THIRTY-ONE
Evalle rode silently in the panel van with four Nyght Raiders and considered the clear skies growing lighter each minute as they reached downtown Atlanta. She had less than an hour until daylight only because she’d convinced Isak that Nightstalkers found her on occasion, not the other way around.
And he hadn’t wanted her exposed to the sun.
He’d been very accommodating after that kiss.
She couldn’t think about that right now, with a bigger worry looming. Grady. She had to find that old ghoul and make sure he didn’t talk to Isak.
How was she going to do that and not agree to give Grady the hour he wanted tomorrow night?
Just once she’d like a simple problem to solve.
The van parked next to where they’d picked her up. Wet heat slapped her skin with the unwelcome rise in temperature after her chilly air-conditioned ride.
“Need anything before we depart?” Laredo said.
“Sure. How about one of those demon blasters?” She gave her GSX-R a quick once-over just to appease him, but she’d have known immediately if anyone had touched her bike.
Isak’s man didn’t crack a smile.
Save her from men with no sense of humor. “You’re free to return to Yoda.”
He climbed into the van, which rolled away.
Isak hadn’t asked to see her eyes again, but he would eventually press that issue. If she ran out of time with the Tribunal, would he still offer to help her if he found out she was an Alterant? Or just rid the world of one more threat?
Lot of ifs and little time to spend on any of them.
Grady should have intel by now, but after an hour of stalking the old ghoul, she had a sick feeling something was very wrong. Where was he?
That hour he wanted on Wednesday night played loud in her mind. What was he willing to do to get that?
She’d have to head home soon or dig out her protective gear and ignore the heat already climbing into the nineties.
Nightstalkers normally gathered within minutes if someone with supernatural abilities stood in one spot and radiated a power field. She’d been doing that for the past hour. One wispy figure finally showed up, when Evalle would normally be engulfed in a crowd of them when Grady wasn’t around.
With no other offers, Evalle cut a quick deal and traded a handshake with a scraggly woman who had to be in her eighties. She got right to the point. “Where are the other Nightstalkers?”
The old woman lifted a hand with paper-thin skin that showed every vein and used her scrawny fingers to brush at the delicate white hair tufted over her head. “They took the others.”
“Who took the others and when?”
“Kujoo. They didn’t act normal. Offered Nightstalkers a trade to stay in this form for more than ten minutes.” She sniffed when a tear streaked along her wrinkled face.
“What’s wrong?” Evalle put her arm around the woman. She would hunt down Tristan and make his bunch very sorry if they had hurt this woman when they’d been here.
“I was too slow,” she mumbled again. “They swore we could stay this way, human, forever.”
Evalle hated having to douse the hope in the old woman’s voice, but she had to stop Nightstalkers from going with the Kujoo. “It’s a lie. The Kujoo are turning Nightstalkers into something that can’t hold a human form or a ghost form. Something evil. Pass the word around to hide from them.”
Tears drizzled down the old woman’s face and dripped off her chin at the stark disappointment in losing the glimmer of hope that she could return to her prior life. Evalle felt as though she’d taken a crayon from a child, but she wouldn’t let the Kujoo trick any more of these poor souls.
Grady was a wily old guy who understood evil. Maybe he hadn’t shown up here because he was hiding from the bad guys.
Maybe she’d convince herself that was the case in another lifetime, when in truth she had a sick feeling he’d been caught by Tristan and the Kujoo.
Daylight had pressed in close by the time Evalle made sure the old woman was safely back in her Nightstalker form and Evalle reached her underground garage.
She struggled to stay awake all the way to her apartment. Feenix thumped, thumped, thumped down the hallway, running to meet her. But he stopped short of flying at her.
He must have seen the desolation in her eyes that soaked through her bones. She forced a smile to her lips and made it real for him. “Hi, baby.”
Clapping the sides of his body with his fat little hands, he waddled to her, grunting undecipherable words, then hugged her leg. She patted his head. “Let me get a shower and type a letter, then we’ll play, okay?”
