by Leela Ash
“What I wouldn’t give to be part of that,” she sighed. “I’d even be willing to relinquish my title and be just a common researcher. I imagine Mr. Lorde will make his own Hare its queen?”
His Alpha had a Hare in his employ? Oh, right! Amarie, the crazy housekeeper. Owen didn’t even think of her as a Witch, but she must be. “I don’t know what his plans are.”
“Ah. Well. Put in a good word for me, would you?”
He made a noncommittal noise. Clarissa’s lip twitched and that eternal smile of hers dimmed.
“I hear that one of your Flight Claimed an Adanai.”
“A what?”
“I guess you’d call her one of the Fae. They’re only legends. None of them Shifted to this world; they all remained on the Other Side when the Wellsprings closed. Except one, apparently.” Her simpering sweetness was curdling into something closer to a sneer.
How the hell did she know more about his Flight than he did? Owen put his folder down and leaned back, frowning. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“No? I’ve heard…” A mocking note crept into the queen’s voice. “…that she knows how to forge weapons that can kill Dragons.”
No clean Shifter would have that kind of information. Maybe the Fangs did, though. Owen guessed he might have just found his traitor.
But, if so, why was she so brazen?
Abandoning all pretenses, Clarissa began to study him with the smug contentment of a cat toying with a mouse. “We’ve researched that too, you know.”
His eyes narrowed. “And why would you do that?”
“To use against Worms.” That caught him by surprise because it made sense. Worms were fallen Dragons, monsters that chewed their own wings off. Worms led the Fangs of Apophis. If he was a Witch Hare, he’d certainly want something that could harm them.
Didn’t mean he trusted this woman, though.
Clarissa continued. “We found clues in English folklore. Turns out, the Saxons had problems with several Worms back in the Middle Ages. Nicor, they called them, and wyrms. They came up with an extremely clever way to kill them.”
“And that was?” He really, really did not like where this conversation was going. But if the Witch Queen was volunteering information, he’d listen.
“Poison. There are certain herbs that – properly enchanted – are harmless to humans but kill Dragons.”
She took a sip of her tea, and smiled.
Owen’s stomach lurched. Suspicion flared… yet, he felt fine. No pains or queasiness. He wasn’t dizzy or confused. Surely, poison wasn’t painless?
She put her cup down and opened the window. “Let me show you something. Elisi?”
From down in the yard, her chief researcher answered. “Yes?”
“We need sound now, please.”
Sound? Wary but curious, he rose to his feet.
“One second, ma’am.” As he reached the window, he caught a glimpse of the young Hare trotting into the barn.
A second later, a girl screamed in pain.
A girl he knew.
“Sydnee!” Owen roared.
Blazing with fury, his Dragon leaped into the fray. Magical energy flared, he began to Shift…
…and suddenly, agony tore through him. As if his insides had turned to molten lead.
Owen collapsed to the floor, writhing in pain.
Clarissa’s smile broadened. “Ah, that’s a relief. The Fangs let me experiment on some of their lesser Worms, of course, and I was 95% sure that it would affect a Dragon. But one worries. There’s always that 5%, isn’t there?”
She sat and poured herself another cup of tea as she watched his helpless struggles.
“So glad I was right.”
Chapter 13
“Ariel? Ariel? Can we go outside yet?”
The plaintive cry roused her from a deep sleep. One eye cracked open. Trey and Brody stood beside the bed, twin accusing scowls on their faces.
“It’s laaate!” Trey groaned.
Little Brody seemed on the verge of tears. “I’m hungry!”
She started to sit up, but as the sheets slid across her skin, she remembered.
Last night. Owen. The love they’d shared.
“Why are you in Dad’s bed?” Trey complained.
“I, um, I slept over.” The boys looked dubiously. Sleeping in a different room of the house didn’t sound like a lot of fun to them. But they accepted her excuse.
Quickly, she clutched the blankets to her chest. What time was it? 8:30? Oh, hell, no wonder she had a rebellion on her hands. The Jackson children had gotten very used to breakfast promptly at 6:30!
