Chapter 13 Kojo
KOJO
The drive from Miami to Detroit took four days, and by the second one I was pressing my back against the door just to feel something that was not the ceiling of Aiden’s rental closing in on me.
I am not built for the inside of vehicles.
Not built for most things this country has designed, honestly, but vehicles are a particular problem — seats too narrow, headroom a joke, recycled air carrying the scent of every human who sat in this position before me pressed into the fabric of the upholstery.
My Bouda decided we would survive it, and Aiden kept talking, navigating the interstates in a voice that pretended we were two men on an ordinary road trip and not a photojournalist smuggling the last known Bouda across a continent. That patience was a gift and I did not tell him so. I should have.
This drive is easier. My mate is here, and that makes the difference between enduring and simply riding.
Kendra fell asleep forty minutes out of the gas station, the seat eased back far enough that the top corner of the headrest presses into my knee through the gap.
I have not moved. The pressure has been building up through my thigh for the better part of an hour and I sit with it willingly.
My Bouda would not allow me to wake her, and I agree with him on that, which does not happen often enough to go unremarked.
You used her name tonight, my Bouda says. Twice. Kendra. Without fighting yourself to find it.
“It still required effort.”
Less than before, my Bouda says. That is what matters.
She relaxed when you said it, did you notice?
That tightening she carries in her shoulders, holding herself like she is waiting to be dismissed or underestimated.
It eased the moment you called her by her name instead of a title.
She felt like a person to you and she knew it.
I watch the back of her head in the dark cab, hair loose from where it was tied earlier. She shivers faintly.
You are guiding her well, my Bouda continues. Keep building her confidence. Let her feel capable. A queen who trusts herself grows into her position. A queen who is afraid of herself fights it at every turn.
“I do not like manipulating my mate,” I say quietly.
In the front seat, Kade’s eyes lift to the rearview mirror. I catch it, her gaze moving to me and back to the road without a word. From the far seat, Andrew glances up from Aiden’s face. Neither speaks. They have watched me talk to my Bouda long enough to know the pattern of it.
You are a Bouda, Alemayehu. Trickster is in our blood, woven into it the same as the ridge, the same as the cackle.
We are not deceiving our mate. We are walking beside her until she finds what Mother Fate placed in her.
Besides, my Bouda adds, did you watch what she did with Aiden in that parking lot? How she resolved it?
She did not tell me I was wrong. Did not lecture. She asked the single question that got me there on my own, so cleanly I did not feel it happening until it was done.
That is a queen, my Bouda says. She moved you without you feeling moved.
“That may be so.” I keep my voice low, barely above the engine noise. “But I want her to choose to be my queen. Not because I guided her into it. Because she decided.”
You are growing a human conscience, my Bouda says, and his distaste is thorough.
It is genuinely unpleasant to witness. You are a primal creature, Alemayehu, governed by the laws of Mother Fate, not the customs of men who cannot even keep a woman.
You see those human males out there with their dating applications and their theories about attraction, none of them have what we have.
Not one of them. And they call our ways primitive.
I almost snort.
She makes a sound and pulls her knees up, curling into the seat, and the shiver in her shoulders is sharper now. The temperature has been dropping for the last twenty minutes, cold bleeding in through the door seals.
Touch her, my Bouda says, and all the commentary drops out of his voice. Give her the furnace. That is what we exist for.
“She has not given permission.”
She is shivering, Alemayehu. She is our mate and she is cold and we can fix it. My Bouda’s tone goes flat. If you will not do it, I will take the hand myself.
He has done it before. I do not test the threat.
I reach forward and press my palm gently against her cheek.
The heat moves out of my skin and into hers almost immediately, and she goes still.
The shiver stops. A long breath moves through her and she sighs and sinks deeper into the seat, every bit of tension running out of her at once.
All these years of running and nothing ahead of it, and now my palm is warm against her cheek and she is settling into it like it belongs there.
I sat in motels smelling like other people’s misery for three years, eating whatever we could find, surviving on my Bouda’s refusal to allow the alternative.
Surviving is not the same as having a future.
I forgot what a future felt like until tonight, watching her face in the motel mirror when she still thought I was dangerous.
She looked at me like a threat and I wanted to fall to my knees.
Now she is asleep in this seat with my palm against her cheek and I am thinking about the clan.
The cubs we could raise. New Bouda born from this bond, the bloodline continuing instead of dying in the wreckage of a burned village.
