Traitor's Son: The Raven Duet Book #2 (21 page)

Jase was beginning to get impatient when Otter Woman made a sharp gesture, evidently settling something, and then turned and walked down the beach into the sea. She started to change shortly after she reached the waves, but Jase kept his eyes on the man who was melting and morphing back into an eagle.

He’d never be able to keep track of an otter in the ocean, but he could see the direction an eagle flew.

The man obliged him by taking off in a straight line, west and a bit north.

Jase wished he dared take out his com pod, but the bee man lingered, running his gaze over the tree-clad hillside.

If you hold still you’ll be invisible.
He could all but hear his grandfather’s voice.
Animals see motion more easily than anything else.

Eventually the man stopped looking, and his shape fragmented into bees once more. But instead of flying off, the swarm spread out and settled around the bubblehead. Jase had read that insects didn’t have much distance vision, so he allowed himself to grin.

He knew Otter Woman didn’t think much of human intelligence—in fact, he was counting on that. But this trap was so blatant it was almost insulting.

And none of the shifters he’d met had struck him as patient people, either.

Jase settled in to wait him out. The drizzle had stopped, and his rain gear was keeping him warm. Time to draw on his heritage, and channel his inner hunter. Because he knew what he was hunting, and the man on the beach didn’t. Bee man would give up before he did.

Jase hung on to that thought and channeled his inner hunter for the better part of an hour, while his butt began to ache and his legs went numb. If he moved around he was sure to be seen, so he hung on to his heritage and waited some more.

After most of another hour had passed Jase was cursing his heritage, and Raven, who’d gotten him into this, and his own stupid half-assed plan. Only the memory of Gima, lying against the hospital pillows with her eyes sealed shut, kept him there.

The sun was breaking through the overcast when the swarm finally lifted, coalesced, and flew off in the same direction the eagle had taken.

It occurred to Jase that Bee Man might have left a few bits of himself, to keep watch and sound an alarm, but Jase had to move now. He stretched out his legs, swearing as cramped muscles screamed, and crawled out of the thicket. Then he pulled out his com pod, centered the GPS app on north, and drew a line across the screen in the direction his enemies had gone. Once he had the line locked, he brought up a map beneath it.

One name leaped out at him, but Alaska Natives had settled all over the state. Just because there was a town there now didn’t mean that was the place he was looking for.

There was an easy way to find out. Jase opened a new window and switched the function to call.

“Gramps? Is there one of those rock piles that opens to the Spirit World somewhere along this line?” He dragged the map to the place he wanted it to appear on his grandfather’s screen as he spoke.

“What?” Jase had never seen his grandfather look so startled. “Why do you—”

“Just humor me,” Jase said. “Are any of those rock-pile spirit places on this line?”

His grandfather looked down. “Yes, in fact. There’s a spirit portal west of Whittier, just past the ruins. There’s an Olmaat rock on the beach below it, too. A very sacred site.”

“What’s an Olmaat rock?”

“Why do you care? Aren’t you going to ask how your grandmother is?”

“If she’d waked up, Mom would have contacted me,” Jase said. The furious grief in the old man’s eyes was unbearable. “How is she?”

“Gone,” said his grandfather.

Jase’s heart froze, then began to beat harder. “You don’t mean . . .”

“No, she’s not dead, but her spirit’s still gone off somewhere. And I don’t understand why she’s not coming back.”

Jase had never heard his grandfather admit there was anything he didn’t understand.

“I don’t know what else to do.” The old man’s controlled expression began to crack. “I swear, if she doesn’t wake soon I’ll have to try your father’s way. But with her spirit wandering, I’m afraid that might do her more harm than good, and I don’t know . . .” His grandfather’s voice husked into silence, and he cleared his throat.

Jase’s own throat was too tight for speech.

“Why are you asking about the sacred sites?” the old man went on. “There’s nothing I could do for her there that I can’t do here.”

“I . . .” He could hardly tell his grandfather he was wrong about that. “Thanks, Gramps. I’ll talk to you later. Keep Gima safe. Keep watch on her.”

