Traitor's Son: The Raven Duet Book #2 (6 page)

She was completely naked.

Jase didn’t care.

“Are you going to let me go now?”

“Not till you’ve listened.”

She must have realized he wasn’t watching her body, because she stopped posing and went around the tree to pick up her clothes. And for once, the part of Jase that couldn’t help but notice all that smooth bare skin wasn’t dominating the rest of his brain.

“If I listen, then you’ll release me?”

“Yes.” She started putting on her clothes.

“Then talk! I want to get out of here before . . .”

Before a whole flock of bird people showed up, and shot him with space weapons that wiped his memory and turned him into a drooling vegetable. If this wasn’t a hallucination, he was pretty sure it fell into the “you’ve seen me so I have to kill you” category.

“I intend to tell you everything, but first, where’s the medicine bag? I can sense that you’re not carrying it—and you should! You need to bond with it in order to use it.”

“What med—That pouch? That’s what this is about? No, forget the stupid pouch. How did you
do
that? Who . . . what are you?”

“I’m Raven.” She put on her pants and sealed them. “Just as I said. I haven’t lied and I don’t intend to. Lying didn’t work out, before. And I’ve already wasted too much time finding you.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Jase pointed out. “And I don’t give a frack about the last time. What are you?”

“I’m a shapeshifter from a dimension . . . well, not exactly adjacent to yours, but we share the same leys.”

“
Lays?
Like, lay of the land or something? How does that shapeshifting thing work? It isn’t
possible.
”

He felt more indignant about that than the cuff. Almost.

“
L-E-Y.
Ley. The leys are currents of magical energy that run through multiple dimensions, which in this case includes both yours and mine. And you—”

“
Magical
energy? Carpo.”

She pulled the shirt over her head, concealing a pair of breasts so lovely they were beginning to distract Jase from even this conversation. But mostly, he was still creeped out by the memory of that gross disintegration. Whatever she really was.

“If there’s no magic,” she asked, “how do you explain what I just did?”

“A hallucination,” said Jase firmly. “Brought on by the drugs in that stupid pouch. Which I should have flushed! Or turned over to the customs cops. I could be in a hospital right now, getting that stuff cleaned out of my system.”

His other theory had to do with aliens, who, after they killed him, would revert to bird form and feast on his eyes. All things considered, he preferred drugs.

The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Honestly, I think you’re going to be worse than she was.”

“Who . . . that girl at the border? She knew who, what you are?”

And she’d still been alive when Jase saw her, which might be a good sign.

“Yes.” The magnificent brown eyes were alight now, with indignation and enthusiasm. “She accepted Atahalne’s quest, even though she had to run away from home and . . . hmm. Maybe I’d better tell you that part later. The leys have been—”

“I don’t care about the leys,” Jase said. “I’m too busy wondering if your spaceship can outrun a Tesla.”

He’d bet the Tesla could give it a race . . . till the batteries died. Then he’d be at their mercy.

“Jehoshaphat!” She stamped one small bare foot. “You want to leave, right?”

Was that some kind of alien curse? It sounded like something an old-time miner might say. But the answer to her question was clear.

“Yes, I want to leave. Right now.”

“Then pay attention! Your people have damaged your environment so badly that it’s mucked up the leys. In all the dimensions, not just this one. The tree plague was the last straw, and my people are sufficiently pissed about it that they want to let the plague ravage your planet and kill you all. The only way—”

“Wait, the tree plague? But they say it won’t spread out of the Tropics. It could never get this far north. And what do you mean, ‘your people’?”

Raven took a deep breath and began to mutter. Counting to ten in alien? Or just swearing? After a moment she turned cool eyes back to him.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “That bioplague, which your terrorists unleashed, will wipe out most of the forests on this planet unless the trees become strong enough to fight it off. And the destruction of the forests will radically change the atmosphere, killing most of the animal life. Human animals. So you’d better start listening.”

“I thought the trees were supposed to resist it,” said Jase. “Scientists are surprised it’s spread as far as it has.”

He wouldn’t have known that much, if his biology teacher hadn’t been fascinated by the microbial war playing out in the planet’s ecosystem. She’d talked about it at boring length.

