Flight From Death Read online

  Stacy stood up and reached down to take my hand. “Up. On your feet. Get your coat.”

  “What? Where are we going?”

  “We’re going out. We’re going to go out to eat a proper breakfast. Then we’ll go down to the docks and watch the water. I’m prying you out of this mire before you fall in too deeply. And while we’re out, we’ll grab a map of the peninsula so you have some idea of where you’re going.”

  And just like that, I shook out of my thoughts and focused on the day.

  • • •

  Stacy left to go home and sleep after we ate breakfast, went shopping, and then stopped for coffee. I decided to stick around the Mug ’n Brew—a Supe-oriented coffee shop—for a while.

  She waved good-bye as she headed for the door. “Catch you later, and . . . Shimmer? Don’t dwell. Please? It’s not worth your energy. Over here, you can be just about anything you want, regardless of where you started out.”

  I smiled at her. “You’re right. I’ll call you when I get back from Port Townsend.”

  Stacy knew how to get in there and shake things up, all right. The woman was all business and no nonsense. If she said we were going to have fun, by gods, we’d have fun. And if we were going to get something done—it got done. In fact, she kind of intimidated me, especially for a human.

  Dragons didn’t usually bother with humans. Now, living among them, I was being forced to confront my own prejudices. Respect was harder to give when you could shift into a giant creature and squash just about anybody you wanted . . . but I knew what it was to be at the mercy of others.

  And, when I’d been ejected from the Dragon Reaches, the Wing-Liege had pared down my powers to a minimal amount. Now I could only shift when I was in water—the source of my power and strength. Otherwise, I was stuck in human form, even though I had superhuman strength and faster-than-average speed. I still had some of my magical abilities, though not all, and the heightened awareness of emotions was innate—nothing could take that away.

  After Stacy left, I gathered my packages and headed home. I needed to clean house before I left. I’d rigged an automated fish feeder, so that was one worry off my list. And Stacy had said she’d come in to check on the house and the fish a couple times while I was gone. But I still needed to tidy up, vacuum, and clear out the refrigerator.

  As I was putting away the tea I’d bought—one of the delightful surprises I’d discovered when I came over Earthside was herbal tea blends—I heard a noise. It sounded like wood scraping on wood. Frowning, I turned around to discover that one of the cupboard doors I’d closed had come open again. The latch must be loose. Or had I really remembered to close it?

  I softly pushed it closed, making sure the latch caught, then turned back to the fridge. I pulled three containers of leftovers out and set them on the counter. I could finish them off for dinner. They’d just go bad if I left them while I was gone. Using a damp sponge, I quickly wiped up one small mess on the corner of a shelf and then straightened up just as the scraping sound caught my attention again.

  Turning around, I saw the cupboard door was open again. As I walked toward it, the door slammed shut and I heard a low laugh. I never thought I’d hear that voice again and I didn’t know whether to laugh or be pissed . . . or both.

  “Cripes. Chai, stop it. You just scared the hell out of me.”

  The laughter stopped, and a waver in the air told me where he was.

  “Show yourself. Come on out.”

  Very slowly, almost like a game of peek-a-boo, a figure shimmered into view. He was tall, very tall. Seven feet at least. His skin was golden and he had eyes the color of sea foam. Broad shouldered and bare-chested, Chai was gorgeous. I raced over to him, throwing myself in his arms as he hugged me tight.

  “Shimmer! Little Sister! I’ve been looking high and low for you.” He brushed my forehead with a kiss. “Finally, someone on the Western Shore told me that you’d been expelled over Earthside by the Wing-Liege. I don’t need to tell you how hard it was to track you down.”

  Laughing—seeing him made all my troubles melt away—I playfully slapped his arm.

  “Trust me, Chai, that’s a good thing. The harder it is to track me down, the safer I am.” If Chai had trouble finding me, then it meant that Greanfyr and his clan would have an equally difficult time. And the harder I was to find, the safer I was.

