FoM02 Trammel (11 page)

In many ways, there wasn’t much difference between Ylli and Lindsay. The ways they were different, though, drove Dane half-mad. Dane’s pet name for Lindsay didn’t reflect Lindsay’s fierce nature and knack for self-preservation. Ylli was prey, and it distracted the hell out of Dane. Every feathery flutter and anxious twitch from the back of the van made Dane’s fingers itch as his claws threatened to come out.

“By the sea.” Cyrus reached out and locked his thin hand around Dane’s wrist. The last year had aged him so much that it made Dane want to howl some days. He kept telling himself he’d seen mages older and more wizened who were still going strong, but it didn’t keep the distress at bay. Every time he was close enough—and more and more he found ways to be close now that Lindsay had Noah—he soothed himself by listening to the sound of Cyrus’s heart.

“Everything here is by the sea, Cyrus.” Still, that did help him pick an exit.

“A long path, by the sea,” Cyrus hissed. The wind coming in the half-open window blew his long, silvered hair around like a cloud.

“There are some trails.” The constant clatter of Ylli’s fingers on the keys of his computer and the soft whistle of his breath were out of sync with the rush and wash of Cyrus’s blood. The world of Dane’s senses was rattled by the lack of harmony. He and Cyrus and Vivian had always been closely attuned, their every move and breath had become an instrument playing a constant symphony of living.

“No trails.” Cyrus let go of Dane’s wrist and leaned forward, glaring through the windshield. “The wheel.”

“I know where it is.” Dane pre-empted any offer of directions from Ylli. A Ferris wheel stood out against the sky, down by the boardwalk. “Put that thing away once you tell Vivian where we are.”

Despite working out where they needed to go, Cyrus looked angry as he sagged back in his seat. Dane didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to know.

“What’s wrong?” he asked anyway, taking advantage of a lull in traffic to dig behind the seat until he came up with a bottle of water. “Here, have a drink.” It wasn’t cold, but it was spring water.

“Feh. Plastic.”

“You should have died sooner if you didn’t want to drink out of plastic. You knew it was coming.

You bought stocks in it.” Dane worked the cap off and shoved the bottle into Cyrus’s hand. “What’s wrong?”

“Things are too clear.” Cyrus scowled but drank.

Dane clenched both hands on the wheel and breathed slowly. He put his foot down on the gas, and they rocketed through an intersection with wildly blinking traffic lights. He could smell smoke and electricity and melted rubber.

“Clear is good,” he told Cyrus. “Don’t worry about it.”

Cyrus put the water down half-finished. “I can’t see
her
. We cannot have lost her already.”

Dane turned the wrong way down a one-way street behind the boardwalk and pushed the van to go as fast as he dared. There was a public parking lot, a little above the beach, and if they got out there, they could see most of the boardwalk.

“Something’s definitely happening,” Ylli chimed in from the backseat. He had a tiny phone that was all picture screen cradled in his hands. “People are talking about some kind of terrorist attack.”

“The truth would only distress them more,” Cyrus said dryly. He huddled in his seat, eyes narrowed, mouth set in a thin white line.

“We’ll get out in the confusion. Lindsay will make sure we don’t stand out for what we are.”

“Are you sure?” Ylli’s question was nearly lost in the nervous rustle of his wings.

They took a corner, almost on two wheels, and Dane cut off a Jeep headed for the parking lot. It looked like the power was out, someone had lifted the gates leading in and out of the parking lots and left them up. Better and better.

“Ask me that again and I’ll pluck you.” Dane took them all the way to the chain-link fence at the far edge of the lot. He could hear the cries and chaos already.

They ignored the chaos and made their way up a long ramp between sections of the boardwalk. The path to the pier on the far side of the boardwalk was cluttered with tourists and yellow trams that droned,

“Watch the tram car, please,” in a prerecorded nasal tone over and over, even though they were all stopped

on their cement paths. Past the carousel and the roller coasters, a Ferris wheel stood tall and still against the sky, riders screaming down from their unmoving baskets.

Aside from stopped rides and flickering lights, nothing here looked out of place, but the air told a different story. It was thick with panic and static and the unique scents of war. Aircraft fuel, gun oil, the sweat of soldiers and worse, all pricked at Dane’s senses. At the end of the pier, he could see the source.

