Justice Calling (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 1) (12 page)

Harper and Levi stood up from their spots, their heads and shoulders running with a rainbow of paint colors. In the meadow, Ezee sat up and started laughing.

“You two look like a unicorn took a shit on you,” Max yelled, getting to his feet.

“Frag the weak! Hurdle the dead!” I yelled, heaving to my feet and running out into the meadow. I used a bit of power to burn away the baling twine on my wrists and thrust my sore arms out, making airplane noises as I ran in a circle through the grass.

“What are you, an Argentinean soccer player?” Ezee said, still laughing. He brushed at his khaki shorts, though there was nothing to be done about the splatters of paint. Somehow he made them look artsy and cool. Ezee could make any outfit look nice.

“Futbol, not soccer. Geez,” I said, grinning.

Paint exploded onto my chest, the balls stinging madly as they burst. I fell backward into the grass.

“Hey,” I said as Harper stalked toward me. “I won, no fair.”

“Mom has tea ready. Let’s go get cleaned up.” Harper stuck her tongue out at me and walked toward the large house in the distance.

“Sorry,” Levi called out. “Can’t trust a fox, eh? Good job with dropping those balls on us, by the way.” He offered a hand to his brother and they followed after Harper.

“If only Harper felt the same way,” I muttered. “Somebody is a sore loser.”

Alek swept me up into his arms and kissed my forehead. “Takes one to know, eh?”

Laughing, covered in paint, and tired as hell, I pushed him away and followed the others to the house. Another lesson learned, I guess.

I wasn’t laughing later when we got back to my place. Alek was still mostly living in his little trailer, which he’d parked out at the B&B at Rosie’s invitation, but we spent a lot of nights at my apartment above my game and comics store.

My mail was stuffed in the box by my back door and I saw the postcard even as I picked up the slim pile. Another missive from Samir. Awesome.

“Want me to burn it?” Alek asked as I set the mail on my kitchen table and picked up the postcard.

“No, safer to keep them in the iron box behind wards,” I said. Alek was the only one I had told about the postcards, mostly because he’d been there when the first arrived in the mail a mere week after the mess with the warlock.

This one was like the others, only my address and name on it, no message. Just a stylized S. Creepy fucker. The first had been of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The next showed up a couple weeks later and had a picture of a canal in Venice. The third was another three weeks after that with a bunch of castle ruins from some place in Scotland.

This was the fourth. It was just a photo of a bunch of trees, no small text on the back telling me where it was taken. It looked weirdly familiar, however. I pushed away the shiver that crept over my skin. There were conifer forests like that all over the world. No reason to think it was from around here.

“Sometimes I wish he’d just show up and get this over with,” I muttered. I didn’t really. Samir would crush me. I was getting stronger, but I had no illusions that I could beat a sorcerer who’d been around since the days when Brutus stabbed a guy named Caesar.

“Every minute he doesn’t is good for you,” Alek said. “You did well today; you are getting stronger, learning new ways to control your powers.”

I smiled up at him. He always somehow knew the right thing to say, even if sometimes I wanted to punch him in the face for saying uncomfortable truths. It was Alek who had postulated that Samir hadn’t shown up yet because he was uncertain of me. Alek had a point. I had gone dark for twenty-five years, running and hiding and barely using magic. Samir had almost caught up to me a couple times, but I’d slipped away from him and stayed hidden.

Until three months ago. Then I’d blazed onto the magical map. Alek pointed out that I’d appeared here, near the River of No Return wilderness which had one of the strongest network of ley lines running beneath its millions of unbroken wild acreage, and living in a town full of shape shifters and other magical beings. From Samir’s perspective, this whole thing probably looked like some kind of trap. Why else would I stop hiding if I weren’t ready for him, right?

Alek’s logic made a certain kind of sense. Samir was arrogant enough to believe his calculated approach to life was the way anyone would approach things. He wasn’t the type to risk his life for anyone, so he would never understand or conceive of the choice I’d made three months ago. I could have stayed hidden, but friends would have died, and I would have had to leave the life I’d built here.

I was done running. Hence the whole training to use my powers and pretending that if I did, I could win against Samir.

I knew I couldn’t. But I didn’t have the heart to tell Alek or Harper or the twins that. They believed in me, the least I could do was try to go down fighting when the time came.

“I’m taking a shower,” I said. “Joining me?”

“No,” Alek said with regret in his voice. “I’m going to try calling Carlo again.” His handsome brow creased in worry. It was Sunday, which meant he usually called and talked to his mentor and friend, a fellow Justice named Carlo. It had been two weeks since Carlo and he had talked, however, and Alek was worried. I hoped he reached him tonight. A Justice going silent was probably not a good sign.

I came out into the living room after showering the last of the paint out of my waist-length black hair and cuddled up to Alek on the couch. I knew from the worry in his blue eyes even before I asked that he hadn’t reached Carlo.

“Nothing?”

“No,” he said, sliding an arm around my shoulders. “Nothing.”

“Wouldn’t the Council tell you if there was something to worry about?” I leaned into him, tucking my head against his broad chest, and breathed in his vanilla-musk scent.

“Perhaps,” he said softly. He shook his head and took a steadying breath. “I called for pizza while you were in the shower. Half all meat, half pepperoni and pineapple.”

It was a sign of how comfortable we were getting with each other that he knew what to get me, especially considering he thought fruit on pizza was an abomination. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, the comfort level or the whole aversion to delicious pineapple.

“You still coming to game on Thursday? You aren’t going to dodge it again, right? We’re down a man cause Steve has that family thing.” We’d been trying to get Alek to game with us for months. I’d broken him in to video games, but we’d yet to get dice into his hands.

He sighed. “I’ll be there,” he said, nuzzling my hair and sliding his hands under my teeshirt.