His grandfather frowned, and was opening his mouth to ask another question when Jase cut the com. He had no answers, and it would be too cruel to raise his grandfather’s hopes and then fail.

He couldn’t fail.

It was just after four when the bubblehead returned Jase to the boat dock, and a five-hour drive from Seward to Whittier. Jase thought about checking in at home, but there was too much risk that his parents would try to keep him there. Instead he stopped at a restaurant in Anchorage for dinner, and then commed home and left a message that he’d decided to stay with Gramps for a while, and see if he could help him out.

His mother would find out Gramps hadn’t agreed to that the next time she called for an update on Gima’s condition, but she and his grandfather would both think that Jase had decided to show up at the door and then talk his way in.

By the time they realized he hadn’t arrived, Jase hoped to be finished. And after they commed to tell him Gima was awake, it wouldn’t matter where he went.

Jase drove straight from Anchorage, through the tunnel and down into Whittier.

He’d never learned why some fool had constructed the huge apartment buildings to the west of town, or why they’d been abandoned. Perhaps they’d been damaged in one of the earthquakes that periodically shook the coast. Perhaps it was simply that no one wanted to live in Whittier.

The small town held only a cannery, and the harbor where the glacier cruises and the ferry docked. The basic setup wasn’t so different from many coastal towns, but in Whittier the mountains loomed over the harbor, and the ruins of the great apartment complex shadowed everything with an air of grim decay.

It was, of course, drizzling.

There were still roads out to the empty apartments and Jase drove there, parking the Tesla as far from the crumbling buildings as he could. He pulled his rain jacket out of the trunk, and after a moment’s hesitation strapped a canteen and belt over it. His grandfather had said there was an Olmaat rock on the beach below the spirit gate, so Jase set off walking along the shoreline, planning to find the Olmaat rock and then hike up. His grandfather’s version of “just past the ruins” could be anything up to a mile, in Jase’s experience, but the wet sand was firm under his gel-soles—easy walking. It was past ten now, and the low sun peeked under the cloud cover in scattered patches.

Jase hoped he’d recognize the Olmaat rock when he saw it. He hoped the spirit portal wouldn’t be hidden too deeply in the trees. He hoped that at least one of his ideas for using it would work—if he couldn’t enter the Spirit World, sooner or later his grandmother’s body would die.

And maybe his world if Raven was right about the tree plague, but that was a battle for the future, for other people to fight. Jase’s job was to get his grandmother back. After that, if he could, he’d finish healing the ley and be done with it. Before other people he loved got hurt, because of him.

He needn’t have worried about recognizing the Olmaat rock. Less than a quarter mile from the ruins, it stood out starkly against the chalky bluff, a misplaced chunk of dark gray stone that had probably been dumped by some ancient glacier. There was no other rock of that color, no other large rocks nearby. Jase could see why the first people who’d lived and fished off this shore had noticed it, and carved their symbols onto its surface.

But as he drew near, something about the rock began to tickle that other sense, the new one that had touched the life in the taiga and the cold clear energy of the sea.

There was a wrongness about the Olmaat rock, a darkness that made the back of Jase’s neck prickle—which was absurd. It was nothing but a big chunk of stone.

Jase couldn’t even read ancient Ananut symbols, and this had been some other tribe’s territory—but he’d bet those enigmatic lines and curves were signs of warning.

Keeping an eye on the dark rock—ridiculous! What did he think it was going to do?—Jase looked for a way up the bluff. It was only thirty or forty feet high, but it was too steep to climb and looked slippery.

A handful of yards beyond the rock Jase found a path up the bluff. It was only a narrow rim of beaten earth winding up the slope, but that was all the ancient people would have needed. Their modern descendants, at least the kind who regularly visited sacred sites, would probably make a fetish of using the ancient paths too.

“You could at least have put up a railing,” Jase grumbled as he started up the track. It wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. The drizzle was beginning to lift, the packed earth was sticky under his shoes, not slippery, and the path was wider than it looked from below.

As long as he didn’t look down.

