Defying Fate (13 page)

With Nathaniel’s help, James tossed Charles in the trunk.

“Isn’t someone going to notice when he doesn’t report back?” Hannah asked.

“Yes,” James said. “But by the time they do, it will be too late.”

James led Hannah and Nathaniel
off the road, climbing a nearby hill so that they could look down on the outpost without being spotted. By the time they reached the top, daylight had broken over the forest. The sun peeked through the clouds and vanished again.

There wasn’t much to look at from above. As James had seen on the map, there were only two more SUVs, an outbuilding, and a fence to protect them. It looked like the Union had all but forgotten the Haven’s entrance.

“So what’s the plan?” Hannah asked.

James considered the two men taking a smoke break between the SUVs. One of them had a beard, which was against the Union dress code, so they must have been guarding the door for at least a couple of weeks. And neither of them looked worried. They must not have realized that Charles had gone missing yet.

“I can disable their electronics from up here,” James said. “Then we’ll have to sneak down and—”

A voice barked out from behind them. “Hands in the air!”

James lifted his hands to shoulder-level and turned slowly.

A kopis stood behind them with a gun aimed straight at James’s chest. The guard seemed to have decided that James was the main threat—he didn’t even glance at the petite blond woman or the twelve-year-old boy.

“Identify yourself,” said the kopis. He had the eyes of a man who had killed before and wouldn’t be bothered to kill again.

“We were just hiking,” James said, inching one of his hands toward the back of his neck.

The kopis stepped forward. “Don’t move!”

James froze.

But Nathaniel didn’t.

He ripped a page out of his notebook and spoke a word of power.

Nathaniel’s magic spiked through the air. It electrified the hilltop, making James’s arm hair stand on end.

A finger of energy touched the kopis. The air rippled, and with a loud suctioning noise, he vanished.

His gun bounced off of the grass where he had been standing.

James whirled on his son. “What the hell did you just do?”

“I sent him away.” Nathaniel’s cheeks were red. He was breathing hard, like he had been running.

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Away.”

Hannah clapped both of her hands over her mouth, staring at the spot that the man had vacated.

The spell had left a sparkling residue on the grass. With enough time, James could have trace that magic to find the man—but he didn’t have time.

The kopides below had heard. And they were climbing the hill.

James grabbed the gun. “We’ll talk about this later.”

“You can’t seriously be mad at me,” Nathaniel said. “He was going to shoot. I saved our lives.”

“But you don’t even know where you sent him. He could be dead!”

“James,” Hannah said warningly. “This isn’t the time.”

She was right. One of the men was already halfway up the rocks, and moving fast—just seconds away.

James’s mind whirled with adrenaline, seeking some way out of the confrontation that didn’t involve killing. But Nathaniel wasn’t thinking. He ripped another page out of his Book of Shadows and slid down the hill.

“Nathaniel,
no
!” Hannah cried. When her son didn’t listen, she turned to James. “Stop him!”

James ran after his son, but Nathaniel had a head start.

He threw one page, and then a second, pointing at the two nearby kopides.

The force of magic made the pressure change. James’s ears popped.

Heat waves shimmered in the air, and both guards vanished.

There was still a man remaining at the bottom of the hill. James grabbed one of the dropped guns.

This kopis didn’t ignore Nathaniel like the first one had. He had identified the real threat.

He swung his gun around to aim at Nathaniel.

James shot first.

All it took was a twitch of the finger. A rain of bullets tore through the air. James wasn’t prepared for the recoil—it nearly knocked him off of his feet. The gun pulled wide.

Bullets chewed the kopis in half and pinged against the wall of the outbuilding behind him.

James stopped shooting too late.

He stepped up beside the body. The kopis’s eyes were open, but vacant. Dead. James had killed him.

“I saw one go in there,” Nathaniel said, pointing at the outbuilding. His voice swam in and out of James’s ears.

“Stay back,” he replied. It felt like someone else was speaking.

He mounted the stairs and kicked open the door.

