“Raven will help me.” I spat the words at them and they looked at each other, laughing and smiling.
“Raven can help no one where he is now. And even if he gets free,” she leaned close, “it would destroy you if he touched those bracelets.”
Whatever belief that I was getting out of this without some sort of punishment fled.
From beyond the elementals came a burst of shouting, gunfire and screams. I strained to look past them, only to see that another truck had shown up, full of men.
Men with guns trained on Hank and Susy.
“Let me go! My friends need me!” I yelled.
The elementals laughed and stepped back, the bonds on me released. “Go then. With nothing but your two hands, half-breed mutt.”
I didn’t believe them. I couldn’t. Still, I tried to remove the bracelets as I pushed to my feet and ran toward my friends. The bracelets were stuck tightly.
I would deal with them later.
Ahead of me, Oka fought in her tiger form against a troop of six men. Six men with guns and knives and trucks lined up behind them. I reached for my connection to the earth . . . and got nothing but a tingle on my right wrist and laughter behind me.
Sweat beaded down my spine, a cold sweat born of fear, not exertion.
Stefan shouted at Hank to back down, then a shot went off. Hank fell backward, his body jerked once and then was still.
Susy screamed, Sunshine clutched in her arms.
Macy lay on the ground, blood pooling around her, eyes staring lifelessly into the sky.
Stefan and his men took the truck before I reached them and drove away, laughing.
I slid to a stop, dropped to my knees by Hank and put my hands on him. I fought to weave my magic through him to heal the wound in his chest.
Susy was still screaming, and I realized she was screaming at me. To heal Hank. Only I couldn’t.
I stared up at Susy, unable to speak around the fear that had me in its hold with only one thought racing through me over and over.
The elementals had taken it all.
I had no magic.
Four
Three Years Later
Oka trotted along at my side because I was no longer strong enough to carry her. My hand went to my ribcage, a game I played to pass the time as I walked. How many ribs could I feel? All of them was the answer, and they were more pronounced every time I touched them.
Then my fingers slid to my wrists and the fucking bracelets that dangled there. I’d considered cutting my hand off once.
Oka had stopped me.
My jaw ticked, anger making the pangs of hunger and exhaustion recede for a brief second. I’d tried everything to get them off, but there was nothing short of those who’d put them on me changing their minds.
“I need to rest,” I said.
Oka paused and then tipped her head to the side. “Off the road then. It’s far too open.”
She’d been saying that for days. But the road was the easiest path, and as hard as we’d worked to deal with that last mountain range, I needed easy for a bit.
I slumped against a protruding rock and leaned my head against it, swiping some of my long locks away from my face. Tangled, dirty, I didn’t even care. I leaned forward with my head between my knees.
On my back, I had a thin pack with a few small essentials. A pot. A knife. A piece of flint. One shirt.
I kept my head down and Oka slid under me so our noses touched. “I’m going hunting. It looks lusher here than the last section.”
I might have nodded. I’m not sure. She was just gone.
And I was done.
I let my body slide down until I was lying with my back against the rock. I didn’t feel bad for myself. I deserved whatever came to me.
But Oka didn’t deserve to die out here.
I closed my eyes and the darkness that was part of me laughed softly.
Embrace the witch in you, Pamela, and you’ll find strength you didn’t have before.
I opened my eyes and whispered back. “Who are you?”
There was no answer. Each breath I took was labored and I knew my body was nearing the end of its strength. Either we found food, or I was going to die.
Time passed, and I felt a surge of excitement cut through the exhaustion. Oka had found food.
I didn’t sit up but waited for her to come back to me. “A river with fish in it!” she screeched as she slid to a stop in front of me. I stared up at her. She grinned down at me. “Get up, we need to get some fish.”
I wobbled to my feet and followed her off the road—what was left of it—through some sparse trees that had regrown since all the destruction, toward the sound of running water.
Water even would be a boon at this point. I stumbled forward and dropped to my knees and stuck my face in the glacially cold water, drawing in big gulps before I flung my head back, my hair sending out a spray like those stupid shampoo commercials I used to laugh at with my mentor.
Beside me, Oka shifted into her tiger form, and I saw her grimace at the same time as I felt her pain in a literal sense. Shifting took energy, and that was not something either of us had.
She waded into the water and with a single swipe of her paw sent a fish out to me. And we aren’t talking a one-pound trout, but a thirty-pound giant of a fish that had teeth like a fucking shark.
I screamed and rolled as it thrashed toward me. I yanked my knife from my belt and slammed it through the monster fish’s head.
“Sweet baby goddess, Oka, get out of there before you get bit!” I yelled.
She bounded out, shifted and laid on her belly, breathing hard. “Just cut me some of it off. Please.”
I nodded and sliced the fish in half and pushed it across to her, grateful the blade was still sharp. That was the beauty of the knife a friend had given me a long time ago. Or maybe it wasn’t so long ago, but it felt like it.
Everything from before felt like forever ago.
I made myself cut through the side of the flesh, pulled it off and ate it raw.
“I hate sushi,” I said around a mouthful, “but this is amazing.”