“Go downstairs. I’ll be right there and get you some breakfast.”
Normally, she fixed a proper meal. Eggs, bacon, and a waffle or toast. Today, everything was off kilter and the boys got to indulge in their favorite sugary cereal. Kept (hidden) precisely for emergencies like this.
There was no sign of Sydnee. As the boys munched on miniature chocolate chip cookies, she knocked on the girl’s door.
No answer.
The room was empty, though Sydnee’s rumpled bed proved she hadn’t been gone too long. Ariel wandered back downstairs. “Trey? Brody? Have you seen your sister?”
Mumbled denials.
Baffled, she glanced about. The children’s shoes were lined up neatly by the front door.
Sydnee’s weren’t there.
Could Owen have taken her to work? Surely not, since he suspected a traitor in the Warren.
A chill settled over her and her feet, unbidden, picked up their pace. She searched the house. Nothing. A circuit of the yard gave no clues. No bodies floated in the pool. No Sydnee sat outside, glued to her cell phone. Ariel dialed the girl. No answer – and she couldn’t hear a ring.
By now, her heart pounded in her chest. Even the boys, usually so clueless, grew quiet, sensing her fear. “Did Sydnee say she was going out? No?”
Time to accept this was a real problem. Ariel dialed Owen’s number. Three rings… four…
“You’ve reached Owen Jackson. I can’t answer the phone right now but…”
Ariel hung up. He’d be at the Warren by now, not on the road. There was no reason he shouldn’t answer.
Unless something was truly and awfully wrong.
A corner of her mind whined that this was nothing. Sydnee probably went for a walk… Owen was busy… she was being silly… Yet, something deep inside her knew better. Call it a Momma Bear’s instinct, handed down from her own mother.
Her family was in danger. She knew it.
She had to find Sydnee.
Yet, what about the boys? She couldn’t drag two little children into danger. She had no friends, no babysitters she knew in town. There wasn’t even a neighbor close to their isolated mansion.
Except…
“Trey, Brody. Put your shoes on.”
Six pairs of beady Rat eyes stared at her in disbelief.
“I’m sorry. I have no right to ask you, not after the scare we gave you.”
“You got that right,” Walker Smith grumbled. “Try to kill a man one day then ask him to watch yer kids the next. You lot ain’t right in the head.”
Trey and Brody gazed out at the junkyard with the rapt, joyous expressions of children on their first visit to Disneyland. Ariel knew what was going on in their heads. They longed to clamber over those junked cars, tip the ancient refrigerator over, and roll around in that rusty barrel. No doubt, she’d come back to find them covered in scrapes and dirt. A future of tetanus shots seemed likely.
Still, she had no choice. And she had no doubt that the Rats would keep her wards alive. If not clean.
As Walker and his wife whispered, she called both Sydnee and Owen again. Neither answered.
“All right.” Mrs. Smith’s soft voice interrupted her worries. “I’ll watch ‘em.”
“Thank you! Thank you so much.”
The first cloud of doubt dimmed the boys’ mood, as they realized they were ab
out to be left with strangers. Then a small Rat boy, about their age, stepped out from behind his mother.
“I got a buncha banana slugs in a bucket. You wanna see ‘em?”
Instant bonding. Trey and Brody’s joy returned at once and all three trotted off to find this amazing trove of slimy treasures.
Good. At least she could be sure they’d be safe. Ariel passed the other woman a slip of paper. “That’s the number of Brandon Lorde, the Alpha of Owen’s Flight. If I don’t come back within a few hours, call him. Let him know what’s happened.”
Mrs. Smith held the note gingerly, like it might bite. Her wide, frightened eyes studied it then rose to her husband. For a long moment, the two Rats stood there, as if locked in some silent conversation.
Finally, Walker nodded. “I’ll go with you. I hunt. I track well.”
Relief and shame warred within her. Relief at the offer of aid. Shame because of the doubts she’d held against them. Rat Shifters were ugly as hell and their Shifted forms were downright loathsome. Yet, Walker’s offer was generous. Noble, even. The sort of thing she expected from a Bear or a Wolf.
