Blazing the Trail (27 page)

“How’d you know?” I came around the back porch of the house, sizzling as I stepped closer to him, pretending to be fascinated by his bike. It was safer than meeting his gaze, especially if he was going to be saying nice things to me.

“You have more strength than you realize, but sometimes you spook when I surprise you. I thought you’d come around with a bit of time.” He flicked a glance at me. “Took less than expected.” I caught his grin, saw pride in it, and got interested in my boots.

“Thanks for the spell light.”

He nodded once in acknowledgment, then crouched beside the bike, his expression rueful. “I hate gears. I’ve had problems with third ever since I got this bike. Doesn’t matter how many times I replace the parts or reassemble them.”

I crouched down beside him, relieved to be talking about something else. “Have you asked Donovan?” I asked. Nick’s dad had sold the bike to Jared. “I mean, it was his bike before. Maybe he knows the trick.”

Jared grinned. “He said he wondered whether it would give me trouble, too. He said it had always been that way, as long as he’d had the bike, and he’d been starting to think it had something personal against him.”

I laughed. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“No. Especially as it has the same grudge against me.” He surveyed the array of parts and chose one.

“So, you know how to put all this back together?”

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, Zoë. And now I’ve done it so often I could do it in my sleep. I keep hoping the next time will be the trick.”

Who would have guessed he was so persistent?

Jared started to work then, frowning in concentration as he fitted the parts together. I sat down on the back steps of the house, brushing off some of the snow first. From the look of them, the wooden steps had been painted a couple of hundred times, but all the layers were peeling. It was strangely peaceful in the backyard, only power lines and telephone poles breaking the view of the backs of other houses, their windows blank.

I propped my chin on my hands and watched Jared work. He moved decisively and worked quickly, so certain of each choice. He had clearly done it a lot, because the reassembly was almost choreographed.

“What changed your mind?” he asked softly.

“I had a dream of what the future might be if I didn’t act.”

He flashed me a smile. “Hey, Wyvern.”

I smiled back, but only for a second. “Well, I almost died there on Wednesday.”

“What?” He pivoted to look at me, his work forgotten.

“Trevor lured me there, saying he wanted my help to stop Adrian from performing a ceremony he didn’t understand. But they did perform it, and they needed a sacrifice, and…”

“They tried to make it you.”

I shivered and nodded, then told him the rest. He was thinking more about the story than his gears; I could see that.

“How’d you get away?”

“Manifesting elsewhere.”

He nodded slowly, although I wasn’t sure whether he was thinking about what I’d said or the gear box. “That’s uncommon among shifters, you know. I think you might be the only one who can do it. The other species must have forgotten.”

“Maybe they didn’t ever know. We wildcards seem to have different powers, both from our own kind and from each other.”

He bent down beside the bike again, and it wasn’t my imagination that his brow was even more furrowed. “That has to be important,” he murmured. “No wonder you didn’t want to go in.”

I told him what had happened the next night, and he asked to see Skuld’s shears. Jared surveyed the shears. He didn’t touch them, just had a good look, then went back to the bike.

“The answer has to be something about us wildcards,” I mused, drumming my fingers on my knees. “They seem to be targeting us but waiting for something.”

“Maybe all of you to be together. Maybe the effect is even greater if you’re all finished off simultaneously.”

I stared at Jared, hearing the resonance of truth in his words. “Do you know that?”

“Just a guess.”

But it was a good one.

“There’s a lot of old lore about the entrapment of shifters,” he said quietly. “I should have paid more attention to it when they were trying to recruit me.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugged. “I like my own freedom too much to ever want to snare anybody.” He turned and looked at me, his eyes filled with invitation. “I like it better when shifters come to me.”

Our gazes locked and held then, and I felt the temperature rise in that yard. I could have fallen into his eyes forever, with all their umpty-gazillion shades of green. My heart started to do that wild dragon thing of matching its beat to his, and I felt our breath synchronize, too. It makes me dizzy when that happens, although I realized then that it wasn’t a sign of kismet as much as it reflected my own attraction.

