Authors: Mia Marshall
It was a harsh reminder of how many times I’d lost myself over the last three months. Each time the madness threatened to overpower me, I felt a sharp prick in my neck and I lost days. When I awoke, it felt like I’d been trampled by a herd of buffalo, or possibly a herd of eighteen-wheelers, but the madness would have receded… for a little while.
“What’s the plan, Sera? Keep me drugged until we find this dual?” I meant it as a joke.
She didn’t laugh.
“We don’t have enough,” I said.
I tried not to show my agitation. I knew the drug was the only thing holding me together, but I hated it. Every time I came to after a dose, I felt different. Duller. The serum hadn’t exactly gone through rigorous FDA testing. We had no idea what the long-term effects might be.
Sera withdrew one needle. The liquid inside was a pale gold, and as the late afternoon sun glinted off it, it seemed to glow. Something about the syringe was different, but before I could articulate what it was, Sera leaned across the table and stabbed me, hitting the plunger in the same motion.
She watched me. I gave her credit for that. She didn’t turn from my look of shock and betrayal.
“I wasn’t out of control,” I protested. Already I was dissolving, my words slurring as the magic slid away.
“You almost were this morning. It’s time for preventative measures.”
“It was…” My tongue was thick in my mouth and the words stuck, but I realized what was different. There’d only been a small amount of liquid in the syringe.
“A tiny dose, yeah. We’re nearly out of the full ones, so I’m hoping a few drops will block your magic for a couple days without knocking you out. Maybe get us to Turkey after all.”
I tried to glare, but my heavy eyes and slack jaw made that difficult. I slid off the plastic seat and became a puddle on the floor.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Sera muttered, just before I lost consciousness.
CHAPTER 3
O
ne would think the after-effects of a quarter dose of the drug would be less painful than a full dose. One would be wrong.
I swallowed. Even that tiny movement caused a wave of nausea that radiated outward from my stomach until it seemed my entire body wanted to retch.
The nausea receded at last, likely because the pounding in my head now demanded my full attention. I groaned, and even that hurt.
I waited, letting my body return to some facsimile of equilibrium. When I thought I might be able to move without dying, I pried my eyes open.
It was still night, though I didn’t think dawn was far off. Someone had moved me to the bed after Sera drugged me.
I sat up halfway and stopped, unable to even scream as every nerve ending in my body lit up. There was hurt, and then there was agony, and then there was this. Tears slid down my cheeks as my body cycled through one stabbing pain after another, tiny needles cutting into each cell.
I stared at the glowing green numbers of the digital alarm clock without blinking, focusing all my attention outside my body. The numbers turned over ten times. At last, the pain ebbed and became something I could manage with the help of an entire bottle of Advil.
It had taken too long. Last time, I’d struggled for about six minutes. It was getting worse.
Sera had a hell of a lot of explaining to do.
I pushed back the thin cotton sheet and eased first one leg, then the other to the floor. I swayed as I stood, and I needed to wait another two minutes before I dared move again.
With each staggering step toward the trailer door, the pain decreased and righteous anger took its place. Sera was my sister and my best friend, and she’d done this to me.
I threw the door open. The clanging of the aluminum door against the side of the trailer sounded unnaturally loud on the flat terrain, which had no trees or water to absorb the noise. It would wake everyone up, but I didn’t care. I already planned to do that.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted as I stepped outside.
My fury increased when I realized I was talking to myself.
The group sometimes fell asleep around the fire pit. As hot as it was during the day, the temperature could drop thirty degrees at night. There were still a few embers glowing in the makeshift fire pit, but no one was gathered around it.
“You’re kidding me. Sera, get out here.” There was no reply. I glanced through the window of the Bronco, still hooked up to the trailer. It was empty. “Don’t even try to avoid this. First you slap me, then you drug me when I was completely fine. I expect groveling.”
I rounded the trailer and froze.
