Silvertongue, page 65
part #1 of Remnants of Magic Series
Aedan rolled his eyes, throwing his hands up in the air - knife and all. “Oh, don’t get your panties in a bunch.”
Ethan flinched, drawing back before catching himself. Noah was already at the door, shoving past Carl and pushing out into the night beyond. Ethan hurried to follow, giving me one last furious look.
And then we were alone. I didn’t know how Noah and Ethan were going to leave - they’d brought my car, after all, and left it burning - but I didn’t much care if they froze to death figuring it out.
I’d nearly had them. I’d come this close to putting an end to the threat. My lips pressed together into a thin line. If Carl hadn’t interfered, this would already be over.
Over. Another needle of anxiety slipped under my skin. Greyson. His chest rose and fell - I could see that much from where I stood - but slowly. Too slowly. And the cast of his skin…
My heart ached. Carl interfering or not, it had long since been too late.
I turned towards him instead, more than a little numb - and was pushed back by Carl as the tall, slender man stepped right in front of me.
“Well, well,” I heard him murmur, his words little more than a whisper. They weren’t meant for me, I knew. “Told you. I told you that you were gettin’ too old for all this.”
He was moving for Greyson. My blood chilled. I raised my hand, moving to grab him before he could get too close. “I don’t know who you think you are, but-”
“Didn’t you ever figure out you shouldn’t keep secrets?” Carl said, his voice dropping lower. He stepped straight past me. When I grabbed for him, my fingers slid right through him. A shiver ran down my spine. I’d known he was a demi - but suddenly, that fact became all the more important.
He stopped beside Greyson, dropping into a crouch. His dark eyes swept up and down our finder’s form, taking in the wounds. The blood.
“Not yet, eh?” he murmured. “Hold on a bit longer, then.”
What? I inched closer, my pulse thundering in my ears. The way he said it - like he had hope. There was a note in his voice that wasn’t just resignation. The thought was enough to set my hands to quivering.
Carl pushed himself upright again, groaning. “The things I do,” I heard him mutter, shaking his head. And then he turned back towards the door.
I froze, entirely unsure what I should be doing. We needed to get him help. He was hurt, badly enough that I knew he was right on the verge of death - and I didn’t know what to do. I could...we could call for help. But that would mean paramedics, and police, and people tromping all over Greyson’s property. If they saw us, if they saw the house, they’d have questions. Ones we couldn’t answer.
My hand slipped into my pocket a second after, fixing around my cell phone. To hell with it. We couldn’t just let him die. We could-
“Hannah!” Carl roared from the doorway. I jumped, shocked back to stillness. From the corner of my eye, I could see Jake flinch, pulled out of his reverie just like I was.
Aedan drew a little closer to me, his eyes narrowed. “Just wait, Jonny,” he said.
A scowl slipped onto my face. “Wait? We can’t-”
“Hannah!” Carl bellowed for a second time. I winced. The sound of his voice was loud enough that pangs of pain shot through my aching, sore head. Blood still trickled down my face. I wiped it away as he wrinkled his nose, opening the door far enough to lean out. “Damn it, girl, would you-”
“I-I’m coming,” I heard someone call in reply. Someone female. Their tone was carefully respectful, but all the same, I could hear the irritation under their words. “You said not to move until-”
“Don’t give me excuses. Get in here.”
Footsteps rang out against wood, hollow and booming. Someone was coming up the stairs. I hesitated, glancing towards Aedan and Jake. There were more of them. It wasn’t just Carl. The realization that we weren’t alone, and that we were quickly on the verge of being outnumbered by a strange crew, was not a comforting one.
But before I could say a word or gesture to the others, the door pushed open. A woman stepped through. Little more than a girl, I amended, biting my tongue and doing my best to keep from jumping. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a messy bun, escaping from its confines in a halo of strands. She froze at the sight of us, her brown eyes going wide. “Uh-”
“Quickly, damn it,” Carl snapped. The tapping of his foot itched at the back of my mind, grating against my thoughts. “Didn’t bring you all the way along just so you could sit in the car, girl.”
