Chapter 4 #6
“It looks to me that you have two, maybe three choices …” I trace his lines of fate. Two thick mottled threads, and one partial branch. “I can let you go, or —”
He falls to his knees. “I can be yours, like the boy.”
Ugh. What is with the loyalty issues the Cataclysm’s got going on in his club? “Absolutely not.”
“I don’t belong to anyone,” the aforementioned boy mutters. But he sounds just a little upset about it rather than offended.
“I’m just dead otherwise,” the berserker says, as earnest as a creature created to tear through enemies — and sometimes allies — in a blood-and-flesh-fueled frenzy can be. “Either you kill me, or he does.”
“Is Ricky your handler?” I ask.
The berserker grimaces. That’s a yes.
“Convince him to go with you when you run,” I say. “Don’t become someone else’s problem.”
“He ain’t leaving Jewels.”
“He’s not going to be given a choice.” And I already know that, as if the understanding is just there on the edge of my peripheral vision and all I have to do is angle my head to fully absorb it.
That’s new. A different way of reading the fates of those nearest to me, perhaps. It’s a little disconcerting.
“You won’t be giving him a choice?” the berserker asks, squinting at me.
“Jewels won’t,” I say. Then I turn back to the boy, Cal.
Lou instantly stiffens, shuffling to place herself firmly between him and me. Brave, but stupid. She might not understand the power I hold — maybe she can’t feel it or doesn’t understand what she’s scenting — but she just clearly witnessed the berserker capitulate without protest.
“You don’t come between me and what is mine,” I say again, trying to be gentle about it.
Problem is, the universe doesn’t feel patient, not about any of this.
It wants me moving, though not enough to just move me itself.
Not yet. “All I want is Cal safe, and to keep him that way. That’s my role here. ”
I’d really rather not be standing here with sweat running down my spine, gathering along my hairline, and a headache threatening to splinter my head either.
“That’s what I do,” Lou says stiffly. “I stand between the world and Cal. I made a promise to his mother, on her deathbed.”
Cal snorts derisively. “Not the deathbed promise,” he mocks, weariness echoing through his words.
A combination of his fear and loneliness, patched over with sarcasm and dark wit, aches through my chest. If I hadn’t already felt it, that alone would have confirmed the connection between us. Because I’m not empathic with anyone who’s not tied to me. As all the Guerra siblings seem to be tied.
I’ll have to ask Rath about the research he’s done into soul bonds, but I suspect that what has happened between us all might be utterly unique.
It might be that Oso, aka the Cataclysm, was bonded to my aunt when she was the Conduit, so that even though she rejected him, enough of that tie remained to transfer through his children to me as the Conduit-to-be.
Or maybe the universe is just fucking around for the fun of it.
Or it might be both.
Cal steps around Lou, not approaching me, but wanting to see me better.
She throws out an arm to hold him back.
I don’t like that at all, so I reach out and give her threads just a little tug of warning. Without really thinking about it. It’s that easy. That instinctual now.
She gasps, stumbling to the side as if I’ve knifed her.
“Allow Cal to make his own choices,” I say. “It’s not for you to direct his fate.”
“Oh yeah?” she says, trying to rally. “That’s your job now? I hear you got yourself caged even worse than us. You wouldn’t have gotten out if Jewels hadn’t risked us all.”
I don’t disagree with her. And she doesn’t try to block Cal from stepping a little closer to look at me.
We squint at each other in the sunlight. Not a hint of purple in his eyes. Not yet.
“I know your sister, Presh,” I say. “Well, both your sisters. And three of your older brothers.”
“Good for you,” he says caustically. “They don’t bother with me.”
“Jewels didn’t tell you?” Lou looks around us nervously, even though as a shifter, she’d pick up the nearby presence of people by sound. Depending on what sort of ‘chill pill’ she’s prone to taking, of course. “Cal isn’t one of the Cataclysm’s kids.”
Cal doesn’t take his attention off me, but when I don’t correct her, he smirks. “You said we had somewhere else to be? That ‘pop stand’ thing?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Pascal.”
“What is?”
“My stupid name,” he grumbles.
I hold my hand out to him.
He eyes it like my offering it is a personal offense. “I’m not a baby. I can walk fine on my own.”
I quash a grin. “Keep up, then.” I turn to walk through the patio doors that Lou flung open. Cal follows on my heels, Lou and the berserker trailing behind as if helplessly caught in our wake.
