearing jeans and a T-shirt that had a Zelda logo on the front of it. He gave me one of his bright smiles, his dark blue eyes sparkling with pleasure.
"Welcome home," he said, strolling up to me. He handed me a crusty piece of bread slathered with butter.
I threw it on the ground. "What the hell did you do?"
"I stepped through," he said, stooping to pick up the bread. "After I described it to her, Julia named it 'popping'. I always liked that term. 'Popping'." He bit off half of the chunk of bread. "Almost as good as pizza," he said around the mouthful.
I watched him lick butter off his thumb and my stomach growled.
"I can get more," he offered as he devoured the rest. "There's plenty."
"Haven't you read your Greek mythology?"
"Except this isn't Hades." Walking over to the fountain he dipped his cupped hands into the basin and brought the water to his mouth, taking a long drink. "It's a one-way street that only those with Demon-Were blood can use. One the Tor'nysoos can't track," he added, pouring what was left back into the basin. "That's why I stopped you before you touched the water." Wiping his wet hand on his jeans, he turned around and faced me. "You weren't ready. Maybe I wasn't either."
Mehk's expression sobered. "Maybe I never would've been, given a choice." He looked up at the sky and I followed his gaze. The white clouds hadn't moved. "It's always the same," he said. "Then like a timer, it goes to a night sky, the constellations never moving. Then back to day."
Releasing a breath, he turned his attention back to me and gave me a smile that didn't climb to his eyes. "How could I not fall in love with Julia when she freed me?"
As a kid, I'd sometimes imagined that spies or aliens had been after my parents and that the only way they could keep me from being captured was to leave me behind. Then when I was older, I'd thought they'd come steal me away in the night anyway and we'd live on the run, dodging danger and righting wrongs. But in the
end, the only thing that I'd ever really wanted was to be with them and for them to keep me safe.
I swallowed, and the lump in my throat landed in my stomach like an icy brick. "If you've been alive all this time, why didn't you try to find me?"
His attempt to be cheerful faded. "I could only step into your world when Julia opened the pathway. And only return when she sent me back. I was her genie in a lamp."
He stared at the fountain bubbling merrily in the artificial sunlight. "When her family discovered what she'd done..." His mouth hardened. "One night I was summoned, but when I stepped through, it was her sisters that had activated the spell using her blood. Julia was gagged and chained to a chair. They attacked me and they were strong." His chest rose and fell as he watched the water for a moment. "If I'd been the demon they thought I was, I wouldn't have survived."
Straightening up, Mehk shrugged, the gesture reminding me of someone I knew, though I couldn't quite put my finger on who. "Our kind were nothing but myth by then. They didn't know that I could easily have killed them."
"What about me?" I asked, my voice tight. "Did you know?"
He shook his head. "But I trusted Julia. I pretended that their attack had worked and dimension hopped. I knew she'd make contact with me as soon as it was safe."
I thought of all the months I'd tried to track down my parents once I was an adult, how driven I was to find out what had happened that had made them abandon me. I'd become a private investigator because of it, but I'd never found my answers. And then a new thought appeared.
What if Laswell had lied? What if Julia was still alive? "How are you still crossing into our world?" I asked, my pulse accelerating.
"Once the Tor'nysoos awoke, I could move freely," Mehk said.
Like a child, I'd let hope mislead me. Unsnapping and snapping the strap on my holster, I told myself I was an idiot. What had I expected? That he would have searched for me when he was free? That we'd all come together and live happily ever after?
"The inter-D's have also slipped through," I said, bringing my focus back to what really mattered. "You saw what they did to Jesse. They're latching onto the Weres to feed and we need a way to stop them."
"There is one, but it's dangerous." He faced me. "Can you trust me?"
"I don't know you," I said, my gaze boring into his. "How can I?"
"No time to find out. If we're not there to engage the Tor'nysoos when it reappears, it will refocus on what it was created to do."
Which was how I got my first lesson in dimension-hopping.
* * *
When my Demon-Were nature had first been awakened, I'd wake up in the morning with my handprint in the wall above me as if I'd pressed it straight into the cinderblocks as easy as if they were clay. It eventually stopped and since I had other things on my mind like saving Cooper's life, I shrugged it off and didn't bother to think about it anymore. Turns out, I'd been triggering my shifter-magic combo powers unconsciously and phasing the wall into 4-D.
Doing it on purpose was a lot harder.
Mehk had me hold up both of my hands, palms out. "This will awaken the energy centers that you'll need to create an opening." The tips of both his forefingers started glowing like they were going to shift. Just before their shape started to soften, he jabbed a finger into the middle of each of my palms with a quick, sharp blow.
The spots stung like a wasp had hit me, and then twin trails of heat flared up my arms, over my shoulders and collided in the middle of my chest. My center, the aspect of my Were nature that I focused on to shift, started humming with energy.
"Focus on concentrating the shifting energy and sending it back into the palms of your hands," Mehk told me. "Both hands. Gives you more options. When the pressure of the energy builds until it feels like it's about to explode, picture where you want to go and do this as you release it." He swiped his palm through the air from left to right. A long line of white light appeared in midair. As I watched, it slowly faded and disappeared.
"Step through before it does that," Mehk added.
