Traitor's Son: The Raven Duet Book #2 (5 page)

His father said that people of all sorts falling victim to corporate raiders was nothing new.

“But all that happened a long time ago,” said Raven. “Almost a century, right?”

“Yes, but after a few villages had been taken over like that, the rest of the Native corporations got scared and voted to put back the original ANCSA policy—only they said that no stock could ‘be held, purchased, or owned’ by anyone who wasn’t at least one-quarter Native descent. Which meant that whatever fights they had would be kept in the family, so to speak.”

“But what if someone who wasn’t quite half Native married someone who wasn’t Native at all?” Raven asked. “Their kids . . .”

“That’s what happened in my family. Between Grandfather and Gima, my dad’s three-eighths Ananut. And since he married Mom, that makes me three-sixteenths. Also eleven-sixteenths white, one-sixteenth Polynesian, and a final one-sixteenth Chinese. And it’s kind of ironic,” he went on, “because my grandfather’s the one who’s only a quarter himself. But culturally, he’s one hundred percent Alaska Native.”

He really should get out to the resort, and visit his grandparents this weekend. Jase sighed.

“So someone like you can’t inherit your parents’ property?” Raven sounded shocked.

“Before the suit, I could still have got everything except Dad’s stock in the Ananut Corporation. He’d have had to leave the stock to someone else, who qualified.”

“That seems unfair,” said Raven. “Particularly if stock in the corporation and a voice in the village council had become the same thing.”

“That’s what my father argued in
Mintok versus,
” Jase said wryly. “Along with a lot of stuff about this being ‘the last bastion of racism enshrined by law.’ I was three years old then. I was exhibit A. Dad won.”

In a courtroom scene so dramatic it had been displayed on vid-screens around the world, because Jase’s grandfather had been one of the chief witnesses for the Native corporations.

“Who is this boy, just three-sixteenths Ananut, to have a voice in my community, in my life?” he had demanded.

Jase’s father had replied, “He’s my
son.
”

The shriek of wind and the whir of tires on pavement were the only sounds for a long moment.

“I’m sorry,” Raven said finally. “But you were only three. Surely no one blames you.”

“Not blame, exactly. Not most of them.”

But there was a reason he went to a mostly white private school, and it wasn’t all about quality of education, no matter what his parents said. And even in Murie Prep, Michael Mintok’s son wasn’t welcome in the Alaska Native Culture Club. That had been made plain before he’d even thought about trying to join. Not that he’d wanted to. Culture Club was all about Our Way of Life.

“Well, I don’t care if you’re Native, Samoan, or Swiss,” Raven told him. “You’re human. That’s all that matters to me.”

“Really?”

“I’m afraid so. Oh, turn in here.”

Jase turned into the trail’s parking lot. He had to maneuver a bit to get a view of the water, and in midafternoon with the top folded down there wouldn’t be much of a physical nature going on. But a nice view set the right mood, and there were some things you could do even in daylight, in a car with bucket seats.

“It’s your turn,” said Jase, shutting off the motor. “What is it that’s so important?”

“Walk first.” The graceful way she wiggled out of the low seat distracted Jase for several seconds.

“Walk? You mean up the trail? Into the woods?”

“I said we were going for a walk, back at the school. Didn’t you hear me?”

She was evidently a nature geek, wherever she’d been raised. And in Jase’s experience, telling a girl you’d been too busy looking at her ass to pay attention to what she said was a bad idea.

“Sure,” said Jase. “It’s just that I’m not dressed for it. Shoes.”

The school demanded dress shoes instead of gels, but Jase’s had walking soles. He liked to be comfortable. And walking in the wilderness wasn’t his idea of comfort.

“There are bears around Anchorage,” he added. Surely that would discourage a city girl. It discouraged him.

“Just black bears,” she said. “If we keep talking they’ll avoid us. You’re not afraid of the woods, are you?”

“Of course not.” It was the things that lived in woods that worried him.

Jase raised the Tesla’s top and got out. It didn’t look like it would rain for at least an hour or two, so he threw his blazer on the seat before he closed the door and beeped the security system on.

“Ready to hike,” he told Raven, and was rewarded when she set off up the trail ahead of him. She had an exceptional back view.