He danced around, chirping with happy sounds, before he landed on his beanbag, where he normally waited for her.
After a quick run through the shower, she pulled on a T-shirt and underwear, then plopped down on the bed with her laptop. Ignoring the possibility of being locked away by the Tribunal as a worst-case scenario or having to ask Isak to help her disappear as best-case scenario would be foolish. She opened a blank document and typed, “To Tzader and Quinn: If I lose my case with the Tribunal and don’t return …”
Thumping and grunting noises reached her before Feenix showed up at her bedroom door. He was dragging his stuffed alligator and a pair of her dark sunshades. She had five pairs besides the one she was wearing.
He flapped his wings and flew to her bed, landing softly beside her. When he tucked his wings, she lifted her arm so he could crawl up against her. He put on the dark sunshades and settled against her chest with his alligator tucked under one arm.
She hugged him, her heart aching over the impossible thought of leaving Feenix, her apartment, Tzader, Quinn … and the rest of the team who had stood by her tonight.
And there was Storm, who knew she was an Alterant and had no issues with that.
She was beginning to think he might actually be telling her the truth about not helping Sen put her away. But he couldn’t prevent Sen from carrying out a Tribunal decision.
Using one hand to type so she didn’t have to give up any chance to hold Feenix, she pecked away. The pain of losing this little guy cramped her lungs when she tried to breathe, but she would make sure he was never left to depend on the world’s mercy like she had been.
There was no mercy in this world for misfits.
Tristan had called that one right.
When she finished typing the letter, she attached it to an email set to send to Tzader and Quinn on Thursday by noon. If the Tribunal locked her up, the email would ensure Feenix’s future was secure, but her baby would be lost without her.
People liked dogs and cats.
Not something that ate lug nuts and breathed fire. Only Tzader and Quinn would protect him.
He stopped muttering words and sounds when she closed her laptop. She should tell him she might not return, but she couldn’t do it yet. “Let’s go see what’s in the kitchen utensil drawer for you.”
Feenix turned and hugged her with one arm. “Mine.”
She swallowed against the lump in her throat and hugged him back. “You’re mine, too, baby.”
For now.
There had to be something she could do, but what? The only Nightstalkers left in the city had no intel on the Kujoo. The human woman with the rock couldn’t be tracked after teleporting. Vyan clearly did not like Tristan, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to hand the woman and the rock over to the Kujoo.
Sitting here with time disintegrating was driving her nuts. She had to do something.
She scrolled through emails while she groused mentally and stopped at one from Nicole with a subject line of IMPORTANT. It read:
Must see you soon. Even daytime.
Evalle lifted her phone and dialed Nicole, who answered on one ring. “Hi, Nic.”
“Where have you been?”
“Butt deep in alligators. What’s up?” Evalle shushed Feenix, whose eyes lit up with excitement when he realized she was talking to Nicole.
“You’re in deep trouble.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, Nic.”
“Come over and I will. Not on the phone. Sorry, but I don’t trust it with the work you do and what I want to tell you.”
Nic had a point. No telling what Isak could tap if he found her number. But going to see her friend now meant putting on gear to ride in the heat and she had no time tonight. Ugh. “Can you give me a hint?”
“You looking for a stone?”
Oh, shit. The heat be damned. “I’m heading your way.”
“Ride.” Feenix pushed away and stood up on the bed, bouncing as she ended the call. “Go ride. Go ride.”
She’d taken him for a late-night ride on the bike once and he’d loved it, especially when she’d stopped by Nicole’s to show Feenix to her. He loved Nic.
Nicole had never driven a vehicle, and she required someone to drive her wheelchair-accessible van when she did travel. For her, Evalle would make the ride in daytime. And to get a hand up on finding this stone. If traffic worked in her favor, she could make Avondale in fifteen minutes. Riding alone would be quicker, but she had little time left with Feenix if she lost her bid with the Tribunal. “Come on, baby. Let’s get you dressed and go for a ride.”