“Right,” she said, turning around. “What’s...ah.” She’d seen Greyson. I felt my hands clench into balls at my side. I didn’t know quite what was going on, but there was a regret in her voice. Regret for Greyson, or for us...either way, I didn’t like it.
Carl sniffed, crossing his arms. “Now, how’s about you-”
“Move,” she said, breaking into motion. “What happened to him?”
“We…think he fell,” I said, feeling Carl’s eyes on me. “We’re not really sure, but-”
“Can you do anything?” the other man said, acting like he hadn’t heard his girl ask me a question.
My fingers twitched. “...Anything? What, can you…” I stopped, my words falling away as a lump welled up in my throat. The first hints of hope were painfully sharp, but I knew better than to get my hopes up. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her back to us. She crouched at Greyson’s side, brushing his hair back carefully. “There’s...a lot of damage. And he’s been left here.” Glancing back, she fixed me with a glare, sharp and pointed.
I shook my head hurriedly. “Not us. He’s ours. We wouldn’t-”
“No promises,” she said, her voice low. “He’s old. You know I can’t fix everything.”
Just as quickly as it had appeared, the hope blossoming in my chest vanished. “Stop poking around at my friend,” I snapped, drawing myself upright. “I don’t know who you people are or why you think you can walk in here. B-But, can you help him?” I hated to put it in words, to risk being told no, that I’d misunderstood. But I could read the scene as well as anyone. I stepped towards Hannah, reaching for her shoulder. “What exactly are you-”
A hand latched around my elbow, pulling me away. “None of that, now,” Carl said. His voice was carefully neutral, brimming with a cheerfulness so fake it might have been plastic. “Let’s let her work. You and I should talk, anyhow.”
“Don’t touch him,” Jake spat from behind me. “Don’t-”
“Let them be,” Aedan said. He didn’t seem worried at all. He stood, leaning against the wall, his arms crossed casually over his chest. Only the rapid-fire tapping of one finger against his arm ruined the act. “Sit down, Jake. We’ll be fine here, Jonny. Go.”
“But- I can’t-”
“Come on,” Carl said with a groan, dragging me onward. The door creaked open, sending another wave of frigid air through the cabin. “Let’s talk.”
I opened my mouth to continue protesting, but snapped it shut again. Aedan didn’t seem worried - and if Hannah there could actually help, having me hovering over her shoulder wouldn’t change anything. I’d just distract her. Greyson couldn’t afford any delay.
So I let Carl pull me outside. The door shut with a final-sounding creak behind me, cutting off the low, irritated argument ongoing between Jake and Aedan.
As though he’d realized I wasn’t fighting anymore, Carl let me go. We slipped down the front stairs of the porch, finally coming to rest on the snow-covered driveway. A bench sat on the very edge of the yard, equally covered in snow but sturdy-looking. It glowed in the firelight, lit in flickering, shadowed colors.
I stared at the source of the light, my frustrations bubbling up again. My car still burned where it sat, rapidly becoming little more than a hunk of twisted, soot-covered metal. Already portions of it were little more than embers.
Another car sat in the driveway, though, behind my poor, dead husk of a vehicle and Aedan’s stolen junker. Two figures were sitting inside, their noses pressed to the glass. They opened the doors, about to jump out at us. I flinched, drawing back. A trap. It was-
Carl raised a hand, waving cheerily at the pair, and they stopped. “Just wait,” he said, his voice raised enough to reach them. “Or go help Hannah. She could use a hand.”
They hesitated a moment longer. I fixed them in my minds - one stocky and short, with plain, unremarkable brown hair cut into a plain, unremarkable haircut. The other was lanky and long, his black locks braided back in rows.
I could almost see the thoughts churning behind their eyes - Carl, who was clearly their leader, hanging out in the dark with a strange demi. Both of them shut their doors a second later, their eyes still fixed on us.
Carl sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Be like that.” He reached down, pulling his sleeve over his hand and knocking the snow off the bench enough to sit. “Come on. Want one?”
