By a Thread

by Nyna Queen

  Darken cocked his head to the side. “You’ve got a past.”

  “Everybody’s got a past,” she said evasively.

  “Well, he does sound like a valuable person to know, this Valentine.”

  Valuable, Alex thought, or deadly. Depended on your angle—and the side you were on.

  “How do the two of you know each other?”

  Yeah, nice try. Alex turned to him with a sweet smile. Luckily two people could play at this game.

  “Look, sugar, if you’re so keen on playing truth or dare, why don’t you spill something about yourself for a change?”

  There! See how much you like that!

  Darken leaned back in his seat with irritating calmness, interlinking his fingers behind his head.

  “Fair enough.” His lips curled at the corners. “What do you want to know?”

  Fazed by this unexpected frankness, for a second, she couldn’t think of anything. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  “Well?” Darken leaned a little closer toward her, that wicked, mocking spark glowing brightly in his eyes. “What can I do to … satisfy your curiosity?”

  Satisfy? Alex blinked. Wait. It wasn’t for him to satisfy anything about her! But the word was enough to flood her frantic mind with a shitload of ideas of what kind of satisfaction he could possibly provide her. Her body responded by tightening in all the wrong places. A hot ache spread between her legs, telling her what the spider thought about him touching her gears for a while.

  Alex’s cheeks were on fire. Shit. Shit. Shit. Sweet Jester, she couldn’t blush around him every five seconds.

  Darken’s smirk deepened.

  Oh, yes, you sleek bastard, you know exactly what your words are doing to me, don’t you?

  Yes, he knew only too well what was going on inside her and he was enjoying rubbing her nose into it. She had defied him and now she was getting the payback. Fucking prick! Physical reactions, right? His magic was screwing with her and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Bloody body. She wished her skin would stop tingling. She wished this man would vanish from her passenger seat. She wished for a lot of things lately and none of them seemed likely to come true right now.

  Come on, sugar, get a grip!

  She took a deep breath, picking up the dropped thread. “You could start by telling me what you were doing in the Jester’s Inn the other night, just hours before they”—she nodded to the back at Max and Josy—“appeared there?”

  The question had been unconsciously nagging on her the whole time.

  Darken’s eyes narrowed for a second before recognition flashed in them. “You were the presence behind that curtain, weren’t you?”

  Presence, huh? “Damn right, I was.”

  He frowned. “Why did you hide in there?”

  Why indeed.

  “You scared the hell out of me, that’s why,” she snapped. “I thought you were going to arrest me or something.”

  And why exactly had she just admitted that? Her lips pressed together. Whatever was happening to her, her brakes were loose, and she had to tread carefully around him. Very carefully.

  “And why, pray tell, would I do that?”

  Uh-oh, thin ice. With directed precision, she’d maneuvered herself into a minefield and whatever she said could explode back at her.

  Alex shrugged. “I’m a shaper. You’re trueborn. You usually don’t need much reason to screw our lives.”

  She tried to sound nonchalant, but the look he gave her was a bit too thoughtful for her taste.

  Before he could say anything else, Max’s head appeared between the seats. “You were in that bar, Uncle Darken?”

  “Yes,” Darken said slowly, cocking his head to get a better look at the kid. “Why?”

  The boy fluffed his hair. “I just thought … It might actually explain why we came out of the rift right there.” He sucked on his lower lip. “How long did you stay there?”

  Darken hiked his shoulders. “Ten, fifteen minutes, give or take.”

  That short? To her, it had felt like an eternity, but then she’d been hanging on the wall, fearing for her life. That kind of thing tended to screw your perception of time on an epic scale.

  Max mulled it over for a while. “It’s something I heard about in our introductory class at the beginning of the year,” he finally explained. “They were giving us an overview over the different techniques of teleportation.” His forehead creased in concentration. “They said in contrast to portalists who connect two places, teleporters move things through space. They have to break up the parts first and then put them all back together—like a puzzle. It’s why we have to learn so much about physics and chemistry and all those other boring things.” He heaved a cute little sigh.

