Guardians of the Portals (20 page)

Eirik pushed away from the table, the weight of their culture a heavy burden to bear. He had to pay more than just lip service in this matter. It was effectively out of his hands. Trey had made his bed. The boy would finally learn to appreciate that actions had consequences. It fell to Gunnarr to determine the facts of the matter.

“Just remember. Innocent until proven guilty, Gunnarr.” Eirik picked his cane off the back of the chair and limped out the door without looking back.

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G
unnarr waited until his brother had crossed the busy intersection and turned left to head down Eighth Avenue. He flicked his cell phone open and hit speed dial.

“They found him. Yes. No, the fool got himself killed. Uh-huh. Send in the other pair of choppers. The asset is still in play, but she has a protector now, so take care, and don’t fuck it up.” He flipped the phone shut and strode through the door.

The situation with Trey had the potential to derail more than just a few sentimental old fools holding tight to tradition. His organization was under fire and his position shaky. The woman’s father had set the hounds of hell on his track: journalists sniffed around his business holdings, senators stood ready to bail for better offers from the Chinese and new players threatened to horn in on his monopoly on the drug trade.

His youngest son stood to lose no matter what. When it came down to it, he was the one who left his family, a cardinal sin in the clans. Better to dispose of that problem off world, even if it meant losing the asset. He had sufficient DNA. They would work with that. Another opportunity would present itself. It always did. After all, he still had Kieran.

Gunnarr headed up 36
^th
Street, deep in thought.

****

“C
aty, hon, please wake up.” Trey rocked her thin body in his arms, terrified he was losing her. Pinkish foam flecked her lips, her breath coming in rasps. He feared she’d punctured a lung. They’d fallen into a shallow pool at the base of a thousand foot cliff. She’d hit first, on her back. The impact had driven them both to the bottom where they’d landed hard.

Trey couldn’t begin to fathom what had happened back in the pond at the oasis. All he remembered was his frantic search for his mate, time ticking off his desperation and then nothing. His body had slipped into stasis in one last attempt at survival. How Caitlin had managed to bring them to this spot was a mystery. He stroked the odd slits in her neck. What in the worlds had happened to her body? She’d gone through some transformation that he couldn’t fathom. Whatever it was, it had saved their lives but now it threatened to end hers. He had to repair her body but had no clue how to go about it.

Nothing in his bizarre existence had prepared him for the rush of emotion and the desperation, the flood of hate and anger, the fear and panic that consumed him. He bargained with his gods, threatened and cajoled, pleaded and demanded, offered his life for hers if only she could live. Nothing else mattered.

He bent over her neck, tears streaming down his face, knowing he would take his own life if he lost her. He could not, would not, continue on without her. He set his ear against the slits and listened to rasping gurgles growing weaker by the second. Her mouth gulped for air like a fish out of water.

“Damn it,” he shouted, “fish!”

He lunged to his feet, ignoring the pain shooting down his hip and leg. He’d deal with the broken bones later. He gathered Caitlin in his arms and limped to the water’s edge. Sliding down a bank into a shallow pool, he laid her down so that her neck and the slits were under water.

“Come on, Caty. Breathe. For me.”

Caitlin sputtered and coughed up blood, but she opened her eyes and stared at Trey in horror. “You’re not dead,” she gurgled.

“No, and neither are you. Caty, hon, don’t talk. I can barely understand you.” She looked perplexed and opened her mouth to speak but he placed a finger over her lips. “You may have punctured a lung. Now that I know what’s wrong with you, I can fix it but you have to help me.”

She mouthed ‘how’ and gripped his arm, trying to pull herself out of the water.

“No, no, you have to stay in the water.” He wasn’t sure how to tell her that she’d shifted, let alone the particulars. “You transformed and saved us. Now be quiet for a minute while I think how best to do this.”

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C
aitlin grew aware of a hollowness in her chest, almost an absence of feeling. She couldn’t detect a rise and fall, yet she sensed the oxygenated blood rushing through her arteries. Horrified, she rasped, “Oh my God, I’m a fish?”

Trey smiled. “Not exactly, hon. You didn’t grow scales anywhere I can see, but you have gills.”