  He pushed me back by my shoulders. “Girl, what a mess you got yourself into. If you needed money, why didn’t you just come to me?”

  I shrugged, not wanting to spoil the mood with the story of why I had really broken into the white dragons’ dreyerie.

  “What can I say? You know me. Now sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself.” I pushed him over to the kitchen table. My house had an eat-in kitchen nook, as well as a formal dining room, and I’d decked it out in a blue and white theme that reminded me of the water. The walls of the kitchen were the color of pale morning sky, just before the sun peeks over the horizon. The fact that a djinn was hanging out in my kitchen seemed delightfully surreal to me. The fact that I even had a kitchen seemed surreal.

  “All right, all right. Don’t get pushy, Little Sister!”

  Chai and I had met when I was first released from the Lost and Foundling—the orphanage for abandoned dragonettes. The owners brought us up rough and harsh, to steel ourselves for our adulthood. Not every orphan survived the ordeal. We weren’t exactly abused, but there were no vacations or holidays and not much playtime involved. I had learned early on just where I stood in the world.

  When I left the orphanage, I’d headed out for the Western Shores, intending to track down information on my heritage. Family meant everything to me at that point. Instead, I had found Chai, sunning himself on a rock. We’d struck up a conversation, and somehow, in the twisted way of the world, we’d become close friends. Djinns were tricky and you could never truly trust them one hundred percent. But in the scheme of things? Chai was the best friend I had.

  “So, have you been Earthside before?” I returned to cleaning the counters. “And do you want something to eat?” Djinns ate food the same as anybody else, though they didn’t really need it to survive. And what they ate varied with the type. Most djinns had a connection to the element of fire, and they tended to prefer their food on the spicy side.

  Chai shook his head. “I thought I might stick around for a while. I missed you. And I could be a useful go-between since . . .”

  “Since I can’t return to the Dragon Reaches right now?” I glanced at him as I drizzled a spoonful of honey over the leftover pancakes I’d tucked away yesterday. I didn’t mind eating them cold.

  He grimaced. “Yes. I wasn’t going to be quite so blunt, but now that you mention it, I can bring you things you might need. I can also help you keep an eye out for Greanfyr. In fact . . . I took a peek in on him and his family before hightailing it over here. Girl, you have to be careful. He’s on the warpath, and he’s pissed as all get-out at the Wing-Liege for letting you live. He wants his pound of flesh, my girl. And I don’t think he’s given up hope of getting it.”

  That so wasn’t what I needed to hear. If Greanfyr was still on the rampage, that meant I’d have to watch my back. There was nothing preventing him from coming over here to hunt me down, and there were oh-so-many ways to make a death look like an accident.

  “I’ll tell Alex. He can talk to the Wing-Liege for me. I still don’t know how those two became friends, and he won’t dish on the details.” I glanced at the clock. It was nearing eleven and I still had to pack before I slept. I made a snap decision. “Chai, I want you to stay for a while, if you can. I have to go out of town for a few days on a case, but you can use the spare bedroom. Just don’t trash the joint. And no bringing home girls.”

  Djinns could be as bad as incubi when it came to partying. In fact, they could be a whole lot worse. Their wishes came with long, snarled strings attached. So, while I was comfortable asking Chai for little things, I never once had
accepted his offer of a wish. And generally I told him what I wanted, rather than ask, and he either complied or refused.

  His eyes glimmered as he crossed over to my side. We had never clicked in a sexual way, but he was there for me, and I knew with certainty the djinn had my back.

  He draped an arm around my shoulder. “Sure, Little Sister. I’ll stick around for a while. You can count on me.”

  • • •

  By the time Bette stopped to pick me up on the way to the office, I had settled Chai into the guest room, which he’d promptly redecorated, and had managed to catch enough sleep to refresh me. As I shoved my suitcase in the trunk and clambered into the front seat next to her, Bette puffed a cloud of smoke in my face. I coughed. Her car was an old Chevy Impala, and she’d tricked it out like a low-rider.

