“Christian’s okay?”
“Last I heard. Now I’m going back to bed. There are keys in the fridge.”
“Why the fridge?”
“Because I wanted you to call before you split,” Ravyn answered. She yawned and then said, “Look, I’m not normally in the business of protecting people, but Kral crossed some lines to get to you, and I owe the leader of Frost a favor for getting him blown up, so you’re clear to use the safe house as long as you need it. Also, I don’t control members’ decisions, but I’ve strongly suggested to my guild that the number against you is crap. So, I’m done. Have a good day.”
She hung up, leaving Alysia shaking her head at the phone. Alysia hadn’t known Ravyn well before, but she suspected the burgundy-haired mercenary was going to be an interesting leader.
As assured as she possibly could be that she wasn’t going to be poisoned, Alysia double-checked all the packages and seals for any evidence of tampering and then downed two of the energy bars and a bottle of water while she made some phone calls and got the keys from the fridge.
She left messages at the two numbers she knew for Christian, giving him the number of the phone Ravyn had left her and asking him to call. She had half dialed Lynzi before she thought better of it. Until she was sure Kral was off her tail, she didn’t want him to have any reason to believe SingleEarth could be used to track her down.
Underneath the keys in the crisper, she found a map marking the location of the safe house and the nearby Crimson guild hall.
The map was good to have because it showed her where she was, but Crimson wasn’t her goal. Her goal was a ranchstyle house set well back from the hubbub of the nearest town or major road and surrounded by the forest that seemed to fill so much of New England.
Christian was a city boy at heart, but when it came to his own home, he knew the value of privacy.
His home. Alysia couldn’t afford to think of it as hers, even if she had lived there for almost four years. She couldn’t automatically assume that she still had any right to it.
Alysia frowned at the sight of the car in the driveway. The shiny silver Prius didn’t look like something Christian would drive, unless he had bought it as part of a cover or “borrowed” it in a pinch.
Maybe he sold the house, she thought as she walked up to the front door.
Was some white-picket-fence family playing house in the place where she and Christian had trained together, the place she had come home to after a fight, tired and triumphant?
It was past a normal dinner hour, but not so late that most people would be angry at being disturbed, so Alysia rang the bell. When no one answered, she walked around the one-story home, trying to keep out of sight of the large-paned windows facing the backyard just in case someone was inside. At the sliding glass door to the backyard she paused again, this time to listen. Anyone there?
She thought she heard movement, so before breaking in, she tried knocking again.
A kid came to the door. He didn’t open it, but he pushed the curtains aside to peer out.
He did sell it, she thought, before the kid met her gaze with his own direct stare and she realized who he was. She hadn’t seen him long, but she was sure this was the kid who had saved her life at SingleEarth.
A second boy trotted up, wide-eyed and curious, but the older tiger turned, snapped something to him, and then dropped the curtain and walked away.
Don’t jump to conclusions, she tried to tell herself as she limped back to her car. She was breathing heavily by the time she reached it, and her knee was aching. She hadn’t intended to do this much running around. But, Christian, why are your ex-girlfriend’s adopted kids in your house?
It didn’t take long to pop the lock on the Prius and find Sarik’s registration in the glove box. They had dropped her car off and taken one of his, probably to avoid bringing her nice, legal, shiny lease to Onyx, which was almost certainly where they were.
I was right.
Maybe she would head to Crimson after all. Frost was Christian’s guild, but it was also the guild whose members were most likely to accept a capture. Very few Crimson members had any interest in kidnappings—in fact, the offer of such a job usually offended them—and Crimson’s guild leader seemed to be no friend of Kral’s these days. Alysia could get more information there.
Arriving at the Crimson guild hall, however, felt oddly surreal. It didn’t have the same sentiment as Frost, or even Onyx; she had joined mostly because it was challenging, not because she fit their normal profile. She could do some subterfuge when she wanted to, but she didn’t like the old-money attitude that Crimson tried to maintain.
The Crimson guild hall was located at the back of a good old-fashioned ranch sitting on seven acres of land, complete with a pair of horses and a bevy of barn cats. There were multiple buildings, but the main training area was inside the larger of two barns—the smaller, of course, was for the horses. The training hall was soundproof and looked nothing like a barn on the inside; instead of a hayloft, it had a ladder that led to the weapons storeroom.
Alysia was halfway up the ladder when someone called her name. It took a moment, but she was able to recall that the woman’s name was Yasmin. She had trained and competed to join the guild around the same time Alysia and Christian had.
“Nice to see you’re not dead,” Yasmin remarked.
“You too,” Alysia replied sincerely. “How has it been here? How long has Ravyn been in charge?”
“Adam had a job get rougher than he was ready for,” Yasmin said, referring to the man who had been the leader of Crimson when Alysia had left the guild.
Alysia wasn’t disappointed to learn he was gone, since with Christian in charge of Frost, that meant two of the three leaders who had hated her and tried to kill her were out of the picture.
“I do not know many details, but I do not believe his mind fully recovered. He did badly at last year’s challenge. Two others beat him by miles. Ravyn won after a tiebreaker.”