“G-g-gills?”

“Yeah, that’s how you’re breathing. Let me fix the rib and get it back in place. I can heal the tear, but you have to work with me once I do that, okay?” She looked at him quizzically. “You have to shift back once I get the lung inflated. Can you do that?”

Caitlin paled, her body rigid, in full panic mode. In truth, she had no clue how she’d changed, or even when it happened. Apparently, her lover wasn’t the only one whose body took over in a crisis, but that didn’t help her now. She realized if they didn’t get her lungs functional, she’d be spending the rest of her life in an aquarium.

Trey busied himself pulsing energy into her rib cage, then he laid his hands on her breasts and kneaded gently. Caitlin murmured ‘pervert’ as he gave her his best leer. Satisfied that the lung would hold air, he told her, “Now it’s your turn. Just concentrate. That’s my girl.”

Caitlin tried holding her breath but the proto-gills seemed to function independently. She groaned, “I can’t.”

“You can and you will, or by the gods...”

Caitlin husked, “Choke me.”

“What the hell?”

“Shut off the air to the gills. Please.” She lifted her head out of the water and guided his hands to her neck. “Do it. There’s no other way.”

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R
eluctantly, Trey pressed the narrow openings closed as her body jerked spasmodically, struggling against the pressure. When her eyes rolled back in her head, he knew he’d lost, that in the end, he’d been the one to destroy the only good thing in his life. He moaned his agony as he stroked her neck, now smooth, free of the slits but still she did not breathe.

He pulled the limp body into his lap, silently cursing the fates and his gods, and pinched her nose shut, breathing life into the only creature he’d ever loved.

“Looks like you’re too late there, mate.”

Trey looked up at the three men holding Uzis inches from his head and wondered again why his life and his beliefs were built on lies. Resigned, he set Caitlin on the ground and prepared for his last battle.

The one nearest his position stared intently and said, “Hey.”

“Shut up.” The man on his right glared at the interruption. “You. Up. Hands behind your head. You know the drill.” He pulled Trey off the ground and slapped handcuffs over his wrists. “Okay, move it. I’m sick and tired of chasing you all over this fucking hellhole. You’re going back to Daddy. Alive or dead. Don’t make any difference to me.”

Trey twisted away and swung his good leg in an arc but the other leg gave way as his bones separated. The man swore at the near miss. Trey went down in a red haze of pain and anger. Someone spit out, “Shut him down,” as his head exploded and he sank into semi-darkness, minimally aware but unable to react. Voices gurgled off in the distance.

“Uh...”

“Now what?”

“This one isn’t dead.”

Boots stomped, the ground reverberating along his back. Whoever it was muttered, “Don’t look like much of an asset.”

The leader said, “Pick her up and carry her back to the other chopper. We’re not being paid by the hour and it’s getting dark. I want off this rock today.”

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“T
rey, welcome back. You had us concerned.”

“Father.”

Trey settled himself on the leather couch in his father’s spacious office. He held back a grunt of pain as the medic arranged his damaged leg onto an ottoman set nearby for his use. The cast encased his leg from ankle to upper thigh, leaving him little range of motion. The medic placed a pillow behind his back and fussed with an IV feeding morphine into his system, then nodded to his capo and left the room.

He avoided making eye contact with his father. The young boy desperate to please the patriarch and prove himself to his older brothers warred with the fortress of spite and hatred he’d carefully constructed as a man. Instead he focused on his leg, pondering why anyone had bothered to go to so much trouble to save his miserable hide when all he wanted to do was crawl into a hole and die. Why did they care when he was no longer any use to any of them?

He struggled to contain his emotions for he understood that his father would view any incapacity with disfavour. The elder would automatically assume it would strip away his will to live, that the loss of warrior standing would be a burden too great to bear. Such had always been their way. However, the old man had already lost one son in this debacle so it was possible he might do whatever was necessary not to lose another.

“I apologize, boy. There was too much damage and you were in no shape to self-heal, even in stasis. Our people opted to take you to the hospital. Good thing.”

“Tell me about this ‘good thing’. How bad is it?”