  “They said teleporting is like stepping into a dark, slippery tunnel with slides on all sides and you have to know where to get off. There came something about resonating and vibration, but that’s for a later lesson. The point is, a teleporter always needs to have an anchor, something to recognize when they are in the rift, so they know where to get off. The easiest way to do that is to teleport to a familiar location, so that is what we beginner apprentices learn first. It’s also why for the first major off-site teleportation they have the pupils phase to their homes. Because that’s usually the place they have best infernalized.” He tapped his temple.

  “You mean internalized,” Darken muttered beside her.

  “But there are other techniques of teleportation, as well,” Max went on, without letting himself being interrupted. “You can, for example, teleport to an object or a person, even without knowing their exact location; it’s called something with ‘magnet’ and ‘art,’ but I don’t remember the exact word. It’s something you only learn in very advanced courses.”

  He flinched and looked up to see if someone was gonna scold him. When no one did, he said, “I think that might have been what I did.” His teeth nibbled his lip. “When those evil men were chasing us, I wanted to get away—far away. And I wanted to be safe. I didn’t mean to phase, though,” he added in a tiny voice. “It simply happened.”

  And wasn’t it interesting that when it came to feeling safe this boy would end up with his forfeit uncle of all people? For all she knew he could have teleported them right into to his parents’ arms, but maybe that hadn’t been far away enough to match his other request. In any case, it was something to file away for consideration.

  Darken let out a long breath beside her. “You were really lucky, you know that? A random jump into the darkness …” He shook his head and Alex scented discomfort around him. It was one of the first emotional whiffs she got from him. “You could have ended a lot worse than in that bar.”

  “Like—dead for example,” Josy noted snidely from the side.

  “Shut up, dopey cow!” Max struck out his tongue at her. “What exactly did you do to help us?”

  “Very funny!” Josy snapped back. “What exactly—”

  “Thaaat’s all fine and dandy,” Alex interrupted loudly, “but it doesn’t explain what your uncle was doing there in the first place.” She gave Darken a prompting glance.

  He returned it with a cold hard stare of his own, trueborn through and through. “I’m afraid that is highly sensitive information.”

  Now, didn’t that sound important? “Let me guess: you could tell me, but afterward you would have to kill me.”

  He scowled.

  Alex smirked. “I’ll take my chances, sugar.”

  Darken pierced her with another long, measuring glance, as if he was weighing something, and finally sighed. “If I’m gonna talk about this, I must be sure that the information is handled with utmost discretion.”

  Hah! Honestly, to who did he think she’d talk? The trueborn authorities? The guardaí? Please!

  He seemed to come to the same conclusion for he just gave her another long look, before turning toward the kids. “Same goes for you two, by the way.” He pointed two gloved
fingers at them. “I’m serious.”

  Big, big nods from the back.

  Steepling his fingers, Darken leaned back in his seat. “When I said I was here on a mission for the Order, it wasn’t completely … accurate.”

  Now, why didn’t that come as a surprise?

  Resting his joint fingers against his chin, he looked at her from the side. “Suppose you’ve heard about the shaper murders of Manor Creek County?”

  Alex grimaced. “Hard to miss. It’s been all over the news.”

  The reminder involuntarily brought back the images she wouldn’t mind forgetting: bloody human remains strewn across a pretty, pretty garden, while behind them docile cows peacefully grazed in a post-card scenic farm idyll. And suddenly she realized what had bothered her about that scene all along.

  “But personally, I don’t think this was a ‘typical’ shaper attack.” She used the fingers of one hand to put the word in brackets.

  Darkens eyebrows rose slightly. “What makes you say that?”

