Chapter Seven #2
“Shit!” I said, and went after him, through clouds of old plaster and broken wall studs, with the kids on my heels.
“Hey! What’s going on?” That was Chayton.
“Caleb met a wolf,” Jen said, taking her phone back before I dropped it trying to dig my partner out of the rubble.
By the time I’d managed, the others had come running, and Caleb was looking pissed off and determined. He’d been shielded as well, but that was a hell of a blow. The wolf ward had some teeth.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said, grabbing his arm when he started back for it again.
“Yeah! Whatever happened to that thing blowing up in your face? In all our faces?” Sophie demanded, a little wild-eyed.
You’d think she’d never seen somebody blown through a wall before.
“They’re protection spells,” Caleb told her. “You don’t try to protect something by bringing down the building—”
“Unless the building is half down already!”
“And Chay didn’t say he knew what they are, just what the symbols mean!” Jen added, eyeing up Caleb like she was suspecting him of being as reckless as me.
If she only knew.
“Protection spells?” Jason repeated, staring at the wolf, which was still glimmering serenely through the dust, as if we were all just being dramatic. “What are they protecting?”
“At a guess, a room on the other side,” Caleb said.
“So Jace might be in there?” Noah asked. “Hey! Hey Jace! Open up!”
“If anybody’s there, they already know we’re out here,” Sophie said dryly. “And don’t touch that!”
But Noah had already raised a fist to pound on the wall. Only to have his whole arm go through it instead. And this time, nothing blew him back out like a cannon going off.
“Hey, look,” he said. “It’s open.”
“Maybe you shorted it out,” Chayton said, looking at the dust-covered Caleb.
“Maybe.” Caleb approached the wall with more caution this time. And had the shit shocked out of him nonetheless as soon as he touched it. Meanwhile, Noah started through, and I grabbed him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded, while Caleb cursed and held his shielded hand, which was smoking.
“It’s letting me through!”
“Like that’s a good thing?” Sophie said. “It’s pissed off now!”
“Maybe. But we gotta check it out, right?” Noah asked, and then disappeared through the surface of the wall—taking the hand I still had on his shoulder along with him.
The ward didn’t shock me, either, maybe because I was holding onto somebody it liked. Or maybe for another reason, I thought, as I stumbled through after him. And found myself in what could only be described as a den.
It wasn’t much nicer than the area outside, except for not having signs of scorching, and the ceiling was still up. But there were blankets, ratty sleeping bags, and an old army cot scattered around, making up half a dozen beds. Along with enough take-out containers to constitute a fire hazard.
But I barely noticed because of the scent. It was pure pack, with a bunch of different signatures threaded through it, dozens and dozens of them, going back months. And one I recognized, overlaying all the others.
Jace had been here recently, but hadn’t stayed.
Maybe because of that, I thought, staring at the blood red letters dripping down the wall, their color originating from a can of spray paint still lying on the floor underneath: Don’t Stay, Not Safe. And then, under that, in all caps: RUN.
And it seemed that the people here had taken their own advice. They’d left their stuff, including the bedding, which looked to be fine, if a little odorous. But nothing a trip to a laundromat couldn’t have fixed.
“They bugged out fast,” I said, warding my hand and crouching down to look through one of the sleeping bags. And finding only a dirty sock.
“Something spooked them,” Noah agreed.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I asked because he wasn’t looking surprised.
“Yeah, there are loads of these kinds of places around, only they’re normally hidden, not plastered with an ad on the door.”
“These places?”
“Hideaways. Usually near where a lot of boys are holed up. My group had a camp out by Nellis, in a vacant lot. But it was pretty exposed, so we set up a safe house at this abandoned gas station, just in case. There wasn’t a lot of room, and it had a rat problem, but—”
“In case of what?” I asked, looking through the trash for some clue as to where Jace might have gone. And not coming up with anything there, either, except for the fact that somebody liked McDonald’s.
Noah didn’t say anything.
I looked up. “What is it?”
“You really have no idea what it’s like, do you?”
“What what is like?
“Yeah,” he said, getting on my level and searching my face.
“You were basically an outcast from Lobizon ‘cause you wouldn’t let them Change you, but you had another side of your family to fall back on. One to provide a decent place to live, food, safety. We didn’t.
Those of us who were turfed out of our clans…
everyone just hoped we’d die. And most of us did. The rest…”
He looked around. “We ended up in places like this. Scared as hell of everybody, including you guys—the Corps—who would take us off to one of those schools if you found us—”
“Wouldn’t that have been better?” I asked. Because yes, the schools the Corps ran for people with unsanctioned magic weren’t great, but the “students” there did get three hots and a cot, plus an education, protection, and some money to start a new life after they “graduated.”
