Trickster's Girl: The Raven Duet Book #1

CHAPTER 14


THE ROAD CURVED THROUGH flat-bottomed glacial valleys, over rivers, and up through the hills, twisting back on itself. The frost heaves became more frequent, the bike rolling over them like a ship in a stormy sea. Even the modern, crack-resistant road surface began to give way, with pothole after pothole flashing up in her headlights.

Sometimes Kelsa could avoid them, but often she was on them too quickly, and the bike slammed over them, rattling her teeth.
She should slow down. Neither she nor Raven had a helmet or any kind of protective gear. If she slid out they could be badly injured or killed. But it wasn’t till the fourth spine-jarring jolt that she finally slowed, and she still had to pay close attention to the road. It almost distracted her from the red bar creeping slowly up the gauge in the corner of the bike’s display screen—but there was nothing she could do about that except pray.
The adrenaline created by running for her life gave out, leaving her more tired than she’d been when they pulled into Pickhandle Lake. The flat gray twilight of the northern night was giving way to sunrise when the battery died. The engine shut down, and the bike rolled to a stop. Kelsa took it onto the shoulder at the last minute. They’d passed a few all-night truckers, and after they’d slowed several trucks had passed them. In a few hours the RVs would take to the road—not high traffic by city standards, but being stalled on a blind curve was never a good idea.
She’d hoped to make it to a station before this happened, despite the rising red bar on the gauge. What kind of moron set out without enough charge to make it to the next town?
The moron who’d owned this bike, apparently.
Raven lifted his head from her shoulder, where it had settled for the last half-hour.
“What’s wrong? Why are we stopping?”
“The battery’s empty. We have to recharge it before we can go on.”
“But couldn’t you tell it was wearing out? Can’t you just let it rest for a while?”
Kelsa’s eyes were burning. With weariness, she decided firmly. How much sleep had she gotten in the last three days? Four hours? Five?
“Letting it rest won’t help. I did know the charge was running out, but sometimes there’s more depth in a battery than shows on the gauge. Unfortunately, it looks like this gauge is accurate.”
Raven looked around, and Kelsa followed his gaze. They’d been riding around the base of a hill, and a bog dotted with scraggly pines lay on the other side of the road. The trees’ silhouettes looked odd, with thin bottom branches and heavy drooping tops, but it was too dark for Kelsa to see them clearly.
“We can’t stay here,” Raven said. “If my enemies find us, they’ll send those bikers after us again.”
“How did they find us at the lake?” Kelsa hadn’t had time to think about that before. “How could they possibly know we’d pulled off there to spend the night? You said they couldn’t use birds and things to spy on us.”
“They can’t,” Raven said. “The thing is…”
Kelsa waited in grim silence. She was too damn tired to put up with his stalling now.
“The thing is, I’m afraid they might be tracking you the same way I have. Following that.” He gestured to the bulge the medicine pouch made under her shirt.
Kelsa’s heart sank. The medicine pouch was the one thing they couldn’t leave behind. “If they can track the pouch, why didn’t they find us earlier?”
“Until you started using it, they couldn’t know what it … smelled like, for want of a better term. But that scent, the unique feel of its magic and yours working together, have been dumped into the ley several times now,” Raven said. “And Otter Woman spent too much time with you. Thank goodness you were smart enough not to let her touch the pouch. They probably only have a vague sense of its magic. But the song of your human magic mixed with it is very distinctive. From now on, staying in one place for a long time is probably a bad idea.”
“Wait. Are you saying that Otter Woman, all your enemies, are going to be able to sense me? Wherever I go?”
“Yes. So how do we charge this battery?”
Kelsa rubbed her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry. She was tired, that was all. It only felt like they were going to be stranded here forever.
“Ordinarily, in a situation like this, I’d pull out my com pod and call for a mobile recharge. We can stop the next vehicle and ask the driver to call it in for us.”
Almost any driver, and any professional trucker, would stop for a stalled vehicle.
“We can’t,” said Raven. “Even the bikers have seen those newscasts. We don’t dare let anyone get a good look at us.”
“So change your face again. I don’t look a lot like the picture they’re showing, and if I were traveling with, say, my grandfather, most people wouldn’t look at me twice.”
Raven’s silence lasted too long. Kelsa was turning to face him when he said, “I can’t shift. Trying to warm that lake, with half a dozen strong molders working against me … I won’t have enough power to change my shape for days.”
He sounded cross, almost arrogant. Kelsa was beginning to suspect that was how he dealt with fear. She was plenty scared herself !
“Couldn’t you … I don’t know. Use some power from the ley to do it?”
