Chapter 9

T he journey to Manhattan takes nearly two weeks in total. We deal with three more ambushes. During the last one they managed to hit Callahan with an errant shot—he had his arm hanging out the window as he drove and the round creased his forearm.

In discussing it, though, Caleb, Caspian, Nico, Philemon, and I decide the ambushes serve a valuable lesson: without overwhelming numerical superiority or armored vehicles and heavy weapons, mortals don't stand much of a chance.

But, according to reports from mortal news outlets—those still operating via the increasingly spotty internet, at least—the Mortal Federation operating out of Manhattan boasts exactly that: armored vehicles, heavy weapons, and a steady stream of mortal volunteers bolstering their numbers every day.

We reach the distant suburbs south of the five boroughs thirteen days after leaving Atlanta—a drive that should have taken a day or two at most. The farther north we got, the closer to larger metropolitan areas we got, the worse travel became. Even surface streets and county and state highways were cluttered with abandoned vehicles. Gas stations are increasingly empty and looted, as are grocery stores, convenience stores, army-navy surplus stores, hardware stores…

The farther north we travel, the more things resemble the early seasons of The Walking Dead.

So far, no zombies, thank fuck.

Now, a few miles outside NYC proper, things have changed again. Here, in the endless maze of quiet, tree-lined streets with neat sidewalks and mid-century ranch homes with detached garages and postage-stamp yards, things seem almost normal. Cars are parked in the driveways; people sit on porches smoking cigarettes and watching us suspiciously as we glide through the quiet neighborhoods.

In the distance, however, you can make out the muffled chatter of automatic weapons fire, the occasional crump of explosives, sirens, and shuddering booms that Caleb tells me are the sound of tanks firing their cannons.

Tanks.

Fuck me. Tanks ?

North, north, north. Slowly. Watching each intersection as we pass through. Gradually, neighborhood streets with houses and yards become wide two- and four-lane thoroughfares lined with shops and restaurants—closed, dark, boarded up, windows shattered.

A body hangs halfway out of a second-story apartment window; blood pooled on the sidewalk below in a tacky, drying, reddish-brown pool. At one intersection, a city bus lies on its side, charred, still smoking; the underside is riddled with bullet holes, and the brick wall of the apartment building opposite the bus is charred, pocked, and scorched by magic.

There's a tang in the air—acrid and sour, somewhere between curdled milk and burning hair. Philemon tells me it's the scent of spent magic—battle magic, in particular. One spell, or two, or even several cast in quick succession in a localized area won't leave a scent, he says. But dozens, or hundreds? The kind of rapid-fire aggressive glamours used to end lives, all cast in a small area? That leaves a scent.

The farther into the city we go, the more apocalyptic it gets. A Walgreens on a corner is little more than a blasted-out shell—a direct hit from a tank, Caleb tells me. In another place, a circular hole ten feet across is cored through several city blocks at ground level—a hastaxi orb, but larger—Philemon says it's sort of like an artillery version of a hastaxi. I stood in the hole and stared through the neat, precise core to a street half a mile away. Desks, walls, bookshelves, clothing racks, displays…bodies—all sliced and cauterized when the orb passed, leaving not even ashes behind.

A pile of bodies lies in the middle of another intersection—mortals, soldiers, wearing camo and armor. The bodies burn with white fire but are not consumed.

We skirted through New Jersey, Callahan informs me, into Brooklyn, and then cut north again. We're approaching the East River now, apparently. My knowledge of NYC geography is essentially zero, so I'm relying on others to guide us. In this, I feel more like a nineteen-year-old than any kind of a leader.

Caleb calls a halt. Our caravan, now thirty-some vehicles long and boasting over a hundred immortals and half that again in mortal numbers, piles up behind us. To our left, the intersection is blocked by the now-familiar sight of a makeshift barricade—cars, trailers, box trucks, street vendor carts, but here the barricades have been erected by people with engineering skills and heavy machinery, each piece fitted precisely, the whole bound with chains and barbed wire and razor wire. This is not a makeshift barricade for an ambush by backwoods bumpkins playing wannabe militia. This is a blockade erected by people who know what the fuck they're doing to force people to go where they want them to go. There's another barricade opposite, leaving the only path the back way we came or the way we're going.

Caleb gathers the pack. "We need to do some recon. Saige and Colin, get around the barricade to the left; Callahan and Channing, to the right. I'll head forward. The rest of you, hang tight. Nico, check our backtrail. Philemon, Maeve, if you have any kind of defensive measures, get them ready."

"Alpha!" A young female shifter calls from behind us. "Alpha! A moment, please?"

Caleb, in the act of peeling off his shirt, turns as he tosses the shirt onto the hood of the van. "A moment only. Speak your mind and be swift."