Which was when someone knocked on the door.

“Pizza!” Alek said, grinning as I pushed my teeshirt back down.

“I’m gonna kill that guy for his timing,” I muttered.

Alek opened the door, but it wasn’t the pizza man. Instead a tall, wiry man stood there, his eyes sunken and tired looking in his nut-brown face, but his iris’s were still the moss green I remembered and his thick black hair was still cropped close to his skull. Just as it had been when I’d last seen him, over thirty years before.

When he told me I was dead to the tribe. When he kicked me out of my home for good.

“Jade,” the man said, looking uncertainly past Alek.

“Alek,” I said. “Would you kindly slam the door in my father’s face?”

Alek didn’t end up slamming the door. The pizza guy chose that moment to show up, causing a shuffle of people as we paid him and sent him away, which ended up with all of us standing awkwardly in my kitchen.

“What are you doing here, Jasper,” I asked, emphasizing his name. He didn’t get to be called Dad anymore. “How did you even find me?”

My anger wasn’t pretty. It burned through me, threatening to boil over, and my magic sang in my veins as I struggled not to do something regrettable. I had thought my resentment, anger, and grief long dead. Guess I was wrong about that. I didn’t think Alek would let me blast my father out of existence, however, even if I had truly wanted to. Alek was a Justice and supposed to protect shifters. Dear old dad was a crow shifter. QED and all that jazz.

“I hired a private investigator,” Jasper said. He glanced at Alek, who was wisely standing by my side and keeping his mouth shut for the moment. “I didn’t expect to find you so close to home.”

“This is my home.” My father looked smaller and older than I remembered but I knew it was likely time and memory playing tricks on me. I’d been all of fourteen and just a kid the last time I saw him. He was still taller than I, his face mostly unlined in that ageless way older shifters had, where he could be anywhere from thirty-five to fifty depending on expression and lighting.

“Jade,” he said, softly this time, his green eyes full of a desperate fire. “I need your help.”

I laughed. I couldn’t stop it from coming out, the hysterical giggles turning into full blown gasping laughter.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said. “And get the fuck out of my house.”

“Jade,” Alek said, placing a hand on my shoulder. His touch was steadying, even if it pissed me off a little more.

“You stay out of this.” I looked up at him as I gained control of my laughter. “That man kicked me out, they all did. Sent me away to live with a woman who was little better than a slave master and her rapist husband. You know the last words that man spoke to me?” I pointed at Jasper. “‘You are dead to the People. You must go away from here and never return.’ So don’t you go feeling sorry for him.”

I hadn’t discussed that part of my life with Alek. He knew I’d been on the street, knew about my real family, the four nerds who took me in when I was a teenager and raised me until Samir killed them. I hadn’t told Alek about the People. They were a dead part of my life.

“Does Granddaddy Crow know you are here?” I asked Jasper. I figured the old bastard who led the cult that was my former Tribe would know. No one did anything without Sky Heart’s say so.

“Sky Heart does not know,” Jasper said. “I have come to you on my own. We are desperate.”

That surprised me. The Crow who were my former people weren’t anything like the Crow tribe, the Apsaalooké, who lived in Montana and were mostly human. Jasper’s Crow were all crow shifters, exclusively. Back in the early seventeen hundreds, Sky Heart, a crow shifter and warrior of the actual Crow people, decided crow shifters were special and should live apart. He took a group of them, gathered from many tribes, and went west to finally settle in what became northern Washington State, at a thousand acre forested parcel of land he named Three Feathers. To guard the people and shore up his own power, Sky Heart summoned a powerful spirit, who called itself Ashishishe, the Crow, and from there on out gathered only crow shifters to him. Which involved some fairly underhanded shit like stealing crow shifters from other places, killing those who didn’t want to come live with the People, and, oh yeah, kicking out any children who didn’t turn into crows.

So, you know, typical cult. I hadn’t realized it when I’d been in it, of course. It wasn’t until years later when I talked it over with my adopted family that I had seen how dysfunctional they really were. Before that, all I knew was that I was different and had to leave.

“The pizza is getting cold,” Alek said. His stomach rumbled.

“So eat it,” I said. “Jasper is leaving.”

“I cannot leave,” Jasper said. “Just please hear me out.”

“It cannot hurt to hear him out.” Alek turned those big blue eyes of his on me and I sighed.

So we ended up sitting around the kitchen table, Alek eating his pizza, me picking at a slice of mine, and Jasper clutching the glass of water Alek had offered him like it was the last piece of floating wood in a shipwreck.

Part of me wanted to break the ice and ask how Pearl, my mother was. But I resisted. This man didn’t deserve a lifeline like that, nor did either he or my mother deserve my interest or concern.

Finally, after long enough that the awkwardness in the air was as congealed at the cheese on my pizza, Jasper spoke.

“Someone one, or some thing, is killing off the People,” he said. “Sky Heart promises he and Ashishishe can stop it, but I think he lies. He says that it is because we have grown too weak, too easy on our young, our blood too diluted with crows who are not Natives. I do not believe this is so.”

“You are half white,” I pointed out. “Wasn’t it Sky Heart who brought in your mother? He is the one who tracks down crow shifters from all over North America and forces them to join you, so he’d be the one to blame if your so-called blood is getting too impure.” The whole thing disgusted me. Ruby, my grandmother, had died before I was born, sometime back around World War Two, but my mother had told me about her, about how Sky Heart kept her imprisoned in his home until she bore him a son who changed into a crow. She was where my father got his green eyes.

“Yes,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “This is a reason I do not believe. There is magic at work. These murders are not natural. Someone is killing us off and no one will act.”

Magic. Samir. No, that would be too easy. If he was killing off my former family to get to me, he’d be gloating more about it. And my father wouldn’t be standing here talking to me, he’d be dead.