I held back, eating only enough to feel just full. We’d done this more than one time, the feast and famine route; we both knew what would happen if we ate too much, too fast.
We spent three days by the river. Eating. Sleeping. Fueling up.
Doing better than we’d done in months. The fish were all teeth and no brains, so they were easy to catch.
I sat at the edge of the water naked, my clothes drying on the rocks to one side. My wrists drew my eyes as they so often did. My pride had done this to me, my belief that I was the strongest, baddest witch around. I snorted at myself. I was such a child then.
“You were old for your age, Pamela. Experience was all you lacked, not humility.” Oka sat beside me and stared across the water with me. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
I rubbed at the bangles as familiar to me as my own body. “The darkness talks to me far more than I want it to, Oka.”
“I hear it too. You aren’t the only one with demons inside.” She tipped her head, her ears swiveling. “Someone is coming, something with an engine.”
I scrambled to get my clothes on, grabbed my pack that had a few pieces of fish wrapped in it, and then we ran for cover. Mostly because we’d learned the hard way when it came to vehicles.
Most of the trucks belonged to Stefan and his gang of right bastards. We’d seen them at a distance a few times, and I’d been sure that he’d seen me. But I had no magic and was pretty much just a girl with a bad attitude. At least I still had that going for me.
Oka and I stayed between a rock and a larger tree, hidden from sight. The trucks stopped, and my heart seemed to freeze in my chest. “Shit. We can’t take them all.”
I was stronger already; being a supernatural meant I did come back quick from adverse situations. Like starving. Even so, I could take two, maybe three guys. Not twenty or thirty like Stefan had wi
th him at last count.
Oka crept forward, belly to the ground.
“Don’t!” I whispered the word, but it was too late, she was gone.
I pinched my fingers together over the bracelets on either side, wishing for the thousandth time that I could remove them. Or that Raven could remove them.
Thoughts of my father scattered as I looked through the thin cover to see the people who approached the river.
Not Stefan.
A caravan of humans, men, women and . . . children. I stood before I thought better of it.
“Hello.” The word was foreign on my tongue and a few of the men lifted weapons. I held my hands up, the bracelets hidden under a long-sleeved shirt. “It’s just me and my cat.”
Oka was at my feet in a flash. “I was checking it out!”
“They have kids with them, Oka,” I said out the corner of my mouth.
She sighed. “Pamela, don’t do this. You can’t protect them. You know you have no magic.”
Only I did.
I just had to be willing to embrace the darkness in me. I swallowed hard, smiled and stepped out toward the caravan and the humans within it. The children were laughing and dancing around, going straight for the water.
“I wouldn’t let them in the water,” I said. “The fish have very large teeth, even if they are good eating.” Several of the adults swooped the kids up before they reached the edge of the water, despite the protests.
A large man with a big beard and eyes that still held kindness in them approached me, his hand outstretched. “I’m Richard.”
I looked at Oka, nodded and put my hand in his for a shake.
“I’m Pamela.”
And just like that, I was part of a human caravan.
Chapter Five
I’d been with Richard and his crew almost a full month and I still couldn’t believe our luck.
A caravan that had ample food, a decent crew of men for protection and kids? Actual children that had survived? That thought still boggled my brain.
A rustling near the edge of the path sent a flock of archaeopteryx into the sky, their green feathers blurring the lines between the tops of the evergreen trees that lined the narrow trail and the sky. I shook my head, knowing a certain peachy-orange cat would pop out of the brush with one of the archies in her mouth before long.
Three. Two. One.
Oka sprang out of the thick bush with one of the bird/lizard hybrids dangling from her mouth. The humans walking nearest to her swung around, guns and knives raised until they saw the culprit. She gave them what I liked to call her ‘Judging Cat’ eyes and sauntered toward me with her prize, tail held high. The archies were all feathers and scales, hardly worth the effort to take down for the stew pot. But Oka loved the chase and the archies were hardly in danger of going extinct.
And now that we weren’t constantly hunting for food to survive, she’d gone back to being a typical cat. Hunting and killing things for the hell of it.
“Someone’s going to shoot that damn cat one of these days,” a man who walked several feet ahead of me declared. He pointed his gun in her general direction as if I didn’t know where Oka was.
I laughed out loud as she sidled up next to me proudly, her prize dangling lifelessly from her mouth. I gave the man a tip of my chin, keeping his eyes on me. “You’d have to actually learn how to hit something first. I saw your aim in the training session.”
He spun around fully, anger tightening his face like a puckered and straining asshole. Don’t ask me how I know what that looks like, you don’t want to know that story. Ass Face looked me eye to eye, since I was tall for a girl.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he snarled and leaned into me, doing his best to intimidate me.
Please. I’d learned from the best how to stand up to bullies and assholes, and the last three years had burned away all my soft edges.
He wasn’t going to have the pleasure of watching me cower.
I raised an eyebrow and let my English accent thicken on my words. “I’m sorry. I thought I was rather clear. You see, I was pointing out your lack of ability to aim. Brush up on your skills, and you might have a chance at hitting her. But, alas, my suggestion seems to have gone over your head. I’ll be sure to dumb it down next time.”