“This may not be the best time for a heartfelt apology.” Her tone was dry, but her dark eyes held no hint of humor. They weren’t focused on me, either. All her attention was reserved for the tall man with a gun standing about twenty feet away from me.
Most people would see the man himself as a threat. Though not as big as Mac, he was several inches over six feet and well-built. His jeans outlined long, ropey muscles and the biceps peeking out of his t-shirt were three times the size of any water’s arms, but his physical strength didn’t concern me. The weapon he held was another matter.
I knew little about firearms. They were one of the few ways to instantly kill an elemental, even an old one, so we tended to be big believers in gun control. It was a handgun, rather than a shotgun, and it didn’t look like one of the modern blocks of metal I saw in most action movies. If anything, it looked more like the six-shooters from old westerns.
My friends were gathered before him. Vivian, Miriam, and Sera lay in their sleeping bags. The agents had pulled themselves to standing, but they’d clearly been caught off-guard. They wore sweatpants and t-shirts, and neither had their weapon. Simon crouched on top of the van, still in cat form. Mac had been sleeping apart from the others, and now he stood a full thirty feet away, too far to rush an armed man without finding a new bullet hole in his chest. Even so, I didn’t think he’d ruled that option out.
The stranger slid his eyes to me, though the weapon never wavered. He was outnumbered, and my appearance only tilted the scales further in our favor, but he showed no sign of nerves. “Come on, then. Join your friends.”
A growl rumbled through the night.
The man was smart enough to move his eyes toward Mac. “You’re weighing the odds right now, aren’t you? Figuring out how fast you can move versus how fast I can pull the trigger. I’ll give you a hint.” He swung the gun to his right until the barrel pointed straight at me. “Not fast enough.”
The growl didn’t subside, but Mac remained where he was.
The man had no room for mistakes. We tracked his every move, waiting for an opening.
Miriam didn’t bother waiting. “Are you stupid?”
His attention turned to the brunette pulling her legs from the sleeping bag. His brow furrowed, either in surprise that she wasn’t cowed by his threats or in confusion that he was being insulted by one of the world’s most adorable women. Miriam was an otter shifter, and though she’d proven many times that she was a grade-A badass, I still wanted to coo over her enormous brown eyes and button nose.
“What?” he asked.
“Seemed a straight-forward question to me.” She stood, ignoring the gun now pointed in her direction. “You don’t have that slack-jawed idiot look, but maybe you just aren’t good at math. There’s one of you and one of that cute penis substitute you’re holding. Looks like it holds six bullets, and there are eight of us. So I guess the real question is, how fast can you shoot?” She took a step toward him.
With his attention diverted by Miriam, I moved forward. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I damn sure wasn’t going to cower in the corner while an armed man threatened my friends.
He caught my movement in his peripheral vision and turned toward me. Mac took advantage of the distraction to step closer. We came at him from three sides, taking advantage of our greater numbers.
Even so, the man’s expression remained relaxed, even confident. “If you lot are willing to sacrifice one of yourselves, well, that might work. Course, one of you will be dead afterwards, so that plan does have its downside. The other option, now, is to talk like reasonable people.”
“I’d feel a lot more reasonable if you weren’t holding us at gunpoint,” I said.
He laughed. “And I’d feel a lot safer if a pissed-off giant wasn’t creeping toward me, but we don’t always get what we want.”
He pointed the handgun at Mac, who didn’t even seem to notice. The stranger sighed and swung it toward me. Mac froze.
“Yeah, I thought it might be like that.” For the first time, he really looked at me.
He reached into his pocket. A second later, I recoiled from the harsh glare of a flashlight. I shielded my eyes, but the light had already moved on. It paused on each of us for a few seconds, even swinging upwards to where Simon crouched on the camper’s roof.
“Now, this is interesting. A fire,” he nodded at Sera. “That might make sense in a desert, but I’d be more likely to find a cat in a rocking chair factory than a water out here in the middle of August.”
