Chapter 4 #5
Jewels drives us right up to another rundown plantation.
Though this one is all red brick, peeling previously white paint, and the vegetation surrounding it is sickly but not outright dead.
Still, the rundown state of the house really doesn’t matter when I plan to burn it all down like the last one, like all of them across all the Federation should be burnt.
Cleansing the world from the atrocities of the past and those ongoing atrocities that allowed Oso, the rejected mate of the Conduit, to gain such a hold here.
To build such a following as the Cataclysm.
I managed to nap for ten minutes on the drive and am now apparently feeling just a little dramatic.
Two shifters wearing Cataclysm club cuts over tight white T-shirts are posted at the house’s double-wide, white-painted front doors.
One of them is a light-skinned, bearded, and ruddy-haired berserker barely holding onto his human form.
The enforcers barely blink as Jewels parks across from those doors.
Apparently, she’s not even going to attempt to sneak me in.
Though she does leave the truck running.
Both guards then practically shit themselves when I step out of the truck, possibly because I still don’t have any fucking sunglasses. They look from me to Jewels with betrayal etched across their faces.
It’s hot, even in the ridiculous outfit Jewels put together for me. The too-short shorts make sense even as beads of sweat start trickling down my spine.
“Do you have some sort of plan?” I ask Jewels, more than a little testy. “Or do you want me to just do my thing?”
The dark-blond shifter glances at me warily. “Does your thing involve burning more shit down?”
I shrug. “That usually ends up happening, especially when the trafficking of kids is going on.”
“Hey,” the brown-haired shifter with light-brown skin to the right of the doors protests weakly. “We ain’t hurting the kids.”
Jewels explodes before I even decide whether I’m going to acknowledge the asshole. “What would you call it then, Ricky?!”
The berserker still in human form shifts restlessly, seemingly reacting to the frustrated aggression now rolling off Jewels. Then he sniffs the air. Ricky’s attention snaps to his fellow guard, and he raises both hands placatingly — to the berserker. “Nobody is hurting the kids, Jewels.”
“I don’t think that’s his issue,” Jewels mutters as she crosses her arms, still pissed but softening her body language. “Are you going to let us pass?”
“Not a fucking chance,” the berserker mutters, almost dismissively.
A whisper of energy draws my attention to the right. Relief at having even that minor touch of essence reach for me has me stepping away to follow it without a second thought.
“What the fuck is going on?” Ricky says, his voice lowered and more intimate. Though there’s no privacy to be found for quiet conversation when around other shifters. “You’re risking way too much here, Jewels. What about the baby?”
I walk the length of the house, ignoring that the berserker is being pulled in my wake. He doesn’t attempt to close the space, though, trailing a half-dozen steps behind me.
A derelict playground is situated at the far side of the house.
Weeds have encroached on the sand that’s obviously been trucked in — we’re nowhere near a natural body of water — on which are set a couple of weathered, toddler-sized plastic playhouses, as well as an oddly twisted metal slide that likely gets hot enough in the sun to burn.
A dark-haired boy with light-brown skin sits on the only intact swing.
The others have been reduced to a few lone chains hanging from the metal structure.
With hints of red highlighted by the utterly suffocating sun, the boy’s hair is long enough to be shaggy.
Head bowed and wearing only elastic-waisted shorts, he appears to be fixated on the sand under his dingy gray runners.
No shirt, no socks. He’s long limbed, but slim. Maybe eleven years old.
The boy raises his head to meet my gaze as I pause on the dead grass edging the play area. And before his features become uniquely his own, I see every other Guerra sibling I know within his facial structure. The dismissive scowl is apparently also genetically inherited.
Either Jewels lied about the Cataclysm’s ability to have children after whatever my aunt did to him thirteen years ago, or the boy is older than he looks.
I assume it’s a bit of both. I doubt Jewels outright lied, and certainly not with any nefarious intention. Information tends to get degraded when passed through multiple sources, so perhaps that’s the half-truth I picked up in her assertion.
“What?” the boy asks me belligerently. Then after assessing me and coming up unimpressed, he snorts. “You’re the big plan?”
I’m pretty certain it’s the berserker hovering indecisively behind me that’s ruining my toughness index in the kid’s view.
Of course, the berserker’s indecisiveness might not be apparent to the kid.
