Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies (2 page)

“They’re going to hold the wake on Sunday, right?” Harper said, handing Joel a can of Mountain Dew.

He cracked the lid and drank deeply. “Yeah. Not that non-wolves are supposed to know, you know. Geez guys. Jade isn’t even a shifter.”

“Small town,” Ezee said. “Can’t keep anything secret here.”

Except me being a sorceress. That was still mostly a secret. Everyone thought I was just a witch. Totally fine by me. Most people, my friends excepted, think sorcerers are evil.

Which might be true. I knew Samir was evil. Me? I wasn’t so sure yet. Given how things had gone lately, I figured I could go either way.

I shoved that depressing thought aside. “Well, I wish they’d buy more comic books,” I said, smiling.

“They still planning to fight it out for who gets to be the next alpha of alphas?” Ezee asked. Wolf shifters had a weird society, from what Harper and the twins had explained to me. They put a lot of importance and power into their alphas, with everything being run like a gang more or less. Not a thing I was a fan of, after how I’d grown up in a cult and all. Alpha shifters were just shifters who were much stronger than other shifters, sometimes with extra powers. Like Alek, though some of his powers came from him being a Justice and were given to him by the Council of Nine, the shifters’ equivalent of a ruling body or gods or whatever.

“Guess so. Glad I’m not an alpha. They are supposed to reaffirm the Peace, too, which I suppose is the real point. I’m keeping out of it. I just deliver pizza, man, and sometimes howl at the moon.” Joel laughed, finished his drink, and left with a hefty tip in his back pocket. I’d delivered pizzas for a while, during one of my lives while on the run from Samir. I always tipped well after being in the trenches of pizza service.

We filled paper plates and shoved dice and minis aside to eat. I asked Harper about the Peace, but it was Ezee who answered me, taking on a professorial tone that I knew from his wink was totally an affectation.

“Back in like the eighteen-forties, when everyone was coming west, a lot of wolves from Europe were coming here, making a name for themselves as hunters, trappers, guides, and such. They mixed with the local shifter wolves and formed pretty territorial packs. There was a ton of fighting between packs, enough that it got to the point where humans were starting to notice weird shit like people turning into wolves, and how many people were dying or disappearing.”

“Wolves are always territorial. It’s like they take the worst traits of wolf and human and combine them into something that resembles neither,” Levi said in a tone that made it clear what he thought. His shifter animal was a wolverine, but he was one of the most laid-back guys I knew besides his brother.

“This was bad, though, way way bad. The Council stepped in. Some say that’s when they created the Justices as they are today. I don’t know. But Wulf, who was still called Ulfr Leifson back then, brought together a huge Althing with an alpha from each of the major packs. To prevent the Justices and the Council from killing them all because they were risking exposure, he brokered a peace. Packs allow all wolves to pass through their territory, and allow non-aligned wolves, like Vivian, or Joel, to live within their territory.”

“Like Max,” Harper added. Her brother was a wolf shifter as well. He lived with Harper’s mom, Rosie, out on a bit of land beyond Wylde, at the edge of the River of No Return Wilderness.

“No fighting, no killing. It saved the wolves from the Council’s wrath and kept them from exposing themselves to humans,” Ezee said with a shrug. “So now that Wulf is gone, I guess they are going to see who is top dog again and reaffirm the Peace.”

“And you think sorcerers are weird? At least we just kill each other,” I said with a forced smile. Shifters had seemed so simple. Like people, who could turn into animals. I was learning though, as I slowly paid more attention to the people around me, that they were like any people: far more complex than they first appeared. None of my friends were wolf shifters, so I’d never really asked about packs and politics. Learn something new every day, I guess.

I’d just bitten into my second greasy slice, pineapple juice and spicy pepperoni sliding over my tongue, when a knock came at the back door.

“Probably Joel,” Harper said. “Bet he forgot something.” She jumped up again and disappeared.

I was halfway through chewing my third bite when she came back, a weird expression on her face as she slid through the door. I swallowed a lump of cheese and started to ask her what was up.

Then I saw the man behind her. Over six and a half feet tall, white-blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and a grim expression on his annoyingly still handsome face.

Alek. And here I was, my hair in a loose braid with pieces falling out, and pizza grease sliding down my chin and staining my teeshirt. Fuck me sideways with a chainsaw.

“Alek,” I said, regretting swallowing that last bite so quickly as it lodged in my throat. Or maybe that was my heart, which was trying to punch its way out of my chest in a fight-or-flight simulation.

“Jade,” he said, his voice low and soft. He raised one hand, holding up a plastic bag with a wadded-up shirt inside. “I need your help.”

The air seemed to go out of the room and I found it hard to breathe for a moment. Anger. Yeah, that’s what I was feeling. Hurt and angry.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem. Let me drop everything and rush to assist you, Justice. I’ll just get my coat.” I didn’t move.

A glance told me that my three friends were trying their best to turn invisible. Harper pressed herself against the wall to Alek’s left, as though her
StarCraft
teeshirt would blend with the
Magic: The Gathering
poster behind her in a sort of nerd wallflower magic. Levi and Ezee, both flamboyant in their own ways, Levi with his Mohawk and tattoos and piercings, Ezee with his silk shirt and pressed trousers, were hunched in their seats, frozen like bunnies sighting the shadow of a hawk. Nobody made eye contact with me.

I guess they would have fled if they could, but Alek’s bulk filled the only door.