I met Sera’s eyes. For him to know what we were by looking at us, he had to be an elemental himself. It meant he also had to know how strong we were, because only those with dominant elemental blood had the traditional coloring.
He knew how powerful we were and still wasn’t scared.
“Fair’s fair. Show yourself.” My voice didn’t waver, and it wasn’t even false bravado. I was just done being afraid of people threatening to kill me. The novelty had worn off long ago.
“And blind myself with my own light? I’m thinking that’s not a great idea.”
“What’s your plan?” Sera asked, following Miriam’s lead and pulling herself from the sleeping bag.
“I’m interested in learning what you’re doing here. We’re smack dab in the middle of nowhere. I don’t get a lot of visitors out this way.”
I shook my head. “We’re only passing through. How about this? We get in our vehicles and drive away. You never see us again, and we don’t get shot. Everyone wins.” I thought that was a fair compromise.
He didn’t seem to agree. “It’s too late for that. You’ve already seen me. Your name, blondie.”
That was the final straw for Mac. Hold guns on his friends, that was bad. Give me a disparaging nickname, and someone had to bleed.
Mac’s clothes ripped in half, falling from his body in shreds as the bear emerged. At least he was only wearing boxers and a t-shirt for sleeping. Mac’s temper meant he had a higher clothes budget than the rest of us.
The man swung the gun toward him, eyes widening in shock and fear. Mac as a human was intimidating as hell. As a bear, he could make grown men wet themselves.
Unfortunately, we’d stumbled upon one of the few who was either too brave or too stupid to flee for his life when faced with an enormous black bear.
His finger tightened on the trigger. Panicked, I reached for what little magic I could access.
There was nothing there. The drug was still exiting my system, leaving me powerless.
I launched myself toward the man, no thought in my head but to somehow defy all laws of physics and reach him before he sent a bullet into Mac. As soon as I started running, Mac raced for me, trying to head me off before I reached the other elemental.
Sera chose the more dramatic solution and set the stranger’s hand on fire.
“The bullets will explode!” I yelled back to her.
“Not hot enough,” she assured me, though she pulled back on the flames a little.
“Still pretty damn risky,” the man said, undisturbed. The fire disappeared, but he didn’t drop the heated metal.
Only another fire would be immune to that heat—or to anything else Sera could throw at him.
It also meant he couldn’t hurt me or Sera, not with magic. Even in the limited light I could see he didn’t have the dark coloring of a strong fire. He was much too tall, as well. He was more human than elemental, but he still had enough power to hurt our friends.
I was ten feet away when he sent a fireball straight at me. It hit the center of my chest and my body absorbed it. Energy filled me as my fire magic fed. The man’s eyes narrowed, calculating.
My plan wasn’t fancy. I would run at the man, and then I would tackle him. We’d figure out the rest later.
I never made it. With only two feet to go, the ground rose to greet me, the desert sand swirling around me. It flew into my ears and mouth, my nostrils and eyes, until I could only gasp and choke. I fell to my knees, retching.
The attack ceased as soon as I stopped moving. I expelled the last of the sand from my throat and cleared my eyes.
When I looked up, all was silent. Everyone stared at the newcomer. Even Mac studied him, his furry head tilted to the side as he considered this new information. No one moved, not even the stranger. He seemed as surprised by his actions as the rest of us were.
“People,” I managed, the words raspy, “it looks like we found the other dual magic.”
CHAPTER 4
“A
what?” For the first time, he didn’t sound like a cocky bastard.
I should have moved away from him, what with the tendency dual magics had to lose control, but my feet carried me toward him without bothering to consult my brain.
It wasn’t only because we’d been looking for him for months now, though I was plenty happy for our search to come to an end. It wasn’t even that he might have information I needed.
I was drawn to him for the simplest reason. If he was like me, that meant I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only one.