“I’m not your stupid battery,” Raven snapped. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then how does it work? I’m sick to death of your not telling me things!”
Raven sighed. “To use the power of the ley, you have to use your own power to call it forth and control it. Exhausted as I am, I couldn’t begin to touch it. And a power drain isn’t like physical weariness, either. Mostly, if you retain some part of your magical energy the rest comes back pretty quickly. But when you drain it completely it takes a lot longer to return. Unlike your battery, resting will restore me, but it will be three or four days before I can shift shape.”
Kelsa remembered other times he’d become tired, how shifting had taken him longer and longer. And he wasn’t the only one who was exhausted. A tear ran down her cheek. She fought to keep her voice steady.
“How come you could do the opening spell on the bike’s storage box?”
“That was only a nudge for the compartment to do something it wanted to do anyway. It didn’t take more than a wisp of will. Molecular manipulation takes real power.”
“So no money either?” The tears were falling now. Her breath began to catch.
“Not for days,” Raven confirmed. “Though that doesn’t need as much energy as changing a whole body does.”
“So we’re stuck here. We’re fracking stuck here, and you’re helpless, and those bikers are coming, and … and…”
“Are you crying?”
“Of course I’m crying, you moron! I don’t want to be murdered by bikers! I want…”
She wanted to heal the ley. She wanted to heal the whole world, and her relationship with her mother, and—
A pair of warm arms came around her from behind. How could this grip be so different from the one that let him hang on to the motorbike?
“I can’t do it,” Kelsa wept. “I don’t want to get killed! I can’t save the world. I couldn’t even save … save…”
“Save what?” he asked.
“My father.”
She was crying so hard, she barely felt him lifting her and turning her so she sat sideways on the bike. Leaning against his chest she cried for fear, for exhaustion, for her father, for the whole damn mess.
He held her till her sobs began to subside.
“I can’t do everything, either,” he finally said. “I’d never have gotten this far without your help. So if you’re finished, could we get moving again?”
A giggle interrupted the sobs. No matter how solid and warm his body felt, he wasn’t human. And she was beginning to accept that. Even to be all right with it. Some of the time.
“Get moving how?” Kelsa fumbled in her pocket for at issue.
“Didn’t you once say you could charge these things with sunlight?”
“Maybe.” Kelsa blew her nose. “Assuming that pack holds solar charge sheets. And that the sun comes out. And that you’re willing to wait a full day—a sunny day!—for a charge that will take us about a hundred miles.”
“Do we have another choice?”
They didn’t.
***

Thrusting her hand past various lumpy objects to the bottom of the bike’s storage compartment, Kelsa’s groping fingers finally encountered the crinkly mass of solar sheets. By the time they’d walked the bike past the swamp, to a place where they could pull off into a drier stretch of forest, the sun was rising.

“We can’t stop here,” Kelsa said. “We’ve got to find a sunny place that can’t be seen from the road.”
On the assumption that the bikers would be at least several hours behind them, they pulled the bike onto the road’s shoulder and set out exploring. It didn’t take long to find a place where the denser woods gave way to bog once more.
By day, the mop-topped pines Kelsa had noticed before appeared even more sickly. Not only scraggly, but a yellowish color that looked like the early stages of tree plague.
“Are they supposed to look like that?” she asked.
“What? Oh yes. The Russian settlers in this part of the world called that kind of boggy forest taiga, ‘land of little sticks,’ because the trees are so spindly.”
“They still call it taiga,” Kelsa said. “I didn’t know it looked like this.”
At least the thin trees that covered the ice-bottomed bog would let light through to the solar sheets.
They wheeled the bike through the woods, swearing as they rammed it over humps of grass and tree roots. To Kelsa’s amusement Raven muttered “carp” several times, as well as “consarn it!”
When they finally reached the grove they’d selected, she looked at Raven with concern. His pale face was covered with sweat, and there were dark circles under his eyes.
The storage compartment also held several gallon jugs of water, and some energy bars that Kelsa was hungry enough to dig into immediately, and without complaint. She even wished the gangster who’d owned this bike had carried peanut butter, but no such luck. There were also three bottles of beer, which she set aside without comment, and a sleeping bag, which Raven promptly appropriated and rolled out on the ground.
“You don’t need me for anything else, do you?”
“No.” Crying had left Kelsa tired, but strangely at peace. “Why are the solar sheets always on the bottom?” She lifted out a big leather satchel with a magnetic seal, closed by a DNA lock pad. “I wonder what they’ve got in here?” She set it aside. “Probably their—aha!”
