Authors: J.A. Pitts
For the rest of us, however, the events of May were a catastrophe. Except the killing Jean-Paul part. That was pretty righteous.
We exchanged pleasantries for a bit: opera, which I knew nothing about; the art scene; philanthropy. Obviously we had nothing in common.
“On another subject,” he continued. His hand shook as he held a letter out to me. “I received this just before you arrived.”
I stepped over and took the embossed document. It was from the Dragon Liberation Front. Son of a bitch. Didn’t I wipe those bastards out several weeks ago?
Dear Mr. Sawyer,
Our last venture involving the mead has run into a snag, as you may have heard. For this, we offer our humblest apologies. It further pains us to bring you news most unsettling. We have opted to exercise other options in our quest for betterment. Be advised we have acquired something that belongs to you, something we believe to be of value.
If this is the case, perhaps we can come to an arrangement. I’m sure the sum required to release this valuable commodity would pale in comparison to its worth. We do hope you agree. We will be in contact with you in the coming days to arrange for said commodity’s release. For one such as yourself, we are sure the monetary sacrifice will be a blip on a balance sheet.
Yours in freedom,
The Dragon Liberation Front
I looked up at him and he grimaced.
“I believe they have taken Mr. Philips,” he said, his voice quavering.
My runes flared again, warning me of imminent danger. His fire was close to the surface. He was close to raging.
The young woman appeared with a pitcher of ice water and two glasses. I took the tray from her and waved her out.
“That is most unfortunate,” I said, pouring two glasses and taking one to him.
He drained it in one, and I thought I saw steam escape his mouth. I refilled his glass before sitting.
“We will be happy to help in returning your servant,” I said, thinking of how Qindra would react. “Nidhogg does not condone this type of activity within the boundaries of her kingdom.”
This settled him a bit. The tension ebbed from his shoulders, and he sat back with a sigh. “My thanks to your mistress.” His eyes gleamed. “I saw your mother today, it would seem.”
I stiffened, and he noticed immediately. Bastard. That caught me by surprise. I let a smile settle over my face and tried to breathe quietly. Lower the heart rate, quiet the battle instincts. He hadn’t touched her, and, hell, I had no idea what she was doing at my place in any case.
“I tell you what,” I offered, leaning forward. “I’ll do what I can to find Mr. Philips. He seems like a nice guy. And you asked so nicely. But my mother is not on your agenda, today or ever. Are we clear?”
“Are you sure?” he asked, his face quite amused. “There is something you may find intriguing about our meeting.”
The rage was rising in me despite my best efforts. I took a long draw on the cold water and set the glass on the table beside me.
“Are we done here?” I asked, standing.
“As you wish,” he agreed, standing to match me. “I will be in touch if I hear anything further.”
“Excellent,” I said. “I’ll find you here, I presume. For the next how many days?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. At this point, I would assume to be in town until Mr. Philips is returned to me.”
Good enough. “I’ll be in touch.”
His gaze followed me out of the room. There was something there, something I’d missed, but he shouldn’t have brought my mother into this. I needed to call Julie, to see what was going on. Was something wrong with Da? Was Megan okay? Crap, this sucked.
Forty
I
made good time over to
B
ellevue.
I
didn’t call
K
atie or anything, just went straight to my old apartment. I needed to know just what was going on.
Julie opened the door and pulled me in, looking behind me like she expected us to be attacked.
“What happened?” she asked. “Katie called me after you left, said you had gone to meet Frederick.”
“Where’s my mother?” I asked, pushing past her, looking from room to room.
“She’s gone,” Julie said, spinning around to keep me in sight. “She left an hour ago, not long after Frederick was here.”
I sat down on the couch, let my helmet roll on the floor, and covered my face with my gloved hands. “Christ, Julie. What was she doing here?”
She sat beside me, put her hand on my knee, and waited until I looked up. “Everything’s fine. Your family is safe.” She hesitated a moment, looking at me. “You look just like her, you know.”
I laughed. Holy shit. Of course I looked like her; she was my mother. I took a deep breath, peeled off my gloves, and shucked out of my jacket. Those I left on the couch, when I stood. “You have any coffee?” I asked. “I’m frozen.”
She got up and went past me into the kitchen. She ground fresh coffee and set up the machine. I sat at the table, and she took out cups, saucers, cream, and sugar. “Want some cookies?” she asked. “Mrs. Sorenson made a batch for Mary the other night, and I brought some home.”
They were fine cookies, but I really didn’t taste them. The coffee was hot and sweet, though. That’s what I needed.
“I met with Sawyer,” I told her, looking into her face for clues. “Someone killed one of his people up here, and he thinks it was the necromancer.”
“Interesting,” she said, stirring cream into her coffee. “Since the necromancer has been killing people somehow associated with you, does that mean he had someone watching you?”
“That’s what I figured, but he didn’t come right out and admit that. Now that group I smashed up several weeks ago, the Dragon Liberation Front, have snatched his right-hand man, Mr. Philips.”
She sipped her coffee, holding the cup in both hands. “Do you think the necromancer Justin and the Dragon Liberation Front are in league?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, waving my hand in the air. “The whole lot of them worked under Jean-Paul. I’m sure of it.”
The color drained from her face, and she fell silent. I knew about her trauma, the pain and torture. But I didn’t know about the fear. I’d had some time to come to grips with all this, pieced things together with Katie and Skella. This was all news to Julie.
“You okay, boss?”
We sat in silence for a couple minutes while she gathered herself. “I can’t imagine more of them, darker, more vile than Jean-Paul.”
I took her hand, just held it for a bit.