The night was retreating, allowing dawn to creep over the horizon. With the growing light, I could make out features that had been hidden before. He had a strong face with sloping cheekbones and a straight nose, a solid jaw currently clenched until a small muscle twitched in his left cheek. It wasn’t a harsh face, though. If anything, the long lashes and the dimple in his chin softened his appearance. I wondered if he minded when people called him pretty.
Like me, he didn’t have the traditional fire coloring of black hair and eyes. On the outside, I was a perfect water, and he appeared to be nothing more than a desert. His hair was a medium sandy blond, his gold-flecked eyes closer to amber than brown. Even his skin was tanned to a burnished gold. He reminded me of a rancher accustomed to spending days in the sun, but without the leathery skin that tended to come with such work. Our extended lifespan was possible thanks to our high-octane healing powers. Sun damage really wasn’t a concern.
The man was still trying to look innocent. It wasn’t an expression that suited him.
“Well, you controlled desert and fire,” I said. “If you have some explanation for how that’s possible other than you being a dual, we’d love to hear it. Perhaps someone’s hiding nearby?” I gestured at the flat landscape surrounding us.
I could practically see his mind racing, though his words were slow and lazy. “I’m a desert, sure. Don’t know what you’re talking about with the fire.”
Sera didn’t bother to remind him that his hand was unburnt. Instead, she hurled a ball of fire at him. He didn’t have a chance to duck.
He also didn’t burn.
“Good thing you were right,” muttered Vivian.
The man studied each of us, his face wary. He ended on me, and he considered me for quite a while. Long enough for the sky to lighten another degree and for whatever thoughts churned behind his eyes to settle. At last, he lowered his gun, though I noticed he still kept his finger near the trigger. “You’re a bit more than what you seem, too. Aren’t you?”
I inclined my head, acknowledging the truth. He’d seen my watery-looking self absorb my own ball of fire. There was little point arguing.
“You’re not here to kill me.” He stated it as a fact.
“No.”
“You gonna try telling me that a couple of old-as-sin waters appearing in the southwest same time as you is a coincidence?”
It was my turn to try looking innocent. He snorted.
“Right. So what are you doing here?”
I smiled with a bit too much enthusiasm. I much preferred talking to standoffs with firearms. “You. I mean, we didn’t know who you were, only what. So we were searching for the abstract you, not the specific you, if that makes sense. I’m Aidan Brook, by the way,” I added as an afterthought.
He wasn’t impressed by my explanation, though the last bit caught his attention. “Brook. That’s one of the old names. I imagine a dual from one of those families would attract a fair bit of attention. You probably should find a different name.”
“Is that what you did?” Sera asked.
“It’s harder to find someone who doesn’t exist.”
“Who were you originally?” Vivian asked. I knew she itched to power up her computer and examine every identity he’d ever had to learn why he’d been so difficult to find.
The man tutted at her, as though she’d asked a naughty question.
“It doesn’t matter,” I assured him. “Though I’m curious to learn if you’ve been running so no one would discover you’re crazy. Are you, by the way? Crazy?” Why ignore the elephant in the room when you can climb on its back and go for a ride?
“Are you?” he countered.
“Only sometimes.” I was opening my mouth to share my entire life story when Mac appeared at my elbow, a gentle reminder to shut the hell up. He’d shifted back and pulled on a pair of jeans.
“What’s your name?” Mac asked, eyes narrowed.
The man spun his gun once and slid it into a hip holster. He hooked the thumb of his other hand into a belt loop of his jeans and raised one side of his mouth, more smirk than smile. If we’d ordered a hot cowboy from Central Casting, we couldn’t have done any better.
“Luke.”
“No way.”
He glanced at me, eyebrows raised. “You don’t believe me?”
“There’s no way you’re named Luke. Or Colt or Jed or any other perfect cowboy name. You were born a Frederick, admit it.”
His mouth widened in a grin, displaying straight white teeth against tanned skin. He raised his hand to his forehead, tipping an imaginary hat. “You can call me anything you want, darlin’.”