She did need Raven’s help to unfold the flimsy black sheets and spread them over the open ground, angled toward the sun. Kelsa plugged their thin cords into the small ports on the bottom of the battery. Raven, who had found the charge meter on the bike’s display, stared at it impatiently.
“It’s not going up,” he said after almost a minute had passed.
“It won’t even start going up for over an hour,” Kelsa told him. She wished the bike had carried another sleeping bag, but if she unzipped the one Raven had taken and spread it out they could both lie down on it. She might not feel as tired as he looked, but it was close.
“We’ll have to wait at least half a day before it charges enough to give us any chance of reaching a town.”
Surely there would be some sort of charge station in the next fifty miles, even in the Yukon.
With a resigned expression, Raven watched her take over half his bed. “So what’s in that leather bag? It looked heavy when you dropped it. Food maybe? Or some blankets?”
“Not with that kind of lock,” Kelsa said. “That’s the kind of lock you see on briefcases full of diamonds or top-secret documents. It’s programmed to open to only one person’s DNA.”
“Why would bikers carry diamonds?” Raven asked.
“They wouldn’t. I’m afraid it’s illegal drugs,” said Kelsa. “And that’s something I want no part of.”
“We should see what it is,” Raven said. “There might be something useful in there.”
Kelsa wasn’t surprised when he knelt beside the bag, examining the lock and seal. Excessive curiosity was one of his many bad habits.
And who knew? There might be something useful in there.
“Can you open it, like you did the storage box?”
“No.” Raven ran one fingertip down the magnetic seal. “This is designed to stay closed, not to open. Its energy is all wrong.”
“Then we can’t open it?”
“I didn’t say that.” He pulled out the big knife, and before Kelsa could do more than open her mouth to protest, he punched through the leather beside the closed seal and slit the bag with one expert swipe. He opened it, and his brows rose.
“Drugs?” Kelsa wasn’t sure she had the energy to go over and check it out herself. That sleeping bag looked really good.
“No.” Raven sounded amused. “But now I see why they go to so much trouble to sell them.”
He lifted the bag and tipped it so Kelsa could see. It was crammed with neat bundles of money.
“Oh my God!” She was on her feet, with no memory of having risen. “They’ll kill us. They’ll track us to the ends of the earth, and kill us in a heartbeat, to get that back.”
“They’ve already tracked us to the end of the earth.” Raven was rummaging in the bag. “Or pretty nearly. And they already intend to kill us, so I don’t see that we’ve lost much by solving our money problem. And we now have this for when they show up.”
The solid black shape was something Kelsa had only seen on vids, but she recognized it instantly.
“A plastic gun,” she groaned. “That’s all we need!”
Raven looked at her curiously. “You don’t sound like you mean that. Why is having a weapon a bad thing?”
“Because that’s more illegal to carry than any drug,” Kelsa told him grimly. “We finally managed to get guns out of criminal hands, because all modern guns have a DNA lock on the trigger.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means no one except the person a gun is registered to can fire it. Unless they cut off the owner’s finger, and it’s hard to aim a handgun while pulling the trigger with a foreign object. A dead foreign object.”
Raven studied the gun in his hand curiously. “I don’t see a scan pad on this trigger.”
“That’s because it’s an illegal gun,” Kelsa told him. “It’s made out of plastic, so it won’t trip border scanners, or make consistent ballistic marks on the bullets it fires. It will work for anyone, and it’s completely untraceable. Which is why being caught with one in your possession means a mandatory ten-year prison sentence, with more time added on if they can figure out why you wanted it. Get rid of it. Break it. Bury it. Right now.”
After a moment of fiddling, Raven clicked the load out of the gun’s handle and studied it. “Only five bullets? And they’re plastic too. To go through border scanners? Are you sure about getting rid of this? With those bikers after us—”
“I’m sure,” said Kelsa, “because there’s another little problem with plastic guns.”
“What?” Raven looked disturbingly comfortable with a weapon in his hand. Guns had been common, Kelsa knew, in the last several centuries of this continent’s history. She still didn’t like it.
“The problem with plastic guns,” she said, “is that they’re made of plastic.”
“So?”
“A plastic barrel deforms a bit each time the gun is fired. That’s why there are no reliable ballistic marks, even if enough of the bullet survives to take them. The first shot will be as straight, as accurate, as with a metal gun. The second shot is almost as good. The third through sixth shots are probably OK, but you’d better be close to the target. The seventh and eighth shots, anyone who isn’t standing behind the person firing is in danger because there’s no accuracy at all. And on the ninth shot,” she finished grimly, “about one in forty of those guns blows up. That’s low enough odds that some people are desperate enough to take the ninth shot. Or even the tenth, though there’s a one-in-six chance the gun will blow up then. No one ever takes the eleventh shot. Not ever.”