“I’d have thought Christian would have tried to take it by now.” It was probably a comment better directed to Christian himself, but Alysia was curious as to what the other guilds were saying. Two years earlier, the guild leaders had feared that Christian and Alysia would take over, enough to put a lot of money into trying to stop them.
“He has Challenged twice here. He won Frost but has not won Crimson. I doubt he will bother to try again, now that Sahara has returned.”
“What does that have to do with Christian?”
Yasmin, whose gaze seemed perpetually downcast, looked up. “Gossip is not my area of expertise. I find it useful to discuss who is in charge, not who is sleeping with whom.” She must have seen something on Alysia’s face, because she added, “You were gone two years, Alysia. None of us know if you will run away again. How much trust do you expect?”
“Sahara was gone much longer,” Alysia pointed out.
“If one has the patience to deal with a spoiled child, a positive relationship with Sahara kuloka Kral is considered a good investment.”
Was that how Christian saw it?
Was that why he had installed the cubs—and possibly Sahara herself—in his house while Alysia was busy being abducted and tortured?
Survive now. Figure out all the rest later.
“I need to know about the contract for my capture,” she said.
“I have that information,” Yasmin said. “Kral has not officially canceled the contract yet, but our guild leader has marked it as expired, now that Princess Kitty has returned. I do not know if it is still active in Frost or Onyx.”
Most members of Crimson wouldn’t have access to information from Frost or Onyx. To use Ben’s term, few people in Bruja “multiclassed,” learning the skills necessary to succeed in more than one of the guilds. Christian would know, but Christian wasn’t answering any of the phone numbers she had for him.
It didn’t take Alysia long to find someone who knew the next phone number she could try,
one she had never called before but that she suspected might get her in touch with Christian.
Of course, if he did answer the phone, she might need to kill him.
Literally or figuratively, she wasn’t sure.
CHAPTER 20
THE SHRILL, PERCUSSIVE ring yanked Sarik from her sleep. Disoriented, at first she just stared at the phone on the nightstand.
Christian put a hand on her shoulder and shoved her down on her face so he could reach over her, answer the phone, and bark, “Hello?” He was met with silence, and after a second hello, he hung up.
“Congratulations,” he said, rolling away from Sarik and off the bed. “You’ve been back six hours and you’re already getting crank calls.”
“Wonderful,” she grumbled. She tried again to sit up, and her head spun. She pressed her palms against her closed eyes, trying to fight the inexplicable pressure that seemed to have pooled in the sockets beneath. The sensation was vaguely reminiscent of the time her father had broken her nose and cheekbone.
“You’re fine,” Christian said. “If you want, I’ll buy you breakfast. Or dinner. Whatever meal this is.”
“What?” She slapped his hand away when he offered it, because she realized exactly why she felt like utter crap. “You jerk. You said—”
“You’re not hurt, just tired. If you had ever had a head cold in your life, you would have felt worse. Just be glad shapeshifters can’t get the flu.”
Her stomach twisted at the mere mention of food, but she felt miserable enough to ask, “Will food help?”
“Yes.”
“Great. You’re driving, and buying.”
As she stood up, she caught sight of herself in the large vanity mirror. The buttercup-yellow cashmere cardigan that Jason had given her for her birthday had been utterly destroyed by her father’s claws. The charcoal-gray wool dress pants were in a similarly stained and rumpled state. She had lost her bone hair-sticks before she had even reached the hospital, and her hair was falling around her face.
“I would like to be able to say I would recognize you anywhere,” Christian said as she stared at herself, feeling lost, “but if I had seen you unexpectedly at SingleEarth, I might have walked right by you with nothing more than a vague sense of familiarity.”
“That was the point.” She started to twist her hair back but then stopped as she realized there wasn’t any kind of elastic nearby. Sahara had worn her hair down, wild around her face.
“You changed your coloring. The way you walk. Your accent. You even changed your perfume,” Christian remarked.
“And like any good Onyx boy, you use all your senses,” she replied.
To hell with it, she decided. Play the part, just until you can figure out how to disappear without someone else taking the fall for it.
She went to the closet and was met by the scent of leather polish. Like most Mistari, she wore primarily materials produced by animals. As Sarik, that meant materials like silk, cashmere, and wool. As Sahara, it had mostly meant patent leather, which addressed the angry-sixteen-year-old-mercenary-brat image and doubled somewhat more practically as armor.
Most Mistari, especially in a group like SingleEarth, had trouble shapeshifting if they wore so much as a polyester scarf or a metal button on their pants. Few could change shape at all with any metal on them, which was why royal-blood Mistari tended to prominently display jewelry as marks of their rank, like the armbands Jeht wore; it meant they were strong enough to tolerate it.
There were steel grommets on Sahara’s vest, and the belt she wore low on her hips above her leather jeans was made of twisted white, yellow, and rose gold. In her ears, she wore sixteen white-gold hoops, eight on each side. Christian helped her as she struggled to slip each of them into place with trembling hands. The holes had become smaller since she had left, but they had been made by a firestone needle. They would never completely heal.
