Elliot, page 3
part #3 of Anarock Shifters Series
Aria fumed in seething rage. Circumstances thwarted her plan, but not her ultimate aim. She needed to talk to Victor about this—either him or Colonel Weeks. No one else would do.
Why did she set her mind on those two in particular? They knew what Elliot was trying to do. They already understood the situation. Maybe Riley and Malachai understood it, too, but Aria didn’t want them.
Jules finally got the gate open and she darted through. Jules didn’t know enough to stop Elliot from coming after her. Would he never leave her alone?
She hit the street and headed south. Elliot came up behind her one last time. “Aria! Aria! Where are you going now?”
“I’m going to find Victor.”
“He’s out hunting in the Quag. You can’t go out there.”
“Watch me,” she spat over her shoulder, but she didn’t bother to look at him. She would never look at him again.
3
Elliot soared over the dense Louisiana bayou. He recognized landmarks from the air. He tilted on his wings and descended to several hundred feet above the ground. The sun drifted toward the western horizon and shaded the sky with color. It would set in a few minutes and leave the world dark and cold.
He didn’t want to be flying around out here over the deep Quag. He wanted to be home in Anarock with his family. What was he doing out here, anyway?
He veered to the right when he spotted a black smudge moving through the thickest undergrowth. He trailed it for a while until it entered a clearing. He studied it from on high. The sun shone on black fur and a large, burly bear ambled along sniffing the ground.
He folded his wings and dropped through the canopy. A few yards above the grass, he shifted on the wing. He resumed his form as a man and landed on his feet in front of the bear.
She halted and narrowed her eyes at him. She growled low in her massive chest. He held out both arms in a gesture of capitulation. “Come on, Aria. This is nuts. Come back to Anarock with me.”
The bear reared onto her hind legs and changed. She shrank into the petite form of Aria Slaughter. No one would suspect such a tiny woman could transform into such a fearsome beast. “You go on back to Anarock, Elliot. I’m busy.”
She rotated sideways and took off into the undergrowth. Elliot’s shoulders sagged. “Aria! This is crazy. What do you think you’re doing out here?”
“I told you,” she snapped. “I’m looking for Victor. It smells like he was here a couple of days ago. He must be on his way to Lafayette.”
He hurried to catch up with her. “That’s impossible. Lafayette is that way.”
She paid no attention. She strolled into the bushes and crashed around for a while. He waited, but she didn’t come back.
He long ago admitted to himself that he didn’t follow her out here to stop her from telling Victor what he was doing. No one could change Aria Slaughter’s mind once she made it up to do something. He didn’t really understand why he needed to come with her. He just wanted to be near her.
Now that she knew what he was up to, he craved her presence, her attention. He craved her being mad at him. Something he did made a difference to her at last. He didn’t realize he felt that way about her until now. Even if she didn’t agree with the way he went about it, she knew. That was enough. Why he couldn’t feel the same way about his father knowing, he couldn’t explain.
He shuffled after her. “Aria? Are you there?”
A breaking twig drew him to his left. He found her crouching near the ground. She traced a boot print with her fingertip. “They were here. They passed this way.”
He didn’t try to reason with her. Three days in the Quag wore out all the words he could think of to change her mind. She was going to do this. She was going to tell Victor that Elliot Weeks was working for NightRage. When that happened, Elliot wanted to be on hand to face the music. He didn’t want to wait around Anarock for the shit to hit the fan.
She stood up and strolled into the swamp. She didn’t look over her shoulder at him. A few paces along, she bent over and picked up a few twigs. She broke them into pieces and gathered them in one hand.
A short distance away, she came to another clearing. She squatted down and arranged her twigs in a pile. She collected a mass of different-sized wood and formed it into a neat teepee shape.
“What are you doing?” he ventured.
“What does it look like? I’m making camp for the night. I’m building a fire.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“From my uncle.”
Elliot winced. In the weeks since the Omega Battalion attacked Anarock, word came down the grapevine that the Battalion wiped out Lucas Slaughter and all his party. The Battalion annihilated families and burned the Slaughters’ encampment to the ground. They even destroyed the food supplies.
Elliot crouched across the budding fire and regarded her. “I’m sorry to hear about your uncle. It was a tragedy. He was a beacon.”
“He didn’t die in vain,” she countered. “He taught all us girls how to survive in the Quag. He said that, even if we spent the rest of our lives in Anarock, we needed to know how to live in the Quag. He said New Breed belong to the Quag. We came out of the water and we would always have to go back to it. He made sure all of us knew. It’s too bad Colonel Weeks doesn’t feel the same way.”
Her words stung, but he didn’t argue. She was right—at least, Lucas was right. Elliot’s father never bothered much with that wilderness survival shit. Anarock was good enough for him and it was good enough for all his kids. Of the four of them, only Finn spent much time in the Quag. He loved going on hunting trips with Victor and the other Griffin boys. Finn could disappear in the Quag like a gator.
Observing Aria’s expert hands preparing her tinder and kindling, Elliot became cognizant of his own ignorance. He didn’t know the first thing about living in the Quag. He didn’t know how to build a fire, much less light it, but Aria sure did.