In the distance, a long, sleek black limousine was parked askew on the boardwalk itself, and ATVs each bearing a driver and a passenger with an automatic rifle were prowling the sands like sharks below the helicopter pad at the end of the boardwalk. Dane grabbed Ylli by the wrist, planting his hand on Cyrus’s arm.

“Don’t let go of him. Don’t let anyone touch him.”

Another gust of wind brought more information. The acrid tang of it made him gag, not from what it was but from what it meant. Hounds. Moore was here. Cyrus had said the young mage couldn’t fall into the wrong hands, and Moore’s were the wrong hands, for certain. But he couldn’t smell Jonas, and that he didn’t understand. He’d have to wait for another day to get a shot at his oldest enemy.

“I won’t.” Ylli barely came up past Cyrus’s shoulder, but he had feral strength and endurance, even if he was prey.

A fountain of sparks went up as an empty ride spun down to its base and kept going, metal scraping against metal. Finally, it ground to a halt with a squeal of protest. Whatever was causing the disturbance was growing stronger. The mage Cyrus wanted found was afraid.

“They have her,” Cyrus said faintly. “And they know we have come.”

“Stay out of sight.” Dane pointed Ylli to where several families were clustered in the doorway of an ice cream parlor. The mixed scents might help hide them from the black-clad men loping their way. Men on the exterior, Dane reminded himself. On the outside only.

There was screaming from up ahead, and Dane had a glimpse of a young woman in a blue dress being half-carried onto the boardwalk. The new mage Cyrus had been talking about. She was young, younger than Lindsay from the look of her.

Dane wasn’t sure he could ever forgive Cyrus for picking this fight, the whole of it, but he didn’t have any choice but to stay the course now. He hoped like hell that—somehow—Lindsay was drawing attention from the action down here. The wind picked up, throwing a toppled tram across the boardwalk and smearing three of the Hounds as they bore down.

Dane let his change take over him and, in moments, the familiar world was replaced by the one his beast saw. All his human concerns slipped away and he was, once again, his beast. His lion body uncoiled like a spring, and he surged forward, wings folded tight against his flanks, ears back, staying low to the ground. The wind made it impossible to fly, or he would have taken to the air and swooped in to rip the girl

from the hands of the men trying to carry her away. Instead, he would have to fight his way to her—the more killing he did now, he told himself, the less he would have to do later.

Through the senses of a beast, the Hounds could never be mistaken for human. They reeked of science and wrongness. Everything in him screamed that they were perversions with nothing left of what they had been before Moore began her experimentation.

If Dane had anything to do with it, they wouldn’t be anything at all much longer. He had hunted them once with Ezqel, back when he had killed them to keep them from Lindsay. That, he had enjoyed to the depths of his soul.

“Do not waste your time at play.” The wind tickled the soft fur inside one of his ears. Dane ignored the bullets that sank into his hide and disemboweled a Hound with a swipe of his paw. “Bring her to me.”

Play
. Taking pleasure in something didn’t make it a game. Dane bit the next Hound, crushing its skull, and spat out its vile blood. No idea what the drugs in it could do to him.

He could smell Cyrus’s little mage now; her terror made her scent strong enough to cut through the blood around him. He wasn’t playing, but neither was he about to suffer a Hound to live. He killed one as it fired a gun into his chest, shrieking in terror. The wounds seared and sickened him, then began to heal.

Another smell reached him on the high winds, cedar and roses and ancient things. Hesham and Mahesh. They sapped the power of a mage’s magic, stifling it completely. He had known their scent for years but had only recently come to hate it. He could forgive mercenary alliances, but not that they had tried to take his place with Lindsay.

A thump of blades cutting the air made him snarl. The helicopter was huge and black, too large for the helipad. Cyrus’s wind should have been enough to ground it, but there it was, preparing to lift off. A rush of icy air caught him in the face, drawn from far out at sea, and the sky darkened. He crouched low to the ground. The wind felt wrong.

More Hounds were coming, spilling out of vans, clambering up from the beach and onto the boardwalk. He had to stop Moore’s people from taking that girl. The rest would have to wait. If he could take her from her captors, he might be able to get her to safety, as he had done with Lindsay. He dodged the slicing arc of bullets firing from a large gun mounted in the back of a van and folded his wings back tightly.

