CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FLY SO FREE
THE SKY BURST open, with a sheet of lightning striking nearby and sending its ozone smell crackling across the little courtyard. Seconds later, rain began to fall in torrents and with every wet drop on her body, the stone melted away. I couldn’t help but watch until both of us stood, drenched and free, and facing each other.
Goldie smiled as she stepped down off the dais toward me. “What enterprise. You have my profound gratitude, Tessa Andrews, and—”
The sound of a single person clapping interrupted her. We both swung around and she flung her wings up in genuine fight or flight reaction. I gestured at her. “Go! Go on, get out of here!”
“Oh, she can’t do that, Miss Andrews. You’ve freed her, but I still have a binding.” And the clapper moved into view, his features sharp and his stature a little on the short side, his suit far more expensive than either of the agents who’d visited me, and his bearing one of absolute authority. My heart sank a bit. If this was the judge in the Society, he knew his magic and I didn’t. My only move was to strip my gloves away and stow them and worry about freezing fingers. My stone flared up again, though, instantly warming the one hand. I clasped them together to share. Under my shirtsleeves, my bracers caught the same slight heat.
Lightning hit again, and thunder rumbled loudly, right overhead, so I knew the strike had been somewhere on campus. Maybe at the library? I hoped Evelyn had the good sense to stay inside. Or maybe it was worse in there? Did they know about me all over Silverbranch?
The gentleman drew closer, and I could see a flicker of caution in his movements. Okay, so he knew about harpies being warrior women with a lot of ability, and maybe he thought I could do more than I actually could, so he took care. Goldie shrugged, trying to bring her wings up again, and shuddered when they refused to answer to her.
She fell to one knee with a groan. Her head bowed. I nudged her. “Get up! We’re not done fighting yet!”
The gentleman laughed harshly. “She is. The moment Mortimer was taken from her, she surrendered.” He stopped watching Goldie and looked to me. “What about you? What does it take to break you?”
I refused to think about it. No names in my thoughts, in case he could somehow perceive them. “I don’t quit. Not in the driving rain, not standing all alone. I can’t fight the way you can, but I don’t quit.” While I talked, I dug the toe of my sneaker under a loose stepping stone in front of me. As any teammate on our field hockey team could tell him about the way I played the game, rain or shine, I’ll drive down that field and put my stick down your throat if necessary. If we needed points, I determined to be the go-to girl. Guys on the ice hockey team came out to watch and get pointers from me on roughing players without getting penalized.
Goldie gave another low moan, so quiet I barely heard it even though it gave me goose bumps when I did. I could feel her tremble next to me but refused to look at her. I had my attention centered on the man across from us. The stepping stone loosened obligingly. A heave rippled through her body.
“You know my name. Do you have one?”
“I have many. At this campus, they call me Maxwell Parker. Judge Parker, if you will.”
“You give it out so freely, I gather that’s not your true name. You don’t think I can harm you with it.”
He flashed white teeth, smiling.
“You would be foolish to try. I can reach out and touch any of your loved ones that I wish. Your mother. Your father. Your rather silly friend Evelyn. Not to mention the others which I already have in my sight—Broadstone. Steptoe. Brandard.”
My heart did a quick step when he mentioned my father. I wondered just what he knew about the situation or if he was bluffing. I noted he’d left Carter off the list. Had Carter covered his activities, or did Parker think that the Society had swallowed Carter hook, line, and sinker?
“You can’t touch me.” Maxwell Parker raised his hands to create some magical havoc.
“You’d be wrong.” I kicked my foot up, and the paver came up in the air where I caught it neatly and swung, my maelstrom stone smacking into it soundly, batting it directly at him. My hand and wrist stung like fire. He didn’t dodge in time. My aim caught him right in the temple and he dropped, well, like a stone.
Goldie lunged to her feet as he did, her wings gone, and her body entirely human, encased in that Amazon leather armor. She got to him first and tied him down. Stuffing a handkerchief from his pocket into his mouth, she looked up at me.
“Nice going.”
My hand smarted. I shook it off. “I manage. The question is: are you rescued or do we have something else to do? I’m game, short of slitting his throat.”
“Pity, because that would accomplish a great deal, but I understand your reluctance.” Goldie stretched. The rain had slowed to a very light sprinkle, and the drops ran over her as though her human skin operated like ducks’ feathers and was water repellent.
I watched her before getting it. “You’re a shapeshifter. Harpies are shifters. Took me a while, with everyone talking about where your nest is located and such.”
“Yes. We perform best half-and-half, human head and arms, the rest winged and avian, but we operate back and forth.” She winked at me. “My wings are tied to some spell Parker has concocted, but I can get around that, given enough time.”
“It took you a while to shift.”
“Yes. Side effect of his working. I expect it to wear off if nothing else, sooner or later.”
“We should make it sooner.” I joined her and looked down at the judge. “He’s really Society.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Is everyone else like this?”
“A few are worse. His is a secret malady, though, or he’d be thrown out. And he doesn’t want that. It would cut his power until he learned to adjust it. Right, buddy?” She poked him. His eyelids fluttered.
“I say we dump him in the creek and see if he floats, sorta like they used to do with witches in Salem.”
“That is an idea.” Goldie grinned at that.
Not a particularly good one if I wanted information out of him, though. I thought I could hear shouts and laughter in the distance.
“We need to go, and now. Can you leave this place, or are you centered here?”
“I can leave.” She patted the judge down one more time, found something of interest in a side coat pocket, and slipped it down her corset cleavage. I had a momentary mental picture of all the men I knew watching her action closely. I shook it off.