She arranged everything. Then she pulled out a few longer sticks and set them before her. She stripped off the bark, peeled away a wad of the inner fiber, and twisted it into a rope. She made the untidiest line of string Elliot could imagine. Then she tied it to her stick to make a bow.
Elliot seemed to recall something about this, but he never paid enough attention to recognize what she was doing. She twisted her bow around another stick and used it to saw the stick into another piece of wood. She did it all so quickly and effortlessly that he wasn’t really surprised when smoke started coming out of it.
She tapped a glowing ember into her tinder and it ignited. In half a second, flame licked up from her bunch of fuel. Elliot bit his lip. “I could have done that for you, you know.”
She poked a few more twigs into the rising flames. “And what would I have done if you weren’t here? Then what?”
He didn’t answer her question. He glanced around him. The Quag started to fall into shadow. “What were you planning to eat?”
“I already ate.” She leaned against a tree trunk and shut her eyes. “I hunted a rabbit earlier. If you’re hungry, why don’t you go fishing or something? I’m sure you’re good at that. All dragons are.”
Elliot looked around him one more time. Ponds and lakes and streams and marshes extended as far as the eye could see. He knew he could fish for his food. He could feed himself in the Quag as well as the next dragon.
He didn’t want to hunt. He wanted to sit down to a nice meal of hot gumbo and jambalaya in a club in town. He wanted to drink a frosty beer and listen to a band playing jazz. After he satisfied his appetite for food and whatever else, he wanted to crawl home to bed and get comfortable between some nice clean sheets.
Now he faced the prospect of spending the night out here with Aria. Was she really worth it? Was defending himself to Victor worth all this trouble? He still couldn’t exactly pinpoint why he followed Aria out of Anarock in the first place.
She wasn’t mad at him anymore. He could tell. She talked to him when she made these stops. She didn’t snarl any nasty names. Neither did she turn aside from her decision to report him. She never wavered from that in the last three days.
Now, when he observed her across the fire, he experienced for the first time a wave of terror that Victor really would find out what he was doing. Up until this moment, he always enjoyed the conceit that he could divert the inevitable somehow. He thought he could convince Aria to change her mind even when he knew that was impossible. He thought he could explain himself to Victor, but that was baloney, too.
How could he explain it away when he really had been courting NightRage behind Victor’s back? How could he explain that? Victor was too astute to be fooled by any wheedling excuse.
Then there was Colonel Weeks. No one knew Elliot as well as his own father. Christ, Elliot was just down in the war room shooting his mouth off about how, if the Prometheus Crest didn’t bring Alexa back, Elliot would do it himself. That pretty much said it all, didn’t it?
In the middle of these ruminations, Aria’s eyes popped open. She looked across the fire at him. “You don’t have to stay out here, you know. You can go home. There’s nothing stopping you.”
He shrugged and picked up one of her sticks. He broke it into pieces and tossed it into the flames. “I don’t want to.”
“I won’t change my mind,” she told him. “Just so you know that.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“Then what are you hanging around for?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
She cocked her head to study him. “What happened to you? You used to be solid with the Prometheus Crest. I never thought you could turn against it.”
He peered away into the gloom. Shadows hemmed in their camp and cut off his sight. “I don’t know what happened. I really don’t.”
“It wasn’t Alexa. You can’t convince me of that. This has nothing to do with Alexa and you must know you can’t get NightRage to do what you want. I shouldn’t even have to tell you this.”
“What makes you say that?” he asked. “What makes you think they won’t keep their word? If they say they’re going to reward me for helping them out, I believe them.”
“They might reward you, but they won’t do it in the way you think. They hate shifters. That’s why they hate the Prometheus Crest. Prometheus is dominated by shifters and NightRage is dominated by wizards and magic-users. They think shifters are stupid brutes who use strength to get what they want.”
“Maybe we do. Maybe they’re right about that.”
“Maybe they are.” She looked away. “I’m not saying they’re wrong, but did you ever stop to wonder why NightRage doesn’t control Anarock? Did you ever stop to wonder why, if they have all this magical power, they don’t just ride herd over the Prometheus Crest and take what they want?”
“I guess it’s because of the dragons. They might have magic, but they’re not as strong as dragons. How else would the Griffins be able to keep control all these years?”
Aria snorted and shook her head. She held out her hands to the flames. “That is the most pathetic piece for self-delusion I can think of. Look at Mitzie Hitchcock. She’s six years old and she almost single-handedly held back the Omega Battalion from crossing the Huey Long Bridge. She could defeat the whole Griffin clan with one hand tied behind her back. Don’t give me that shit about NightRage not being as strong as the dragons.”
“Mitzie Hitchcock belongs to the Prometheus Crest along with her brothers,” Elliot pointed out. “She wouldn’t attack the Crest.”
“My point exactly. No way can you convince me that NightRage is just sitting over there in Hoffman Triangle cooking up ways to defeat the Prometheus Crest because they can do it anytime they liked. If they wanted to control Anarock, they already would.”