Not a Rat.
“Thank you again,” was all she could manage.
He nodded. “Show me where you last seen her.”
Chapter 14
In front of the Jackson mansion, Walker trotted in circles, his beady eyes fixed on the ground. “Yep. She come over here.” Once he pointed, Ariel could see the outline of a girl’s shoe on the road’s dirt shoulder.
“We’ll never be able to follow her,” she sighed. “There won’t be any tracks on a paved road.”
“She didn’t use the road. She crossed it.” One skinny finger flicked at a clot of mud in the center of the street. “Then she took off into the woods.” He nodded at another print on the side of the road and a tiny skid mark where Sydnee slipped crossing the ditch that lay between their road and the forest.
“But why? What’s in the woods?”
“Dunno.” Walker scrambled over the ditch and kept going, following a trail only he could see. “Guess we’ll have to ask her when we find her.”
That easy confidence, so strange in a skittish Rat, buoyed Ariel’s spirits. Once again, she gave a silent prayer of thanks for his help.
Occasionally, she spotted one of the clues he tracked. A broken twig. A weed, stomped flat. On her own, though, she wouldn’t have made it ten feet.
Walker lasted a half mile before he stopped and crouched. The Rat seemed to fold in on himself, growing smaller, and his eyes darted about nervously.
“What’s wrong?” She scanned the dense woods too, looking for any signs of Sydnee’s passage.
“We got a problem. Big one,” he whispered.
Ariel missed half of his mumbled words. She knelt beside him, fighting to ignore the unreasonable flash of revulsion that washed over her as she brushed against his leg. “Why?”
“Your girl, she’s walking that way, straight on.”
“Why is that bad? What’s up there?”
“It ain’t where she’s going, it’s how. She’s walking straight as a crow flies.” When Ariel didn’t respond, he scowled. “People don’t do that. We drift left or right. Take away our bearings and we walk in circles. Ain’t natural to go straight on like this.”
She shivered. “Why… no, how could someone do that?”
“Spell.” The word sent a shiver down her spine, confirming her worst fears. “Only thing I ever seen. Fangs git something of yours ‘n’ put a ‘Come Hither’ spell on it. Then you walk straight to it. Don’t stop. Don’t look left nor right. Don’t drift. You walk straight on.”
Ariel took a deep breath, ordering her stomach to settle. “The Warren’s that way, isn’t it?”
“Yep. ‘Bout a mile over this ridge.”
Ariel pulled out her phone and tried Owen and Sydnee again. Nothing.
No weapon, no plan, no Dragon to back her up. So be it. She’d figure something out.
When she rose to her feet, Walker remained crouched low. “I ain’t going in there.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” she assured him. Rats weren’t fighters and there was only so much she could ask of a stranger. “But my family’s in danger. I have to go.”
“Suit yerself.” His nose twitched violently; she half expected to see whiskers pop out of it at any moment.
“Will you do one more thing for me? Follow the trail – let’s make sure it goes to the Warren. Then wait while I go in.”
“That’s two things,” he grumbled. She waited for an answer. Walker shifted, grumbled, and finally spat. “Fine. But I ain’t sticking around if it’s dangerous. Don’t think I will.”
That would have to do.
Straight as a ruler, the trail made a beeline to the Warren. Once every doubt of that faded, Ariel pulled out her phone and called Brandon Lorde.
No one answered; her call went to voicemail. After leaving a short message, she hung up quickly, cutting short any chance of a late pick up. An Alpha Dragon like Lorde would never permit a mere Kin to take this sort of risk. Danger was the domain of protectors, Shifters like Wolves, Bears, or his own Kind. Not that Lorde could stop her. He was too far away and she was too stubborn. But she didn’t want to argue right now.
The two of them came out of the woods behind a neatly painted barn. The yard between it and the farmhouse was dotted with cars and two U-Haul vans. Young women, arms full of boxes, staggered about.
The Warren was moving. Judging by the confusion, they hadn’t planned to do this.
Good. The more disorganized her enemies were, the more time she had to figure out a plan.
