Promises to Keep

chapter 8


“JAY?”

He leaned toward the voice.

“Jay, wake up or I’m going to kill you.”

Jay followed the voice—which was as much magic as sound—back toward his brother. When he opened his eyes, he found Vireo looking pale and shaken, and Caryn flushed with relief.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

No one answered him. They probably assumed they didn’t need to. But he got nothing. He couldn’t hear a thing anyone wasn’t saying.

Unsettling.

They were both staring at him, waiting for him to say something.

He wasn’t with the shapeshifter anymore but in another SingleEarth medical room, where he had been given a bed of his own. He tried to push himself up, and realized that he was hurt.

“Be careful,” Caryn said. “I couldn’t heal it all. Your magic fought back when I tried.”

The clothes he had been wearing earlier were gone, replaced by light cloth pajama pants like those they gave out in hospitals. He didn’t have a shirt on, and there were bandages on his chest. And not just bandages but stitches, holding together wounds in the meat of his chest and shoulders.

He remembered the thorns cutting into him. Though the brambles themselves may have been an illusion or fantasy, they apparently represented a real, physical attack.

“What happened?” Vireo asked.

“I don’t know. How long was I unconscious?”

“A couple hours,” Vireo answered. “I called for Caryn’s help when I couldn’t reach you mentally and you started to bleed. It took us about an hour to get you stabilized. I take it you’re pretty mind-deaf right now?”

Jay nodded. He was too exhausted to hear anything specific in the noise around him, like listening for a whisper after spending hours in a noisy nightclub. Whatever he had touched minds with, it was far bigger than any shapeshifter.

“So …,” Vireo said. “I hate to ask while you’re still in your sickbed, but did you learn anything useful about our other patient?”

Jay paused to reflect on his experience.

“There is someone, a ‘he,’ that she is afraid of. I think her being unconscious may be a way of hiding from him. She has an elaborate trap in her mind set up to keep her hidden. I got caught in it when I tried to find her.”

“We should probably let Jay rest,” Caryn interjected. “Jay, do you need anything?”

He shook his head. He knew someone who might know more about their mysterious patient, but there was no point in explaining his intent to Caryn and Vireo. They would want him to be careful, by which they would mean, “Stay in bed and don’t go seeking flirtatious vampires.” Considering how many semi-legal and life-endangering escapades Caryn had engaged in, Jay resented her belief that he should be careful … but he knew better than to challenge her.

Thankfully, Vireo not only could shield himself against others’ thoughts in a way Jay had never been able to, he considered it polite to do so, so he didn’t hear anything inconvenient, and Jay didn’t get any comments from either of them on his decision to find Xeke again.

Jay didn’t have a choice. He had found the shapeshifter behind Xeke’s apartment. Xeke might know who she was.

Besides, it would be fun to see him again.

“I’m good.”

Vireo squeezed his shoulder on the way out. “I was worried about you,” he admitted.

Jay shrugged, not sure how to respond. “I’m okay,” he said.

“Yeah. But I’m the one who asked you to do it, and, well, just be careful with yourself.”

With that said, Vireo left quickly. For a man who had dedicated his life to meddling with others’ minds, Vireo wasn’t comfortable with his own emotional insides.

Once alone, Jay used the phone by his bed to call a SingleEarth secretary, who told him that they had no direct contact information for Xeke but suggested that he try the vampire’s club, a place in Boston called The Market.

Information offered two phone numbers matching that description. The first seemed to belong to a clothing store. The other was the club’s answering service, which informed Jay that the phones were not manned in the mornings and that he could either leave a message or call back after six.

A few words into telling whoever heard it to ask Xeke to call him, it occurred to him that the message he had been about to leave wasn’t going to work.

Hello, this is Jay Marinitch. Xeke and I met last night at a party.

Given the way Xeke liked to flirt, that probably applied to a lot of people. The club wasn’t likely to give out Xeke’s number to every person who called, or to even bother to pass on a message. Jay tried to think quickly. What would actually seem important enough to get them to bother Xeke with it?

“Hi, this is Jay Marinitch.” Instead of referring to the party, he said, “I’m in the hospital, and I need to get in touch with Xeke, but I don’t have his number with me. He can call me at …” He looked over and read out the number posted next to the phone. Hospital was a bit of an exaggeration for Haven #2’s clinic, but if anyone looked up the number, at least it would come up as a medical facility.

Jay hung up the phone, discovering in the process that his arm was incredibly heavy. He was exhausted. It was time for some good old-fashioned non-coma-style sleep.

He closed his eyes. What should he be? Kitten? Squirrels and bats slept well, too.