Opening my backpack, I took out Steptoe’s coat. “The best way to get out of here would be to do it unseen.” I also got my phone out, texted Evelyn to meet me at the car PRONTO, and put my phone on silent before putting it back in the little pocket most backpacks had reserved for cell phones and other important goodies.
I turned the coat inside out and began, very carefully, to see if I could stretch it apart, just as I’d seen Simon do it. It resisted. Fabric is fabric, right? Except when it isn’t, and I didn’t think this was, not entirely. I gritted my teeth and prayed I wasn’t exhausting its magical capability but this felt urgent. “I know what you can do,” I muttered at the object. “So get with the program.”
Judge Parker began to thump on the ground, kicking up small puddles of mud and water.
“What are you doing?” Goldie brushed sopping wet hair from her face impatiently.
“Working on something. Simon says . . .” I halted. No. Really? As easy as Simon says . . .
I took up the coat again, determined to stretch it enough to cover both of us, chanting Simon says with every pull. With great resistance, it began to grow in my hands. I turned it about, stretching and shaping it until it could cover both of us. I stood next to her and flung it overhead, catching the other edge. “Let’s go. Match your pace to mine. We can’t be seen.”
I hoped.
Being on the other side, it seemed impossible to tell. I couldn’t be sure until we passed a loving couple on the walkway, immersed in each other and laughing in that intimate way people in a relationship talk to each other, and they didn’t notice us at all. Or the rain.
Of course, that could just have been being in love.
I took a moment to text Evie.
We walked each other across Silverbranch to the parking lot where I opened the car door and shoved both Goldie and the suit coat into the back seat. It wavered for a moment, but I pointed at it and said, “Stay.”
It did. I couldn’t see either of them at all, but could feel the car bounce a little as she settled on the rear seat. Evelyn came running up, her clue to hurry because I had the car started and in gear. She threw herself in.
“What is it?”
“A little trouble, nothing serious, but I might have accidently assaulted one of their professors.”
“What???” She let out a screech to match the squeal the tires made as we left.
“It was him or me.”
“Really? What happened? One of those sexual advance things?”
“No, more like a field hockey hit gone wrong.”
She winced.
“He caught it in the head.”
“Caught what?”
“One of those nice stepping stones on the path. That’s what I get for showing off my athletic skills.”
“Oh, jeez, Tessa. Are you sure you didn’t kill him?”
From the manic glare in Maxwell Parker’s eyes as he struggled to get loose, I was pretty sure I hadn’t. She reached over to pat my knee. “You probably didn’t.”
“Thanks.”
“De nada.” Evelyn paused, and her breath slowed. Then she said, “There are two, darkened by cloaks, hidden by shadows—you think they are one and the same, but they are not. An abyss separates them. Choose well.”
Goldie gave a strangled sound from the back seat as I sat up straight on the driver’s side. “Evie?”
Silence.
“Evie, are you all right?” I wondered if the students of Silverbranch had put a hex on her or something.
She shook her head then and answered, “My hair is going to frizz something awful by the time we get home!”
And then all of us sank into our thoughts as the rain got serious and noisy. What had she been gibbering about, and was it serious? Because she didn’t seem to be all there when she’d said it. I wondered if the Society had reached through her to threaten us and decided things were bad enough from time to time without imagining worse.
We made good time getting away from Silverbranch and caught up with the leading edge of the squall. I put the headlights on, but they did a poor job of cutting through the dark curtain of advancing night and pounding rain. Evelyn shivered. “Got any heat in this thing?”
“Sure.” I eyed the dashboard. “Somewhere.”
I’d taken my eyes off the road. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen the small dead things falling along with the rain. But I did. My heart skipped a beat. I did hear the profound silence of nothing but the wind howling and the rain pelting the ground, and the car schussing through the growing puddles. It fishtailed as we hit unexpected slush and maybe a patch of ice.
The car drifted in answer to my pull at the steering wheel and I jammed my foot on the brakes. I tried to counter the movement, remembering centrifugal forces and those driving movies that were mandatory viewing, but none of my efforts helped. A huge tree keeled over right in front of us, branches thrashing and immense roots going bottoms up. Evelyn made a tiny squeak deep in her throat, and someone muttered, “Athena have mercy” from the back of the car.
No mercy to be found. I wrenched the steering wheel about. The car skewed around in a circle and then accelerated in the opposite direction, directly at the massive tree blocking the road. I had a moment to wonder if we had working air bags and if Goldie had buckled in, when the car spun around yet again. My wrists weren’t strong enough to keep the steering wheel straight, and I felt as if we’d been jolted into a bumper car ride with no control. About then, I decided this was no ordinary skid. Solid shadows assailed the car, and the headlights died out without even a flicker. Then the car itself quit as it hit the fallen tree, hard.
My door popped open as if it had never been latched, seat belt snapping loose, pitching me into the rain and onto the road, and I lay there for three seconds to catch my breath.
Then something truly immense leaned out of the tree toward me. It was darker than the night and the storm, as if it were the thing that swallowed all universes and suns. My feet, still hung up inside the car, caught on my backpack strap, and as I flipped over to crawl away, I dragged my pack with me. Before I could free myself and get to my feet, the thing in the night took me by the elbow, jumped me to my feet, and kicked the tree off the road. My little car rolled into a small ditch at the side, and I heard nothing from either Goldie or Evelyn.
The nightmare holding onto me shrank to almost human size.
Malender leaned into my face and said, “We need to talk.”