And I could—apparently—be attracted to more than one guy at a time.

The feeling was more powerful with Jared, though, and I wondered whether it was just that I didn’t know him as well or whether we really did have a stronger connection. I wondered whether I was ever going to know, and sighed as I deliberately looked away.

“What’s bothering you?” he asked, focused on his bike again.

“What do you mean?”

“Something’s bugging you. I noticed it yesterday. Come on, spill it. The bike won’t be fixed for a few minutes yet.”

“We could go in my car.”

“It’ll wait a few minutes.”

“Are you afraid, too?” I asked on impulse.

His gaze flicked to me and back to the bike, so quickly that another person might have missed it. I heard his quick intake of breath, too, and felt the jump in his pulse.

He wasn’t certain of what would happen.

Maybe this was an opportunity to learn more. To go in armed with more data. I watched Jared for a minute and remembered that he was the one who seemed to know the most about dragon lore—well, other than my dead brother, Sigmund. That was probably because he’d had Sigmund’s book on the
Pyr
for a while and read it repeatedly.

Maybe he knew something more about Wyvern stuff.

“It’s this Wyvern thing,” I admitted, shamelessly fishing.

“Sounds like you’ve been working at it.”

“It’s the future part that isn’t happening. Plus Sigmund says that this part of a Wyvern’s evolution or development can drive a Wyvern insane.”

“That’s not very encouraging.”

“No. It’s not. But he’s like that.”

“Wait a minute. Sigmund who?”

“Guthrie. My older brother.” Jared glanced up, surprised.
“Yes, the dead one who turned
Slayer
and wrote that book you had, mostly to piss off our dad.”

“Probably worked, given what I know of Erik.”

I nodded.

“So, you’re talking to dead people, then?”

“Only Sigmund. And only when he feels like it.” I left out the bits about the
Wakiya
elder and Kohana’s appearance this morning. I’d noticed before that there was something electric between Kohana and Jared. No need to spoil the moment.

He straightened and flashed me a grin. “That’s reassuring.”

“Is it?”

“It’s got to be better to talk to a limited group of dead people, in terms of your sanity, than all the dead people ever.”

I threw a snowball at him. Jared laughed and ducked.

I stretched out my legs, trying to explain my frustration to him. “The thing is that I’m supposed to be able to see the past, the present, and the future simultaneously, but I never really know what’s going to happen.”

He cast me a glance. “Never?”

I blushed then and looked down. “Well, not about important stuff.”

Jared smiled. “So you’re in good company. Nobody else can see the future, either.”

“But I’m supposed to be able to! I’m the Wyvern.”

“I don’t understand why you’d want to see it,” he countered, surprising me a bit.

“Doesn’t everybody want to know what’s going to happen?”

“Only superficially.” He straightened and faced me, gesturing with a greasy motorcycle part in one hand. “I mean, if you could see your whole future, every choice and its consequence, every seemingly random event, every single
thing that was going to happen to you before you die, then what would be the point of living? You could just look at it all, like watching a movie, then say, ‘Oh, that’s that,’ and die.”

“Not funny.”

“I’m not joking.” He bent down beside the bike again. “What if you can’t see the future because it’s filled with a thousand possibilities? What if it’s a network of choices influencing events? What if choosing one path closes off another? What if it’s not a fixed destination but a realm of possibilities?” He glanced up. “What if the only way to see the future is to live it?”

“Then what about this Wyvern ability?”

“Maybe what the Wyvern sees is the array of possibilities that can result from a single choice.” He shrugged. “Maybe she can see where this decision will lead, based maybe on the other decisions being made simultaneously. Maybe it’s a very short-term thing, this vision of the future.”

“Two minutes’ warning, max,” I said, thinking of Derek.

Jared glanced up, apparently recognizing my reference. “That’s the wolf’s gig, isn’t it?” I nodded, and there was suddenly a bit of tension between us.

“So, are you dating him?” Jared was trying to sound indifferent, but he blew it completely. He was deeply interested. I heard it in his voice, which was thrilling.