  Alex waved a hand. “I know people think we’re all just bloodthirsty monsters, but that murder?” She shook her head. “Even those of us who are heeding the call of the wild don’t run around slaughtering innocent people for the plain fun of it. True, they kill for food or if threatened, but last time I checked, they rarely seek out living communities and even if they were starving, they would have gone for the cattle rather than the people. Rather than children.” And those farmers hadn’t been eaten, they had been butchered and left to rot.

  “People might find it hard to believe, but there is human in us too.” It was a fact that seemed to be easily forgotten among the non-shaper-population.

  “And if they were moonbitten—rabid,” she added in case they weren’t familiar with the term common among shapers, “they wouldn’t have stopped with the people. They would have killed the cattle, the chickens, and the dog—if there were any—and then they would have gone to the next farm and the next. In a blood frenzy, it’s really hard for us to stop. So why are only the people dead, but the cattle aren’t? Why just this one farm? Nothing living should have survived within miles—but no, they just made this one little bubble of splatter movie horror scene material. Call me biased, but something just doesn’t end up there.”

  Darken watched her from the side with a disconcertingly poignant gaze. “That’s what my brother thought, too.”

  Alex blinked in surprise. “Did he, now?”

  Darken nodded with a grim expression. “As highest authority in Lancaester, all homicide related cases sooner or later land on his desk for countersigning, so you could say that he commands quite a bit of experience when it comes to cases with shaper involvement. As soon as he learned about the Manor Creek incident, he called Ivertia’s High Commissioner and voiced his concerns about the hasty railroading as shaper attack.” He hesitated. “You see, the whole affair is extremely unpleasant in the light of the running election campaign, with so much controversy going on about the shaper related reforms. Especially since my brother was one of the few in the Council who made an outspoken stand against the planned register requirements.”

  Yeah, that probably didn’t earn him any points in the race.

  Alex smiled sharply. “Why, I think I’m starting to like your brother.”

  Something flashed on Darken’s face. “Oh, just wait until you meet him.” It sounded like a threat.

  “Oh well, I’m not sure if I like him enough for personal entanglement.”

  “And I’m not really sure if it can be avoided.”

  The hint of a smile fled from his face and he raked his fingers through his hair. “Anyway, Steph suggested the opening of an in-depth inquiry and even offered to provide personnel and resources, but they refused. Said that it was deemed a matter of ‘minor difficulty’—a clear case, if you will.” He cleared his throat. “I’m afraid when shapers are involved they usually don’t make much fuss about the benefit of the doubt. No offense.”

  “None taken.” Alex shrugged lightly. “It’s not like you’re telling me something I wouldn’t already know. My kind is a convenient scapegoat whenever one is needed.”

  She hated how bitter her voice sounded, but she couldn’t help it.

  Darken’s eyes felt too heavy on her and she stared at the street, absently rubbing her arms.

  “So, what happened? With your brother, I mean.”

  Something stiff entered Darken’s posture. “When his concerns were so casually dismissed, he issued a request for access to the investigation files and was, plainly spoken, stonewalled.”

  Alex arched her eyebrows. “They can do that? Isn’t he this kind of big shot in trueborn high ranks?”

  Darken’s lips pulled back, reminding her of a large cat trying to bite a porcupine. “Officially they can. The crime happened in the Province of Ivertia, which is technically beyond his jurisdiction. He doesn’t have any legal access rights in other provinces, but usually, if such a request is made, it is granted as a matter of courtesy. You see, all Southern Provinces are closely cooperating in the crime-solving department.”

  Alex stopped at a traffic light.

  “And frankly,” Darken added, “if Steph became the Governor, he would get access rights in all Southern Provincial matters, anyway. So being refused on such flimsy grounds …” He tapped the window frame. “My brother thinks something about this smells rather foul.”

  A rotten egg was foul. This whole thing stank to high heavens.

  Alex pursed her lips. “He thinks someone is deliberately trying to shut him out of the affair?”

  “It would seem so. There is virtually no sensible reason to refuse his request—especially since they pegged it as standard case … unless, of course, someone wanted to hide something from him.”