After what seemed like miles of uphill hiking, Jase was panting too hard to admire any view. He was beginning to fear he’d have to ask her to stop for a while when the trail leveled out to a grassy meadow.

“There,” she said, turning back to him. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? And just look!”

The view stretched over the basin in which Anchorage had been built, and from here you could look west over the bay as well as north to the ridge of mountains that rimmed the city on the other side. Jase looked northeast, to see if it was clear enough to make out Denali in the distance, but it wasn’t. It hardly ever was.

“We’ve got pretty much the same view from our living room window,” he told her. “And the living room has chairs. And no bugs.” He waved off a curious bee, and then leaped aside as it zoomed straight at him.

“You’re afraid of bees, as well as bears?” She sounded critical.

“I don’t like pain,” Jase said defensively. “It’s called not being crazy.”

“Oh?” Her voice softened to a sultry murmur. “No pain. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Jase knew he was being manipulated, but the promise in her voice lured him farther down the trail.

She chattered as they walked, pointing out flowers in the open glades and birds in the woods. On this rocky hillside the trees were thick and full, and now that the trail wasn’t going straight uphill Jase had to concede it was pretty. But not so pretty that he followed her when she turned off the trail and plunged into the forest.

“Wait a minute! You can get lost out here. We lose a handful of tourists that way every year.”

Those tourists usually lost themselves in Alaska’s vast wilderness, not right next to Anchorage, but she was too new to the state to know that. Jase hadn’t signed up for a cross-country hike. He wasn’t dressed for it, either.

She turned back, framed by the dark green boughs, looking far more at home in this wild forest than she had in his car.

“I want to show you something. I can’t do it here, on a trail where anyone might come by. We don’t have to go far.”

Her serious expression told him she wasn’t proposing a bit of outdoor nuzzling. Too bad. Still . . . what was this important thing she wanted to talk about?

“All right. But I’m not going far. Not off the trail.”

The woods seemed wilder out of sight of the path. She was quiet now, but Jase figured the noise they made thrashing through low branches would ward off any bears. He was about to call a halt when she stopped, at the edge of a small clearing with young, slim trees growing around it.

“Come look at this.”

As far as he could tell she was staring at the ground, but he went and knelt to look where she pointed.

“I don’t see—”

Something flat and firm clamped around his wrist and clicked, followed by another click. Jase stared at the magnetic cuff—the kind cops used—that fastened his wrist to the small tree beside him.

“What the frack? What is this?”

She couldn’t be a cop; she was too young. And the police didn’t need to haul people out into the wilderness to arrest them.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I promise I’ll let you go as soon as I’m done. But the last time I did this my . . . audience took off running. I’ve already wasted days tracking you, and we’re running out of time.”

“I don’t care if you’re going to do a striptease,” Jase snapped—not quite truthfully. He couldn’t think of anything else she could do that required this kind of privacy, but her expression was wrong for anything sexual. Was she deformed or something? That would count as important, but he’d seen enough of her shape, even under the loose stretchie, to know it couldn’t be too bad. “Let me go,” he added more quietly. “I won’t run off on you.”

The impish smile returned. “Let’s test that. In fact, I’ll make you a bet. If you don’t try to run, I’ll let you go immediately and we can talk on the way back to the car. If you do try to get away then you have to forgive me for cuffing you, and listen to what I have to tell you before I take the cuff off. Agreed?”

“That’s one of those bets where you get what you want either way.” He was a lawyer’s son, after all. “What about what I want?”

Raven considered this. “What do you want?”

Cuffed to a tree was probably the wrong time to say this, but Jase was too annoyed to care. If she got huffy and stalked off, he’d com Ferd to come out with a saw and cut the tree down to free him.

“Any chance you’re going to get naked?” Jase asked.

She threw back her head and laughed, full and free. “I think I like you, Jase Mintok. Lord knows why. Yes, at some point I will be naked.”

Jase stopped being annoyed. “You will?”

“I promise.”

“Completely?”

“As the day I was born.”

“’Treme,” Jase said. “Go for it.”

He was now watching with considerable interest, the cuff on his wrist almost forgotten.

She stood in the sunlight, smiling confidently. Then her face began to melt.

