I See You (Oracle 2) (14 page)

The guy closest to Ettie grabbed her arm. She shrieked, more affronted than injured.

Beau reached over and broke the grabby guy’s hairy wrist.

“Fuck!” the guy screamed, definitely in pain. He let go of Ettie and backed away from Beau.

Someone coughed …
 

No, my painfully slow brain informed me … that was what the bark of a silenced gun sounded like.

Before I could react, Beau was on the floor before me and Kandy was standing in his place.

The werewolf was holding Byron’s gun aloft, standing nose to nose with him.

Beau rolled to his feet but stayed hunkered down. He was assessing the situation.

Kandy had just saved his life.

My limbs felt heavy, sluggish. As if I were mired in a large tub of nasty processed cheese. Weapons were being drawn, bad guys were shifting around me, and I couldn’t move.

That was the moment Chi Wen had seen.

That was the moment I’d almost lost Beau.

“Nice dog bite,” Kandy sneered, nodding toward Byron’s scar. “Bet I can do better.”

Then she crushed his gun as if it were made out of brittle candy.

With his free hand, Byron reached underneath his loose silk shirt and pulled a stun gun out from a body harness. He wore two. He jammed the electric weapon into Kandy’s gut. She snarled and broke his arm.

He screamed, even as he somehow managed to hit her with the stun gun’s shock again.

Beau picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and ran for the locked lecture hall door.

“Stop,” Ettie screamed from behind him, but she wasn’t talking to her brother. She threw herself on the guy with the broken wrist who’d swung his gun to follow Beau’s movement.

Well, points for Ettie.

The other three assholes mobbed Kandy alongside Byron, slamming her with their stun guns and practically frying her with electricity. She didn’t go down, but she wasn’t in control of all her limbs anymore.

“Beau, no!” I cried. “Kandy!”

Beau smashed through the door, stumbling into a huge auditorium. A hundred or more metal-framed gray vinyl seats rose up before us.

“Meth ragers!” someone yelled from the lab.

“Don’t kill them!” Ettie screamed.

Beau dropped me to my feet.
 

“Beau!”

“Run, Rochelle,” he said. “You promised.” Already turning back into the lab, he glanced back at me, his eyes blazing green with his shapeshifter magic. “You promised.”

I nodded. Then, not wanting to waste time thinking about it, I spun left toward the stage area, away from what I assumed were the entrance doors. I went for the windows, not wanting to get caught in the maze of hallways.

Furniture splintered and glass shattered behind me as I snagged a wooden chair from behind a brown folding table. Once I cleared the lectern, I flung the heavy chair through the far windows, which appeared to overlook some trees growing in the green space between the buildings. The safety glass of the middle window shattered. The chair dropped over the exposed ledge.

Running over the escape scenarios Beau had drilled into me for eighteen months until they were just a jumble in my head to block out the grunts and groans emanating from the lab, I grabbed the ledge, scrambling to find a solid grip among the pebbles of glass littered there.

I flung my leg over the window frame. It was a high drop to the grass below. Well, for me at least.

A man screamed in pain behind me. Not Beau. I couldn’t help but smirk nastily at the sound. If it wasn’t for the stun guns and protecting Ettie and me, Beau and Kandy would have cleared the lab in two minutes.

I lowered my body over the edge. My satchel got caught up on the ledge above me. I tugged at the strap until the bag fell, whacking me painfully on the hip. Thankfully nothing appeared to fall out. I hung there for a moment, scraping my palms on the red brick of the exterior ledge. Then I dropped to the ground before I could talk myself out of it.

I lay there, stunned on the well-watered green grass, and staring up at the broken window ten or twelve feet above me. The wooden chair was on the ground beside me, but even if I dragged it underneath the window, it wouldn’t raise me high enough to climb back into the lecture hall.

Muffled grunting filtered down to me, shot through with pain.

Then a ferocious snarling growl.

Then nothing.

“Where’s the little bit?” Byron asked, sounding as if he was moving into the lecture hall. I still couldn’t place his accent. It was Southern, but definitely not the same as Beau’s and Ettie’s.