After bickering with Ricky, then bickering over the amount of luggage everyone is taking, Jewels loads five other kids and two more women into two trucks — the one we drove here and a second identical vehicle, same color, make, and model.
Plus, Cal and Lou. They’ve obviously been planning their escape for a while.
Maybe for as long as I’ve been held by the Cataclysm. But once more, I let the opportunity to gain clarity on how long that is pass me by. I think doing so might be necessary for my mental health at this point.
The kids range in age from a tiny toddler to about eight or nine.
All of them are quiet and seemingly obedient, though the furtive glances from them to the still-hovering Ricky, the nameless berserker, and me are telling.
The woman in her forties is Jewels’s mother, though she’s shorter and lighter skinned.
The other woman, a shifter in her late twenties, is clearly the mother of the youngest.
I don’t ask where the other mothers are. I already know and don’t need any of that voiced out loud around the kids.
Names aren’t shared with me, seemingly deliberately. The women’s understanding of my power and the power of awry in general is obviously … ill-informed. Purple-eyed essence-wielders don’t need names to wreak havoc.
Cal is perched next to me on the lowered tailgate of the truck we arrived in, swinging his legs and humming quietly to himself. I don’t pick up the tune, but I suspect it’s something he’s made up himself because a shiver of energy underlies the vocalization.
Lou and Jewels are locked into some whispered fight in the front hall of the house. It’s their third confrontation since we all met up. I didn’t bother listening in before, nor do I do so now. It has nothing — and also everything, I suppose — to do with me.
I don’t set the house on fire. But I really want to. I’m slightly worried about traumatizing the kids, though, even more so than this entire experience must already be disturbing.
Ricky tries to pull Jewels aside as she spins away from a red-faced Lou. She strides past him, brushing him off. Every time.
She might have seemed meek around the Cataclysm, but Jewels is forthright and focused when on mission. She made the decision to use me to rescue the kids, including the baby in her belly, and she’s clearly not going to allow anything to distract her.
Jewels’s mother helps get the toddler strapped into a car seat as she quietly tasks the second-eldest child as the toddler’s guardian for the rest of the day.
Then she hustles over to me, eyes not quite lifting to meet my own.
She’s a mage. Curvy, with fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, but not a hint of gray in her dark-blond hair.
Essence swirls around the rings on her fingers as she clasps her hands before her, almost in prayer, then deliberately drops them to her sides.
“I’m Pinky’s friend,” she says quietly. “Her ex-sister-in-law. She says that she … owed you a favor …”
I snort quietly. “A favor she foisted upon me.”
A smile flits across her face — a quiet joy at remembering her friend, perhaps.
With her mother a mage, Jewels’s father must have been a bear shifter and tied to the Cataclysm MC.
“Yes, it was a quick conversation …” She clears her throat.
“Even a fireside chat might be monitored in the Federation if it happens more than once.”
“I understand.”
“I’m … I’m … goodness, I’m so nervous.”
I just let her work through it. Cal’s seemingly unconscious humming cut out the moment she approached. His gaze is on the two of us now, soaking up every word.
“I’m … I understand what you are … am I to ask you for —”
“No.” I quickly cut her off, speaking pointedly for the benefit of the universe, not her. “None of you will carry the burden of being indebted to me. You are just … along for the ride as I make my own way home.”
She nods a little doubtfully.
I try on a smile, though my headache is seriously killing me. I still haven’t found any sunglasses.
She swallows, dropping my gaze. So my smile really doesn’t convey much sweet softness. She taps her chest with three fingers from her left hand, clearly waiting. To be dismissed?
“What is your name?” I ask, trying to not be pissy about the near-worship shit going on. Again.
She nods her head a little frenetically. “Angie. Agnes May Joh —”
“Thank you, Angie,” I say before she can give me her full name. Not that it makes a difference — for me — but just so the universe doesn’t get other ideas and mistake the offering of it as a favor to be collected.
“Jewels is my entire world,” Angie murmurs, turning her head just enough to watch her daughter arguing with Ricky by the front bumper of the second truck. “I’d do anything, owe anything, to get her safe.”
I wince, but thankfully no essence shifts between us at that open-ended invitation.
“I should have gotten her out when her father … died. But she’d already caught his eye.”
The Cataclysm, she means.