Eastward, according to the dashboard compass. The opposite of the direction I want to be going. Something tugs in my chest, like a pinch of sadness.
Farther away, I realize. I’ve just turned farther away from my mate.
My mates. Plural. Though I have no idea how I’m going to breach the chasm between Reck and me. I’m not certain if I really want to.
My aunt survived without all her soul-bound mates.
She also died easily a century before her time, thereby stealing that century of my life. Stealing my life as Zaya, with my own soul-bound mates, from me.
“Do you have any sunglasses?” I ask Jewels, shoving away the useless self-pity. It’s done. Unchangeable. Dwelling in the past won’t fix what’s broken in the now.
“Oh, um, it’s not my truck, so I’m not sure.”
I yank open the glovebox, finding a handgun, a knife, and a couple of packages of hot sauce. No sunglasses. I sigh, rubbing my already aching temples. “I’m going to need a phone.”
Jewels shakes her head. “Not within the Federation. It’s all monitored. But … once you get us over the border … we’ll try to get you anything you need. You …. you can get us over the border, right? All of us? My mother, Pinky’s friend, is getting everything organized with the kids, but —”
“Yes.” I press my head back against the headrest again, finally allowing myself to close my eyes against the bright day. Just for a moment. I ignore Jewels’s ‘but’ and everything implied in the unarticulated question. I wouldn’t be heading this way if the universe wasn’t going to use me to extract the kids from Federation territory. “I can get you all over the border.”
Jewels’s grip on the wheel remains firm, her attention on the road fixed as she takes me farther and farther away from where I desperately want to be. Where I can surround myself with the family I’m slowly building. A family I’m still not certain I deserve. A family I’m not certain I’m allowed to have —
Jewels clears her throat. “You mean California, though, right? Because, um, the Navajo Nation won’t allow us to stay —”
“Through the Navajo Nation and into California. All of you, all at once. Safe and sound,” I say, essence threading through my words, enforcing the promise. Even if I don’t yet know who exactly makes up the ‘us’ I need to collect and protect.
Jewels’s energy finally relaxes, just a little. She turns up the air conditioning, then fiddles with the radio, finding a station that plays old rock. Classic rock, I suppose it’s properly called. But it feels old.
Like I do, deep in my bones now. The ancient power settling deeper within me.
Everlasting. Conduit. Goddess?
I had had a thought … tangled with Rought in my bed, perched on Rath’s lap in the tower library, whispering with Presh in the early morning … that I might be able to be both a person and the Conduit.
But those blood runes the Cataclysm used to imprison me? They feel etched deeper than skin now, carved into bone, threaded through my life force, woven through my very DNA. Containing Zaya, caging her, until only the Conduit, the goddess, remains.
Of course, that all could just be an overreaction.
I’ve had a shitty fucking day, and it’s only just beginning.
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?!”