  The rain had increased to the point of being a downpour, and Bette turned the windshield wipers to high. “So, you ready for the trip?”

  I shrugged, my thoughts still on Chai’s sudden arrival. “I guess. I got a surprise visitor this morning.”

  “Hunky and hung, I hope?” She cackled. The woman could turn into a water moccasin, and she had an alluring charm for humans. She might look like a grandma-from-hell, but she could shake it up big-time in the sheets from what Alex had said. They had gone out about a hundred years ago but discovered they made much better friends than lovers.

  “Yes, but it’s not like that. He’s more like a brother than anything else.” I told her about Chai.

  She turned a cautious eye to me as we pulled into the parking spot Alex had reserved for her in the lot next door to the office. “Shimmer, you’re a sweet girl—”

  As I started to speak, she waved me silent. “Don’t contradict me, you have no clue how old I am.”

  I grinned and shut my mouth. There was no good way to answer that one.

  “I know you say he’s been a friend of yours for years . . . but honey, are you sure you can trust him? The djinn are a tricky species. They twist words for fun and profit, you know.” Her eyes crinkled and she reached out to pat my hand. “Please, just walk softly. He may seem like family but the fact is, you can’t trust much of anybody right now. Especially when it’s only been a few months since the Wing-Liege sentenced you. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  I ducked my head. “I know . . . but I have to trust somebody. I can’t walk around paranoid all the time. I’ve spent my entire life looking over my shoulder. I’m tired of it, Bette.” My shoulders slumped and I hung my head. “I’m just so tired of fighting.”

  She squeezed my hand. “It’s not fair, and you’re right. You shouldn’t have to. All right then, but if anything seems off-base, you come to Alex and me. You hear me?”

  I nodded. “I promise.” As I pulled my suitcase out of her car and carried it over to Alex’s rusty brown Range Rover—he owned several vehicles, but thank gods he hadn’t brought his motorcycle for the trip—I thought about what Bette said. Chai’s sudden appearance after not seeing him for so long had startled me, but I needed to trust him. Right now, I needed the sense of security he brought me.

  “Ready, love?” Alex was in the driver’s seat, with Ralph in the back. Apparently we were all riding up together.

  I nodded and stowed my suitcase into the back alongside theirs. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  Alex blew a kiss to Bette. “Hold down the fort. We’ve got our cells. Call me if anything urgent comes up.”

  “You’ve got it, precious.” As she teetered over to the building in her five-inch platform boots, we pulled out of the parking space, headed to ferret out a ghost.

  CHAPTER 3

  Our route took us up I-5 to Mukilteo, where we would take the ferry over to Whidbey Island. From there, we’d drive up to the other end of the island to Coupeville, where we would catch another ferry to Port Townsend. There were other routes, but this seemed the most expedient. I didn’t tell Alex that I’d forgotten to check out the schedule. I knew most of the Washington State ferries had late sailings, so we shouldn’t have any problem.

  North of Seattle, western Washington opened out a little. Oh, the forests were still there, but the land felt more like shoreline, with windswept trees and bushes. To the east of the freeway, once we were north of Seattle, a long stretch of rolling berry farms lined the road. To the west, Edmonds, a small town with a vintage feel, led into Everett, which was solidly Navy. Past Everett came Mukilteo, named after a Native American word thought to stem from the meaning “good camping ground” or—alternatively—“narrow passage.” Continue north, and the road wound through Bellingham and on to the Canadian border.

  I had never been up this way. Hell, I had seen very little of Earthside. So, as Alex drove, Ralph played tour guide. The sun was long gone, even though we’d decided to take off at seven since we wanted to make it over to Port Townsend before midnight.

  As we exited the freeway onto Highway 526, also known as the Boeing Freeway, Ralph leaned forward, over the back of my seat. He was a good kid—though I knew he wasn’t all that young, but compared to me? He was a baby.