She inclines her head in a gesture of respect. "If you're doing recon, I can help. I'm a hawk. Aerial reconnaissance could be valuable."

"Your name?"

"Emily."

Caleb nods. "Excellent suggestion, Emily, I thank you, and your queen thanks you." He gestures in the direction of the river—or so I assume. "See where they've barricaded and if the barricades are manned anywhere. If you can get even a rough estimate of how many tanks or whatever this Mortal Federation has, that would be fantastic. Be safe and be careful."

I rest my hand on her shoulder. "I appreciate you volunteering, Emily. Your contribution is valuable and welcome."

Emily is, going by appearances, another so-called "illegal," an immortal born in secret after the Treaty. She's medium height and svelte, with pixie-cut platinum blonde hair. She smiles at me, eager and full of energy. "I'm just glad to be doing something! If I have to sit in the back of my dad's stupid RV listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival for one more fucking second, I'll go feral."

I grimace. "Ooof. I understand—it's been a very long trip. When did you join us?"

"North Carolina. My uncle, my mother's brother, was part of that ambush. He blames Dad for Mom's death. He never knew why she died, meaning that Dad's a shifter, but he knew Dad got Mom pregnant and that she didn't survive the birth. When Uncle Paul found out about immortals, he went nuts. Tried to kill Dad and me both and then when that didn't work, he joined that so-called Militia because he now hates immortals. I guess he and Mom were close."

Caleb rests a heavy hand on her shoulder. "Emily. We need to go."

Emily rolls her eyes with a sigh. "Sorry. Dad calls me a jabber jaw."

I smile at her. "We can talk more later, Emily. For now, Caleb is right. We need information so we can make a plan."

"On it." She does a weird half-curtsey, half-bow thing and then turns and jogs down the street, peeling her clothes off. A glimpse of her back and buttocks, and then amber light flashes, and a red-tailed hawk digs at the air with her long wings, soaring upward with that distinctive piercing screech.

The pack has long since vanished, leaving behind piles of clothes. Caleb is last. He cups my jaw and kisses me. "Back soon. Defensive measures, babe. Around here, anything could happen, so be ready."

I caress his jaw. "Will do. Love you. Be careful."

He winks at me, shucks his jeans, and shifts on the move, already a wolf loping away before his jeans hit the ground.

Philemon looks at me. "A dome, you think?"

I nod. "Go to the back of the caravan and cast forward. I'll link up with you midway."

Philemon jogs toward the back of the lineup of cars. I cast a line of prana toward him and feel his meet mine—I've never done anything like this before, but the actions come instinctively—Mother's Spirit, perhaps, or maybe I'm actually learning things. We weave our prana stream together into an unbroken line connecting us; I feel his movements, his deft manipulations of the warp and weft in the ley lines, spinning the single thread into a thick rope of dozens of braided strands—needle-thin strands that are braided together, and then those are braided together, and so on. I mimic his actions until the link is braided from end to end. And then I feel Philemon begin to push. It's the only word. He pushes toward me, and so I push toward him, forcing the ley line to belly open in the center, slowly becoming a bubble of woven prana that gradually envelops the caravan. Technically, it's not a dome but a long, ovoid bubble surrounding the caravan above and below. Maya glimmers between the threads, shimmering dimly in the bright sunlight. I anchor the tip of the structure into the earth and feel Philemon do the same, severing the connection between us. A few minutes later, he rejoins me near the front.

I can feel the pack, and Caleb, quite clearly—he's moving slowly, creeping. The others are harder to pinpoint since our connection isn't as strong or deep, but I feel them moving nonetheless.

I even feel Nico, now that he's been added to the pack—I'm not sure when Caleb formally bonded him to the pack, but that portion of pack politics isn't any of my business since I'm not a shifter. Oddly, though, I feel someone else back there with Nico…

Sierra?

Ten minutes later, the giant, shaggy, lumbering brute that is Nico's grizzly shambles along the line of cars, vans, RVs, pickups, and busses. And beside him? Sierra, in wolf form. She's limping, her fur bloody and matted, one ear split halfway down the middle.

Caleb?

I know. She's been trailing us at a distance the whole time.

She's injured.

She's tough. She'll heal. If you believe she's come to some sort of understanding, she can return to the pack. Otherwise, the separation remains.

I'll talk to her.

She may not be able to shift if she's hurt. We heal much faster in our animal form, and if we're injured badly enough, we cannot shift at all until our human body can withstand the injuries. A quick pause. The situation in Manhattan is not good, Maeve. I'll debrief you fully when I get back, but…it's not good. The Mortal Federation has cut the island in half and controls the whole northern half. They have the equipment, leadership, and personnell to make this very, very difficult.