I rolled over onto my stomach, then pulled myself to my hands and knees. I was fairly certain I hadn’t hurt anything in the fall, but I didn’t feel like testing that notion right at this moment.

Footfalls crunched through glass on the other side of the window. “Hey!” someone shouted.

I wasn’t going to have much of a choice.

So I ran.

∞

I ran.
 

It was sweltering. And, though the sun was dipping in the sky, it was not yet setting.

I wanted to turn back, but I didn’t.

I ran away, as I’d promised so many times in so many training sessions over the past year and a half. I should never have persuaded Beau to go home. I should have been happy with a phoned-in warning … if only we could have found a working number. Obviously, if we’d tried harder, we could have found a working number. Everyone was online these days …

But I hadn’t been happy with the idea of a phone call. Had I been so convinced of my own abilities that despite Chi Wen’s warnings to observe and interpret — to not get involved — I had pushed Beau until he’d relented?

Had my arrogance and my childish need to claim my magic gotten Beau mentally screwed by his mother, beaten by his stepfather, and almost shot?

Oh, God. That had been the moment Beau was supposed to die. The moment Chi Wen had seen … and thwarted.

If nothing else, that was crystal clear. The far seer had just manipulated the future he’d seen. He’d just saved Beau’s life via Kandy.

Though I was clear on one other thing. I was running away while an asshole drug lord tortured Beau with thousands of volts of electricity. Of that, I was sure.

I blew by the next two buildings, startling a few students as I jogged past. Then I remembered that Beau had always said that I should call 911 and circle back in this sort of situation.

I cut right, then right again.
 

Actually, I wasn’t sure that calling the authorities was a smart move just yet. With Beau’s juvie record — plus whatever his connection to Byron was — a police presence might make everything a bigger mess.

Slowing my pace, I fell in behind a group of other twenty-somethings on a sidewalk that ran parallel to a road cutting through the campus. They were chatting about what cafeteria to hit for dinner while my boyfriend was being assaulted two buildings away.

A gray van drove by in the direction we were walking, then turned right across the sidewalk up ahead.

Finding the road made me realize I wasn’t sure I could backtrack to the parking lot where we’d left the vehicles. What happened if I couldn’t make it back to the Brave? Would it be towed?

Stop. Stop. Stop thinking
.

Following the van, I left the shelter of the students heading for dinner, then jogged across the lawn to round the corner of red-bricked Coulter Hall.
 

I crossed to the wide front walk leading to the entrance of the building, ducking in behind a group of four girls. By their endless stream of chatter, they seemed years younger than me. But by the discussion they were having about fall classes, they were actually two years older, at a minimum.

A small crowd had gathered before a paved area adjacent to the side road and before the front doors of the science building. It wasn’t a parking lot, so I guessed it was an area for delivery vehicles and whatever.

“What’s happening?” asked one of the girls I was tagging along behind when our forward progress was impeded by a wall of students.

“Some sort of campus security training exercise,” a guy answered back from the middle of the crowd.

I pushed my way through the students until I stood just behind the first row. Someone had thrown a couple of battered red cones on the sidewalk. Everyone around me was chattering and pulling out their phones.

About twenty feet away, Ettie was being pushed, none too gently, into the back of the gray van that had just passed me on the road. The guy with the broken wrist was doing the shoving. He was also limping, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, and wearing a navy windbreaker with the word ‘security’ emblazoned in white capital letters on the back. It was the sort of jacket that the bouncers or security guards wore at big events.

“That’s not campus security,” one of the girls said behind me.

Mr. Fake Security climbed in the back of the van after Ettie as I pushed my way through the crowd sideways in an attempt to see more of the interior of the vehicle.

Byron and a third meathead hustled out of the building, carrying Kandy between them. Apparently, the tiny werewolf was too heavy for just one of them. She appeared to be out cold. The sight made me seethe. At least, Byron’s right arm was tied in a makeshift sling.