“Hence five bullet clips.” Raven nodded understanding. “But that still gives us two good shots, and at least three decent ones, so—”
“Unless,” said Kelsa, “it’s already been fired five times. Or three. Or seven, and just loaded with a fresh clip. We have no way to know how many times it’s been fired.”
“Ah.” Raven eyed the gun more dubiously. “Then we probably shouldn’t rely on it. Are you really going to take half my sleeping bag?”
***

They slept all morning, and Kelsa didn’t wake till the clouds started blowing across the sun. Some of the hard bumps had poked through the sleeping bag’s inflated pad. She sat up, rubbing a sore spot on her ribs.

Raven had already unplugged the solar sheets and was folding the crackling plastic.
“The battery gauge shows a little charge, and it’s getting cloudy. I think we have to try.”
It was past one by the time they’d repacked the storage compartment. Raven used the point of the big knife to break the latch so he wouldn’t have to waste magic opening it next time. And despite Kelsa’s arguments, he’d put the plastic gun back into the money bag.
“It must have at least a few shots left, or they wouldn’t have kept it. And while we shouldn’t use it unless we get desperate…”
He didn’t have to finish. The police were looking for them, the bikers were hot on their heels, and if Raven’s enemies didn’t know where they were right now, they would the moment Kelsa healed another point on the ley. She and Raven might well become desperate enough to need that plastic gun.
The clouds were thick, but high enough for Kelsa to see the top of the snow-capped peaks as they moved on down the road. She kept one eye out for the bikers. Who knew how far behind they were by now? Or even ahead? She kept the other eye on the battery gauge.
A little over an hour later, when the indicator was nearing the bottom, they pulled into a charge station at Beaver Creek.
“We don’t dare go in,” Kelsa said sharply as Raven started for the store. “Not looking like you do now.”
She hoped the drivers around them would be too busy charging their vehicles, taking care of their own needs, to pay close attention to the two teens on the bike. At least Kelsa looked somewhat different from the picture they were broadcasting, and the bike was completely different.
Except for the missing black eye, Raven looked exactly like the picture on the vidcast.
“I don’t like this.” He too was glancing around the charge lot. “They’re closing in. We’re only about thirty miles from the border and I can’t shift. Not for days yet. I don’t know what to do.”
Kelsa had been thinking about that for several miles, but she still had to hold hard to her courage when she spoke. “If we’re that near the border you’d better get off here. When you can change again, you can fly over and find me.”
“But what about—”
“It’ll take the bikers a while to stash their drugs before they cross.” Kelsa tried to put more confidence into her voice than she felt. “Elizabeth Stayner’s PID should take me right through.”
She pulled out the card as she spoke, just to make sure. The picture still showed her, with her short black hair. Did the “1” in front of her age look a bit more blurred? No matter. It only had to last a few more hours.
“I won’t trust any more little old ladies,” she added. “I’ll find somewhere to lie low, to keep safe, until you find me.”
“I don’t like leaving you.” Raven was scowling in a way that might have attracted attention, but his concern was so sincere Kelsa didn’t have the heart to scold him.
“It’s just thirty miles to the border. I’ll be OK. And I’ll get the dust across. I finish what I start. Remember?”
Raven sighed. “I can’t think of a better plan. Be careful. And Kelsa?”
“Yes?”
“When you said you couldn’t save the world … You’ve already done more than I dreamed a human could.”
Before she could begin to come up with an answer, he turned and walked away, past the station store and into the woods beyond. Watching him vanish, Kelsa realized that he’d become a friend—despite the fact that his comments about “humans” were still a little condescending. The fact that she could make friends again was probably another sign of healing, but right now it only added to her worries.
Would he be safe, from grizzly bears for instance, without the ability to change his shape?
He could work minor magic, Kelsa consoled herself. He could probably protect himself from anything but another shapeshifter.
And away from the medicine pouch, he was probably safer from them than she was.
Kelsa unplugged the bike and got back on the road. Despite the gathering clouds there was no rain, and shafts of sunlight lanced through the gaps, illuminating tree-clad slopes and brushy tundra.
The taiga bogs, with their twisted trees, had become common beside the road. Raven had assured her they were healthy, but Kelsa couldn’t help but think that this was how all forests would look if the tree plague reached the north.
She had to go on. The ley had to be healed, no matter how dangerous it was for her. But that didn’t mean she would try to cross the border with a plastic gun in her storage compartment.