“Why, you mouthy little bitch—” He raised his gun and Oka let out a long low growl beside me.
“He wouldn’t dare,” she muttered around her mouthful of archie. Of course, no one could hear her speak but me. Well, there were a few others—like those fucking elementals I’d caught glimpses of here and there—but I tried not to think about them. They didn’t take any note of me now that they’d bound my magic.
A tingle of dark witch magic slid along my arm as my defenses flowed, raising the hairs under the thick purple cloak. He was going to get a shock if he lifted that gun an inch higher.
Kill him.
Damn that voice.
A hand dropped onto his arm, stopping him before he had his gun fully lifted, and I lowered my still-tingling fingers. Shooting at me would have been stupid on many, many levels. But Ass Face didn’t know what Oka and I had survived, or how strong that had made us, how good we were at turning the tables on those who attacked us.
Richard, the leader of the caravan, who considered himself a spiritual seer of sorts, had his hand on Ass Face’s arm, his grip tight enough that I could see the strain in his fingers. Ass Face was newer to the group even than me, and by the looks of it, he wasn’t going to last long.
My suspicion was he was a spy for Stefan, but I’d not said anything yet to Richard about that. Just in case I was wrong.
Despite the fact that I knew Richard was no such thing as a seer, the people—check that, the humans—respected him. And I knew better than to correct them as to what he really was.
A charming charlatan who’d managed to set himself up as a leader of this caravan.
There were worse things in this world, and he did the best he could by them, which was more than many of the caravan leaders.
He was a good man as far as I could see.
He put his second hand on Ass Face’s shoulder. “Ron. Good to see you. Might I have a word? We need some help shifting some of the cargo around in the transport truck. Won’t move itself as you know.”
Ron frowned deeply and didn’t take his eyes off me. “Yeah, sure.”
I preferred the name Ass Face to Ron. Oka snickered, picking up on my thoughts. “You know, I’m going to say it every time he comes around. Ass face,” she said.
Richard eyed me as if he could see the smile I had hiding behind my lips as I struggled to keep my face straight. Finally he nodded as he nudged Ron away.
“Keep up with the caravan, Pamela. We don’t want to lose you,” Richard said over his shoulder.
“Of course.” I gave him a jaunty two-fingered salute.
I wasn’t sure if he suspected what I was, or if he was just looking out for a young, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl who still carried the faint accent of her homeland. My heart gave a funny jump as it always did when I thought of England. It would be no more now. Was it even intact? Or would it have been smashed against another larger continent?
I was eighteen years old and sometimes felt a hundred with the past that weighed on my shoulders.
Now that we were able to breathe a little, and not fight so hard to survive, it gave my head plenty of space to remind me of all the things I’d done.
Oka shifted onto her haunches, her butt wiggling, tail lashing side to side as she adjusted her weight for a leap. I pointed a finger at her. “Don’t you dare come up here with that thing. I don’t need green blood all over my clothes,” I said.
She wrinkled up her lips, her body sagging. Mild irritation flowed from her to me, but she took her prize off the side of the trail to eat her meal.
“I’d have shared it with you,” she called after me as I continued to walk behind the humans and their transport vehicles. I snorted.
; “I’d rather starve,” I said, only half joking. If I didn’t ever have to eat another archie again, I’d die happy.
The humans startled and gave me some serious side-eyes—starving was no joke to them. I smiled at them all and then looked to the sky as if the wisping clouds were incredibly interesting. This was about the only downside of Oka being able to talk.
I forgot on a regular basis now that we were around people again. Three years on our own was a long time.
And the stinker loved to make me look like I was an idiot, talking to no one, laughing at jokes only I could hear.
She was lucky I loved her; the saucy little redhead was almost more trouble than me. Which was saying something.
“Don’t let Ron bother you.” The voice of the one person in this caravan I’d let get close to me in the last few weeks made me smile despite myself. Macey leaned down, grabbed the end of her long dark brown braid and used it to tickle Oka on the head before sidling up next to me.
When I’d first met her, I’d thought I’d misheard her. Surely her name wasn’t the same, but there it was. The world throwing a nice little coincidence at me for shits and giggles.
Her brown eyes all but sparkled with laughter, something that was in short supply in this world. “Ron’s just pissed because Isa won’t go to bed with him. Or even let him look at her tits for that matter.”
A man to her left slowed, frowned and slammed into her shoulder, making her stumble a bit. I reached out and caught her by the arm. She was rail-thin, and all muscle. Most of the humans who’d survived were by this point. Three years of living on what you could hunt and scavenge, learning to dodge the animals and supernaturals that remained . . . that left only the strongest bodies and hearts.
“You’re one to talk, Macey, since no one will touch you with a ten-foot pole,” he snarled. Right, this one had shown up with Ron. So, he was sticking up for his buddy, was he?
My suspicion that they belonged to Stefan only heightened. I needed to mention it to Richard.
Asshole Number Two turned around with a smirk on his face. “The men here are literally responsible for repopulating the planet, and not one of us would pick you. We’d rather let humanity die than fuck you even with a bag on your head.”
Aimless Witch Page 3