The Matriarch’s traditions carried on. I think about watching Kendra carry a new life, her scent shifting into something only a Bouda male can read, and I would be there for all of it.
Her habits. What she needs when she is tired.
Rubbing her feet at the end of a long day.
Preparing her meals, whatever she prefers, and I would learn to cook in the westernized way with the cramped kitchen and the electric stove and the culturally specific seasoning she would tell me I was using wrong.
I wince at that last part. I have tasted this country’s food. Most of it should not exist.
None of those cubs exist until she accepts the bond, Alemayehu, my Bouda says, and he sounds nearly sympathetic. She has not accepted it. Stop daydreaming and do your job.
Kade’s foot hits the brake.
The truck lurches, the rear end kicking sideways before the tires catch, and Kendra’s head snaps forward off the headrest, her hands flying to the dashboard.
Andrew grabs Aiden’s shoulders to keep him from pitching forward and I have my hand at the back of her coat before I have thought it, easing her into the seat as the truck rocks to a stop.
“Oh shit,” Kade says.
“Oh my god,” Kendra starts, raw with sleep and adrenaline. “What are you doing,”
“What the fuck,” Aiden says from behind us.
“Oh shit is right,” Andrew says quietly, and something in his voice pulls my eyes to the windshield.
The freeway is blocked. Three black SUVs sit across both northbound lanes with headlights aimed directly at us, and behind them four more, spread wide, a wall of steel none of us are driving through.
Men stand in the gaps between vehicles, weapons raised, and even from here I can see the helmets.
The same helmets. And above us, rotors, two helicopters holding position over the freeway, searchlights pouring through the snow and sweeping the road surface below.
“We were almost fucking there,” Kade says, quiet and flat. Then the anger finds its footing. “How the fuck.” She looks up at the helicopters. She has her answer.
The driver door of the lead SUV opens.
I know the posture before the face becomes clear. The same loose, unhurried walk from the parking lot. The man who drove away into the blizzard with a threat. He stops in front of his vehicle and looks directly at the truck.
“I know you can hear me, Alemayehu.” His voice carries through the windshield.
He doesn’t need to raise it. “These weapons might not do much to you right now, I’ll give you that.
But they will hurt her.” He lets that sit for a second.
“They will kill her. So do me a favor and get out of the truck so I don’t have to make that decision for you. ”
Get out, my Bouda says immediately. We fight for our queen. We did not fight hard enough before and we lost everything we had. We will not lose again.
My door is open before Kendra finishes saying my name.
“Kojo,” she says, “what are you doing,” and then: “Kojo, stop.” But I am already out, both feet on the freeway, the snow dissolving on contact with my skin, my ridge locking upright along my back.
The passenger door pulls open from inside and Kade’s voice cuts across the cab. “No. Kendra, no. If they shoot, you get hit, and we cannot have that. Stay in the truck.” Then, sharp, toward the back seat: “Andrew, guard her.”
“Tell that witch-vampire,” the leader calls out, “that if she takes one step outside that vehicle, your mate is dead. I’ve got two snipers on that truck right now.”
Kade doesn’t move. Something recalculates behind her eyes. “That motherfucker,” she says through the open door. “I am going to personally drain him when this is done.”
The helicopters hold steady above us. The searchlights pin the truck and the road in white.
Fourteen armed men in the formation ahead, not counting the leader.
Two in each helicopter at minimum. Every helmet is fitted with the same anti-cackle hardware from the parking lot, and the rifles track me as I stand on the freeway.
My Bouda is already running the numbers.
He is counting the men, the gaps between them, the distance to the formation, the angle of the helicopters against the freeway surface.
He is pulling it apart and rebuilding it in the span of three seconds and when he has it he says: I have a plan.
Listen to me exactly and we survive this. Tell Kade to guard the queen.
“We should not act without a clear plan.” The growl that builds inside me is not mine.
It rises from somewhere below conscious thought, my Bouda pressing against the wall of my control with his full weight, and when he speaks it is not a suggestion: If you will not protect her, Alemayehu, I will shift.
Right here. I will not stand still while our queen sits in that truck with snipers on her.
I know exactly how much he means it.
I breathe. I exhale through my nose and let my body settle and I am about to call to her when it hits me, sharp and unmistakable beneath the exhaust and the gun oil and the chemical stench of the helmets: petrichor, highland mineral air, the specific cold of savannah grass before rain.
My ridge flattens for exactly one second.