  “But what would they want to hide?” Josy asked from the backseat. The kids had been so quiet, Alex had almost forgotten they were there.

  “That’s exactly the questions we’ve been asking ourselves, darling,” Darken said. “But you know your father. He doesn’t like being left in the dark”—Josy made a sound which mightily resembled an understatement-huff—“yet when he pressed the issue, they threatened him with a public disciplinary action.”

  Ah shit.

  Alex grimaced. “He backed down, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.” Darken sounded angry.

  But not at his brother, Alex thought as she watched dark shadows glide over his face like storm clouds over a landscape of sharp mountains and lakes. More on his behalf.

  “In the current state of the elections, he can’t afford such a process. The press would have a field day with a scandal of that scale. The circumstances might be unprecedented in years so there is no say how it would end. The proceedings might drag on for months and even if he won at the far end, the damage would have been done for right now.”

  And that’s how you effectively stifled any dangerous headwind: just bury it beneath a big heap of bureaucracy and wait for it to suffocate. Great Mother, she hated bureaucracy. She hated politics. Period!

  “Unfortunately, my brother isn’t a man who takes kindly to being threatened.”

  Alex thought she heard a fierce kind of pride in Darkens words. They seemed to be one hell of a crazy family.

  “Since I was on leave of absence at the time, he asked me if I could have an onsite look around and make some quiet inquiries on his behalf.”

  Alex nodded. “I understand. A favor under brothers.”

  “I’m not sure you do.” Darken pulled off a glove and held out his arm to her. Pretty lines. Gold and black. The shaper in her was immediately fascinated by the moving tangle of lines and she had to restrain herself from reaching out to trace them with her finger to see where they began and ended.

  “Do you know what these mean?”

  And just like that, the conversation turned into a slippery slope. Alex wet her bottom lip. No use to play stupid. “You are forfeit. One of Death’s Servants.”

  “Ye
s,” he conceded softly, “I am forfeit. Arcadia’s sword and shield.” The sudden sharp contempt in his scent startled her, especially since when she looked up, his face betrayed nothing.

  “Our loyalty belongs to the state—only to the state, and we work for no one except for the greater good of the country. We are not to be used for the petty purposes of individuals, not even those of the family. This favor,” he balanced the word on his tongue like a knife artist the point of a knife on the tip of his finger, “is breaking more than a dozen imperative state laws, and if it ever became public that I was here at the behest of my brother …” He left the rest of the sentence hanging in the air, unspoken but clear enough.

  Ah, well, that certainly explained why he wanted to keep his presence a secret. Inconvenient was a mild word for that. If this became public, his brother’s career would be over in a heartbeat. Did they try you for treason for something like this? She wouldn’t put it beyond the trueborns and their conviction obsessions. They just so liked a good torch burning.

  “So, to answer your question,” Darken tipped his head in her direction, “when I came into the bar, I was following a trace. Until I got … distracted.”

  And by “distracted” he meant by his niece and nephew supposedly being abducted by a crazy shaper, thanks for the reminder.

  She considered his words. Just to think that she might have served whoever had done that to the farmer family of Manor Creek. Alex tried to remember if she’d noticed any shapers popping in during her last shifts at the Jester. It didn’t happen that often but once in a while she would spot one of her kind. Of course, if they had good control over their true skin, she wouldn’t necessarily recognize them for what they were, although most shapers weren’t as well trained and careful as she was. And then, she knew exactly what to look for.

  Alex rubbed her left arm, digging her fingers into her skin, then realized what she was doing and dropped her hand back to the wheel. Man, that tingling was reaching torturous levels. It felt like she’d been stroked and teased all over her body until her skin was sensitive to the slightest touch. Even the constant rub of her clothes was becoming almost too much to bear. If only she could get rid of her shirt. And her bra. And get some cool air onto her skin. It would make things better. She was almost sure of it.