I eyed the carton of cigarettes he offered me with distaste, shaking my head. “I’m good. Look. I don’t know you. What the hell are you-” I caught myself, biting off the words hard. No, that was the wrong way to go about this. I couldn’t help but be angry - if Carl hadn’t interrupted me, I’d have killed Noah. But it sounded an awful lot like there was hope for Greyson yet, and they hadn’t attacked us so far.
We should probably not make every crew we ran into an enemy. Not until we knew there wasn’t another choice.
Carl was watching me, I realized. His face was in shadows, nearly invisible, but I saw him nod fractionally. “Good,” he said. “Least you’re not an idiot. ‘Bout this, anyway.”
Now that I’d slowed myself down long enough to actually think, I just...stared. The pieces were falling into place, bits of half-remembered conversation from months before and clues my mind must have secreted away. In the center of it all was Aedan, lounging against the wall of Greyson’s house as though he didn’t have a care in the world.
“You’re Detroit, aren’t you?” I said slowly, staring down at him.
He grinned, flicking his lighter. His face erupted into light, there and gone a brief second after. “Real genius, you are.”
I sank onto the bench beside him, seeing the way he nudged his chin towards it. “Oh. Then- I mean, why are you here?” I swallowed hard. “We’ve been meaning to...to talk to you, but we thought…” I shook my head, still trying to sort through the jumble of feelings and irritations that were taking over my mind.
“Why did you stop me?” I said, more slowly. “Those people. Because of them, Greyson is...hurt.”
“Badly,” Carl said, bobbing his head in a nod. A thin coil of grey smoke drifted up into the night to join the black pouring off my dead car. “Might be Hannah can help. We’ll see.”
“They won’t stop,” I said, unable to keep a sharp edge from my tone. “They got away, now. They’ll come back. They’ll hurt us again. So why the hell did you-”
“Shit, kid. Don’t give me that,” Carl said, shooting me a look. “I think you’ve done decent so far, given the circumstances, but you can’t just waltz into someone’s territory to set up shop and not expect them to take offense. It might surprise you, but not everyone’s okay with you just fuckin’ with how things’ve been around here.”
I stopped. His voice was still cheerful, but there was an edge in his words. His eyes were fixed on mine, carefully watchful.
He held the stare for a long, drawn-out moment, as though waiting for me to say something. And then he sighed, letting a cloud of smoke slip between his lips. “Anyway. To get back to what you said. Don’t know that we really have a name, but sure. Heard a few months back that there was strange shit going on up this way, but we’ve had bigger issues. Didn’t really care to deal with you lot.”
Deal with us. The implicit threat hung pointedly in his word choice. I stopped, my chin dropping gently. Suddenly, being alone in the yard with him didn’t seem like such a good idea.
But Aedan hadn’t been worried. I clung to the thought. He wouldn’t set me up. Probably.
“Ontario moving was a bit much,” Carl said, shrugging. “They’re ambitious. Should have expected they’d try something, of course. So we came to see what happened.” His grin glowed in the half-light. “Kids were getting bored, anyway.”
“You’ve been here?” I said slowly, trying to keep from scowl. “What, and you just watched?”
He shrugged again. “Wasn’t our fight.”
“It seemed to be your fight when you stopped me from putting an end to things,” I said, forcing the words past my clenched teeth.
Carl snorted. “What, you think that’ve ended it? Don’t be an idiot. You go and kill the marketeers’ leadership, you’ll just leave a void. They’d all go scrabbling to fill it and pick out the next head. That’d be a total pain for everyone involved. They’d come south, chipping away at the territory boundary and launching raids. They’d be trying to make themselves look good, and all. Be strong.” His eyes were fixed on mine, watchful. “You wouldn’t have lasted to summer.”
I swallowed. Put like that, it almost made sense. “Oh.”
“Oh,” he echoed, a chuckle rippling up from his gut. “Had to keep things from getting out of hand entirely. Besides.” His tone softened. His eyes drifted towards the cabin, to where I could see Jake silhouetted in the door’s window. “Nathan felt Greyson go dark. Figured something had to be wrong.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice dropping. “And he- do you think your friend can-”
“We’ll see.”