“You gonna call Katie, tell her you’re okay?”
“Damn it, yeah.” I got up, pulled out my cell, and called her. Julie sat with her coffee, pretending not to overhear my conversation.
“She’s only a little pissed,” I said, sitting back down a few minutes later. “But she thought coming here was a smart move.”
She nodded her head once and picked up a cookie from the plate. “She and I had quite the conversation. I hear you may be moving.”
Talking to her calmed me, gave me back balance and a sense of normal. “Maybe in the summer. We’ll see.”
“Going to spend that check Sawyer gave you, finally?”
Honestly, I hadn’t thought about it in a while. I was flush with money. That’s what I needed for the smithy out at Black Briar. I could get a new forge and everything.
“I’ll do something with it, I’m sure.”
I sipped my coffee a bit, thinking. Too much had gone down in the last twenty-four hours, and I welcomed the calm. The second cup of coffee was even better than the first, and I could feel my fingers and toes again.
“Okay, we’re all safe and sound. Dragons are where they need to be, and the world has not fallen into the sun.”
Julie looked at me, waiting.
“So, what the hell, Julie. Why was my mother here? Did someone die?”
“No, nothing like that.” She toyed with her cup, trying to think of a way to tell me something hard; I knew from experience.
“Just spill it,” I said, throwing my hands in the air. “Christ on a crutch.”
“She apologized to me several times for that f-bomb you dropped earlier.”
I rolled my eyes. “Great, whatever.”
She took a deep breath and looked at me with that boss look. “She came about Megan.”
Megan, damn. “Was she in trouble?”
“Nothing specific, but yeah. Your mom thinks she’s heading for trouble like nothing you ever did. They’re out of their minds with worry, and she’s slipping away from them in ways you never could.”
I shook my head. That made no sense. “I left. What more could I have done?”
“They’re worried she may be getting into drugs. You never did that.”
Drugs, crap. “No, not even in college. I had no desire to go through life wacked out on somebody’s poison.”
“And you went to college.”
“She’s not old enough. Fifteen,” I said. “They had me under an iron fist when I was fifteen. The only thing I had going for me was Tae Kwon Do.”
Julie got up and walked to the coffee table. “She left these for you.”
They were pictures of Megan. Dozens of them. School plays, yearbook photos, belt awards. “She’s a black belt?” I asked, surprised. “Took me to seventeen.”
“They let her start sooner,” she said, shuffling through the pictures and showing me one of Megan, maybe ten, getting her first rank.
I’d missed so much. Her whole training career to black belt. That was huge. Some of the pictures reminded me so much of me as a kid it hurt. But the rest, the ones where she got taller, prettier, coming into her own. Those gave me an ache I did not know was possible. God I missed her. Missed Ma, too.
“Your father is thinking about moving,” Julie said. “Something happened this summer that has him freaked out.”
The fear was back. Suddenly I was twelve, sleeping in the back of our car while sleet beat down on the roof. “Why? What happened?”
“Your mother wouldn’t say. She just thought you should know. Maybe thought you could come home, talk some sense into him. It was because of you they settled in Crescent Ridge. You knew that, right? He risked whatever scared him so badly so you could have a normal life.”
How many times can you say “fuck” in a day before you use up your allotment. I squeezed the bridge of my nose, trying to keep the tears from coming.
“She’ll run,” I said, looking at the most recent pictures of her. “If he tells her they’re moving, she’ll disappear. That’s what I was going to do.”
“That’s what your mother is afraid of.” She reached over and took my hands in hers. “Sarah. Your family needs you. Your sister needs you. Can’t you find some way to make this right?”
I pulled away from her, stormed over to the living room, and started throwing on my jacket and gloves. “I gotta go,” I said, feeling like a coward. “I can’t. Not now.”
She followed me to the living room and handed me my helmet. “What are you afraid of?”
I stopped, looked at her, and felt the fear tight and hard in my chest. “I can barely fix myself. I have dragons and necromancers screwing up my world. How can I bring that down on them? They have enough problems.”
“I see.” She walked to the door and opened it, giving me a free escape route. “I’m sure Megan will understand that when she’s living on the streets, hooked on heroin.”
Not fair. The runes tattooed on my body flared to life. The berserker rose in me: fight or flight, what’s it gonna be? I sat down on the couch, collapsed really, slamming it back against the wall. I put my fists on the sides of my head to hold in the scream I felt building. Keeping that in your head was the hardest thing in the world. So why try?
I shrieked, and Julie shut the door. I wailed, stamping my feet and slamming myself back into the couch, over and over. It only lasted a minute or so, and I only quit when the couch broke. It collapsed under me, broke the main support beam or something. My ass was on the floor, and my throat hurt from the screaming.
“Feel better?” Julie asked. I looked up and she was sitting in a kitchen chair she’d pulled into the living room to watch me. I’d knocked over the coffee table, somehow. I didn’t even remember touching it.
“Quite the tantrum.”
I took slow deep breaths, or slower than I’d been doing. It took me almost three minutes before my heart beat began to stop hammering in my head. It was possible I pulled something in my neck, or maybe my back.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Jesus, Julie. If Da’s set on running, how can I possibly stop him?”
“You faced a dragon, for fuck’s sake,” she said, her voice rising for the first time. “You faced that bastard while the rest of us lay broken and mangled. Even when he fled, you chased his sorry ass down to his lair and took the fight to him. You’re stronger than anyone I know, Sarah. Why can’t you give some of that to them? Go to them, or at least go to Megan. She’s drowning, and they’re both terrified they’ll lose her and then they’ll have nothing.”