A ten-year minimum sentence.
About eight miles out of Beaver Creek, she passed a local road heading away from the highway. There was enough traffic this close to the border that pulling off to bury the gun seemed like a good idea.
Kelsa turned the bike and started down the side road. She hadn’t gone a hundred yards when she saw two bikes coming toward her. The riders were anonymous in their helmets and heavy jackets, but all four tires gleamed with newness.
She put her bike into a skidding spin and laid rubber on the asphalt as she raced back to the highway.
Two more bikers were coming up the highway toward her. There were still stretches of potholes, but Kelsa stepped on the accelerator pedal and kept her foot down.
They’d been waiting for her, watching for her. Had Raven’s enemies learned to track the medicine pouch?
However they’d done it, they had her now. With power streaming from the newly charged battery, the bike she rode could hold the distance between her and her pursuers. But where were the other five?
Kelsa discovered part of the answer when two more bikes appeared on the road coming toward her.
The darkened helmet shields concealed their faces, but the thought that they might be innocent travelers never even crossed her mind.
The cutaway slope of the hill closed off one side of the road, and if she swerved into the forest the thick brush would stop her in minutes. Was that what they wanted?
Kelsa headed straight toward them. How could they stop a speeding bike? Besides shooting her. Or shooting one of her tires. Or driving her into a tree, or off a cliff, or…
Just before she reached the bikers she swerved off the smooth surface, too swiftly for them to intercept her, riding not into the woods, but up onto the slope where the hillside had been carved away.
It was almost a forty-five-degree angle—too steep, the dirt too loose—but she was going so fast that sheer momentum took her several yards up the slope, with rocks and dirt spitting from under her tires.
The handlebars bucked as the front wheel began to turn, but Kelsa fought with all her strength, holding the wheel straight as the bike skidded and slithered back down to the road—beyond the oncoming bikers.
She shouted aloud in triumph, in gratitude at still being upright, in motion. Her heart was hammering in her chest. Her father would have killed her for pulling an idiotic stunt like that.
All six bikers were behind her now, and she sent power screaming into the wheels and shot ahead, ripping around the corner…
Then slamming on her brakes as the border post appeared.
It was almost a quarter mile away, so Kelsa had time to slow to a speed that wouldn’t trip the sensors. She had little to fear from the bikers here. U.S. state border stations were formidable; the national stations were full of armed, trained guards. She was safe from mayhem, as long as they were in sight.
She was also riding a vehicle that wasn’t registered to Elizabeth Stayner, carrying a large bag of cash she couldn’t account for, and a highly illegal plastic gun.
She would almost rather have faced the bikers.
Kelsa took her place in one of the five lines of cars waiting for the scanners. The station was busy—there were seven cars in front of her, and the line of RVs and trucks waiting for the big scanners was even longer. Not many people were waiting to pick up walk-across passengers. Whitehorse was a long way back, and there were no large cities near the Alaskan side of the border either, but a handful of cars occupied the designated parking lots on either side of the walk-through gate.
Many of those drivers had abandoned their vehicles, taking advantage of a small park, with benches and a stream, that had been built to showcase the big WELCOME TO ALASKA sign.
That welcoming sentiment was somewhat diminished by the twelve-foot steel-ribbed fence that ran downhill on the stream side and up the hillside to the right, continuing out of sight in both directions.
Two cars pulled in behind Kelsa before the bikers rolled decorously around the curve and took their place in line. Clearly they’d known where the border station was. Had they used the time to ditch their weapons? And where were the other three? Out burying their drug stash in a place that could be reached from the Alaska side of the border? Or were they already on the other side, waiting for her to cross?
Raven had been wrong. Recharging the battery with solar sheets had cost them too much time.
“Hello, bitch.” Kelsa jumped, but the low, fierce voice didn’t come from behind her. It came from the small screen on the bike’s display. “Punch the contact button. We need to talk.”
It made sense for the gang to have a bike-to-bike com system. It probably had a feed in their helmets as well. Kelsa looked at the bikers, two cars back. Several had taken off their helmets, like good citizens enjoying the sun that had broken through the shifting clouds.
The one who was looking down at his display was the redhead who’d accosted her at the Woodland Café.
Kelsa’s stomach knotted, but they were all locked in by other cars, surrounded by witnesses, and under the omnipresent gaze of the grid—a grid whose cameras were probably being watched by border agents. She would never be safer than she was now. She punched the “com on” button.
“What do you want to talk about?”
The camera’s tiny lens distorted his face, making the nose more prominent and the ears recede. The puffy brown patches of fresh burns showed starkly against his pale skin.