“Do you know Doreen Reeves?” the bulk in question asked. He didn’t seem surprised I wasn’t rising to help him despite my words. I guess his lie-detection powers were still intact.

Levi sucked in a breath and then immediately looked like he regretted drawing attention to himself as Alek and I shifted our gazes to him.

“Dorrie. She drives an Explorer,” he said with a tiny shrug. “Just fixed her check engine light last week.”

“She’s missing,” Alek said, his cold blue eyes back on my face, turning my skin hot beneath his gaze.

A weird feeling twisted in my gut. “She’s a wolf?” I asked, though it was half a question only. Town full of strange wolves. Woman missing. I watched a lot of
Law & Order
, I could do crime victim math.

“Yeah,” Levi said. His eyebrows pulled together as though the piercings in them were suddenly magnetized. “Shit.”

“Can’t your visions tell you where she is?” I said. I was half out of my chair though, holding myself down with an act of stubborn will. I already knew I’d help. I just didn’t want Alek to think he could waltz in here after over a month and snap his fingers for his personal sorceress bitch to come magicking for him.

Okay. That was definitely the anger speaking. It left a bitter taste in my mouth that drowned out the pepperoni and pineapple.

“No,” Alek said.

I waited, but he didn’t say more. Everyone was looking at me. I felt their eyes like physical weights pushing me out of my chair.

“Game’s postponed,” I said with an exaggerated sigh. “Don’t read my notes while I’m gone.”

“You do not have to come,” Alek said. “Just work spell like you did before, I can do rest.” His usually faint Russian accent stood out stronger, and hinted at his own emotions hidden somewhere under his totally stone-faced exterior. I couldn’t decide if that made me feel better or worse.

“Nope,” I said. “You get me or nothing.”

He held out the bag without another word.

I climbed up into Alek’s truck and breathed in the scent of hay in sunlight and his own vanilla musk. I’d missed that scent, missed the feel of him near me. It wasn’t fair. But I had a job to do. I shoved away my resentment and the mixed emotions of anger and lust and pulled the teeshirt from the bag.

Reaching for my magic, I focused my will into a locate spell, picturing a link between the shirt, which still smelled faintly of sweat and cigarettes, and the woman who owned it, who had, I assumed, worn it last. I’d been training these last few weeks, plus the ordeal in Three Feathers had pushed me to a new level, I guess. I didn’t even have to touch my twenty-sided die talisman to work the find person spell. Practice practice practice.

I felt a tenuous link, stretching to the north.

“North,” I said. “It’s not a strong link.”

Alek started up the engine with a nod and drove out of the parking lot, taking the single road out of town, heading north.

“What does ‘not strong’ mean?” he asked softly after a moment.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think it’s good though. Where did you get her shirt?”

“From her mate.”

I risked a glance at him, at his perfect profile in the shifting light from the streetlamps. He didn’t elaborate, so I turned my focus back to the spell, to that thin silvery thread only I could see stretching into the darkness.

“You didn’t call,” I heard myself say.

“We are going to talk now?” Alek said. In the corner of my vision I saw a muscle tick in his cheek. He had stubble, faint and only a shade darker than his white-blond hair. He looked tired, but that might have been a trick of the uneven light.

“No,” I said. “Bad timing.” I swallowed the “sorry” I wanted to put at the end of that.

After a long moment, he said, “Neither did you.”

“Touché,” I muttered. Point one to Alek. Great.

The thread of silver veered off to the left, growing thicker as we left Wylde behind. I sat up straighter, peering ahead.

“Left at that turnabout. There’s a logging road there, leads to an old quarry. We’ll have to park and walk, I think.” The quarry was a popular hangout for college students to scratch their names and dirty slogans into the rocks and drink beer and make out. Despite the weak link to Dorrie, this made me hopeful. Maybe Dorrie had run out here with some hot out-of-town wolf to do a little extra-marital mating. Maybe I was about to wreck a marriage instead of find something worse.

There are far more terrible things than a broken relationship.

Alek drove the truck as far down the logging road as we could go, until huge logs dragged there sometime in the past stopped our way. He killed the engine and we climbed out. The air was chillier here than in town, a breeze sighing in the tall trees and sticking my sweaty teeshirt to my back. Summer was definitely over.

I was about to call up a light, which would make holding onto the tracking spell fun, but as I said, practice is practice. Alek beat me to it, pulling a flashlight from under his seat. He shined it ahead of me as I moved carefully down the road and into the quarry.

The hillside here was cut away, a scar on the landscape. Alek’s light caught bits and pieces of it as he moved, loose gravel crunching beneath our feet. Darkness pressed in on me. Somewhere, not as distant as I’d have liked—which would have been so far I couldn’t hear at all—a wolf howled and was answered by a chorus.

“I’ve totally seen this movie,” I muttered.

“This is the part where we get eaten by a chupacabra,” Alek said. He came up close behind me, his muscular body a solid presence at my back. Comforting even as he annoyed me.

His joke made me smile and then get pissed that I was smiling. “Stop being charming,” I said, refocusing on the teeshirt in my hands, on the sliver thread of magic pulling me forward into the dark.

“We will talk, Jade,” he murmured, his breath warm against my neck, stirring the small hairs there. It sounded like so much more than just a simple promise.

I pushed down the hurt that rose and just nodded curtly, not trusting myself to speak.

We moved slowly through the quarry, the thread growing thicker, pulling me toward where I knew there was a drop-off and a secondary rock fall where they’d mined bigger boulders. We had to be near now.