Feenix tossed his alligator up in the air and caught it, stomping back and forth on the bed. “Go ride, dammit.”
“We’re going to have to work on your vocabulary,” she told him on the way to finding his T-shirt. “You’ll need those sunshades, too. We’ll be in midday sun.”
But she was wrong. By the time she’d covered herself in a custom lightweight Aerostich riding suit she’d just received in the mail and wheeled her bike out of the elevator car, the skies were overcast, with temperatures in the eighties.
Not ideal, but a welcome break.
Putting the side stand down, she turned to Feenix, who hopped out of the elevator and landed next to her.
“Don’t forget, you’re a robot today,” she told him.
Feenix immediately straightened up and pretended to move his hands and feet like a robot while he walked around in a circle.
“You’re good.” She put goggles on him to cover his eyes that glowed sometimes, and gloves, to keep him from using his power inadvertently. Then she lifted him up to the back of her bike seat. He gripped a looped strap on each side that gave him the look of a stuffed animal attached to the chassis.
The black T-shirt Nicole had given her for Feenix raised a smile to Evalle’s lips. Just above his potbelly, it read EVL TOO. Nicole’s idea of the perfect match for Evalle’s vanity motorcycle tag, which read EVL ONE.
“Go fath, dammit.” Feenix kept staring straight off the rear of the bike, but his mouth curved up.
“Will you stop saying ‘dammit’ if I get you a bucket of lug nuts?”
“Yeth. What ith bucket?”
“Never mind.” Her gear was lightweight but hot standing still with no air moving. “Sit up straight and don’t talk to anyone. Got it?”
He looked at her and pointed at his mouth, as in you told me not to talk.
She smiled. He had her there.
Climbing on, she cranked the engine and kinetically closed the elevator door.
The ride to Avondale, which was east of downtown Atlanta, took a few minutes longer than expected. A good little backseat rider, Feenix leaned with her through the curves and made a high-pitched whistling sound when she revved the RPMs.
Nicole lived in a remodeled warehouse near Main Street, not because living in a loft apartment was the style for a woman in her late twenties but because she liked the sense of community she found here.
Evalle used the security code to enter and parked in the secured garage beneath the four-story building.
Feenix hopped down and hurried over to the elevator, where he flapped his wings to reach the button.
“Feenix! Robot, remember?”
“Thorry.” He dropped back down to the concrete and did his robotic circle walk.
Evalle reached the elevator as the door opened and two women walked out. They took one look at Feenix and stopped. Evalle lifted her key ring, which had a small black box on it, and pointed the box at Feenix. “Walk into the elevator.”
He did a perfect imitation of a robotic gargoyle.
The women laughed and oohed over him.
Bless Feenix, because he managed not to smile when she could see how much he wanted to.
Thankfully, the fourth floor hallway was vacant of humans. Nicole’s door opened before she knocked on it.
Beautiful. That word always jumped into Evalle’s mind when she saw Nicole, with her caramel brown hair that flowed and curled around her brown sugar shoulders, but the woman wasn’t the least bit vain. She wore a flowing sleeveless housedress that hid the crippled legs she’d been born with, and she leaned heavily on her rosewood cane.
“I’ve been waiting for you.” Nicole inched forward to give a hug she knew Evalle didn’t allow easily. When Nicole hobbled backward and opened the door wider, she saw Evalle wasn’t alone. “Hello, Feenix. Oh! You’re wearing the shirt I gave you.”
Bouncing into the apartment, Feenix took Nicole’s exclamation as a cue to be himself again. He stomped from foot to foot and pointed at his shirt. “Like it, dammit.”
Nicole gave Evalle a sharp look at the curse word.
“Don’t ask. It was an accident, and I haven’t been able to fix it.” Evalle told Feenix, “‘Dammit’ is not a good word, so don’t use it, okay?”
“Whereth my bucket?”