The outbuilding had two rows of bunks stacked three high. There was a shower stall in one corner and a tiny kitchenette on the other; the open cabinet held a box of Twinkies and three packets of Ramen noodles.

A trail of blood drew James’s eye to the lone terminal beside the kitchenette.

The last kopis had been trying to contact Union HQ when James’s misfire had taken off the top of his skull.

James tossed the gun to the floor, feeling nauseous.

“Did you get—” Nathaniel began as he stepped into the outbuilding behind James.

He saw the body at the desk and never finished his sentence.

James checked the terminal. Like the equipment in the SUVs, it had no signal, so it couldn’t have transmitted data. Nobody would know they had taken the outpost. James stared at the body, transfixed by the cherry-red fluid that spilled out of its cranial cavity. That was his work. He had killed this man, and hadn’t even intended to do it.

“And you yelled at me for tossing those other guys across the dimension,” Nathaniel snorted.

It was absolutely the least helpful thing he could have said in that moment.

“I never meant to kill these men,” James said.

“Isn’t that worse? Accidentally killing someone instead of purposely neutralizing them? You should have let me take care of them myself.”

“And you don’t care that you might have killed them, too?”

“Not when the bad guys are trying to kill us back!”

“These aren’t ‘bad guys,’ Nathaniel. These are men—just human men. Now every single one of them might be gone.”

“Not the one on the trail,” he said. “He’ll just be sore.”

“That’s not the point,” James said, frustration thick in his throat. “Five men may have died at our hands—”

“And we’re still alive,” Nathaniel interrupted. He peered out the door. “Mom’s coming this way.”

James took another glance around the outbuilding. The only weapon in sight was on the dead man. Although it sickened him to touch it, he took the handgun and popped the magazine. Fully loaded.

He pushed Nathaniel out of the building and shut the door behind them.

“Is that everyone?” Hannah asked, looking pale as she skirted the bisected body.

James turned to the cave, where the entrance to the Haven was hidden. It was nestled into the bottom of the hill, half-obscured by bushes.

He clenched the gun in both hands. “Let’s find out.”

Waiting with the van while
everyone else risked their lives was both extremely boring and extremely refreshing. Ariane was no longer the wife of a kopis or expected to rush into battle, so she was happy to use her pregnancy as an excuse to stay behind. Boredom was infinitely better than terror.

But that meant that Ariane had nothing to occupy her attention aside from the contractions that had been progressing all morning. She paced circles around the van, lower back knotted and aching. Her hips felt like they were about to split in two.

Ariane hoped that the Haven would have good hospitals.

On what had to be her hundredth lap around the van, she heard a series of muffled
pops
, like the climax of fireworks on the Fourth of July. It echoed over the trees and faded away.

There were no fireworks on a rainy May morning.

It was gunfire.

Ariane leaned against the hood, taking deep breaths. There was no way to tell who had just been shot, and not knowing was almost worse than being in the battle herself. Even so, some small, angry part of her hoped that those gunshots meant that James Faulkner was dead.

A rush of wind interrupted her thoughts, and Ariane knew before she turned around that she wasn’t alone anymore.

Metaraon looked just as impressive in ordinary human clothing as he did in the robes of a Council member. With those massive wings folded at his back, he would make the most ordinary clothing look like the robes of a king.

“Hello, Metaraon,” Ariane said.

His eyes lingered on her swollen belly. Metaraon didn’t show much emotion—nothing but wrath and occasional lust—but she thought there was an element of surprise to his silence.

Ariane lifted her chin in defiance.

“Well? What do you want?” she asked when he failed to speak.

“I had come here for James Faulkner,” he said. “I didn’t expect to find you here as well.”

“I saw you hunting us last night. I’m sure you must have noticed my presence, since you’ve been following us for hours.”

“Days,” Metaraon corrected.

He stepped closer, and she realized that the hand he had been holding behind his back wasn’t empty. Ariane stepped back quickly and bumped into the van.

Metaraon was holding a knife. It was a wicked, slender triangle the length of his forearm, with glossy white bone as the cross-guard.