She winced, and he must have seen it, for he grinned nastily.
“Yeah, you got me good. So you can’t be feeling you owe me any dirt, right? If anything, you owe me a favor.”
He was trying to sound friendly, but his voice lingered on the word favor in a way that made her skin crawl.
“What kind of favor? And what makes you think I owe you anything? I was defending myself. Creep.”
It was only bravado, but it made her feel better, even though his expression didn’t change.
“Now that’s where you’re wrong. You’ve got something that belongs to us, and we want it back.”
“That big leather bag?” Kelsa’s thoughts raced. “What’s in it? Drugs?”
Could she trade them the bag, and keep them on this side of the border?
A flicker of surprise crossed his face before he realized that she couldn’t have gotten through the DNA-locked seal. She wouldn’t have, without Raven’s creative destruction.
“None of your business what’s in it. It’s ours, and we want it back. Drugs won’t go through the scanners, so you don’t want to be carrying it yourself.”
That much was true. The cash and the gun would go through, but Kelsa’s expression would certainly give her away to a customs guard trained to watch for people with a guilty conscience.
“Just bring it back to us,” the redhead wheedled. “And we’ll take it, turn around, and go. You’ll never see us again. Promise.”
It sounded like a lie, but she couldn’t be certain. Even if he meant what he said, would Raven’s enemies release their human tools now that they had the medicine bag within their grasp?
“Where are the others?” Kelsa asked suddenly.
“What others?” He hadn’t expected this question, and his eyes slipped aside. He was lying. He was lying, and he knew it. The others might still be hiding the drugs, but there was an excellent chance they were waiting for her on the Alaska side of the border.
Cold dread gripped Kelsa’s heart. She wouldn’t be able to get away. Not from the bikers. Certainly not from Raven’s enemies, if they could track the pouch she carried.
She wanted to heal the world; she didn’t want to die for it.
“The guys who were with you at the lake,” Kelsa said. She needed time to think. “There were nine of you. Where are the other three?”
“Just taking care of business,” he said mildly. “Our business. Don’t worry about them. You know we can’t let you get away with robbing us, bi—uh, girl. You gotta give the bag back.”
“I could turn it over to the border guards,” Kelsa said. “And tell them how I got it.”
His narrow face brightened with what looked like a real grin. “Well, if we end up in jail you can tell us how to get out. Jailbreaker. How did you do that? It ain’t so easy to get out of the slam once you get in.”
He sounded genuinely curious, and not at all frightened. He was right. She didn’t dare approach the authorities. That would put an end to her quest as surely as if the bikers killed her.
“I’ll think about it.” Kelsa cut the connection. Her face felt cold despite the sun. Her hands shook.
She’d promised Raven to get the medicine pouch over the border. To finish what she’d started.
But if she crossed the border the bikers would be waiting. And even if she could elude them, Raven’s enemies would sense her magic. She might be able to keep ahead of them till Raven caught up with her, but he couldn’t defeat all of them. The ice had proved that. Sooner or later, his enemies would win and the quest would end.
No, her quest would end. Just as Atahalne’s quest had ended long ago. It was her magic, not the pouch alone their enemies were tracking. All Raven needed was the medicine bag and a human, any human, who was stupid enough, desperate enough, strong enough to see the truth and take up their duty. It only had to be a human. It didn’t have to be her.
I always finish what I start.
Raven was counting on her to finish. The bikers were counting on her to try to finish. To give back their cash and go racing across the border into their trap. Raven’s enemies were counting on her to try. And die.
What if she did something no one expected?
The bottom of her stomach dropped away as if she were stepping off a cliff, but Kelsa got off the bike and opened the storage compartment.
She brought out the big satchel. The weight of its load pulled the slit together. It looked more like a fold in the leather than the damage it was. Her heart was pounding, but Kelsa took her time, giving the bikers every chance to see what she was doing. She needed maximum confusion for this to work. Chaos and running crowds. They’d run toward the money, right?
“Hey!” A startled voice came from the bike’s com. “What are you doing?”
Kelsa ignored him. Hefting the bag she set off, walking between the lines of cars toward the border station. Toward the border station’s guards.
Several of the guards seemed to notice her. Or maybe they were looking at the person whose steps she heard jogging up behind her.
“Hey!” The voice was louder than it had been on the bike’s com, and angrier. “What are you doing with my bag?”
Kelsa didn’t stop until a rough hand grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. It was Redhead, and his burns looked even worse in person than they had on the screen. Kelsa no longer cared.
