Jessica Andersen - Magic Unchained

Zane’s brain was a seriously weird place, and Rabbit felt right at home. The twists and turns made sense, like he was driving in a strange town but somehow knew exactly where to find the gas stations and fast food, as if he’d been there before in a previous life. Or, more accurately, as if he’d recently spent time in a very similar town. Zane might’ve been misguided and far too ready to buy into his own self-serving interpretations, but he’d honed some of the same skills Rabbit had found himself needing more and more lately, as he tried with increasing frustration to reconnect with his mother’s spirit, while hiding those efforts from everyone, including Myrinne. Especially Myrinne.

Secrecy. Suspicion. Righteousness. Contempt. Rabbit sent his consciousness through Zane’s mind, passing memories and signpost-bright emotions, picking through the labyrinth until he found what he was looking for.

When he did, he brought his perceptions closer to the surface, to the point where he could feel his own body sitting hunched over beside Zane, and could sense Dez, Sven, and Cara sitting nearby, waiting tensely for the intel that could make or break the winikin’s life. Lora was already free and clear; she hadn’t known anything, and had been painfully easy to reprogram. She was the kind of person who would always look for a pack leader to tell her what to do, how to feel. As far as she now knew, she had spent the past ten months or so as part of a whack-job cult, which she’d been lured into by a guy she met online. She was ashamed of the guy and the cult, and didn’t want to talk about either of them. She just wanted to get back to her life, and shouldn’t present any further problems for the Nightkeepers.

Zane, on the other hand… well, they would have to see.

“He thinks he’s part Nightkeeper,” Rabbit said, channeling the info he was getting from the winikin. “It was a family legend that his twice-great-grandmother had a child with either her own Nightkeeper charge or another member of his family, putting mage blood into the mix. That’s why Zane was trying to sacrifice Cara—he was looking to activate his supposedly latent Nightkeeper powers. It looks like when he first got here, he had a couple of dreams that reminded him of the coyote cave and gave him delusions of grandeur mixed up with some sort of divine plan. He fixated on Cara, first as his mate, then as his sacrifice.”

“Did he talk about it to anybody other than Lora?” Cara asked at almost the same time Sven said, “Did he have anything to do with those creatures showing up at the funeral?”

“Give me a minute.” It took Rabbit longer than that to find the information on Lora, whom Zane had barely registered as more than a spare set of hands. The attack was easier to dial into. “I don’t think you’ve got any other traitors to worry about; it was just him most of the time, with Lora helping out at the end, once she really started cracking under the pressure. As for the attack, he didn’t know anything about it beforehand, but decided it was a sign telling him to act now.”

After a few more questions and answers that didn’t really add anything to the mix, Dez sighed and said, “I think he’s tapped out. Rabbit, what do you think about reprogramming him?”

“Same as with Lora, I can change his memories of the past ten months so he thinks he fell in with a doomsday cult that was pretending to be the Nightkeepers, and scramble it around enough so he won’t come looking for us.”

“I hear a ‘but’ in there,” Dez commented.

“Not intentionally.”

“But…”

“Shit.” It felt way hypocritical to rat out a guy whose brain felt more than a little familiar, but Rabbit told himself it was the differences that mattered. “Using Lora was easy for him, and so was leaving Cara in that cave to die. He’s not a full-on sociopath like Iago, and not crazy like Iago was at the end, either. But he’s not hooked into an ethical code, either human or Nightkeeper. I can change his memories, but I can’t promise he won’t do something else if we let him go. He’s… predatory. Hungry. I don’t think that’s going to go away.”

“So what do you think? Should we let him go?”

“I… I’m not sure.” It felt seriously weird that he was being asked to comment on Zane’s moral character, when he himself was a half-blood screwup who had burned down several million dollars’ worth of other people’s property and fallen prey to Iago’s mind games over and over again, jeopardizing the Nightkeepers in the process. He was the Master of Disaster, the guy who gave Murphy’s Law a bad name.… There was no way he was qualified to make this call.

A little help here, gods? Rabbit thought, automatically using his magic to shape the words into a prayer, even though it had been a long time since his prayers had done anything but rattle around inside him. Instead of rattling, though, the prayer whooshed out of him, disappearing and taking some of his magic with it, and leaving stunned silence behind.

Holy shit. What just happened? Heart kicking up a dozen notches, Rabbit sought the prayer, tried to follow it, but came up against the blank walls that bounded his consciousness instead. What the hell? Where did it go? Part of his problem was not knowing whether he was supposed to be praying to the sky or the underworld, not knowing what to think or believe. Were the sky gods the saviors the Nightkeepers thought them, or were they lying schemers, like Zane here?

Hello? he called, hearing it rattle. Anyone?

In the outside world, the others were discussing Zane’s fate. Sven said, “We can’t just let him go. Not with that inside him. What if we—”

Out of nowhere, a power surge hit Rabbit, making his blood sing. It poured through the walls of his mind, up from the floor, down from the ceiling. The rattles got louder and louder, sounding like a crazed mariachi band trying to do “Radar Love” on fast-forward; they swirled around him, tightened in on him, blotted out everything except the noise and the magic.

He must’ve fogged out for a minute, because when things cleared, he heard the others still talking about what to do with Zane. They hadn’t felt the surge. How was that possible?

Because this power is yours alone, Rabbie.

Mama!? The word burst from him with such a rush of hope and joy that it almost made it all the way back to his body, to be shouted aloud.

Careful. Some secrets are better kept until you know more. Finish quickly here and then come to me.

The power snapped out of being, though its echo remained. Rabbit’s heart thudded happily in his ears; the flop sweats were gone, along with his hesitation over what to do with Zane. He was powered up, jazzed, ready to get on with things as he tuned back in to the conversation.

Cara was saying, “I don’t like it. What’s more, the others are going to be pissed if they find out your idea of ‘releasing’ Zane was to stick him in a mental institution and fake the paperwork to keep him there through the end date. You’re getting dangerously close to imprisoning winikin to avoid a mutiny.”

“Trust me,” Dez said. “I’m aware of the parallels. But not everything Scarred-Jaguar did was one hundred percent wrong. And, besides, the rumors are your problem.”

“We’ll tell ’em he was mind-bent and released,” Sven said promptly. “They don’t need to know the rest. And, Cara, seriously? Admit it. You don’t want him released all the way, either. You know what he’s capable of.”

She made a noise of disgust, but subsided.

“So I should get started?” Rabbit asked, trying not to let his real body jitter with suppressed excitement the same way his mental projection was doing inside Zane’s skull.