“Compound fracture, severed artery, torn soft tissue and other things. You’ll need rehab. The best our healers have to offer.” Gunnarr settled onto the couch, leaving a wide space between them, a measure of respect for his son’s still lethal abilities. “This wasn’t all due to the fall, was it?”

“Let’s just say they were less than gentle in handling me.” An involuntary shiver ran down his spine in remembrance of the savaging he’d suffered. “I wish you hadn’t bothered. Why didn’t those apes just let me bleed out? It would have saved you a hell of a lot of trouble.”

Gunnarr ignored the implication and continued, “You might lose some range of motion. I’m told there are still issues with your hip. But we’ll see.”

“Issues.”

“Hip replacement is an option. But let’s get you through the rehab first and then let our medics decide the best course of action.”

Trey muttered, “Dammit.” He stared at the cast on his right leg, eyes unfocused as the drugs cascaded through his system. He’d need time to formulate a plan for escape, not that he had anywhere to go. He would be nothing but a liability to his uncle, if indeed Gothi even wanted him back. He thought it odd that his father’s men had been the ones to pluck him out of that hellhole of a dimension. How had they accomplished that little feat of legerdemain? Did Gothi know it was possible, and if he did...? Trey would let that question air for a while. It had too many implications that led down paths that could turn his world on its ear, even more so than it already had. It was likely his father had access to superior technology, yet that still did not explain how they had tracked him to the unmapped Portal. The more he pondered the odd sequence of events, the more questions he had.

“Why?” He wasn’t sure what he expected as an answer, if indeed his father would even understand what he wanted to know.

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G
unnarr looked up, surprised that Trey could mentally function given the level of drugs in his system. He’d withheld the seriousness of his son’s injuries. He’d had to argue and bully the surgeons into not amputating the leg. It had taken fourteen hours and a team of the best orthopaedic specialists on the East Coast to perform what they called a miracle. After that he’d called in chits from every clan leader, bargaining for the best of their healers to be sent to headquarters. His autocratic demands had put his organization under a heavy burden. He had yet to figure out how to turn the situation to his advantage. His position of Capo now rested on shifting sands.

Gunnarr pushed off the couch and walked to his desk, avoiding Trey’s question, for he knew exactly what the boy wanted to hear. He had no clear answer for the whiplash change of heart he’d had when he’d seen his offspring near death in the hospital.

Pulling out his desk chair, he sat heavily and brushed a hand over his eyes as he mentally ran through his options. He could lie, but his son was too smart to buy simple avowals of fatherly love and concern. That this young man had chosen a path at odds with tradition and in opposition to the best interests of family and clan was partially his own fault. He’d engineered the situation, in collusion with Eirik. He’d made that particular bed, not his son. It was something he could never admit, ever. The clans would see it as weakness and he was already under siege by the Miami group who daily impinged on his lucrative arms business.

Trey’s hiss of pain brought Gunnarr back to the question hanging between them.

“Can I get you anything? I can call the medic and have him give you something else.” He reached for the intercom button but Trey mumbled, “I’m fine,” as he adjusted his position to take weight off his hip. Gunnarr decided to go with the logical rationale first so he stated with finality, “Tradition.”

“That’s an excuse.”

“It’s a reason, boy. And it wouldn’t hurt for you to pay more attention to it.”

“We broke with that generations ago, Father. I made a choice. The old ways no longer pertain to us. I’m surprised you even came for me.” Trey grimaced and barked, “I want to know why.”

Gunnarr turned away to hide the lie in his eyes. With ice-cold resolve he said, “We wanted the asset. You happened to have it. Your track record with valuable property has not been sterling.”

“You don’t know anything about that.”

“Oh, but I do. Your uncle filled me in on all the details of your little escapade with the mother.”

Trey clenched his fist tightly enough to dislodge the morphine drip. He looked at it idly, as if relishing the agony to come, hoping to overwhelm the pain of betrayal.

“Gothi ... and you. I should have known.”

“Do you think we exist in a vacuum, boy? We are not as different as you might think. We work together when necessary to save the clans. And to clean up messes made by fuck-ups like you. How the hell you ever survived this long, I’ll never know.”