He planted a hand on the side of the van next to her head, blocking all escape. His eyes never left her pregnant stomach.

There was a time when his smoldering eyes would have filled Ariane with arousal. It was the look he got before their trysts in Hell, when she was staffing the Council of Dis and he was posing as judge. It used to mean that he was about to deliver all kinds of pain and pleasure to her body.

But Ariane knew that he didn’t have sex in mind. Not anymore.

Anger flitted through his gaze as he stared at her stomach. He lifted the knife between them, pressing the flat side to Ariane’s lips to silence her. The metal was so cold.

“It seems that you and I need to talk,” Metaraon said.

The tunnel into the cave
was so steep that James couldn’t walk down it; he had to climb, and then offer Hannah a hand so that she could join him. Nathaniel jumped.

A heavy door blocked the end of the tunnel. James tried the handle.

Locked.

“I’ll look for a key,” Nathaniel said, clambering up the tunnel again.

Hannah glanced around the dark passage, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. The only light came from the surface, and the cloud cover meant that there wasn’t much of that, either. But there were no cameras here. Nobody to watch them. It was as safe as it could be.

“Was this worth it?” she asked. After all of the close-range gunfire, it sounded like she was whispering. “Killing so many people to take the Haven?”

James closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to look at her. He thought that the sight of the dead kopides should have haunted him, but it was Elise’s face that flitted through his mind.

“Yes. It was.”

He almost sounded convincing.

“Maybe…maybe this will be good,” Hannah said. She tugged at the hem of her shirt and fidgeted with her sleeves. “I’ve been worried about Nathaniel. What he’s been doing with magic. At least this way he’ll be held back a little, and—and you can teach him how to handle whatever’s left.”

He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. The skin was still sensitive from the spell that used to be there. “I’m not going with you.”

“What?”

“I can’t go with you into the Haven. There’s too much I have to do here.” James coughed into his hand. “Sorry. I assumed that you realized that.”

“You know what it means if Nathaniel and I go into the Haven without you,” Hannah said. “Didn’t you ever read Pamela’s papers on interdimensional temporal distortion?”

James used to use them as sleep aids. “I read them once or twice,” he said.

“Time runs at a different speed between Earth and the Haven. It only takes a minute here for an entire day to pass over there. Nathaniel and I will be dead within a month.” She paused, giving him an expectant look. He didn’t speak. “So…you’re saying that you’re okay with that?”

“You’ll live a full, happy life, safe from the perils of this world. Whatever amount of time lapses on this side is irrelevant.”

“Cut the bullshit, James.” Hannah jabbed a finger into his chest. “Irrelevant? What is that supposed to even mean? Your son will be dead.
Dead.
You won’t see him become an adult, or get married. You won’t see your own grandkids. It doesn’t matter if it takes fifty years for that to happen in the Haven—it will only be a few weeks over here.”

“My feelings in the matter aren’t nearly as important as your safety, Hannah. You can both have a good life in the Haven.
That
is what matters.”

Hannah made a disgusted noise, flinging her hands into the air. “I don’t know why I bother. You missed the first ten years. Why should you care about the rest of his life?”

“That’s not fair, and you know it,” James said. “If you had told me about him—”

Footsteps shuffled on the tunnel above them, and they both fell silent. Nathaniel jumped to the bottom again.

“Found it in the shed,” he said, handing the key to James.

Hannah gave him a thin smile. “Great.”

James turned the gun’s safety off and opened the door.

He was greeted by impenetrable darkness on the other side. James felt along the wall until he found a switch, and a bank of fluorescents buzzed to life.

He entered slowly, gun at the ready. The room looked like an office space that had been abandoned in a large, craggy cave. The banks of computers facing the back wall were strangely mundane—but the wall itself was not.

A sweeping arch of ancient petroglyphs marked the wall of the cave in the outline of a door. There were cavemen and animals, abstract swirls and loops. It was the physical representation of a very ancient form of magic, the kind of arcane power that had been lost to time. James had only seen such markings in books before.