“Exactly.” Raven sounded pleased. “The reason it’s spreading, instead of the trees fighting it off, is because the leys—”

“Magic leys,” said Jase sarcastically.

“The leys are too badly weakened to support them.” She was glaring at him now. “You don’t believe a word I’m saying, do you?”

“No,” Jase admitted. “Aliens . . . yeah, maybe. Magic, no. So you might as well let—”

“But you’re the one who has to heal the ley! Atahalne, who made that pouch, he died getting it to the south end of this ley. And Kelsa—”

“Died,” Jase said. “As in dead?”

“That was over two hundred years ago. But yes, he gave his life for this task. And Kelsa got arrested. She almost got killed healing it up to the border. She passed that bag, and Atahalne’s quest, on to you! There’s no time to find anyone else. You have to try.”

“No, I don’t. Particularly if it entails dying and getting arrested. Let her come back, and I’ll give her the dirt and she can finish whatever-it-is herself. If you need to get her out of jail,” he added, “my dad can refer you to a really good lawyer.”

Raven sighed. “I wish she could finish. She was a magnificent healer. She opened four nexuses, far more powerfully than I thought any human could. That she chose you is an honor, Jason Mintok.”

The way she said “human,” as if she wasn’t one, made goose flesh rise on his arms.

“Great,” said Jase. “An honor. Well, I decline. If she’s so special, let her do it.”

“I can’t,” said Raven. “It’s not because she was arrested; they’ve already let her go. But my enemies are too aware of her. They can track her, and stop her easily now. It was always a race, and they moved too quickly. They’re still moving, but they don’t know about you yet. If we move fast enough, you might be able to heal the rest of it before they can stop you. But we need to get started. Immediately!”

“Enemies? Never mind. I don’t even want to know. Let me go.” It was an order, not a plea.

“If I let you go, will you listen? Please?”

“I’m not listening now,” Jase told her. “Because I’m not going to do it. Whatever it is. Get the key and open the cuff.”

To his astonishment, she went to the rock where the bird had placed the key and picked it up. No difficulty finding it, Jase noted. Almost as if she really had put it there herself—which was flat-out impossible, no matter what he thought he’d seen!

She stepped forward and inserted the electronic key into the slot in the middle of the wide plastic band.

“I suppose instant cooperation was too much to hope for.” She turned the key and the magnetic clamps popped open. “But at least promise that you won’t destroy the dust in that bag. Or give it to my enemies. To anyone but me. It holds human magic, created for this purpose alone. I don’t think any human now alive knows enough about this ley to re-create it. So it can’t be replaced.”

“Sure.” Jase rubbed his wrist gingerly. The bruises were already darkening. “You can have your damn pouch back, anytime. Just keep out of my way.”

He stalked back toward the trail. He could feel her eyes on him, but she didn’t follow. Maybe she planned to pick up a ride at the trailhead parking lot. Maybe she could com someone to come and get her. Maybe she planned to fly!

The thing that worried Jase most, as he reached the trail and hurried down the mountain, was that he half believed that last answer was the real one.

***

Hallucination.
It had to be.

Jase drove home and hit the button that raised the garage door. Both his mother’s and his father’s cars were gone, but he waited in his car for five full minutes. If his . . . problem was caused by fumes the stuff emitted, he wanted to give the air in the garage plenty of time to clear. He was fairly certain it was safe, but he still held his breath when he went into the garage and dragged out the recycling bin. Jase picked through it till he found a plastic tub with a lid that seemed to be airtight. Then he went into the kitchen and armed himself with a plastic bag and a pair of salad tongs. Thanking God his mother wasn’t home, he took a deep breath and entered the garage. His lungs were straining by the time he’d maneuvered the pouch into the plastic bag, and he had to run outside to breathe before he returned to press the seal closed, dump the whole thing into the plastic tub, and snap the lid down.

Then Jase went out to breathe again, and let the air clear a little more before he parked the Tesla inside. With the pouch isolated he felt fairly safe . . . assuming this wasn’t one of those drugs that stayed in your system and kept giving you hallucinations weeks or years after you took it.