Keeping low to the ground, he ran for the helipad.

Already, the helicopter was beginning to lift. Dane could see the lurch as it broke free of gravity for the first time. Two tall, thin men—Hesham and Mahesh—hurried toward the helipad. The brown-skinned young woman in the blue dress hung limp between them, her feet dragging on the ground, one bare and one still in a white shoe. He pushed hard into the wind that fought him back, and all he could think was that Cyrus had lost control of the air. Gunfire staggered him, shattering one of his paws and leaving him to struggle on three legs while his magic healed him. Overhead, an immense spiral of black clouds roared.

The limousine driver opened the back door and helped an auburn-haired woman out. Moore. She had come and Dane wanted nothing more than to tear her to shreds. But he had to focus. The human part of his mind was full of questions—where was Lourdes, where was Jonas—but the beast forged on, slapping away an ATV that came too close, using it to clear a path ahead of him as he gained a dozen precious yards.

Another woman, this one with long, dark hair, slipped out after Moore and took her by the arm, hurrying her to the helicopter. Where the hail of bullets had failed to deter him, a lightning bolt smashing a crater into the walkway ahead gave him pause. The dark-haired one was a weather witch; she must have been the reason Cyrus was struggling. He looked behind to see the Hounds closing in, maneuvering to trap him while the helicopter escaped.

Dane summoned up all his strength for a dash down the last hundred yards of the boardwalk. The wind lifted him and slammed him to the ground, into a streak of rifle fire. He scrabbled onto all fours, spreading his wings. The helicopter was already rising. He could see Moore through the open door, and the other woman next to her. A wave of the dark-haired woman’s hand and lightning ripped down again.

There was nothing he could do, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying. As Moore escaped, the Hounds turned on him, some with guns and some with blades. There had to be at least thirty of them, and many human soldiers as well. He had survived worse. Pursuing him kept them from turning on Cyrus.

The rain came down like a wall of wet night and the Hounds hunted him, their bullets tearing into him faster than he could heal. Dane charged the nearest cluster, determined to keep them busy for as long as possible. And then something else came. Dane heard a sickening thud like a bomb going off, and the darkness was washed away in a flood of eerie red light.

The Hounds turned from him and began to howl. Dane dropped the one he was killing to face the new threat. A breaker of fire swept down the boardwalk, consuming everything in its path. There was nothing he could do but run like a terrified cat. As he cleared the far side of the helipad, the burning wave broke over the boardwalk. The howling reached a crescendo, and was gone.

When Dane turned, everything stood as it had been. The rain pounded down, a natural rain now, and washed away the smoke. He let the form of the beast slide away before Lindsay’s illusion disappeared, but he kept the core of it in him so that he could follow his nose back to his people.

He found Noah waiting for him, pointing him toward the van and the car. Lindsay was probably in the back of the car, with Kristan in the driver’s seat. The van door was open, waiting for him. He couldn’t make the words to thank Noah for his intervention. He limped to the van, trying to make sense of what had happened to them.

In the passenger seat of the van, Cyrus was pale and still, his breath coming slowly.

“I called Negasi. He’ll meet us at the house,” Ylli offered from the backseat. He was almost as white as Cyrus, a bedraggled and terrified little bird. “I don’t know what happened. He said some other mage took the wind from him.”

“She did.” Dane started the van and turned it to follow Kristan home. He couldn’t hear anything through the static in his head, his mind turned to a channel left blank with disbelief. He reached over and found Cyrus’s hand, fumbled until his fingers were on Cyrus’s pulse. It fluttered there like a broken butterfly, clinging to life all the way home.

At the house, Dane carried Cyrus to his room, where Negasi waited. The healer helped Dane undress Cyrus and wrap him in warm blankets while he tried to give Cyrus back some strength. When they had done all they could, Dane could hear that familiar heartbeat again, but it did nothing to comfort him now.

He left Cyrus in Negasi’s capable hands and went to his own room, where he closed and locked the door. If anyone spoke to him or if he replied, he couldn’t have said. He sat in the chair at his desk and took out a sheet of paper. He meant to write Ezqel, but the page stayed as empty as his mind.