Tisper reclined against the back of Quentin’s passenger seat, the scent of leather and pine growing stale the longer they drove. He’d turned the radio on some time ago, but she couldn’t hear a word past the violent rustle of the trash bags taped over the busted window.
She thought about offering to pay for the damages but the last thing Quentin needed was more money. Besides he deserved it. He deserved to have holes in so many more places than his car window.
They’d been driving on the interstate for some time now and still Tisper hadn’t asked where they were going. She didn’t care, as long as they came back with Jaylin in hand. Along the way, Quentin had made phone calls—several of them. Tisper couldn’t tell if he was calling multiple people, or one single person who just wouldn’t answer.
The silence burned in her ears. Each time she looked at Quentin, he was piercing the road with his steely gaze. Staring down the horizon with his angry, solemn eyes, but never turning to see the inquisitive expression on her face.
He had a destination. And Quentin Bronx may be something of legends, but his car was still only a machine. The gas light blinked on empty as the fuel started to take from its reserves. Tisper watched the reluctance, the tight, helpless-frustrated set of his jaw as Quentin pulled onto the exit. They were just beyond Snoqualmie Pass, where the world was more mountain than men. Houses and rest stops were sparse—the land in these parts still belonged to the wilderness and the roads to trucks and other transports.
She couldn’t help but think it was funny. A wolf, in the snowy mountains where the evergreens grew like moss on this stony face of the world. This should be just the place for him and yet Quentin looked so out of his element. She swore for a moment, as he wrangled himself free of his seatbelt, that she saw the faintest sheen of sweat on his forehead. The door clapped shut behind him and Tisper sunk in her seat to inhale the stale, recycled air. She could only bear the quiet for a moment before she knocked the door open and stumbled out into the open breeze.
“The least you could do is buy me a soda,” she grunted, meeting Quentin at the gas pump. The air was so different in the mountains. So pure.
“Here,” Quentin said. She’d expected a few dollars, maybe a credit card. But instead, Quentin handed her his entire wallet. “Get something to eat. It’s a four hour drive to Spokane.”
“Why are we going all the way to Spokane?”
“We need help,” Quentin said, selecting his gas and jerking the pump free. “From a friend.”
“And why couldn’t we fly to Spokane?”
“Next flight doesn’t leave until nine tonight.” He socketed gas pump into his tank. “I’ve even looked into private planes. Driving is our only option.”
She didn’t care what the deal was. As long as Quentin knew what he was doing, she’d put her trust in him. Her world wasn’t equipped to handle these situations. Maybe Quentin wasn’t either, but he was her best shot. He was Jaylin’s best shot.
By the time she’d returned to the car with bags in hands and a stick of jerky between her teeth, Quentin was leaning against the frame, his large hand lost in thick locks of dark disheveled hair. The other gripping a cell phone, holding it to his ear, bringing it away when he felt like cursing to himself. He looked like he’d aged ten years in the ten minutes she’d been gone.
“Why wasn’t I informed?” He was trying to control his voice—trying to speak quietly to the person on the other end, but Quentin sounded angry and as she tossed her bags into the passenger seat, Tisper heard every word. “No. Imani’s here—I need her here. Call her sheriff. Amelia Newbridge. I’ll text you the number; she’ll take care of it.”
Then Quentin hung up. It was strange to see someone as polite as Quentin Bronx hang up without goodbye. But then, there was nothing ordinary about him right now. He clutched his phone hard, sent the device smashing and skidding across the pavement like he was skipping a stone across water. Tisper heard the glass of the screen shatter, chunks of the device splintering across the icy ground.
And then Quentin seemed to stiffen, his shoulders rigid as he stared at the broken phone in regret.
Slowly, Tisper removed the stick of jerky from her mouth. “You needed that, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Quentin.
“In case someone calls about Jay.”
“Yes.”
Quentin let his back fall against the gas pump column. His hands came up to his face and his fingers wiped down roughly. “We’re not going to Spokane,” he said, his back sliding down the concrete pillar until he was seated on the curb.
“What do you mean we’re not going to Spokane?” Tisper asked. She rounded the hood of the car, stood tall in front of him. “What the hell do you mean? Where are we going then?”
“I don’t know.”
“No. No more I-don’t-knows. What was that phone call about?”
Quentin’s voice was rough and grainy—shredded with exhaustion. “When Jaylin disappeared, I was manning the Idaho border. That territory belongs to another alpha—Leonardo. He was our closest ally aside from Imani. He has more wolves at his disposal than any other alpha on the continent. He was going to be our ticket to Jaylin, but…apparently, half of Leo’s pack has been wiped out. They were ambushed by Eastern scouts. He’s nowhere to be found. He was… Leo was all the muscle I had left.”
Tisper didn’t understand what he was saying, but he looked shaken, a hand clamped over his mouth and hair fallen over his eyes. She moved in and took a seat beside him on the curb. “So… theoretically speaking, how would one work around the ‘ambush’?”