If touching the stuff had messed up his brain then it was way too late to wash it off, but Jase hit the shower anyway. Under the warm stream, with no more strange visions troubling him, he finally began to relax.

What the hell was he going to do next? He should probably have his mother take him to a doctor to get checked out. But if he did that, he might get arrested for carrying the pouch away from the border. If the stuff would pass out of his system naturally, or cease to affect him now that he’d stopped breathing the fumes, it would be stupid to spend several years in jail.

He should have known it was a hallucination the moment a gorgeous girl—a gorgeous
Native
girl—made a play for him. But it felt so real, so pleasant . . . till it turned into a nightmare. Why would anyone take drugs?

He got out of the shower and treated his damaged wrist. Holistomax was the best nonprescription salve on the market, but it would still be days before those bruises faded, and the marks would be impossible to explain to his parents. If it was winter he could have worn long sleeves, but in mid-June that would be too suspicious. Jase finally wrapped a bandage around his wrist, and decided to tell his parents he’d scraped it hiking in the woods with a girl. It wasn’t quite a lie, and the girl part would explain the hiking part sufficiently that they probably wouldn’t ask many questions. Any questions except Who is she? Is this serious? Will we get to meet her?

Jase shuddered at the very idea.

That solved all of his problems except what to do about the drug. Promises to psychotic hallucinations didn’t count, but to flush the stuff he’d have to take it out of containment. And what if it poisoned the water system? If he buried it, some dog might dig it up and a kid could find it. And what was it doing to Ferd’s cousin Manny, and his chemist friend?

Jase was reaching for his com pod to call Ferd when it beeped, and Ferd told him that Manny’s friend had completed his analysis and wanted to see them.

***

Even in the Tesla, it took almost half an hour to reach Alaska University Anchorage in rush-hour traffic. Manny—darkly Hispanic to Ferd’s freckled Caucasian—took them straight to the chemistry lab where his roommate, Georg, awaited them.

Jase had expected an acrid chemical scent, and test tubes, and beakers bubbling over open flames. Instead, the lab held a lot of scanner-looking machines and a bank of microviewers. It smelled of floor wax.

Yorg, whose photo ID badge said his name was Georg Ridders, was studying something on one of the viewers when they came in. “Ah, there’s another! Thirteen thus far!”

“Hey,” said Jase uneasily. “You don’t have that stuff lying around loose, do you? I mean, suppose it emits fumes or something?”

Ferd cast him a curious look. Jase hadn’t told him about the incident in the woods because, on the slight chance the girl really did exist, it made him look like an idiot. But hadn’t some of the other kids seen Raven too? Mick certainly had, and Rochelle said everyone was talking about her. Unless he’d hallucinated that whole day? Was he hallucinating now? The thought made his brain boggle.

“You don’t have to worry about that.” Georg lifted his mild blue gaze from the scanner, blinking Jase into focus. He must have been using close-vision to enhance even the magnified image on the viewer. “No fumes. No physical effect at all. And it’s still the most weird of samples I’ve ever seen.”

“Weird, as in high street value?” Ferd asked hopefully. “I mean, you can’t know about the physical effects if you smoked it, say, or—”

“It’s not a drug,” said Georg. “It’s mostly sand, very rounded, more than what you see with most beach sand. The unusual part is the pollens! I’ve counted thirteen different species so far, and there may be more. But the most ’treme part—”

“Pollen?” Jase asked. “Like ragweed and stuff? Can that give you hallucinations?”

“No,” said Georg. “I keep telling you, it’s not a drug. But when I send these pollens through the biomolecular dater, I find that all of them are over two hundred years old! The small leather fragments in the sample are also from that same era.”

“Um . . . does two-hundred-year-old pollen have any street value?” Ferd asked. “Lab value?”

“Not really. Oh, if you put it out on the nets some archeo-botanist might pay a few hundred dollars, but it has no value except for the unusualness factor. Which is high! I would have said that you could sell this pouch Manny has told me about to a museum, for an authentic medicine bag from the late eighteen hundreds should have some value. But the ashes mixed into the bag are modern, so a museum would ask many awkward questions about provenance and probably not be willing to buy it, since the bag has clearly been tampered with in modern times.”