Angie hisses under her breath.
“You never owed me in the first place,” I say easily, though my raised arm is getting tired. “But your fear will take you only so far on your own.”
Jewels practically bares her teeth at me. Lou shifts uncomfortably. Trixie’s desperation to get away from me is all but leaking through her pores.
“For the baby,” I say without thinking about it. And then suddenly, I understand that the child Jewels is carrying is important to the universe. Perhaps for the most minor of reasons, but that is literally how the thread is woven.
I thought this entire rescue might have been centered around Cal, with the others just along for the ride.
Jewels plucks the scratch ticket from my hand. “Fine,” she says. “I’m … I didn’t like what he was doing to you, but … it could have been worse.”
“Good to know,” I say caustically.
She flinches, opening her mouth to clarify her observations about my imprisonment. Angie squeezes her daughter’s wrist, cautioning her.
Ignoring them and achingly aware that I absolutely don’t want to be in this moment any longer, I hold the tickets out to Lou.
“What will I owe you?” she asks nastily. “I get what you are, what the color of your eyes means. Like, a life debt, right? That’s not a fair trade for a couple hundred or even a thousand bucks.”
“If you were destined to die in the Federation,” I say, not completely answering her question because I don’t actually know, “you already owe me your life.”
“Take it,” Cal snaps from the base of the slide.
Lou flinches, then plucks the second-last ticket from my hand.
Trixie takes a large step back before I even offer her the final ticket. And that’s a choice, isn’t it? So I simply tuck it in the back pocket of my ridiculous cutoff shorts, turning in Cal’s direction. “I’ll buy you a burger.”
He juts his chin out. “What if I want something else?”
I quash a smile. He really doesn’t need encouragement. “Anything I can give you is yours for the taking,” I say, essence threading through the promise.
Lou steps forward as if she’s going to grab my arm. She doesn’t, but her chest rattles with the growl of her beast. A bear, I assume. “We’re leaving,” she snaps, rubbing her chest as if the sound was disconcerting. “Without you.”
“I knew that already,” I say, more amused than pissed now. “We’re headed in opposite directions, after all.”
“Right,” she says, blinking as if she’s just realized how utterly rude she’s being. “We need to keep moving.”
“He’s not coming after you.”
“For Cal, he will.”
“And why is that?” I ask mockingly, interested to see if she’ll drop the pretense about Cal not being the Cataclysm’s kid even though she’s already admitted as much.
She doesn’t. “He can find us, take us, without coming himself.”
“He’s otherwise occupied,” I say. I know it’s the truth because it’s me he’ll be hunting, might already be hunting. “Cal and I have time for a conversation.”
“I’m his guardian,” Lou insists. “He doesn’t need you in his life, or … the brothers that abandoned him …”
I lower my voice. “Is that the vitriol you’ve been pouring into him? To keep him tied to you?”
She jerks away from me, face flushing. “It’s not … that’s not …”
Cal heaves himself off the bottom of the slide as if he’s a road-worn eighty years old, not twelve. “It’s my choice,” he says, looking at me but responding to Lou.
“Yes,” I say.
“No,” she says.