Her forehead and chin receded and her nose stretched out. An oily blackness flowed over her skin, and her whole body shrank like a deflating balloon. Her clothes collapsed around her as feathers sprouted, first the central shafts, then black vanes that grew out and meshed together.

Jase was on the other side of the tree, screaming, yanking on the cuff so hard agony shot up his arm.

A raven wiggled out of the girl’s stretchie and hopped toward him. Two-footed bird hops, like a real raven. But it seemed to Jase there was more than a bird’s intelligence in the round black eyes. It cocked its head and emitted a soft bird croak. He could almost hear the girl’s ironic voice saying,
You lose.

At some point Jase had stopped screaming, but his throat felt raw when he spoke.

“I’m dreaming. This is a just a nightmare, right?”

The scent of damp earth and warm spruce filled his nose. He’d pulled on the cuff so hard the edge of the plastic had cut into his wrist, and drops of blood welled around the strap. It hurt, even after he quit pulling. He was still shuddering. Raven . . . she’d melted!

“No, it’s the drug! It’s the dirt in that stupid pouch. It’s giving me hallucinations, days after I touched it, just like I thought it might.”

The bird hopped back to the limp pile of clothing, pecked the shirt aside, and dug its long beak into the jeans. It finally emerged holding a magnetic key.

The key to the cuffs.

“Don’t you dare fly off with that!”

Jase felt stupid the moment he said it, for it implied that the bird was real. That the girl, Raven, had turned into a bird.

Jase looked at her empty clothes. At the raven, who was hopping back around the tree with the key in its beak. The memory of that transformation was horribly vivid.

The bird set the key carefully on a rock, then hopped toward Jase and croaked.

Jase stepped back, swinging around the tree. “Get away from me!”

The bird cocked its head again, at an angle impossible for human bones. Then it hopped back to the key.

And waited.

“You . . . you want me to take a closer look at you?” The very idea scared the carp out of him.

The raven’s head dipped, just like a nod. It was big, far bigger than the crows Jase was accustomed to seeing—nearly eagle-sized. He had no doubt that strong beak could peck his eyes out, and its talons looked sharp as nails.

The raven stood beside the key and waited.

He could still call Ferd, but explaining what had happened was suddenly a lot more complicated than telling him about a psycho girl luring Jase on and abandoning him. If he was hallucinating the whole thing—which he had to be, didn’t he?—he might as well go with it.

“All right.” Jase tried to slow his racing heartbeat. “You can come closer. But when I say stop, you have to stop. OK?”

The raven . . . he would have sworn it nodded.

It hopped a few yards, then stalked the last few feet on scaly bird legs. Its feathers were glossy black, with white highlights where the sun struck them. It had round, solid-color animal eyes, and its beak wasn’t shiny like the feathers. Slowly, watching him, it spread its great wings and held them wide. Its wingspan had to be close to five feet, and the feathers on the underside formed an intricate pattern.

“OK,” said Jase. “I looked. Give me the key now.”

The bird took another step, then stopped when Jase flinched back. It croaked, and combed its beak through the feathers on its breast. Did it want him to touch it?

The thought raised goose flesh on his arms. Suppose whatever had done that to the girl was contagious? Suppose after he touched it, he started melting too?

“No way,” Jase said. “Don’t come any closer.”

The bird flipped its wings and settled in to wait some more.

Clearly, if he wanted the key he’d have to touch the bird. And if he
was
hallucinating, there was no danger. Right?

Jase gave in and reached out tentatively to touch the feathers on its breast, wary for the first movement of that sharp beak.

He must have guessed right, for the bird stepped into his touch, pushing his fingers through the stiff outer feathers and into the warm down below.

Jase jerked his hand back and examined it. No oily blackness. No sign of melting. Yet.

“OK, I get it. You’re a bird. Now can I have the key?”

Its body had felt like a bird’s, thin flesh over bone under the soft coating.

The raven hopped back and considered him. Then it began to expand, rippling and bulging disturbingly as it grew. The feathers bristled, then contracted into blackened flesh. The beak receded, forehead and chin emerged, the neck elongated and thinned. Then the oily darkness faded into warm brown, eyelashes and eyebrows sprouted, and in moments Raven the girl stood before him.