“What?” Nicole asked.
“That’s another conversation. What’s up?”
“You’re in a lot of trouble.”
“I don’t need a witch with psychic ability to tell me that. I could have used my Magic Eight Ball.”
“You need someone to clue you in on how bad it is.” Nicole lifted her hands and murmured words, then the room fell dark as night. “Get out of that gear and start catching me up on the details while I fix our tea.”
Nicole produced several colorful twirling toys that floated across the room. Feenix took up the chase, flying after them through the eleven-hundred-square-foot apartment while Evalle gave her the rundown. Tzader and Quinn had warned Evalle about discussing Belador or VIPER business with anyone outside the tribe and agency respectively, but Nicole knew both groups existed and, at times, details that surprised Evalle.
She’d met Nicole while patrolling Avondale for Southend warlocks her first week in Atlanta. Warlocks were male witches who walked on the dark side of life, and the trio terrorizing Avondale had been especially dangerous.
When Evalle had found the three supernatural goons, she’d thought Nicole was a lone wheelchair-bound woman in danger of being hurt. But Nicole had intentionally drawn the boys into a dead-end driveway at the rear of a shopping center after midnight. She’d revealed herself as a witch, then used her rare gift to show them what their future held where they would end up enslaved to a more powerful warlock with twisted sexual cravings.
Nicole had done more in sixty seconds than anyone had accomplished with the three boys in their entire lives. She’d given them a choice of going to a halfway coven house for rehabilitation or facing worse judgment by their peers for crimes committed against humans.
They’d made the smart choice.
When Nicole realized Evalle had witnessed the exchange, she’d warded Evalle against being seen by the warlocks when they’d walked away from the alley, protecting her from any repercussion down the road in case the rehab didn’t work.
Evalle had never had a stranger act so selflessly on her behalf except for Tzader and Quinn.
Nicole was a rare witch, not because she was psychic.
Psi ability wasn’t uncommon in witches, but Nicole could speak to spirits from the future and sometimes give that future a corporeal form. That might sound like a handy ability to have, except that opening up a channel for a spirit from the future also opened a pathway for that spirit to travel to the present day. With no way of knowing if the spirit was evil or not, Nicole risked being attacked or unleashing the spirit on someone she cared about.
And when Nicole’s spirit traveled forward to search for answers, she risked being trapped in the pathway, which would leave her body an empty host.
But right now she was seated on a cozy chair in autumn colors across from where Evalle perched on a sofa. Nicole put her tea down on the glass end table at her left and clasped her hands in her lap while Evalle gave her a rundown on what had happened so far.
Nicole sighed quietly. “That explains some of my visions. You know of the ancient tribe who hunts the Ngak Stone, of the male being who is helping that tribe and about the human female whose life dangles in the midst of it all because she found the stone. But do you know why the female will not give up the stone?”
“She thinks it’s like a genie’s lamp that will grant her wishes?”
“That would have been my first guess, but when I asked the spirits for help all I got was that her world is a blur of fear.”
“Fear of what? Is someone hurting her?”
Nicole frowned with deep thought. “Not yet. I think the blurry part is important, but I don’t know what it means. Do you know anything about this woman?”
“I saw her.”
“Really? Did you talk to her?”
“No, I was too busy fighting off the guy helping the Kujoo.” Evalle rubbed her forehead, pushing back the ache from lack of sleep. “All I know is she’s clueless about all this.”
“What about the blurry part?” Nicole pressed.
Evalle ran back through last night in her mind until she hit on how the woman had been out in the dark with no flashlight and had felt with her hands at one point for her dog. But her eyes had been sharp and clear when she’d held the stone. “She might be blind.”
“Ah, I hadn’t considered that, since the woman was seeing something. It’s wrong to assume blind means no vision at all. Fear of a blurry world would make sense. You think the rock is allowing her to see?”
“Maybe.” Evalle sat up. “Do you know where she is?”
