Thicker Than Blood (5 page)

“Secure government prison for supernatural things?” Kira stood up. “No. That’s a bag of nope, tied with a nope bow, and with a big fat nope cherry on top.”

Wow, Alek’s sister really was a nerd. I was willing to bet he had no idea. In non-bizarro world, Kira and I might have been friends. I filed that into the sad thoughts file, which was overflowing lately into a sad thoughts filing cabinet.

I stood, too. It did sound insane; I didn’t blame her for thinking so at all. But… I had no choice. I stepped in front of her, which was one of the more terrifying things I’d ever done in my life.

“If you don’t help me,” I said, “There’s a better than good chance Alek will die.” Technically he already had.

She looked down at me with eyes colder than I’d ever seen Alek’s. “I don’t care,” she said, biting off the words one by one. Then she shoved me aside and stormed out the door.

Jaq rose. “I’ll talk to her,” he said, walking around the table to follow her out.

I stood there, back against the wall, breathing hard and trying not to start smashing tableware. Eventually the twins turned their chair, catching my attention, and looked at me.

“You really his mate?” Cora asked.

“Really,” I said. I missed him like hell right then, even worse than before. “What happened between them?”

“He killed a friend of ours,” Alma said after a moment and a heavy glance exchanged with her twin. Her lips pressed into a pale line.

“As Justice,” Cora added. She ran a nervous hand through her green hair, spiking it up in different directions.

I realized she meant Alek’s role. Justice. Something else he’d likely lost because of me. I started to say something like “he wouldn’t do that” but shut my mouth. Alek would, I knew. He’d have a reason, of course, and I doubted their friend had clean hands if a Justice had been sent after them, but… I knew Alek. We’d met with him accusing me of murder, after all. He would always do what he felt was right, no matter the consequences.

Noah re-entered the room before I could frame a response or another question, making me realize I’d never even seen him leave.

“Kira has agreed to stay the night and hear out my inside man in the morning,” he said. “There is a room for everyone if you want it, though she claims you will all stay in your vehicle.” The vampire’s nose wrinkled slightly as he said that, as though he could hardly imagine why anyone would choose an RV over a proper bed.

“Yeah, we’re good,” Cora said. “We can find our way back.” She and her twin took the hint and left the room.

I followed Noah again down another hallway that could have been the same or different from any of the others I’d come down. This place was a maze, which I guessed was intentional. He showed me to a small room that had a single bed and an attached bath with shower. My backpack was already there, sitting on a padded bench at the foot of the bed.

“Sleep, Jade,” he said, his voice and expression almost gentle. “I will wake you when the druid arrives.”

“What if Kira won’t help me?” I asked. I didn’t want to sleep, though my body certainly did. It was definitely in healing mode, begging me for rest even though I’d spent a lot of time sleeping the last two days. Or maybe three days? I was losing track of time. How long had everyone been out there, running and hiding, without me?

“She will,” Noah said. “She is hardly in a position to turn down what I offer her. Leave the tiger to me.” He left, closing the door behind him.

That didn’t sound ominous at all. Nope. I let it go. I took a long shower, not letting myself cry, and then changed into clean-ish clothing before lying down on the bed. Sleep took forever to find me. It brought only worry and nightmares, and no rest at all.

Harper knew she must have passed out for a while. The pain in her abdomen had faded, which hopefully meant the gash she’d felt earlier but couldn’t see had closed finally. Her head still throbbed like someone had wrapped it in a towel and beaten her with a sack of oranges, but opening her eyes to the dim light didn’t make her want to barf anymore. She knew from smell and sound that she was alone in the room. Somewhere beyond the wall at her back, she heard the cry of a chickadee.

So there were likely evergreens nearby. Harper filed that information away and twisted her neck as best she could, taking in the room now that she was alone and conscious enough to evaluate.

She was in a windowless wooden box, as far as she could tell, with a bolt screwed into the floor behind her anchoring the collar and chain around her neck. There were tiny wood shavings and lighter wood around the base of the bolt, so it was probably a new addition to the room. Biting her blood-crusted lip, Harper managed to spin a few degrees. A cheap card table stood against the wall near the door. Only one door. Her way out.

She’d read stories of foxes chewing off their limbs to escape snares, but her mouth wouldn’t reach her shoulder, so that lame plan was totally out. Harper flexed her wrists, testing the strength of the cuffs. They felt like heavy iron, and the sound that issued from them as she twisted her hands experimentally confirmed it. She lay still, heart pounding in her throat, waiting to see if anyone came to the too-loud sound of clanking chain and metal, but the house seemed eerily quiet.

Twisting her hands had opened the scabs on her wrists, renewing the sharp pains and waking up blood-starved appendages with the death of a thousand needles. Harper twisted some more, her shoulders screaming a protest she ignored and felt her hands start to slip as her skin pulled and tore. More blood. That was what she needed. Slippery beautiful blood.

They stretched and strained in the darkness
, Harper quoted to herself as a distraction, channeling her inner Bess,
and the hours stretched by like years
. No one was coming for her by moonlight, not if she had anything to say about it.
And everyone figured poetry was a useless life skill
.

Her left hand came free of its cuff with a sickening, moist pop. She was able to turn fully on her side and use the sore hand to free her still-trapped right one, gouging into her own wrist until her thumb dislocated with another moist, grinding pop.

Hands. She had them now. Such as they were. Harper lost a few minutes to lying on the floor, breathing through the pain. She wanted to shift to her fox self and get away from it, but her neck and feet were still trapped. One step at a time.

