Chapter 22 Jackson
JACKSON
Taking a deep breath, I checked my watch once more.
My anxiety was making it hard to stay focused.
The sun dipped low on the horizon, dusk coming on strong.
After the night I’d spent with Shyanne, I’d felt like I was on top of the world.
The whole experience had been like some blissful dream, but then I’d received that awful phone call, and it had doused that happiness with devastation, sadness, and mourning.
Losing Tormynd and once again being reminded about how close death was to all of us gave my task a much more dangerous tint.
Now I had to put those thoughts from my head and focus on the task at hand.
I sat on the outermost branch of an ancient and powerful oak tree, gazing off into the distance at the Bauer Estate.
Flying to and landing on this perch had been dangerous in and of itself.
Christian’s family had private security—wyrms whose only job was to watch over and protect one of the most powerful families in all of shifterdom.
They could have seen me coming and ruined everything.
I’d had to fly in dangerously low, nearly crashing into multiple trees along the way, to get to this spot.
Before I moved in, I took a moment to calm my nerves and tried to make peace with what I was about to do. Taking Bryn? Actually kidnapping her? It disgusted me, but there was no way to get my sister back without doing what Joseph wanted.
My phone buzzed with a text.
Shyanne: I’m in place. Be careful.
Careful? That was an understatement. If even one of the security guys or another member of Christian’s family found me in the house…
At best, there would be questions and scrutiny that would make the kidnapping impossible.
At worst, they’d realize what was about to go down, and possibly kill me—old family ties be damned—especially if they realized I was there not only to kidnap her, but to kill her as well.
The thought made my stomach roil. Brynhilda Bauer had always been a sweet kid and one of my favorite people.
She loved to perform and chose acting, choir, and singing over sports.
Christian and I had always teased her about her name, and the fact that it was really close to Broom-Hilda, the old newspaper comic strip about a witch.
We would call her Sweepy, Sweep, and Sweeper.
She hated it, but in the way you hated anything a big brother and his friends did—with a combination of love and irritation but grudging assent.
Pressing my fist to my mouth, I waited for the sun to set and recalled the last time I spoke with Bryn.
It had been right before I went off looking for Ayumundi.
Christian had invited me to her school play, and I’d carved out the time.
Afterward, we’d all gone out to dinner. I closed my eyes, envisioning it as if it was happening at that very moment.
“Jackson?”
“Yeah, Sweep?”
“Ugh.” Bryn rolled her eyes. “I told you to stop calling me that.”
I shrugged and winked at her. “Yeah. You’ve been saying that since you were five, yet here we are.”
“Hey, dude?” Christian called from down the table. “You want fried pickles for an appetizer?”
I wrinkled my nose at him. “Gross. No.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, then went back to his menu.
“Jackson?” Bryn repeated, nudging my arm.
“What’s up?” I said, scanning my own menu.
“Did you like the play?” she said, eyeing me with intense interest.
“You did a really good job.” I was being honest. She’d been phenomenal in the role of the genie in the school’s adaptation of Aladdin.
My jaw had hit the floor when she’d come out.
From the moment she’d taken the stage, she’d commanded everyone’s attention.
Her jokes, her stage presence, her voice when she sang the songs?
All of it was top-notch, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d never have believed she was only eleven years old.
She acted like a seasoned actor twice her age.
“You think so?” she said, eyes shining with excitement.
I reached over and mussed her hair. “I do.”
“Hey! Quit it.” She giggled and pushed my hand away.
When she stopped laughing, she glanced down the table toward her parents, then back at me. “I want to be an actor when I grow up.”
“Sweep, we’ve known that since you were three years old, singing along to The Lion King songs.”
“No, I mean really,” she said, her words low and urgent. “Mom and Dad want me to go to college to be some stupid doctor or lawyer or something. Or get a business degree like Christian did. Blegh.” She made a gagging sound.
When the server took our order and removed the menus, I glanced over to see the rest of the family were deep in conversation, then turned my full attention to Bryn.