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but neither was this. Only Noah didn’t look like he agreed. He looked like he thought I might have lost my mind.
“They hate us there!” he whispered violently, I guessed in case the ward was porous enough to let sound through.
“The clans have been turning out more vargulfs than ever in recent years, and guess where a lot of those have ended up? I knew a guy who escaped from one of those schools, just fought his way free one day, because a friend of his had been taken to one of the prisons—the places they put you when you don’t play nice. The places where you never get out!
“He wasn’t going to end up like that, he said, and he didn’t. He died of an infection in his wounds a few weeks later—the ones the Corps gave him rather than let him go! Sweating and screaming on a pallet in our safe house, because there was nowhere else for him to go—”
“Nowhere else?” I said, horrified. “The Corps wouldn’t—”
“Don’t tell me what the Corps wouldn’t do!
’ he snarled. “They would have saved his life—maybe—and then taken it away again by locking him up as an incorrigible afterwards! He’d hurt two of their men getting free, and they don’t forget stuff like that.
He was screaming, ‘Don’t take me back! Don’t take me back!
’ and made us promise. And human hospitals were out, because no money, and if we’d gone to the emergency room and they’d run a blood test—”
“It would have been better than letting him die, Noah!”
“It would have been the same.” The blue eyes were steady on mine.
“The clans kill us if we do anything that threatens to expose them. There’s nowhere for us to go, except some of the local native tribes—the human ones.
They don’t judge; I guess they know what it’s like to be an outcast. We sent somebody for a medicine man who’d helped us before, but he didn’t get there in time. ”
He got up and prowled around the small space, just another converted hotel room.
One with a ward to make it look like a blank stretch of wall, which someone had then plopped a bright and shiny visible deterrent across, which might as well have been saying ‘look here!’ to anyone with an ounce of magic in their veins.
But the people here didn’t have my training, did they? I thought, looking around.
Maybe it was the best they could do. Or the best they could afford, paying a down-on-his-luck mage to cast a spell to give them some measure of protection. And somewhere to retreat when the bad guys came knocking.
As one of the said bad guys, it did not feel great.
“And the Corps is the least of it,” Noah added bitterly.
“There are worse things out there. The Dark Circle has been recruiting, and they’re targeting Weres.
Especially vargulfs, ‘cause they know we don’t have anybody else.
Or we didn’t before Cyrus, but a lot of the guys are too scared to trust him, a big-time clan wolf—”
“He was vargulf until recently,” I reminded him. Cyrus had been outcast for political reasons until he’d taken up Whirlwind’s challenge for his brother.
But Noah just laughed. “He was never vargulf. Not like us. But he wanted to help, and he meant it. I couldn’t believe it when I realized he meant it.
” There was wonder in his voice where there had been only bitterness a moment before.
“And then the crazy bastard did it—or he tried.” He looked at me, and his expression was suddenly a lot older than his years.
“You know this isn’t going to work, right? They’re never going to let us back in.”
“They already have. You were presented—”
“Yeah, because you literally tore that Rand guy a new one for objecting. But how long do you think you can keep doing that? How long do you think Cyrus is gonna let you do that?”
“Let me?”
“You’re his mate. And you didn’t see his expression when Bleddyn got in that one good hit.
He was, like, this close to forgetting about politics and restraint and all that stuff his brother wanted and taking him the hell down—all the way down.
If he’d seriously hurt you, or Rand had when they piled on you—”
They did seriously hurt me, I almost said, but bit my tongue. Because I shouldn’t be here in that case. And feeling better all the time, as if the fight had happened weeks instead of hours ago.
“Cyrus is going to leave us, too,” Noah said softly. “He just doesn’t know it yet. Maybe Jace was right to get out early. The longer we stay—”
But I didn’t get the end of that sentence, because the ward suddenly fritzed out, and a triumphant-looking Caleb was standing in the now bare doorway.
“Bastard thing,” he said viciously, flicking the residue off his hand. “You okay?”
No, I thought, looking at Noah.
“Jace was here, but he’s gone,” Noah told them, evading my eyes.
“Where did he go?” I asked, directing the question at the boys, because this wasn’t the moment for a heart-to-heart, and because somebody had to know something.
They looked at the warning on the wall and then at each other. But my fledgling clan hadn’t disintegrated yet, and I was still Lupa. And moreover, a Lupa who had fought for them. Jason broke first.
“Tartarus,” he said hoarsely. “It’s where everybody ends up, sooner or later. I’d bet money we find him there.”