“I don’t know,” Quentin said. His knee bounced, up, down, up, down. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I don’t—I don’t know. I have everyone looking. I have to call them all in now, explain what happened. That means bringing them in. That means taking all eyes off the search, sending some of them to Idaho to find Leo too. They were probably using his boarders for access into Washington. Getting as close as they can without alerting my men.”
Tisper was lost. She waited until she was sure he had nothing more to add, then she said, “Can I ask you something?” He stared straight ahead she noticed then, how different he looked in this light. So tired. She’d seen that look before on herself. “Why did you bring me? I want to find Jaylin more than you know, but why me?”
“Intuition.”
“Maybe you’re not as intuitive as you think you are.”
Quentin turned to look at her. His calculating eyes had grown weary, the ambition in them faded. He laughed but there wasn’t a smile to it. “I couldn’t do it. I can’t do it alone. I can’t do this.”
“Then why?” Tisper asked. “Why are you this big bad alpha if you can’t handle the heat?”
“I never wanted to. I never asked. Alphas don’t have an option but to be alpha. It’s something fate decides for you.”
“I get it, trust me. I spent most of my life in a place I didn’t want to be, pretending I was someone I’m not. But you’re wrong about the rest; there’s no such thing as fate.”
“There is such thing as fate and it’s kicking my ass.”
Tisper drank in a deep breath. She was thankful for the high mountain air. It kept her head steady. “So say there is. Say you’re this leader—this alpha or whatever. That means you’ve got this army behind you right? So what are you bitching about? You’ve got power, just use it.”
“I’m worried my men alone won’t be enough. If that phone call held even an essence of truth, a war between wolves has just begun. Without Leo, that leaves only me and Imani defending the West. Two of us, in arms against half of the United States. And Jaylin…If they take him, it’ll be all for nothing. Just another innocent person, lost to their backward logic.”
Tisper was afraid to ask just what he meant. She was afraid to know what might happen to Jaylin. So she didn’t question it. She stood up and held out her hand. “Then get off your ass and give me the keys.”
Quentin furrowed with a look that said what for?
“Don’t give me that broody face.” She wiggled her fingers. “I know sleep deprivation when I see it. You need brain function, and no offense but you don’t look so pretty with bloodshot eyes.”
Quentin surrendered his keys into the palm of her hand and pushed himself up from the ground. “Try not to break anymore windows.”
Tisper cracked the door open and slid herself into the driver seat, adjusting the mirrors to her liking. “Maybe later. Right now we need to take back wasted time.”
“Where do we start? If he was anywhere in Washington, we would have found him by now.”
“Then maybe he’s not in Washington,” Tisper said simply. “Details. I want them. All of them.”
Quentin didn’t evade her like she thought he would. He took the passenger seat and relaxed against the headrest. “Details,” he said. “Alright. I can do that.”
Tisper felt something of a resolve, turning to adrenaline in her bones. And though she feared for Jaylin, she knew there was only one way this was ending and it would her way. With Jaylin, safe and alive and smiling.
She turned his key in the ignition. She could feel the purr beneath her feet, and in that moment, Tisper took back every bad thing she’d thought about cars.
She pressed to the gas, veered from the parking lot, fishtailing the curb on her way out. The car jounced back onto the street so hard Quentin had to grip the roof to keep from launching out of his seat, but as she glanced over, Tisper saw his look of panic crack into a genuine grin—the first one she’d seen all day.
“This,” he said, “is why I brought you.”
–
There was something about wolves.
The way they paced, the way they stalked and sniffed and respired. Each breath came in hard gusts—tired expiration, boredom, uncertainty. They’d all gathered under the table—all twelve of them, some lying down, some walking, walking, walking along the hardwood. Each weighty, lumbered footstep drove Jaylin’s nerves wild. Then there were times where he felt a breath on his leg, a wet snout on his ankle. He felt like bounding out of his chair. He wasn’t sure why; they didn’t seem aggressive, but desperately, Jaylin wanted to run from the wolves.
Ziya was across the table, talking. She hadn’t stopped talking. She only shut her mouth to take a bite of chicken, chew, swallow and then she was speaking again.
Jaylin hadn’t touched his food.
“It really is remarkable how they are. There’s an understanding among them. They all have different personalities, you know—each one of them. Some love, some fight. Some cater to the others when they’re ill and some rebel completely against their Alpha.”
Jaylin jerked his foot away from the tickle of a curious snout. “They have an alpha?”
“Her name is Mayla. She doesn’t much like to be around the others. She comes out of her room on occasion, to make sure the Omegas are behaving.”
“Omega?” Jaylin asked. “Like Alpha and Omega?”
“Wolves work in a hierarchy. A little like us. The Alpha male and his female mate, the Beta wolf, the Subordinate and then, at the bottom of the totem pole lives the Omegas. Think of it like the working class. You have the top one-percent: the Alphas. Below that, you have the upper-middle class. The men who work for the one-percent: the Betas. Then below that, the Subordinate lower-middle class: the men who work for the men who work for the Alphas. Then lastly, you have the Omegas, living below the poverty line; the men and women of America who have everything decided for them. When they may eat, when they may sleep. The Omegas live for pleasing their Alphas. You, dear Jaylin. You are an Omega.”