I gripped Mac’s forearm before he could call Luke a few choice names himself. “It’s better than blondie,” I whispered.
Luke watched Mac, unconcerned. “Well, with two duals here, any fight will be mutually assured destruction. So how’s about we all put up our arms—” Luke gave Mac’s biceps a pointed look, “—and head inside before the day gets too hot for anyone who’s not a desert or a fire. I’ve got a little place about half a mile up the road.”
He headed northeast, following a trail no one else could see.
We waited several seconds, having as many conversations as we could through loaded looks and emphatic gestures, but it was pointless. He was the reason we’d spent nearly three months driving around the southwest and most of Texas. Of course we were going to follow him.
We were halfway to his house before I realized he never said whether he was crazy.
House was a generous description of the structure. It had four walls and a roof, but my version of a house had conveniences like soft beds, internet access, and indoor plumbing.
Instead, we found a structure that appeared to have risen from the desert floor itself, the walls bleached from constant exposure to the merciless sun. A covered well and several large buckets stood on the hut’s east side. I stretched my magic into the depths of the well to greet the water gathered at the bottom. It was stagnant and lacked the vibrance of the lakes and rivers in the Tahoe area.
I ignored the pang of homesickness. It had been too many months since I fed from either Lake Tahoe or the Truckee River. Other than a quick trip to the Gulf Coast and another to the Rio Grande, I’d been limited to flat, still lakes. Since we started running in June, I’d recharged where I could, because I needed to, but it never felt like home.
It wasn’t just the fresh, vibrant water I missed. I missed the A-frame cabin, with its living room covered in floor pillows and the ugliest orange curtains this side of the 1970s. I missed the upside down teddy bear wallpaper and the spiral staircase that took me to my small bedroom, where Vivian sometimes lived across the hall and Simon slept upstairs. When I cracked the window, I could hear the river rumbling by. I didn’t sleep as well anywhere else as I did in that cabin.
Home meant safety. I had to believe I’d see it again.
For now, I fed off the stale well water, and soon the last residue of the drug exited my system. My power remained dull, but I was getting used to it. It was the cost of using the serum, and I tried not to think about whether that cost was permanent.
Luke’s home didn’t have a door so much as a heavy piece of wood covering a large opening. He grabbed it on either side and easily moved it out of the way. Next to me, Miriam made an appreciative sound.
I slid my eyes toward her.
“What? Being a dual doesn’t mean he can’t be hot. You better hope that’s true, at least.”
I couldn’t deny she had a point. While I’d developed an appreciation for men built like small trucks, Luke’s lean body held a certain appeal, particularly when his back and shoulder muscles flexed under his cotton shirt.
Heat filled me that had nothing to do with the attractive stranger or the rising temperature. Even before I faced him, I knew Mac stared at me. His expression was opaque. Before I could say anything, he walked away, joining the agents as they pulled up in the vehicles.
“You’re going to need to move those.” Luke told them. “There’s a decent-sized ridge five miles north of here. The overhang should hide them.”
Sera glanced into the dark room. “No.”
“This isn’t a discussion.” Luke drew a bucket of water from the well. As his biceps bulged and released, I was pretty sure I heard Miriam whimper.
Sera wasn’t so easily distracted. “Ten minutes ago, you were pointing a gun at us. We’re going to keep our escape route open.”
He grabbed the full bucket off the rope, then faced Sera.
Carmichael stepped closer, and I resisted the urge to yank him back. The agent hadn’t always shown sound judgment when interacting with the magical world. Placing himself between two ludicrously powerful elementals was a terrible idea, but he might not figure that out before he was dead.
Luke set the bucket on the ground and leaned against the adobe wall. From a distance, it was a casual, even relaxed pose, but tension thrummed through his body. He was prepared for a fight.