Jay couldn’t find the energy to shift his mental state to anything other than “bed-bound, injured human-shaped person.”

And so as such, he drifted back to sleep.

Not here again.

The brambles and branches menaced, grabbing at him with their needlelike fingers. As he struggled to focus, to become something that would be safe in this hell, the world around him went soft, like a video blurring out of focus.

This is just an echo, he thought. He was in his own mind. That meant he could control it, explore it. Understand it.

He slipped through the brambles like a shadow, drawing no attention, and at last found himself outside a tall black fence with iron ravens on the top. He should have been able to see through the gaps in the fence, but there was nothing but darkness.

He walked the length of the fence, trying to find an opening, but there were no corners or gates, no matter how far he walked. He turned around, but instead of the forest, the fence was behind him as well. No matter how he turned, he faced cold iron, blocking his way.



He woke to find Xeke sitting in the chair by his bed, reading a celebrity gossip magazine dedicated to the most ludicrous lies imaginable. Xeke didn’t give the tabloids a lot of credit for accuracy, but they certainly were entertaining.

Oh, good. Jay’s empathy was starting to come back.

“Good to see you awake,” Xeke said. “I was surprised when my secretary passed on your message.”

“You have a secretary?”

“I have several.”

“I can’t remember the name of the town where Kendra’s gala and your apartment were,” Jay said. “Or how I got back.”

“How odd,” Xeke said, in a tone that made it clear it wasn’t odd at all.

His mind told Jay why. The town was spelled. Not all of it; normal humans lived in enough of the town that it would be terribly awkward if they couldn’t remember how to get home or to work or how to give people directions to visit them. But crossing certain boundaries would trigger the spell, which was powerful.

“You seem like an interesting guy,” Xeke said, “but I’m surprised it didn’t give you even a moment’s pause that I would willingly bring a hunter to a place where I routinely work and sleep. You were on your best behavior at Kendra’s, and I know we’re safe here in SingleEarth, but I don’t know where you draw your lines.”

Fair enough.

“So the spell is to keep people from finding your homes?”

“More or less,” Xeke answered. There was a lot more to that “more or less,” but Xeke’s mind skipped over it, not forming the images clearly enough for Jay to pick them out. “So tell me: Should I be flattered you were looking for me, or nervous?”

Oh, right. He had a reason for wanting to find Xeke.

“I went into the woods, behind your apartment.”

The words triggered something in Xeke, but again, Jay couldn’t focus well enough to pick up on all of it. There was something about an arrangement. Politics, and a disgust of politics. Walking a tightrope.

“Did you have a nice walk?” Xeke asked.

“I found a woman, a shapeshifter, unconscious,” Jay answered. “She still hasn’t woken. We’re not sure what’s wrong with her. The doctors here think that maybe if—”

“You want to stop talking now,” Xeke interrupted, with a spike of nervousness.

“Could you look at her, and let me know if—”

“I’m leaving.”

“But—”

“Call me if you’re interested in a night out on the town,” Xeke said. “I’ll leave my phone number at the front desk. But I’m not having this conversation with you.” With that, he disappeared, too wary to even take the time to leave his number in person.

Jay scowled. He didn’t like mysteries. He really didn’t like it when people kept things from him.

He had never had an adolescent’s panic over what other people were thinking, or whether they were thinking of him, or that sheer certainty that everyone was thinking about him all the time that most young teens had. No, from the start he had known when they lied; when they were pretending to be macho while scared; when it wasn’t quite true when a mother said, “No, of course I’m not mad,” when her young child accidentally broke an heirloom piece of china; and when people weren’t thinking of him at all, even when they were in the middle of a conversation with him.

He understood. Everyone needed little lies to get them through the day, false courage to make them find real courage, and false comfort when something couldn’t be repaired. Their minds were so complicated and their lives so intense that who could blame them that most of the time they weren’t thinking about anything but themselves?

People were fascinating to Jay, but they weren’t mysteries. That was why Xeke had fled. For some reason, he needed to be a mystery.

Jay could spend lazy hours as a cat basking in the sun, or as a lizard on a rock, or as a sparrow singing for the pure joy of the day. Others of his line used their empathy to become powerful healers of the body and mind, or to help them mediate conflict. Those who chose to go into human businesses made staggering amounts of money as psychotherapists, lawyers, marriage counselors, or industrial psychologists.

Jay had chosen the path of a hunter because whether he was a songbird or a kitten or a koi in a pool, there was one thing that could always pull him back: the challenge of a hunt.

He had been challenged, and like a bloodhound, he was now committed to this mystery. Damn you, Xeke.