Jaylin felt ashamed of himself for some reason. An Omega. Dirt from the bottom of the barrel.
“Are you one too?” he asked. “A wolf?”
“In a way,” Ziya said. “In a way, I’m nothing of the kind. Sort of like you, Jaylin. Your heart is wolf but your mind is human, and your body—your body is something else. We’ll never have the mystic beauty of these creatures.”
“Is that why you brought me here?” Jaylin looked to the food on his plate. Then the entire corpse of a roasted chicken at the center of the table. He felt like vomiting at the browned, flaky flesh. “You know what I am. You’re going to take me in for the bounty.” He could taste his heart, acid in his throat. But what would he do? Run from a dozen domesticated wolves?
Ziya looked to him, a deep, powerful pleading in her gaze. “No, Jaylin,” she said, too earnestly. Too tenderly. “I want to help you. I want to help everyone who’s been affected by this condition. I want to find a way to stop the deaths—to end the affliction. Don’t you agree? Isn’t that what you want too?”
Jaylin looked down at the cut of chicken on his plate. For some reason, Anna was in his head again, smiling with her beautiful freckles and her A-symmetrical dimples and the glowing complexion of a mother-to-be.
For no one to hurt again. For no one to hurt the way Quentin had hurt. The way Alex had hurt. The way Lisa had hurt. For no one to lose a lover or a sister or a daughter. No more death.
“Of course,”Jaylin said. Of course that’s what I want.
–
It had felt like an hour now that Alex had been floating around his room, blowing the smoke of burning sage into each corner, on every belonging he owned—even climbing back into the squalor of his closet to spread the smoke evenly from wall to wall.
“So uh…” Sadie watched him wave at the smoke like he was shooing away a mosquito. “Watcha doin’ exactly?”
“Cleansing,” Alex said, then he held a spray bottle with his other hand, squirting down each corner with some kind of herb water. “It’s important to cleanse everything you own before you put things out there—you know, into the universe.”
“Right. Into the universe.” Sadie waited until his back was turned, and then lifted the little latch of the wooden box and took a peak inside. She saw a flash of turquoise, and then the box snapped shut.
“Wait until I’m done,” Alex snipped, hand trapping the lid closed. He scooped the box onto his hip and carried it around with him while he cleansed.
“So what exactly are you doing this for?” Sadie asked. “Like… are we exorcising ghosts or something?”
“We’re casting a spell,” Alex said.
“A spell. Like a real spell. Like a witch’s spell?”
Alex finished misting the final wall and took his seat on the ground again. “You’ve done them before, right? I can tell you didn’t cleanse first. You feel like bad luck.”
“Feel like bad luck? Spell? No, I mean—when Jaylin was missing, I printed some I’d found online but that was it. And I’m pretty sure they didn’t do squat but give Matt the jeebies. You’re not saying—you can’t actually be saying you’re a witch?“
“No.” Alex snapped the box open and took two stones from inside. The turquoise and something blue and brindled—shimmering like the scales of underwater trout. “Anyone can practice magic. But there’s a difference between practicing magic and living it. Some of us are born with it in our blood.”
“And you practice?”
“I started after Anna died. I thought maybe I could—I wasn’t trying to bring her back, but maybe I could send something out to her. Give her the goodbye I needed to give her.”
“Did it work?”
“Does it ever work the way you want it to?”
“Why did you stop?” Sadie hated the look on his face. The way he gazed fixedly into the flame of the candle, like he was waiting for the fire to speak to him.
After silence stretched on, Alex said, “It made me sick. I was sick, really, really sick for months. I thought maybe it was the world’s way of telling me to butt out. So I did.”
“So what makes you think it’ll work now?” Sadie chewed on her inner cheek and took in the precious stones. The fire lit each lovely fracture in the sediment. Like looking into a different universe, she thought.
“Quentin had an intuition about you. His intuitions are usually right.”
“I’m not a witch, Alex.”
“You say that,” Alex smiled. “But look how the fire bends.”
He was right. When Sadie looked to the candlesticks between them, the little flames were leaning her way. Just slightly, but enough to raise a brow. She blew at the flames, watched them dance and wiggle in protest—but once they’d settled again, the fire leaned doggedly in her direction.
Her eyes found the stone once more—the blue one, with slivers of shimmer that split down its body like lightening. “What are these for?”
“That’s turquoise and that’s kyanite. They’re kind of like our conductors for the communication spell.”
“Communication? Are we going to talk to Jaylin?”
Alex shook his head. “Even if we spoke to Jaylin, he couldn’t return the call. It’s kind of a one-way thing.”
“So who are we… ‘communicating’ with?”
“Her name is Qamar. That’s really all I can tell you.”
“Will she be able to help us?”
“She might just be the only person who can.”
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