Plus, my purple-eyed gaze means little to someone who can’t feel my power or who doesn’t know another of the awry.
“That’s me,” I say, taking a few more steps toward the boy. Not that I need to be any closer to him to know that the Cataclysm is wrong about one more major thing. “You ready to blow this pop stand?”
“Pop stand?” he echoes with a sneer. “What does that even mean?”
I have to think about that. “No idea. Something one of my uncles used to say fairly regularly.”
“Lame.”
I laugh, unable to recall the last time someone was so unaffected by my presence, and finding it seriously delightful.
The laugh ruins it, of course. Power underlies my mirth, literally vibrating across the ground between us. So much so that the sand shifts, individual grains momentarily dancing, glinting in the sunlight.
The boy’s eyes widen, currently so dark blue as to appear almost black. Though they aren’t going to stay that way for much longer. Thankfully, he doesn’t instantly fear me. His mouth drops open with a question.
Before he can speak, though, a tall, slim woman with barrel-curled light-brown hair that must be hell to maintain in this heat throws open the patio door behind and to my right, charging out into the playground.
Her flip-flops are a light blue, matching her tiny sleeveless cotton sundress.
With that shifter swiftness, the newcomer throws herself between me and the kid, facing me with her hands raised to rend and tear. “You leave him be,” she snarls.
Then she gets a good look at me.
Her suntanned skin pales drastically. Her gaze flicks over my shoulder to the hovering berserker. If I were a shifter, I presume I would smell her fear.
Her fear of me, not the berserker. She’s looking for backup from him.
“Geez, Lou,” the boy grumbles. “Take another chill pill.”
From his tone, I understand that’s not a twist of the familiar expression. And though I should be understanding of how someone would resort to medicating themselves to get through this fucking existence, it pisses me off.
“Don’t come between me and what is mine, Lou,” I say, not thinking through the claim before making it.
Lou’s mouth drops. Fear fading into distrust, she clenches her hands into fists at her sides and firms her stance. “Cal is mine,” she snaps. “I don’t know who you think you are, coming here and thinking you can take him from —”
“Cal?” I say, testing out the name and interrupting Lou before she can really get going. “Short for Calvin?”
The boy huffs at my apparent idiocy. But then, still seated in the swing, he leans deeply to the side to see me past his self-proclaimed protector. So he’s not as disinterested as he’s feigning.
“That’s not information you need,” Lou says, trying to be fierce, though her voice wobbles a bit on the ‘you.’
“Jewels didn’t mention me?” I ask, just a little sarcastically.
“I … um …” Lou’s gaze flicks to the berserker.
I sigh, glancing over my shoulder to acknowledge him for the first time. “Are you just going to stand there?”
He glowers at me, head slightly lowered, gaze aggressive. His default setting, I’m fairly certain. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says. “I protect the kids.”
“Not well enough,” I say. “Otherwise, I’d already be on my way home.”
“Who do you think you are?” Lou repeats. “Coming here? Judging us?”
The conversation has taken a sharp detour, and it’s seriously too hot and too bright outside to stand here and inanely argue. “It’s less about who I think I am, and more about your personal take on who I am to you.”
“That …” Lou sputters. “That don’t make no sense.”
The berserker shifts slightly behind me — he gets it.
It’s an easy guess that Lou hasn’t met many awry, since Cal reacted to me without fear and she’s his self-appointed guardian.
I can tell without looking any deeper that Lou isn’t Cal’s mother.
She’s slightly too young, though I wouldn’t put anything past the Cataclysm, including raping a minor.
And it would be rape, because a teenager would only agree out of pure fear. But also, they look nothing alike.
For the first time since I escaped the rune-scribed holding cell, lines of fate abruptly and involuntarily blink into focus around me. I trace all those twisted threads of energy in a single glance.
Eyes wide, Cal stumbles to his feet, stepping around Lou. She grabs him. A little too forcefully for my liking — he winces at her hold on his arm — but I don’t think the aggression was intentional.
I deal with the berserker first, glancing at him over my shoulder. “You know who I am?”
He nods stiffly. “We’ve been guarding you in shifts. People talk, even behind his back.”
“You know what I can do?” I ask, not bothering to hold back any of the power I carry.
I’m still healing too slowly, still utterly weary. But the berserker scents the air and takes a wary step back from me. That’s a yes.