“For the last eight weeks, everywhere I go I’ve gotta worry that some old one’s gonna turn up. I’ve been keeping a low profile for a damn long time, and up until recently, it wasn’t that hard. All the old ones, anyone who might know what I am or what’s supposed to happen to someone like me, I knew where they were. Now I’ve got strangers traveling around every place I’ve ever lived, and you lot show up out of the blue in all the same places.”
I felt a stab of guilt. He was safe until we decided to find him.
Sera didn’t appear to feel the same. Her eyes flashed and her fingers tapped against her thigh.
“Of course it’s not a coincidence.” I spoke in a rush to intercept whatever Sera was about to say. “But we already said we don’t want to kill you. We’re here for information, and dead people don’t answer questions. But while you don’t know us, we don’t know you, either. Until we’re sure you don’t have some medieval torture chamber in there,” I waved toward the inside of the hut, “we’re taking your word that you won’t kill us.”
A clever woman would have stopped there. “By the way, how are you doing with that whole sanity thing?” I offered my brightest, most helpful smile, the smile of a woman who’d never thought of hurting another, and I ignored the shadow stirring to life now that the drug had worn off.
Luke offered an inarticulate shrug, though a smile played on his lips as he watched me, through pure force of will, stop talking.
“It’s not up for discussion,” he repeated. “This is my secret home. It has no records, and it’s impossible to see on any map or satellite. Even someone in a helicopter would have a tough job finding it. If you want to learn whatever you’re here to learn, you’ll move those shiny heaps of metal where they can’t be seen.”
He disappeared into the hut.
“Let’s move them,” I decided. “We can’t ask him to trust us if we won’t do the same.”
“And if he tries something, I’ll take him.” Miriam grinned, possibly hoping it came to that.
Mac scowled, but he didn’t argue when Johnson climbed into the camper van and Miriam slid behind the wheel of the Bronco. We watched them drive off until they were out of sight, then moved toward Luke’s home.
I stepped into the darkness.
The inside did nothing to dispel my first impressions. It was, at most, fifteen feet in either direction. The floor was packed earth, the walls unpainted adobe. The only furniture was a cabinet that doubled as a counter, a large cooler, and a twin mattress held off the ground by a crude wooden bed frame.
The cooler was the only thing that didn’t look like it was cobbled together from items found on the side of the road. It was high end, the sort that might keep food cold for several days despite the heat. Most elementals had more than their share of money—live long enough, and even a conservative investor would became wealthy enough to buy a small island—but the cooler was the only sign Luke hadn’t gambled his fortune away one drunken night in Vegas.
The room was barely large enough to hold all of us, and there were no chairs. Mac claimed one corner, where he could best observe the entire room. Sera perched on the edge of the mattress and Carmichael followed, keeping several inches of space between them.
Simon had assumed his human form for the walk to Luke’s home. He glanced around the dark room, unimpressed. A second later, he returned to his cat self. He strode outside, a tiny bundle of pure grace, then ruined the effect by flopping on the ground with his belly exposed to the sun.
Luke watched the transformation, his expression somewhere between shock and amusement. “If we’re trading answers here, I’d appreciate it if one of you lot could explain why people keep turning into animals. I heard rumors, but figured that’s all they were.”
I couldn’t help smiling at his confusion. Many fulls weren’t taught about shifters, though we shared a similar origin story.
Both races were born from the earth’s first magic, but whereas we were born of humans and magic, they’d been born of animals and magic. The old ones tended to find this, to use the technical term, icky. Many of them preferred to deny shifters existed rather than share their origin story with creatures they considered polluted. The original magic that created shifters lived for a while in human form, which was why shifters could assume both human and animal shapes, but that made no difference to the old ones.
“I’ll let Simon fill you in. He loves correcting elementals’ ignorance.” Luke nodded his thanks and moved to the counter, pulling bowls and utensils from the cupboard. He seemed to consider my response good enough for now. Whatever else he was, the man wasn’t easily ruffled.
I wished I could say the same. I bent to pick up Simon’s discarded clothes but saw no place to put them. Instead, I folded them and set the neat pile back on the ground.