“No. Someone is blocking her face or shielding her.”
Crap. “Could be the Kujoo Vyan. I think he’s protective of her. If she is blind, she’s got to be terrified, between losing her eyesight and witnessing all that she saw in the park last night.”
“Hers was not the only fear I sensed. What is yours?”
The abrupt question caught Evalle off guard. “Nothing.”
Nicole’s pretty face stilled with disappointment at the lie.
Evalle sighed. “That’s not true, but I don’t want you searching my future.”
“If you fear something that’s coming, I can help.”
“My future has always been a crapshoot, but the dice are stacked against me right now. If you go looking into my future you could run into anything and not make it back.” Evalle considered what Nicole could do. “I need to know if I’m making the right decision on something. I have to find the Ngak Stone before another Alterant gets his hands on it.”
“There’s another Alterant free besides you?”
“Only because he escaped. He’s the guy working with the Kujoo and he hates Beladors almost as much as the Kujoo do. He claims Brina locked him away even though he didn’t turn into a beast or kill anyone before he was caged. I don’t know if I should believe that or not, but I’m more concerned with finding out if the Alterant, the Kujoo or the Medb are setting a trap for the Beladors. If not, I should have told the team about this Alterant, but if he was telling the truth about wanting me to tell my tribe, I’ve got to find a way to stop them from walking into the trap.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Tristan. Can you help me?”
“I’ll try.” Nodding, Nicole closed her eyes and leaned back. Several quiet minutes passed, then Nicole spoke a short prayer. Her eyelids started fluttering with rapid eye movement. “The Alterant Tristan … has a tortured past. He has lived as a beast in the jungle for five years.”
But had he changed into a beast before being caged or not?
Nicole was silent a moment, then said, “This same man at nineteen … is frightened, standing in front of strangers, Beladors, who are talking to him about his strange green eyes … then he disappears from his job digging graves and is in a jungle, terrified … he changes into a beast. He is tormented and alone.”
That sounds like Brina lied to me about Tristan. What about the other Alterants? Evalle’s throat tightened. She wanted to yell in frustration, but she wouldn’t distract Nicole.
“He does not have the stone yet. The Ngak Stone resides still with the female you met. She waits for … you. Follow the path from whence you last saw this stone. The trail will lead to the woman at her home, where you will find a sign of your next decision.”
That wasn’t a lot of help, since there was no way to track the woman after she’d teleported, and what did the “sign of her next decision” mean? Evalle kept quiet, watching Nicole’s lips move as she spoke in a dainty voice.
“Trust will open the path for one who is born to the task.”
Oh, great. Trust. One of my strengths. Why couldn’t Nicole tell her kicking demon ass opened the path? She had plenty of credits for that.
Nicole’s mouth puckered along with her brow with deep thought. “The path will lead to a choice one should not face.”
Evalle thought her head would explode with holding back her questions. What choice? That path didn’t sound promising.
“Your tribe’s future depends on the choice you make … to trust or not.”
What the heck did that mean? Evalle tapped her fingers on the fabric covering the sofa, waiting for a sign that Nicole was finished.
“You will be victorious—”
At that, Evalle gave up the breath she’d clutched in her lungs.
“—and you will lose.”
“What?” The word popped out before Evalle could clamp her lips shut. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Nicole’s eyes opened, drowsy at first, then lighting with the sharp intelligence that lived behind the hazel orbs. “The Kujoo do hold the future of your tribe in their hands.”
“I didn’t doubt that part. What did you mean about the choice to trust or not? To trust the Alterant Tristan?”
“Only you will know the answer to that one … unless you allow me to search your future.”
“No. It’s too dangerous. I’ll figure out who I have to trust. What about the victorious and losing part? How does that work?”
“There is no absolute win in your future. You must lose something.”
“Story of my life,” Evalle quipped.
“I hope not. I want you to survive this.”
“Me, too, but protecting my tribe comes first.” The story of her life, which was shaping up to be a short story.