“What exactly is your point?” Elliot asked. “You want me to believe they don’t want to control Anarock, that they’re perfectly happy to let the Griffins do their dirty work for them?”
“How else do you explain it? How do you explain several thousand of the world’s most powerful magic-wielders sitting around letting a bunch of freakin’ shifters run their lives for them? Did you ever stop to wonder why they agreed so quickly to help Victor against the Omega Battalion?”
Elliot frowned. He didn’t like where this was going. “It must be because they didn’t want the Omega Battalion to conquer Anarock and wipe out the population. They didn’t want to allow the Battalion to destroy us.”
Aria shook her head again and her mouth wrenched in a grimace. “You’re soft in the head. That’s your problem. You don’t think. Didn’t you see the way NightRage blasted the Omega Battalion off the bridge? They could have beaten the Omega Battalion single-handedly, but they left the Prometheus Crest to take out the trash. They swept the Battalion off the bridge and then they vanished.”
“So what are you trying to say? Are you trying to tell me that NightRage never considered the Prometheus Crest their enemies in the first place? Do you seriously expect me to believe that they were Victor’s allies all along and agreed to help him out of the kindness of their hearts? Come on! That’s shit.”
She shrugged and shut her eyes. “I know one thing. Riley brought word about the attack and within ten hours, Victor had all of NightRage lined up at the bridge—no negotiation, no concessions, nothing. They just came when Victor snapped his fingers and said, ‘come’. That looks an awful lot to me like the behavior of an ally.”
“Then how do you explain them wanting me to get intelligence for them?” Elliot countered. “How do you explain them trying to weaken the Prometheus Crest?”
“Maybe they told you what you wanted to hear. NightRage are sneaky. They use underhanded tactics to get what they want. They’re not upfront like shifters are. So they spied on the Prometheus Crest. So what? That’s nothing new. They certainly didn’t take you into their confidence, though. They wouldn’t. They don’t trust shifters. They never have and they never will. They’ll keep you at the bottom of their totem pole. Even if they overthrew the Prometheus Crest and took over Anarock, they sure as fuck wouldn’t promote you. They would run the city their own way and leave you out in the cold with the rest of the shifters. If you don’t see that, you’re dumber than I thought.”
She fell silent until Elliot thought she must have fallen asleep. He didn’t disturb her. He didn’t want to talk to her about NightRage and the Prometheus Crest anymore. He liked her better when she got mad and called him names. This cold-blooded logic disturbed him more than he cared to admit.
The problem was that everything she said was right. He couldn’t find one flaw in her reasoning. He squirmed in his seat, but he didn’t make any noise. He didn’t want her to wake up and start talking again.
Could it be that the NightRage magicians played him for a sucker from the very beginning? Could it be that they were in league with Victor all along, that he never really had to seal an alliance with them against the Omega Battalion because he already had one in place?
If that was true, then Victor’s father, Cameron, must have made peace with NightRage a long time ago. He must have passed the alliance to his son. Maybe that was why people like Colonel Weeks supported Victor so easily when Cameron died. No one dared to challenge Victor. Some people even said Cameron died defending Victor from a challenge during the invasion.
How else could Victor solidify power so fast? NightRage didn’t even try to stop his ascension. Why? Because they already supported him. Maybe Cameron arranged from the beginning that NightRage would support Victor against his brothers and any other challenger. Maybe Cameron promised them some concession if they backed Victor.
Elliot’s head spun. If Aria was right that NightRage was Victor’s ally from the beginning, then this put a whole new twist on things. Could the NightRage Crest have been playing Elliot all along instead of the other way around?
He studied her across the fire. She turned out to be so much tougher than he ever expected. He always thought of her as an insecure tag-along for her sisters. He saw Aria doing things for them and even bending over backward for them. He didn’t see her strength.
He saw it now. She knew a thousand times more than he ever would, not just about Anarock politics but about the whole Quag. He should have listened to her from the start. Now he couldn’t go back.
He couldn’t exactly throw himself on her mercy, either. She was on her way to report him to Victor. She wouldn’t turn aside for anything, not even for him. Even if he changed his mind and wanted to return to the Prometheus Crest where he should have been all along, she would still report him. That was just the way she was. She was loyal to her Crest. Period. What he did would never change that.
4
Aria opened her eyes and frowned across the dead remains of the fire. Elliot still sat across from her. He observed the realization dawn in her features. He didn’t sleep at all last night. He watched her sleep and he watched the embers fade. Chill settled over the land and left him stiff and uncomfortable, but he didn’t turn away.
She fascinated him more than ever, now that he knew how astute she really was. She saw things in him he didn’t even see in himself. He should never have taken her for granted. Now he would never get a chance to tell her.
She tightened her lips and stood up. She scanned the undergrowth, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t look at him again. She dropped onto all fours and transformed into the shaggy black bear from yesterday. She ambled off into the thicket sniffing the ground on her way west.
Elliot strolled after her. She didn’t try to leave him behind. He didn’t need to take wing to keep pace with her.
He no longer dreaded her finding Victor and telling him everything. He almost looked forward to getting the confrontation out of the way. Then maybe he could get on with the business of redeeming himself.