“It is your bag,” she said. “And the drugs inside will have your fingerprints and DNA all over them, which is why I’m turning it in to the authorities. They’re watching us.” She nodded toward the guards, since both her hands were clamped around the bag’s handles.
A female border guard had started walking toward them.
The gang leader followed her gaze, and his expression darkened. “They want you for jailbreak. You can’t squeal.”
“They only want to talk to me about it.” She hoped that was true. “They can’t prove I did anything. All they’re going to do is deport me. You plan to kill me. I’d have to be crazy not to turn myself in.”
He didn’t even bother to deny it. An angry flush flooded his face as he reached out and grabbed one of the handles. “Give me my bag, bitch.”
The approaching guard quickened her pace, but she was still too far away. A man two cars back opened his door, looking concerned, and she could see the worried face of the woman in the car next to them. The woman was turning on her com pod.
“No.” Kelsa pulled back, letting the guard see her beginning to struggle, letting the cameras record it.
The soft click of a cocking gun was familiar only from vids, but Kelsa froze, staring at the biker.
Only one of his hands gripped the bag now. The other was concealed beneath it, pointing the gun at her.
“Let go or I’ll shoot.”
But his gaze flickered toward the guard, who was jogging now, and frowning.
Kelsa met the biker’s cold eyes. “There are dozens of cameras recording every move we make. Recording your face. You don’t dare.”
She gave him several seconds to think about that, to realize its truth, before she let go of the handle he still held and pulled on hers, opening the slit in the leather wide and putting distance between them.
“Gun!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “He’s got a gun! He’s trying to rob me. Help!”
She twisted her wrist, flipping the gaping bag. Money tumbled into a growing pile, and the plastic gun skittered across the pavement.
Not everyone in the nearby cars could see it, but the guard did. She tapped on her com button, then pulled out her own gun as she ran forward. “Hold it right there! Both of you. Freeze!”
Kelsa let go of her handle and turned to run. The bag swung down revealing the gun in the biker’s hand. The woman in the car behind the biker began to scream.
The boom of the shot almost deafened Kelsa; it wasn’t at all like the mild bang she heard on the vids. She spun to look back, staring in horror, wondering where the pain was.
But the biker had fired at the guard, who had dived behind a car and was yelling at the people in it to get down.
Was Redhead insane? Every second of this was being caught on the net. Kelsa hadn’t dreamed he’d actually shoot at someone.
But he had. Horns sounded, and people yelled and jumped out of their cars, running away from the shooting—except for a foolish few who were creeping in on the money.
Redhead looked back, toward his gang, his bike. The gun in his hand was a clear warning. Kelsa heard the hum of a swarm of bikes drawing near. She turned and ran, weaving through the parked cars.
Shouted commands were followed by shots as more border guards ran forward. If anyone got hurt in this mess it would be her fault—though she’d never dreamed the biker gang would be crazy enough to try to shoot their way out in full view of the net!
The penalty for possessing an illegal gun was ten years. The penalty for firing one was much, much worse. Thank goodness she’d refused to touch the gun in the bag! She hoped the plastic bullets wouldn’t penetrate a car.
As a fusillade of shots rang out behind her, Kelsa dodged around a final bumper and reached the park where the sign welcomed everyone to Alaska.
She pressed her hands over her ears and dived behind a concrete planter, praying that everyone survived. This had gotten totally out of hand!
But she still had a job to do. Looking around, she saw that most of the people who’d been waiting for walk-through traffic on this side of the fence had taken shelter behind the welcome sign. At least, there were a lot of feet beneath it.
On the other side people were crouching behind whatever cover they could find—planters, benches. Who to choose? One boy, who’d taken shelter behind a tree that looked too small to protect him, caught her gaze.
He was clearly a full Native American, with cheekbones higher and broader than Raven’s. His shining black hair was cut in modern wedges, and he wore what looked like a business suit and shiny black shoes.
No teenage boy dressed like that voluntarily. Someone’s driver perhaps? He looked too young for that, but he also looked like someone who would understand Native American magic far better than she had. And at least she could be certain he wasn’t a shapeshifter, because not even a supernatural being could have anticipated this!
Like everyone else, he was staring toward the gun battle. The shooting had stopped, and the guards were shouting demands that the bikers surrender, while the bikers were yelling for the guards to back off.
It didn’t sound promising, but Kelsa had to get the boy’s attention. Now. Somehow.
The planter that sheltered her was filled with dirt, covered by a layer of smooth stones.
The first rock she threw over the fence clattered on the ground several yards from the boy. He glanced at it, but he didn’t look at her.
Another shot was fired, and the shouting grew louder.