“Oh.”
Carl shook his head, shifting in his seat. “Asses shouldn’t’ve just come in swinging at him like that. It’s not right. Not with him having been here longer than any of us. Should’ve had a little respect.”
I risked glancing over at him. “And that’s why?”
He took another long draw, letting my words hang between us. “Well, I’m not going to lie,” he said. And then he started chuckling. “Thought it was pretty damn funny to see them all come in like big tough guys, only to get sent packing. Wish we had some popcorn for that one.”
So he didn’t like them either. A bit of the weight in my chest eased up. Aedan and Jake had been pretty clear about how the primes behaved, and I knew better than to relax. All the same, the acknowledgement that even he thought Noah’s group was full of shit was a welcome one.
“Anyway. While my girl sees to the old bastard, you and I need to talk.”
I flinched. His tone was hard again, cold and level. I looked over, finding him staring right back at me. “I thought we were.”
“This? This is just getting to know each other. And now it’s time we got down to business.”
I nodded slowly, still pinned in place by the look he was giving me. “All...right.”
He leaned back, sliding the hand holding his cigarette down to rest on the bench beside him. “Have to be honest with you. Don’t think anyone’s really thrilled that you’re here, kid.”
“Jon.”
“Didn’t ask,” he said, not missing a beat. “If you thought things were going to end here, well, you’re wrong.”
I nodded again. “I know. I didn’t think this would be it.”
“Well, at least you’ve got that much sense,” Carl muttered, looking down. “Look. So far as my group’s concerned, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“You mentioned something like that.”
“And I meant it. With the west side in shambles, we’ve got to keep an eye out for runners. And Toledo’s always an issue too, you know.” His eyes flicked back up to meet mine. “Up to now, the north’s just been a buffer between us and them. I like that. Buffer is good.”
“We’re not looking to start a fight,” I said, shaking my head. “Really.” It felt like I was treading the same ground I just had, before Noah tried to sell his asshole deal to me. I could only hope this wasn’t going to be a repeat encounter.
“See, right now, I’m pretty convinced that you guys’ll have your hands full,” Carl said. A crooked grin tugged at his lips. “They’re going to keep you too busy to think about starting anything with us. And, hey.” He held his hands up. “If they’re occupied with fightin’ off you lot, they’ll leave us alone.”
I stopped, my retort falling away. Carl was still watching me. The man was way more observant than he looked. His words played over and over again in my mind, rolling off the tip of my tongue. It almost sounded like-
“Are you saying you’ll let us stay up here?” I said, letting the question slip out.
Carl’s grin widened. “I’m just being practical here. Make yourselves useful, yeah? Keep the north away, and let me worry about the real problems at hand.” His head tilted to one side a fraction of an inch. “Do that for me, and I could be convinced to overlook your squatting here.”
I sat back, my shoulders rising. The truth was, like it or not, we’d be dealing with the marketeers again regardless. It wasn’t like I could turn him down and everything would magically go back to peace. And right then, he sounded halfway friendly.
He’d still be doing all of the normal things, the whispers in the back of my mind insisted. Killing, and stealing, and using his powers to take advantage of the masses. He’d still be a demi, the leader of a crew, doing all of the things that we’d found so abhorrent in the marketeers.
“Don’t try and ship anyone across our territory,” I heard myself saying. “Not under our nose.”
He chuckled. “Do you really think you’re in a position to make deals?”
My eyes tightened. I wasn’t, and we both knew it. I could try and command him - but with how my head was spinning, I knew I was dangerously close to flat empty. And enspelling the leader of the southern primes didn’t sound like a good idea even in my head. If he refused, there’d be nothing I could do to argue with him. And there was no telling how he’d react to my asking, either.
But he only sighed, rolling his eyes. “Not like I’ll be able to do much business with Noah for a while anyway, eh?” he muttered darkly. “Not after getting in the way.”