Great, I growl. Finish the recon and get back here so we can make a plan.

I feel a wordless assent and leave it at that, assuming he needs to focus.

I watch Nico and Sierra approach. Nico stops a few feet away from me and collapses backward with a gruff moaning whuff onto his butt.

"All clear back there?" I ask him.

He nods, lets out a groaning whuff, and then indicates Sierra with his chin.

"Thank you for escorting her here."

He bobs his head, whuffs again, and then pushes to his feet and ambles away on all fours, thick fur, and great muscles swaying.

Sierra is sitting on her haunches, her front left paw held off the ground—it's mangled horribly. She's skeletal, shaking, and visibly weak. She's sustained several gunshot wounds to the torso. Her jaws are stained pink with old blood.

She looks up at me and whimpers pitifully.

"Jesus, Sierra," I whisper. "What the hell happened to you?" It's a rhetorical question since she can't answer. I can feel the pack across the bond, but since I'm not a shifter, I can't communicate mentally with anyone but Caleb when they're in animal form. "Can you shift?"

She just whines.

I crouch warily. "Can I try to heal you? I'm not great at healing, but I'll give it a shot."

She shifts toward me, whimpering again. I take that as permission. I cradle her injured paw in my hands, close my eyes, and access my prana. As always, I visualize it as a seething, roiling ocean of blinding golden-white liquid light at the center of me, behind my navel. I pull a needle-thin thread of prana and focus on her paw—just the paw. It's been broken—not just broken but shattered beyond all recognition. A trap, I assume. God, the pain must be unimaginable. I have no clue how to ease her pain other than healing her, so I focus on that.

In my mind's eye, I wrap her injured paw in prana, coating it in the golden-white light; the prana acts as a sort of magical X-ray, almost, letting me see in more acute detail the breaks in the bone and the tears in the tendons and ligaments.

Slowly, focusing all my will, intent, and attention on each specific break, I use as little prana as I can manage, knitting each little piece of bone back together one by one. I lose track of time. My head pounds. Sierra doesn't move and seems to be barely breathing. Once the bones are knitted, I do the tendons and ligaments next, which are much easier, and then the fur.

When the paw is as good as I can make it, I release her and sink backward onto my butt. I'm sweating and panting, I discover.

I've destroyed mountains, ended hundreds of lives at once, and fought a six-thousand-year-old fae tyrant and haven't felt this drained.

"It's the detail work," I hear, and I open my eyes to see Philemon watching from a few feet away. "Something about close work, healing something as delicate and complex as a canine paw is much more demanding in some ways than a major glamour." He shakes his head. "This is why you're the queen, though—a healing like that would have taken any other healer several times longer."

Sierra gingerly tests her paw, resting a bit of weight on it. It holds, and she seems surprised. Her amber-glowing wolf's eyes look up at me, full of very human emotion.

"I can help with the gunshot wounds," Philemon says. "They're older and simpler to heal, and this is something I have dealt with, albeit a very long time ago."

I nod, glancing at him. "That would be good. That really took it out of me."

Sierra tenses and growls when Philemon crouches at her side, fingers reaching for her fur.

"Hey, he's going to help, okay? I know he's a fae, but he's good people. You can trust him."

Sierra lets out a long, low rumble, teeth bared; Philemon, eyeing her warily, touches her fur with careful, delicate fingers, barely making contact with the red, crusted wounds. I feel his prana surge. At first, nothing happens. And then the wounds, three of them, all seem to enlarge at once, the holes stretching—Sierra whines in her throat. One by one, spent, misshapen rounds emerge from the wounds and tink onto the asphalt.

Philemon breaks out into a sweat, now putting his other fingers onto her fur, his whole body shaking with exertion. First, the crust, tinged with what is surely an infection, softens and turns pink, and then, even more gradually and almost imperceptibly, the seeping wounds grow smaller and smaller and smaller. Last, they begin to close, the flesh knitting back together, then scabbing over, and then turning pink.

Philemon sags backward to his butt, panting. "Sorry, I—I can't manage the fur."

Sierra twists and licks at the patches. A moment later, amber light swells, first from her eyes and then more nebulously, and then the glow blinds us, fades, subsides, and Sierra is lying nude on the ground, fresh pink healing round wounds on her side—one just beneath her breast, another just below her ribcage, and a third closer to her hipbone. Her ribs show, her cheekbones are prominent and sharp, and her skin is tight and papery. Her eyes are hazed with unshed tears.

She squeezes her eyes shut. "Why?" she breathes, her voice a hoarse whisper I have to strain to hear.