“What’s wrong with that stuff?” I asked. “Lots of people have those kinds of degrees and jobs.”
“I want to follow my dreams. You know there are actual shifters in Hollywood, right? Hidden away, and none of the humans know what they are.”
“I do know,” I said, nodding along. “There’s—”
“Keanu Reeves,” she blurted, eyes wide and excited again.
“He’s a sea serpent shifter. He told everyone he didn’t know how to surf when he did Point Break, but he did because he spends all that time in the ocean, in his serpent form and his human form.
Michelle Pfeiffer is a panther shifter. It’s why she was so good as Catwoman in that old Batman movie. Oh, also—”
“I get the picture,” I said. “Listen, kid, follow your dreams.”
“What?” She looked at me in surprise, as if she’d expected me to talk her out of it.
“I said follow your dreams. Who gives a shit what anyone thinks but you? I know it seems like forever away, but when you’re forty or fifty years old, do you want to look back on your life and think, ‘what if?’ Or do you want to look back and say…
” I again made sure none of the other adults were listening before going on, “Do you want to look back and say, ‘I did that shit!’”
Bryn clamped her hands to her mouth to stifle her giggles.
I prodded her shoulder. “Well? Which one do you want? A big bank account and a trail of discarded dreams, or a life full of joy and happiness? Do you want to do what someone else wants you to do, or do you want to follow your heart?”
The conversation was deeper than most young girls were used to, and Bryn looked at me with renewed interest. It was the look you got when you’d done something unexpected and amazing.
It was the type of look I could imagine a child having if they came downstairs on Christmas Eve to find Santa placing gifts around the tree.
“What’s your answer?” I said, urging her on.
Her lips curled into a mischievous grin as she leaned forward to whisper into my ear.
“I want to do the cool shit,” she said.
The horror of what I needed to do now—what that fucker was forcing me to do—washed over me. One life for another. I had to take that sweet, brilliant child who’d been like a surrogate little sister to me for years, and…and…
I grabbed another branch to steady myself and vomited down onto the forest floor below, my guts heaving and cramping as all the food I’d eaten in the last twelve hours came back up.
The horror of what had to be done was almost too much.
I retched and threw up until there was nothing left inside me, and even then I continued dry-heaving, tears running down my face.
Tearing a handful of leaves from the tree, I swiped them across my mouth and spat.
Eyes wet with tears, I tried to focus on the mansion.
Sometimes blood came before friendship. An entire species hung in the balance.
I couldn’t let my love for Bryn push aside my duty and honor to my family and my people.
It was a sacrifice that had to be made. All I could do was hope that what we’d told Christian would make it easier for me to do what needed to be done.
With him out of the way, then it would be one less obstacle.
As the sun gave up its last vibrant rays and slipped past the horizon, I pulled my phone out and texted Shyanne.
Jackson: It’s time. I’m going in.
I didn’t bother waiting for her response.
Now that it was dark, time was of the essence.
I pulled a vial of wyrm pheromones out of my pocket and spritzed it on my chest, arms, crotch, armpits, legs, neck, and head.
Tossing the empty vial aside, I leaped from the oak tree at the edge of the forest that surrounded the estate.
Spreading my arms wide, I took a swan dive from nearly two hundred feet up, the wind rushing up to whip at my clothes and hair.
Jaw set and determined, I stared down as the ground rushed up to meet me.
At twenty feet above the ground, I shifted to my dragon form.
Turning my death dive into a swift banking turn, my wings scooped air and shot me forward at fifty miles an hour only three feet above the ground.
I had to gain as much speed as possible to glide all the way to the mansion with as minimal wing flap as possible.
Like any other shifter, wyrms had an enhanced sense of smell and hearing.
The last thing I needed was to get screwed over because someone heard my wings.
For most of my life, the Bauer Estate had been a second home for me, a place where I played as a boy.
It was always a place of joy for me. Now?
It looked sinister and dangerous in the faint glow of the rising moon.
Yet, the house itself wasn’t sinister. How could it be?
All it did was provide security and safety to those inside.
The only actual menacing thing around here was me.