Un-dislocating a thumb was not as simple as it looked in the movies. She managed to jam it back into position, but her right hand was an aching mess that didn’t want to obey her commands.
Fat fucking patootie
, she told it silently. She had work to do. She felt along the collar with her left hand and got lucky. It was a bolt mechanism, with a metal pin tucked through to hold it in place. Clearly Samir hadn’t expected her to be able to get her hands free and unlock herself.

She wanted to fling the stupid collar across the room, but she carefully lowered it to the floor with as little noise as she could. Her feet were still chained to the collar and cuffs, and bolted into the floor. She’d been put into a rough hog-tie, the chains intersecting and locked together at the ankles.

Unfortunately, the manacles on her ankles weren’t bolt and pin, but sported a pair of heavy iron locks keeping the chain affixed to them. Harper allowed herself exactly three deep, aching breaths of freak-out time looking at the stupid locks, then realized her fox ankles would slip right out of them now that her body wasn’t contorted into crazy positions.

“Total failfish,” she muttered.

She reached into the Veil, letting her human body slide away into warm grey mist and her fox body emerge. She remembered the pain of the bear’s teeth ripping into her flank, but enough time must have passed, because while she was sore, her body felt whole and her legs slipped easily out of the manacles. It would have taken at least two days to heal this much in the mists. Harper pushed that thought away. Worrying about her friends wouldn’t get her out of this house. One panic attack at a time was enough.

More smells and sounds flooded her senses now that Harper could think without the pain from her human self distracting her. Shifter musk, wolf and bear, lingered in the air. A slightly cooler breeze caught her attention, coming from what she’d thought was a solid wall behind her.

There was a window in the room, she discovered, but it was nailed over with a thick piece of plywood. Harper considered trying to get it loose and escape that way, but her ears picked up slight movement and the vibration of voices coming from beneath her. She’d probably pushed her luck with the chains in terms of noise. A huge piece of wood being pried off a window wouldn’t be silent.

Most of the old cabins and farmhouses around the Frank were no more than two stories, so there was that, at least. Harper slunk up to the door and pressed her nose to the crack beneath it. She smelled nothing but drying mud, faint shifter musk, and citrus cleaner fluid. No one seemed to be moving around upstairs, but she waited another full count of sixty. If there was a sentry outside the door, he’d have shifted his weight, she thought. She still heard nothing close by.

Pulling her human form back sucked balls, but she couldn’t open the door with her fox paws—not quietly, at any rate. Her right hand throbbed and wouldn’t grip the doorknob, so Harper gently turned it with her left. It was unlocked, and didn’t appear to have any wicked spells on it, either.

Praise Jeebus for hubris, I guess
.

Harper eased the door open, wincing as the old hinges squealed. She hovered in the doorway, taking in a narrow view of a hallway. She was at the end of it, two rooms off to the right, one off to the left that smelled like a bathroom, a linoleum floor starting just over the threshold. Beyond the room to the left was a stairway down. She slid out of the room, trying not to touch anything and leave more of a blood trail than she had to, and carefully closed the door behind her.

Slipping back into her fox form, Harper crept down the hall, pausing every few steps to listen, nose in the air, wary of any sign of Samir or the men with him. She pressed her nose to the bottom of the first door on the right, picking up stronger musk smells. Bear shifter, probably the big white bastard who had bitten her ass. No sound though. She guessed this room was used for sleeping or something, and decided not to risk opening the door.

The second room smelled strongly of Samir. His honey-sweet, almost cold scent irritated her nose and made her growl. She stayed away from that door, guessing that he’d put some kind of ward like Jade used on his own room. That would be a bad way out.

Harper flattened herself to the floor at the top of the stairs and poked her head over. The stairwell was unlit, but enough light filtered in from the hall and the window in the bathroom to let her make out a door at the base, which was closed. Light and shadow flickered under the uneven seam of the door and a soft male laugh filtered up. Definitely people down there.

Harper backed up along the hallway to the bathroom, the one room she hadn’t explored yet. It dated the house to the 1970s with its yellow and green patterned linoleum and lime green-bath and shower combination.

But it had a half-size window over the toilet. A window with a latch. Harper took a deep breath and then pulled on her human form again. She was getting dizzy from going back and forth between injured, aching human and mostly healed fox. It was annoying. All her human form wanted to do was rest in the mist and heal itself. Not today.
Biblethump
.

She eased the bathroom door closed and flipped the lock, hoping if anyone came up here they would assume it was a compatriot inside and not an escaped prisoner. Gritting her teeth, she climbed up on the toilet and used both hands to force the iced-over window open. Cold air blasted her face, clearing some of the pain fog from her mind. It also reminded her she was about to jump out a second-story window in only ripped jeans and a bra. Classic.

Harper narrowed her eyes against the freezing air and the bright daylight. It was late afternoon, she guessed, the pale winter sun dipping behind the house. So she was facing west. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Immediately below her was snow piled up where it had been dumped off the roof. A few skeletal bushes dotted the snow beyond and then it was open space for a good two hundred feet until huge pine trees rose up. Harper didn’t see any movement or sentries posted here, though the chill air carried voices to her from somewhere very nearby.

Now or never
, she told herself. No reason to stay. Dangerous to drop like this, but the alternative was sit here and wait for someone to find her. Terribad choices, all around. If she could get to the trees, she stood a chance.

Sure
, she thought.
A chance against a sorcerer and a pack of mercenary wolves and shit. Cause I’m an expert woodsman
.

These were her woods, at least. She didn’t know the Frank completely, nobody could, but these woods felt familiar enough to give her hope. She doubted they were too far outside Wylde. If she could get away, she would deal with the next issue of figuring out where to go.
First steps go first
.