Philemon presses a cold, sweating bottle of water into my hands. I twist the top off, scoop my hand under her head, lift, touch the bottle to her lips, and tilt.

"Slow," I caution. "Small sips."

She wets her lips first. Licks. I tilt again, and she allows a few drops down her throat this time. Gasps raggedly. Another sip, this time a bit more.

She tilts her head away, swallowing. "Not…my first…rodeo," she whispers.

Someone else—Caspian—hands me a large white T-shirt. I help Sierra to a sitting position. She struggles into the shirt, groaning in pain. She accepts another sip, this time taking the bottle and drinking as she settles the shirt around her hips.

Her eyes go to Caspian and then Philemon. "Thank you." She swallows hard. "Thank you."

Caspian nods. "Good to have you back, Sierra."

Philemon just smiles. "I'm glad I could be of assistance, Miss Sierra."

We're alone then. I sit cross-legged near her and wait. She takes tiny sips, staring at the ground between her thighs. Finally, she turns her gaze to mine, hers watery and fraught with emotion.

"Why, Maeve?"

I frown at her. "Why what?"

"Why heal me? Why help me after the way I treated you?"

I shrug. "Why wouldn't I? It hurt that you hated me so much for something out of my control, but I always understood it. I have nothing against you, Sierra. I didn't before and I don't now."

"I was horrible to you."

"Yes."

She looks at me. "Being separated from the pack…it was…" tears trickle, finally. "I'd rather die than go through that again." She shakes her head. Sighs. "I know Caleb isn't meant for me. He never has been. But I thought…I thought maybe even if we weren't bonded mates, we could still…" A shuddering sob. "And then you came along, and…I couldn't handle it. The jealousy, the pain of losing something that was never mine, the embarrassment…it was all too much."

I squeeze her knee. "I'm sorry, Sierra. I mean, I love Caleb. But I…ever since my mom died things have just been happening to me. Things I have no control over. But I'm sorry that what the Fates have thrown at me has caused you pain."

She snorts. "God, you're really hard to dislike, you know that?"

I grin at her. "Sorry?"

She takes my hands in hers. "Forgive me, Maeve."

I squeeze hers. "Of course, forgiven."

Her head swivels, and I follow her gaze—Caleb is trotting toward us, tongue lolling, ears perked and swiveling. Channing, Saige, Colin, and Callahan join him, emerging from shadowed doorways and shattered windows. Everyone shifts back to human form as they approach us, clustering around Sierra, hugging and laughing.

Caleb stands removed, still in his wolf body. Sierra wobbles to her feet, a task that requires a visible effort. She totters toward Caleb and drops to her knees. "Alpha. I've learned my lesson. I've apologized to Maeve. Please, Alpha. Caleb, please. I can't live without the pack."

Caleb sits on his haunches and regards her for a moment, and then he licks her forehead, once. She collapses forward, pressing her face onto the back of her hands, sobbing and shaking. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Caleb transforms and crouches beside her. "Welcome back, Sierra." His voice is low and gentle. "You've been through a lot, I see."

She works herself back up to sit on her shins, nodding. "Caught my foot in a fucking bear trap. I should have seen it, I know, but the bastard hid it really, really well, and I was dizzy with hunger. I had to keep up with your trail so I couldn't stop to hunt. I couldn't stop to sleep because that's when I made up time. So I…I missed the signs. It wasn't some old, forgotten trap, either. The fucker who set it came to check it. I played dead until he opened the trap, and then I…" she sighs, shrugs. "I wasn't trying to kill him, just get away. If I'd have just killed him, he wouldn't have been able to shoot me, but I…I thought since we're trying to make things better with mortals, I probably shouldn't go killing one, even in self-defense."

Caleb chuckles. "You might have erred a bit too far on the side of caution on that one, Sierra." He rises to his feet, regal and imposing despite being nude. "Go get something to eat and rest."

She fights to her feet, and Saige hooks her arm through Sierra's with a backward smile at me.

Caleb's attention turns to me. "I made contact with the Army of the Once-Mortal Queen. Their leader is coming here."

"When?" I ask.

"Now," he answers.

At that moment, a cloak of darkness sweeps over us, a thick, black, impenetrable bank of shadows surging and roiling.

It tastes of magic…and it smells familiar.

"No one move," I call out, magically amplifying my voice. "Remain calm."

I hear boots on stone. A snarl of a lion. The groaning whuff of a bear. A chorus of yips and howls of wolves. The clack of wood on stone—spear butts on asphalt.

I feel Caleb move to stand beside me, Caspian on the other.

I stand, waiting.

I smell blood—fae, shifter, and vampire.

The cloak of shadows swirls in reverse, becoming black threads that vanish into the palms of the fae who cast the glamour.

Andreas.