Once again, I felt a strange sense of personal power, an inkling that my choices were part of whatever resulted from this discussion. Was Jared right? I stretched out my legs, acting casual about it, knowing I was anything but. “Sort of.” I took a deep breath. “He’s a good friend and a nice guy. He’s here, and he’s intense, and there are no games.”

Jared smiled. “That future is clear?”

I bristled at his tone, thinking—rightly—that he was criticizing Derek for being predictable. And that irritated me
because Derek was predictable and it wasn’t one of the things that attracted me to him. I did like Jared’s adventurousness.

“He’s direct,” I said, hearing my own defensiveness. “I like that.”

Jared straightened then and turned to confront me. His eyes flashed with unexpected annoyance. “Direct? That’s what you like now?”

“It’s better than not having a clue what someone is thinking. It’s better than never hearing anything at all!”

“I told you about Donovan’s warning!”

“I don’t believe that you would change your mind about anything you really wanted to do, regardless of who told you not to do it. Even Donovan.” I stood up. “I believe that you didn’t call me because you didn’t want to see me.”

Jared didn’t like that. He didn’t like it one bit.

His lips tightened for a moment; then he pointed at me. “You want direct? Here’s direct. You’re sixteen. I haven’t been for a while. That makes you jailbait, and I’m not going to have any more dealings with cops ever again. And if you don’t think that changes my choices, then you can think again.” He pivoted to crouch down beside the bike, his body vibrating with anger.

Why hadn’t I thought of that?

I watched him for a few minutes, the silence charged between us, and knew he wasn’t going to speak first. “You never told me what you did.”

“Because it doesn’t matter.” He spoke quickly and with heat. “I was full of hell when I was sixteen. Nothing major, but I got the attention I wanted—then found out it wasn’t worth having. They sealed the records, so I’m not going to be the one to spill the whole sordid story.”

It bothered him. I could see that.

I could have been graceful and let the conversation die.

Instead I pushed him. Call it making the future.

I went to his side and crouched down beside him. He didn’t look at me. “So, what does this jailbait comment really mean? Since you’re being direct?”

“You want me to tell you the future? The one you can’t see?”

“Give me your version of it.”

I didn’t think he would, not in a million years, but Jared surprised me one more time.

“That I’ll be turning up for the next two years. Just checking in, keeping in touch, helping you out when I can.” Jared stepped closer and his eyes brightened as he turned to face me. We were almost nose to nose. He arched a brow, his expression completely intense, and I knew I never wanted him to be any other way. “But once you’re legal, the only way you’ll get rid of me, dragon girl, is to tell me to go away forever.” He smiled crookedly, smiled enough that that deep dimple made an appearance. “I’m hoping that by then, you won’t do that.”

My heart thumped.

My breath caught.

He’d said exactly what I’d wanted to hear, and even better, I knew that wasn’t why he’d said it. Jared had said it because he meant it.

And this was my chance to push my future in a specific direction.

So I leaned forward, eliminating that little sliver of space, and kissed him.

It felt, just so you know, every bit as good as it had the other times.

Plus it just felt right.

M
y messenger rang, and I was so absorbed that I almost didn’t realize it was mine. It was in the pocket of my jacket, the sound muffled a bit. It was Jared who pulled back, then caught his breath.

“For you, I think,” he said, and his voice was rough.

He straightened and cleared his throat and turned his attention back to his bike.

It was Meagan and she was freaking out. “Derek’s gone,” she said as soon as I answered. “Trevor’s not here today and neither is Suzanne. I can feel spell light in this place like crazy. It’s like the school is filled with spellsong. It’s enough to make me feel sick, and I can’t even make a dent in it.”

“Where’s Jessica?”

“She’s right here and really worried about you.”

“I’m okay. I’m with Jared. We’re going after them.”

He glanced up at me, and I saw that there were no more bike bits on the cloth. He tightened a nut, threw his leg over the bike, and started the engine. It caught and ran with a throaty throb, and he grinned in triumph. He fiddled with the gears, nodded with satisfaction, then revved the engine for emphasis.