“Not good enough.”
Viciously, I said, “I don’t want you to watch me die, you idiot. It’s tearing you apart watching the cancer eat me.”
Eli slanted a look at me, one hard and cutting. “You ran away. You always run away.”
I tried to cuss but the words stuck in my throat. I managed, “I’m sorry.”
Eli nodded, a tiny dip of his chin. “You should always make use of backup if it’s available. It was available and you went out alone.Don’t.” His tone was steely. Softer he said, “However, what you did was brilliant, flying with a trackable cell. It was a good plan. We know where you went. Is the last location you circled for so long the place where EJ is?”
“Yes.” I took a few deep breaths. And accepted Eli’s hand, which was still out, in offering. He pulled me to my feet and steadied me. The pain swept through me like waves if waves were made of blades and broken glass. “Gimme a minute,” I said. I held the Anzu feather hard against me. The pain ratcheted down slowly.
“You’re right about one thing. I do not want to watch you die.”
“Okay. So I don’t die. I stay alive.”
“Good plan.” Eli opened his cell. Punched a number. He said, “Yeah. We’re heading back in. Last coordinates are where she tracked EJ. Shimon has him. She confirmed that there are two groups of fangheads, competing.” Helistened for a bit and I didn’t try to overhear. I was too busy breathing. “Copy.” He closed the cell and picked up my gobag and the crystal. “What’s this?”
“Soul. I’m pretty sure. We’ll need to free her but... I don’t know how. She’s trapped but that isn’t her arcenciel form. It’s a mermaid form. And I’m pretty sure she isn’t sane in that form.”
“Yeah. Copy that.” Eli studied Soul in the beam of his flash.
“If we find a rift in the dimensions,” I said, lying by omission, “we can try breaking the crystal and tossing her in.”
“Yeah. We’ll do that. Just go out and find a rift. Though I guess a rift isn’t any more impossible than anything else we’ve done.” He tucked Soul in his pocket and slid an arm under my shoulder and around my back. Our heights were pretty much the same, but it worked. He flipped on a strong flashlight and shone it across the snow.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.” I took my first step. Agony like boiling oil passed through my middle. I took a second step. And a third.
It was nearly dawn when we got back to the inn. Eli used his cell continuously, and by the time we got back, a battle plan had been organized. But I still hadn’t found Beast. And I wasn’t able to fight for EJ. I would be a liability. Which just sucked.
I lay on my recliner with the heated blanket on high, sipping chocolate with CBD oil in it, trying to find Beast, trying to find my half-form. No such luck. I watched the team as they filed out the door, taking the kids with them to drop off with Bedelia and Carmen at Evangelina’s old place, the only safe place the witches knew. Gramma, Carmen, and the two human sisters were going to keep watch over them. The café would remain closed for the morning breakfast business. Asheville didn’t slow down for a little snow, and the locals without power usually came out to Seven Sassy Sisters Café en masse when snowfall hit. Snow days were big moneymakers. But not today.
Brute, who had been injured in the vamp attack, wason the sofa, curled around himself, healing with were-creature speed. I smelled vamp blood on him and in him. Once again, despite the hatred between weres and vamps, they had saved him. But he was deeply asleep. On one shoulder lay the grindylow, also asleep.
Outside, as the dawn grayed the sky, the vamps went to their hideouts for the day and the witches and humans took off on snowmobiles to the main road, which was freshly plowed. Box trucks that had been parked at a nearby gas station pulled up and the smaller vehicles were loaded in. I hadn’t even thought about needing to get around on plowed and clear streets and then back onto packed snow. “Good thing someone had a brain,” I said.
Understanding my comment, Alex said, “Box trucks were put in place by Eli and Shaddock during a break in the weather. Eli also has the helo on standby. And the sheriff’s office and Buncombe County Emergency Services have been informed that the Dark Queen’s people are searching for the Flayer of Mithrans. Your brother called. He said to let him handle it. I told him to... um...” Alex’s face went red. “I told him to do something anatomically improbable.”
My lips twitched into a smile before it faded. Pain brushed through me as if pushed by a broom, and I forgot to breathe. When I could speak, I griped a whisper, “I’m useless in this form. No wonder they left me behind.”
“Nah. You’re just a lone wo...” He stopped as Brute rolled over on the oversized sofa, lifted his head over the sofa arm, and gusted out a sigh that stank of dog breath. “Lone cat,” Alex said. “You’re just a lone alpha cat trying to lead a pride of alpha cats.” He grinned over his keyboard, curls dangling in his face. “Sucks to be you. Lemme play my tiny violin, Your Majesty.”
I threw a pillow at him. But I felt a lot better.
***
It was Alex and me in the house, alone—sleep deprived and ornery on Alex’s part; sleep deprived and in serious pain on my part—as the box trucks and then the snowmobiles moved our people around. I was hoping Beast wouldcome back online, reboot herself, and help me into my half-form. If not, I’d have to change to Beast and then I’d be useless until she let me shift into half-form. I hated to admit it, but Beast had as much control over my shifting as I did. Maybe more, since we had spent more than a hundred years in her form.
On the screens and over the comms, we listened to the team travel, which was next to impossible on roads that were mostly but not always plowed and some that were not designed for anything bigger than a pickup truck. It was midday before they were in place. And by then, the cars I had followed as owl were all gone.
The team moved in to find a Halloween fright house complete with scattered viscera and gore, five beheaded vamps, six dead humans, and enough blood spatter to qualify the house as a testing ground for crime scene school. Legolas wasn’t there. Neither was EJ.
I could practically feel Molly across the miles, disintegrating. “Alex.” I made a cutting motion across my throat. The younger Younger cut the mic so we could talk privately. “Ask Eli on a private channel if EJ’s clothes or his marble locator device are on site. If not... I have an idea.”
“Copy that.” Alex opened a private channel to his brother.
I lifted the crystal prison that held a mermaid-predator creature captive. Soul was frozen inside the four-inch-long quartz crystal, her finger-fins wide open, her lips parted, her scaled body trapped in the midst of a twisting motion, like an eel trying to escape. Slavery was evil in every way.
But, for EJ... I twisted the chain, sending Soul’s body twirling with the decorative quartz.