They swung Kandy, dropping her — hard — into the back of the van. The meathead eyed the crowd nervously, stuffing his hand deep in the right pocket of his fake security jacket as he yanked the sliding door shut with his left.

I caught a glimpse of Beau and the two other bruisers in the back just before the van door latched closed. All three of them were out cold. And, even from this far away, I could tell that Byron’s thugs would have been better off being loaded into an ambulance. Beau’s head had been in Ettie’s lap, which made me feel slightly better about her.

“Are they … are they kidnapping those people?” another woman asked from my left.

“The real campus police are on their way,” a guy right beside me said.

The meathead crossed around to the driver’s side of the van as Byron turned to address the crowd. “No worries, guys,” he called. “Just a training exercise.” Then he flashed some sort of badge.

“Like that’s legit!” the guy beside me cried, stepping forward as if to confront Byron.

I grabbed his arm. “No,” I hissed. “Let security handle it.”

The guy shook me off, but he opted for pulling out his phone and taking pictures of the van instead of pushing forward.

Byron climbed into the passenger side of the van. The vehicle pulled away before he got his door fully closed.

The muttering and fretting of the crowd grew, but it was just a wash of useless noise.
 

Beau had drilled me with contingency plans, over and over again. I was supposed to call Audrey if we got separated. I was supposed to make it back to the pack if anything ever happened to him.

I cleared the crush of the crowd, but stayed nearby on the grass in the shadow of the brick building. I dug my phone out of my satchel and pulled up Audrey’s contact info.

Except … if I went to Portland, that meant I had to just let whatever was happening with Beau … with Ettie … with the vision … happen.

Beau would be pissed if I didn’t follow the plan he’d painstakingly drilled into my fiercely independent brain.

But how long would it even take Audrey to get to Mississippi? And then what? She’d call the police, or she’d at least ask for assistance from the Gulf Coast pack, and neither of those things was good for Beau. Well, I wasn’t sure about the pack thing, except I got the sense that Beau was protecting Ada from them for some reason.

I scrolled from A to B with a flick of my thumb. I had a dozen entries total, at most.

I stared down at the contact I’d selected.

Blackwell.

I didn’t trust the sorcerer. Beau didn’t trust the sorcerer. But he and I had formed a pact over a year and a half ago. Blackwell’s end of the bargain had included a ‘friends’ clause, one that meant he’d come to my aid if it was in his power to do so.

As far as I’d figured, sorcerers didn’t get much more powerful than Blackwell. Which was probably why most of the other Adepts I knew hated him. That, and he had a habit of collecting things that didn’t belong to him.
 

As he’d collected me.

I opened a text window and typed.

I’m in trouble.

I hit send. Then I heard sirens, so I backed farther away from the crowd, tucking myself behind a large tree to watch the campus police pull up to the building. As the first of the security guards stepped from their car, the crowd surged forward as one entity to voice their version of the events they’d just witnessed.

My phone pinged. I glanced down at a new text message.

> Where are you?

Oxford. University campus. Mississippi. I’m unharmed.

> Can you get to shelter? Somewhere private?

I glanced around. Campus security was pushing the crowd back, requesting that students head to their dorms or to the cafeterias. The guy who’d wanted to stand up to Byron was talking animatedly with a guard who was taking notes. Another guard was collecting cellphones.

I wasn’t sure where ‘shelter’ and ‘private’ would coincide, but I knew I’d figure it out eventually. I applied my thumbs to my keyboard.

Yes.

> Go. I’ll need an address and a picture.

I tucked my phone in my purse, thinking over my options. I clung to the anger evoked by watching Byron haul Kandy around like she was a bag of garbage. That fury overrode the fear that made me sluggish. It galvanized me, even if it was a false bravery built on adrenaline rather than ability.

Looking around at the still-gathering crowd, I was surprised that so many students were on campus for the summer semester. Perhaps the regular student body was just larger than I realized. Either way, some of the campus buildings had to be closed after hours or even for the entire summer. I just didn’t know how to identify them.

A dark-haired girl was watching me from around the corner of Coulter Hall. She ducked back when I saw her. But then she stuck her head out again, beckoning me.