"I'm not sure I'm up to this."
"How did you shift that first time?"
"Cooper told me the basics and then I followed my instincts," I said.
"Exactly."
Nothing is ever as easy as it sounds when it's your first time, but a girl can hope. I focused the hum of energy in the middle of my chest into my right palm, pushing it into the spot Mehk had touched. I let it build until my hand throbbed from the pressure, my skin tightening, feeling on the verge of splitting. Picturing the practice ring in the compound, I swiped my hand from left to right and released the energy.
I contemplated the line of white light in front of me. "It's like having a combination knife and magic marker for a hand. Are you sure it's safe?"
"Not if we stand here too long." He grabbed my hand and stepped through the slice in the air, pulling me with him.
An endless black, frigid silence gutted me and then we were standing in front of the Bone Clan gate again, the dark sky above us flecked with bright stars. I thought I'd held a clear image of the practice ring in my mind. I was disappointed it hadn't worked and told Mehk what I'd pictured.
Walking up to the gate, he stopped about four yards away and brushed his fingers through the air like he could feel something in front of him. "The practitioners have put a temporary spell on the bones and rocks. Nothing carrying the mark of the Fourth World can cross it."
"They've stopped new inter-D's from getting in," I said. Bad for us, but I felt a brush of relief that they'd thought of a way to slow down the rate of infection.
"You shouldn't have turned down my freshly baked bread," Mehk commented.
"We could hop back and grab some."
"No more than once per sunrise. Get too tired and you could end up anywhere. Exhaust yourself and your tattered essence will be scattered all over the Fourth World."
I looked at him in disbelief. "And you were going to mention this when?"
"I thought you'd feel the strain and figure it out."
"Wait a minute," I said, propping my fists on hips, "when you took us from here to the village, there wasn't any of this step through stuff happening. You put your hand on my shoulder, and we were there."
"Full Demon-Were versus half practitioner," he said, grinning down at me. "I pop. You hop."
A movement from inside the compound caught my attention. "Uh, oh." I stepped in front of Mehk, crowding him back.
Bald Guy and the female Were that had been on guard duty with him at the quarantine cellblock, stepped up to the gate. Bald Guy said something to her and she took off for the tiered stronghold.
"We thought he'd killed you. Or made you like Jesse," he said, fear and anger on his solid, uncompromising face.
Cooper appeared next to him. His hard gaze bore into Mehk, his eyes a cold silver in the moonlight. He looked like he'd aged ten years in the few hours I'd been gone. "Are you hurt, Addison?"
I walked up to the gate, wanting to reassure him that I was fine. And collided with the invisible barrier of the practitioners' spell.
"Trace energy from the crossing can last ten hours," Mehk said.
"Any new infections since the barrier went up?" I asked Cooper.
"None," he said, and I could feel his struggle to control his worry and the need to reassure himself that I was okay.
"Then I have no complaints. Try and get some sleep," I added.
Because tomorrow we had a lot of explaining to do.
CHAPTER NINE
The next morning, the gate was unlocked and Mehk and I were hustled inside. Cooper was there to meet us and I spent the next ten minutes convincing him that Mehk was on our side while the Demon-Were entertained himself with studying the flowers that grew along the wall.
"We don't have the luxury of turning away anyone who can help us," I finally pointed out.
Cooper glanced toward the woods where the black and tan wolf paced just inside the tree line. "The way he helped Jesse?
"
I followed Cooper's gaze and wondered if there was any hope for the brothers. "He was dying. Mehk gave him another chance."
I was about to ask Cooper if he wouldn't have chosen the same for Ryker given the chance, when he gripped my shoulders and turned me toward him. "I knew you weren't dead," he said, distress flickering through his eyes. "But you didn't feel the same. I thought he'd turned you." He nodded toward Jesse. "Like that."
"He wouldn't have," I reassured him, and somehow I knew it was true. Wrapping my arms around Cooper's waist, I pulled him in tight against me. I rested my head on his chest, the beat of his heart steady and strong under my ear. "No matter what happens, we'll make it through this." Without using the plan that Mehk had suggested before we settled down to wait for sunrise.
Cooper propped his chin on top of my head and his chest expanded under my cheek as he pulled in a deep breath. "I don't know how," he said, his voice a deep rumble under my ear.
"We've dealt with tough situations before."
"Not genocidal monsters."
"Is that even a word?" I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
Cooper's arms tightened until I wondered if he might crack a rib. "I don't want to lose you."
"You won't. I promise."
He pulled in another long breath and let me go. "I hope that's a promise you'll be able to keep." He turned me around, dropping his arm across my shoulders as he faced off with Mehk. "Everyone's waiting. We have a lot to discuss."
* * *
Cooper took Mehk and me to Ryker's old suite where he said the others were waiting. As we stepped into the spacious apartment, the hushed conversations between the practitioners, Dr. Barrett and Rosalind stopped in mid-sentence and their attention landed on us. Butterflies jumped around in my stomach, reminding me of the one and only time I'd let a teacher talk me into something. A minute into my speech about George Washington to my fellow seven-year-olds, I threw up on my shoes and ran off the stage crying. On the upside, no one ever asked me to perform in front of an audience again.