When he neared the top, the trail turned into a cleft in the bluff that took him up the rest of the way. From the cliff’s edge Jase looked out over the bay. More open, far more inviting than Whittier itself, the bay was rimmed by the same kind of tree-clad slopes that rose behind him. Glaciers threaded through some of the gaps between those hills, flowing down to the quiet water.

The clouds were still too low for Jase to see the top of the higher mountains, but what he could see was beautiful.

Jase turned and took the path inland. The portal, when he reached it, was almost as unmistakable as the Olmaat rock: a pile of small boulders more than twice Jase’s height.

The stones that formed it were much the same color as the Olmaat rock, but they didn’t feel the same. Reaching out clumsily with that tenuous, other sense, Jase didn’t pick up anything except a hint of . . . other? travel? difference?

Whatever it was, it didn’t bother him the way the Olmaat rock did. Jase followed the path around the piled stones, in case there was an actual opening you could walk through and find yourself in the Spirit World.

There wasn’t.

That didn’t surprise him, but he’d have felt really stupid if he’d spent half the night trying other ways and then walked to the other side and found a door.

Now for the hard way.

The rain had stopped while he explored the rock pile, leaving the air so fresh it almost hurt to breathe. Jase pulled out his print of the death path and studied the complex stripes and swirls. This might be easier with a mirror, but he didn’t have one. And he had a hunch that magic worked more off the intent of the user than precise artwork, anyway.

He stripped off his rain jacket, then his shirt, flinching as cold air met warm skin. He pulled out the black marker and started with the deep V under the hollow between his collarbones, which seemed to center the whole design. After a while his hand grew more confident, and he began to pick up on patterns, as he sometimes did in the curving body of a well-designed car. The slanting lines over the ribs drew down to the center, not up and out. And that spiral down the middle of his torso, ending at his navel, was supposed to pull him not only down, but in.

In and down. Every black mark on his body confirmed that theme. By the time Jase was finished drawing he was almost sure his next idea wouldn’t work either, but it would be both faster and easier if it did.

He waited a few minutes for the marks to dry, then put his shirt and jacket back on. He found a flat face on the rock pile, where he’d have put an invisible door if he’d been designing it, took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

“I believe I can walk through,” he said firmly. “I believe I can walk right through these rocks and into the Spirit World. I believe.”

Mustering all the conviction he could—and having his eyes shut helped, when it came to not believing in solid rock—Jase walked forward as if the stone pile wasn’t even there.

He bruised his toe, his knee, and his knuckles when he threw out a hand to catch himself.

“Carp.” One of the knuckles bled. Jase licked it, and resigned himself to entering the Spirit World the hard way.

The design on his chest spelled out the answer. Down, and in, and darkness.

Jase found a place where he could sit with his back against the rocks and pulled out the sleeping pills. He was so tired, if he’d been in a warm bed, he probably wouldn’t have needed them. Leaning on a rain-wet pile of rocks, he took three.

Remembering what had happened before, he pulled off his belt and strapped his ankles together. If his real-world body should happen to start moving without his direction, he didn’t want it to go stumbling off a cliff. Hopefully the belt would prevent that.

Jase closed his eyes and tried to get comfortable. Eventually a mild dizziness swept over him, his muscles relaxed, and the darkness pulled him down.

Jase opened his eyes in the Spirit World.

It was the first time he’d had a chance to examine the place, without being distracted by arguing with Otter Woman or running for his life. It looked much like the real world, though the rock pile was more luminous than it should be in the Arctic twilight, and the rain that had happened so recently in his world . . . hadn’t.

At least this world was warmer. Jase set off, walking away from the bluffs. He couldn’t feel his real body now. If he didn’t try to connect with it, it should stay where he’d left it. And if he was right about how things worked in dreams, it didn’t matter what direction he went.

He concentrated on Gima, on his need to find her, to see her again. He passed through glades and meadows thinking about his grandmother. Jase was concentrating so hard that he’d walked past the pond before he realized that the frogs weren’t making their usual kid’s-horn honk, but instead croaking, “Hey boy. Heeey boy.”