She couldn’t immediately change the fact that she had highlighted her hair until it was an unextraordinary medium brown, but otherwise the costume was complete once she had slipped on boots with metal stiletto heels she had previously used to kill someone.
“That’s a little more familiar,” Christian said.
“And you’re ever the gentleman for staring while I changed,” she replied sarcastically. “What would Alysia think?”
“Contrary to rumors,” Christian answered, “Alysia and I are certainly more than ‘just friends,’ but we were never romantically or physically involved. What would your vampire think?”
She flinched. “What do you know about Jason?”
“Is he the vampire you ran off with while Alysia and I were fighting Maya’s entire nest?”
“You were there?”
“I went after you but got there just in time to see you head out the back while I was fighting. The vamp with you was bleeding, limping so badly that it was obvious you were the only thing holding him up. He couldn’t have made you go anywhere against your will. Then I found Cori, and I knew why you had gone. I figured if you needed time away, that should be your choice, so I didn’t tell Kral I had seen you there. I just told him that I had run into someone from Frost who had already taken down a lot of the nest.”
The “someone from Frost” would have been Alysia, of course, but that wasn’t the mystery.
“You never told Kral?” she asked.
“It was none of his business.”
“How did he find out I was there?” The fact that she had gone after Maya had been one of the crimes he had thrown at her when accusing her of defiance.
Christian shrugged. “I don’t know. Information gets around, and gets to Kral, in more ways than we can even imagine.”
Very true.
“Such as the fact that Alysia dropped by,” Sarik said, “just a few hours before I called.”
“That’s something I still don’t understand,” Christian said. “Why did you come to Onyx with her? I’m sure you knew your father wasn’t likely to be around at that hour, and you were careful to stay where I couldn’t see you, but even with all your camouflage, you risked a lot. You can’t tell me you couldn’t talk your way out of being there.”
“I needed to know if Alysia wanted to kidnap me,” she answered vaguely. She could tell that Christian wasn’t going to let the subject drop, so she explained, “I knew she was a third-level member of Onyx, not to mention Frost and Crimson. She wasn’t dedicated enough to SingleEarth to throw out her weapons, and Crimson especially is known for doing long undercover jobs. If she was there for me, going with her to Onyx seemed the best way to get her to show her stripes where no one else from SingleEarth would get hurt.”
“Also the best way to get you noticed and hauled back home.”
She laughed. “Sure,” she said sarcastically. “I don’t care how good Alysia is. I’m three hundred pounds in my tiger form, with the claws and teeth to match. If she had made a grab for me or pulled a weapon, I would have been gone before she made another move. She even let me drive. If it hadn’t been for your obsession with her, everyone at Onyx would have told SingleEarth to screw themselves, and I would have known Alysia wasn’t after me.”
“Obsession?” Christian echoed, looking amused.
She sighed. “I need to ask you for something.”
“That lunch I promised?” he quipped.
She shook her head. This was almost as hard as standing up to her father, but if six years in SingleEarth had taught her anything, it was that it was always easier to find the courage to help someone else than it was to help herself.
“I want you to leave Alysia alone,” she said.
“You really think you can enforce your father’s threats? I know you too well, darling.”
The words confused her. “What are you talking about?”
“Are you going to try to convince me that you don’t know your father agreed to leave Alysia alone and drop the contract against her only if she and I didn’t get back together?”
“Why wou
ld— It doesn’t matter,” she said. She didn’t understand why her father would be so afraid of Alysia, but at that moment, it worked in her favor. “I don’t care about my father’s issues with Alysia. I care about Alysia, for her own sake. She has dreams, Christian. Plans for her life. She can have a future in SingleEarth, or anywhere she wants. If you go find her now, you’ll push her to give all that up before she has a chance to realize that she has options. Did you know she’s in college?”
Christian frowned, not disapproving but obviously confused. Of course, he and Sahara had been homeschooled by the same tutors; they were literate and could pass for educated, but neither had gone through the traditional school system.
“Tell me you’ll give her time,” Sarik said.
He looked like he wanted to argue, but at last just shook his head. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told your father: I don’t control Alysia. Once I confirm with Ravyn that she’s all right, I’ll back off—for now—but that won’t stop Alysia from hunting you down once she recovers and finds out that you and Kral have decided to team up and emotionally blackmail me.”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Given what Sarik had put her through, Alysia deserved to take any shot she wanted.
“Also, you’ve lost your free lunch,” Christian added before storming out.
She hesitated for a moment, then followed him, not in the hope of catching him but because the only alternative was continuing to hide in her room.
Near her father’s office, however, she saw a sight that enraged her: Kevin, her father’s current favorite flunky, leading Jeht and Quean across the dimly lit chamber. Jeht walked ahead of the messenger, perfectly composed, as if completely unaware or uncaring of the grandeur of the Onyx Hall. His brother looked distinctly more nervous, as if he were less trusting of the stranger.
Christian had reached the scene first and was staring at Kevin with murderous intent. “You went to my house?” Christian demanded.