  Ralph was lanky and lean, and he wore round, dark-tinted glasses in the style of John Lennon. Shorter than both Alex and me, he topped out at five eight at the most, and he tended to dress in cargo pants, T-shirts, and sneakers. Brilliant, he was also a genuinely nice guy. And he had a crush on me. I knew it. Bette knew I knew. Alex knew I knew. The only person who didn’t realize I knew it was Ralph himself, and I preferred to keep it that way. Less awkward in having to turn him down if he made a move, because—as sweet as he was—Ralph was not my type.

  “So, I grew up around here. I lived in Everett until I was ten and my father moved us to Seattle.” He brushed back a lock of unruly black hair.

  Alex flashed a quick glance over his shoulder at Ralph. “I didn’t know that. When was that?”

  “Oh, sixty years ago, give or take a few. The area was a lot less crowded then. My father found a job down on the docks in Seattle when he got out of the military. He was in the Army during World War Two, you know. After that, when he decided to settle down, he had to age himself up with glamour magic that he bought from a witch. That was before the humans knew we existed.” He laughed softly. “I remember the first time—oh, what, five or six years ago? I remember the first day when he felt like it was safe to come out of the closet and he went to work without the makeup. The guys were spooked, but since he’d worked with them for so many years, it didn’t take long before they accepted him.”

  Weres aged the same as humans until they hit young adulthood, and then the process slowed dramatically. The longevity factor made for some hard feelings among a few humans, but the otherness was far more problematic. There were hate groups actively out to kill the Weres and Fae and vampires.

  I glanced back at him. “What did you do before it was safe to come out as a Were? Did you use magic to age yourself?”

  He shook his head. “No. I spent the sixties doing construction and I job-hopped a lot. During the seventies, I got fascinated by the emerging computer market. I supported myself through temporary jobs while going to school. In 1989, I got hired on by Microsoft. I came out of the closet when I moved to Google in 2007. Two years back, I quit to open my own consulting company. Shortly after that I met Alex and decided it would be fun to work with him. I don’t really need the money—I got in on the ground floors of both of the giants and made a killing. But I like keeping busy and I have control of the entire network.”

  Listening to him talk wiped away some of the geek-boy image. Ralph was a full-on professional in his field, though he still looked, and acted, like a shy college student.

  We took a right, keeping on Highway 526, and shortly after, another right onto Highway 525. The highway would turn into the Mukilteo Speedway and lead us right to the ferry landing. As we sped along, the sign for the ferry lane came into view. The shoulder was dedicated to those waiting to board, and during peak times it would be filled several sailings’ worth
of cars, all lined up single file along the roadside.

  Trees and houses buttressed the speedway, but here, homes weren’t packed close together, and they didn’t directly sit on the edge of the street. The two-lane road was covered in mist, slick with rain, and our headlights cut through the rolling fog like a dim laser. As the ferry lane became the “ferry traffic only” lane, we edged into it.

  “We’re almost there. Looks like we lucked out and missed the backups that happen around this time of night.” Alex hadn’t spoken much, but then, he wasn’t a talkative guy. Ralph’s nose was back into his phone or iPad or whatever it was he was doing.

  “I’ve never been on a ferry but if it has to do with the water, you can bet I’m going to like it.” I paused as the road began to slope down on a stronger gradient. Up ahead, the first traffic light we’d seen in a while glowed through the mist and rain. Just beyond it, in the distance, I could see the faint glint of water, but even more, I could feel it. Open water.

  My spirits rose and I rolled down my window to breathe in the scent of brine and seaweed and decay. I could feel it in my bones, in my blood. The scent of it intoxicated me in a heady, welcome-home manner. Suddenly aware of how much I had missed this, I practically bounced in my seat like a little kid.

  “You can hear her, can’t you? She’s singing to you.” Alex glanced at me as he navigated the road. “No diving overboard when we’re on the ferry, mind you. Once we reach Port Townsend, you can go out and take a swim.”

  “I promise.” The thought that by tomorrow, I’d be out swimming in my dragon form made me so happy that right now I would have promised just about anything.