Here and there, scruffy men lounged about. They didn’t lift a finger to help the Hares.
“Shifters?” she whispered to Walker.
He shook his head. “Thugs.”
So, how was she going to find her family in all this mess?
The Rat took that moment to remind her that she was on her own. “This is it for me.”
“But you’ll wait for me?”
“Til someone notices you, yep. Then I’m gone.”
No apology, no excuses. It was up to her. First, she needed to know where Sydnee and Owen were.
From her pocket, Ariel pulled her cell phone and dialed Sydnee’s number.
Immediately, a musical jangle rang out from the barn – not twenty feet ahead of her! Hope blazed in her heart… until a man spoke from the front of the barn.
“Who the hell keeps calling that kid?”
“Dunno,” a second voice answered.
There were guards then. At least two of them. Ariel hung up.
First thug was pensive now, however. “Cops can track phones, can’t they?”
“I think I seen that on tv, yeah.”
“I’m gonna throw the goddamn thing in the woods then. We don’t need nobody following us.”
They were going to throw it in the woods here, where it could lead the police to the Warren? Clearly, these guys were not hired for their brains. Ariel and Walker waited as the guard retrieved Sydnee’s phone and lobbed it far into the raspberries.
Once the two bruisers had settled back at their posts, she tried Owen’s number. This time, she didn’t hear a thing.
She didn’t have a Rat’s ears, though. “Farmhouse.” Walker’s voice was as soft as rustling grass. “Second floor. Room with the curtains open.”
“Remind me never to try to sneak up on you,” she whispered back. He flashed her a toothy yellow grin.
So, she knew where her loved ones were.
Now what? The barn was guarded…
No. The barn door was guarded. But was there another way in?
Nothing turned up in her first scan. No back door, no hatches. If they existed, they were up front. Yet, as she studied the rear wall, Ariel spotted something. A shadow in the thick grass that grew about the base of the barn.
Was that a hole? Keeping the barn between her and the kidnappers, she slunk down to the wall.
&
nbsp; True to his word, Walker stayed behind where it was safe.
Cool air, heavy with the scent of old manure, wafted out of the grass. Brushing it aside, Ariel found what she was looking for: a small gap where a board had rotted away.
Ignoring the dank stench, she lowered herself to her belly and wiggled through it. Cobwebs brushed against her face. A rusty nail snagged her shirt and tore a two inch rip. For a moment, boards pressed against her sides, her shoulders, threatening to hold her in place. Then she wiggled free into an old stall.
No animals lived in this barn. Instead, it was crammed with junk. A rusted truck on cinder blocks. Antique tractors and farm tools. Strange, metallic things she couldn’t name. All remnants of the old farm.
In the midst, tied to a pole, sat Sydnee. The poor child was gagged, her face stained with mud and tears. Ariel scurried over to her. Sydnee gave a muffled shriek, but her eyes lit with relief when she recognized her nanny. Ariel raised a finger to her lips as new tears began to spill down the girl’s face.
Fortunately, the barn was chock full of sharp, dangerous implements. Ariel grabbed an old blade and carefully sawed through Sydnee’s bonds. Once the girl was free, she scooped her into a hug. Thin arms wrapped themselves around her, hugging her back with a fierce love. She held the girl just long enough to reassure her that yes, it was going to be all right. Then, with a kiss on the head, she let her go. Too scared to be her usual cool, aloof self, Sydnee grabbed her hand and squeezed it tight.
She led her back to the gap. Sydnee wiggled through in a flash; Ariel followed with a lot more squirming and writhing. A minute later, they were safe with Walker at the edge of the woods.
“May have to make you a honorary Rat,” he snickered.
Dirt and manure streaked her clothes, her hands, and her face, but Ariel gave him a triumphant grin of her own. “Can you get Sydnee out of here?”
“Yep. C’mon girl.”
Sydnee kept her death grip on Ariel’s hand. “Why aren’t you coming?”
“Your father’s still here. I’ve got to help him.”
“I can help too!”
“Shush!” Walker hissed. His eyes flickered fearfully about. “Don’t yowl so!”