Kelsa gritted her teeth and took careful aim. She wasn’t good enough to throw anything through the fence’s tight-spaced ribs, but…
The next stone banged off the tree over his head, and the boy jumped as if it were a bullet. This time he had the sense to look around.
Kelsa waved frantically at him. Once his gaze was fixed on her, she pulled the medicine pouch from beneath her shirt and held it up for him to see.
It took only moments to wrap the cord around the pouch. The leather was warm from her body. Her father’s ashes were mixed in with its dust. She’d given her heart to completing this quest. But it was Atahalne’s quest as much as hers. Humanity’s quest. Humanity’s duty.
Love and death and duty didn’t seem quite as clear-cut to Kelsa now as they had a few months ago.
It was time to pass it on.
She threw the pouch over the fence. She’d intended it to fall at the boy’s feet, even into his waiting hands, but the pouch wasn’t as aerodynamic as a stone. It landed almost six feet short of the tree.
The boy’s brows rose, questioning.
Kelsa gestured impatiently for him to pick it up.
He seemed to make up his mind all at once, scrambling to snatch up the pouch and then diving back to shelter as still more shots rang out—though that tree really was too small to protect him.
Kelsa prayed once more that no one was hit, that no one had died, because the bikers had created so much more of a diversion than she’d intended.
She was still praying, with her eyes closed, when the sound of applause and honking horns signaled the bikers’ surrender.
The sudden relief sent weakness shooting through her, and her knees gave way, dropping her to the ground beside the planter.
The Native American boy was staring at her, curiosity and concern on his face. She made a little gesture of shooing him away, hoping he’d realize he should stay where he was and do nothing. The less contact between them the better.
In a few days Raven would track down the pouch, and a shapeshifting stalker would appear in the boy’s life to explain. He would probably cope with it better than Kelsa had.
If the cameras had caught her strange behavior, she’d say she’d been trying to warn the boy that the skinny tree he’d chosen wouldn’t stop a bullet and he should find somewhere else to hide. It wouldn’t be any more suspicious than the rest of the story she’d have to tell—though when she added the bikers, Raven’s wild creation almost made sense.
She could say she’d wanted to be alone, to camp and travel to get over her father’s death, which was pretty much true. She could tell almost all of the truth about the bikers trying to assault her in the Woodland Café, and her escape.
She could say she’d picked up Raven for protection against the bikers, that she’d been afraid to travel alone. She’d tell the story he’d given her about making a pod call for him, and having no idea how he’d gotten out of jail.
Would she ever see Raven again? If he had any decency, he’d at least come land on her windowsill and tell her how it had worked out. He wouldn’t. She’d come to like him, but she’d also come to know him, and that kind of human understanding wasn’t part of his nature. If the tree plague ended, that would be her answer.
She could tell the authorities most of the truth about the bikers tracking her down—at a campsite, since the clerk at the cabins had seen Raven that night. She’d say she’d run off into the woods, circled back, and stolen one of their bikes to escape on. She’d come to the border intending to turn that bag in to the authorities there. She didn’t even want to go to Alaska. She didn’t have any desire to go on healing her world, to feel the brimming rush of life-giving magic—
“Miss, are you all right?” The urgent question was accompanied by the pressure of a gentle hand on her shoulder. Kelsa looked up into the concerned face of a border guard and realized that her face was wet with tears.
“Are you all right?” he asked again. He carried a first-aid kit, and his gaze was already straying to the shaken people emerging from behind the sign.
“I’m fine,” Kelsa said huskily. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Not that we’ve found so far. If you’re all right, would you mind staying here for a bit? We’re sorting this out, but it’s going to be a while before anyone can move on.”
“I’ll stay here,” Kelsa assured him. She rose to sit on the planter, and had just enough time to slide Elizabeth Stayner’s betraying PID down into the dirt before the guards who were looking for her showed up.
“Would you please come with us?” It wasn’t a question, despite the polite phrasing. “We have some questions for you, Miss…?”
“Kelsa Phillips.” They’d get the information from her DNA scan anyway. And soon after that she’d have to face her mother, who’d be harder to lie to than the cops.
She wasn’t just going to be deported, she was going to be grounded forever.
“Yes, I’ll come.” Kelsa rose to her feet, careful not even to look over the fence at the Native boy.
It was in his hands now. And he was probably the right person to finish this healing.
Her mother had believed that the hospice staff were the right people to deal with her father’s death. Had she been right, after all? Wrong?
All you could do was the best you could do. No one could do more. And unlike the shapeshifters, Kelsa could change her mind.
“I’ll come,” Kelsa repeated. “And I’ll answer your questions. I’m ready to go home.”