Dragonsword Read online

  Dragonsword

  Sam and Sam Book Five

  Chloe Garner

  First Edition

  Copyright © 2016 Chloe Garner

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Covers by Christian

  Published by A Horse Called Alpha

  Work by Chloe Garner

  Anadidd’na Universe

  -Rangers

  -Shaman

  -Psychic

  -Warrior

  -Dragonsword

  -Child

  -Book of Carter

  -Gypsy Becca: Death of a Gypsy Queen

  -Gypsy Dawn: Life of a Gypsy Queen

  -Gypsy Bella: Legacy of a Gypsy Queen

  Other Urban Fantasy

  -Hooligans

  Science Fiction

  -Portal Jumpers

  -Portal Jumpers II: House of Midas

  -Portal Jumpers III: Battle of Earth

  Space Western

  -Sarah Todd

  Samantha sat on the hillside next to God, her white dress flapping in a slight breeze. The trees in the orchard waved in the live air. This was change.

  “I’m afraid,” she said.

  “I know,” he answered.

  “I know the rules,” she said, claiming the peace of the place even as she considered the darkest of her fears. “I broke them.”

  “Smashed them,” he answered. “But you came and put it away. It’s gone now.”

  “But I know the rules,” she said. “It isn’t faith if I know the rules.”

  “Child,” he said, face wrinkling in an easy smile. “Do you really think I wouldn’t leave you a path back?”

  “Yes. Of course you would, but I can’t understand how. I studied the rules with the angels. I know them.”

  “Don’t you think I knew you when I wrote them? There are rules above even those the angels know,” he told her. “Faith, child. Have faith, and walk on.”

  She turned back to the valley, feeling the heat radiating from the red limestone cliffs behind her.

  “Huh.”

  He laughed.

  This was her paradise. She felt whole for the first time in a long time, and while she was happy here, there was work to be done on the other side. She stood.

  “Any other details on what I’m supposed to do?” she asked. The short, old man who was the image God took in this place turned his head up to the sky with closed eyes and grinned.

  “Save Carter.”

  DRAGONSWORD

  Jason was back. He was alive.

  The darkroot that had shifted her perception for months was shattered, gone.

  Samantha felt new, alive, like she could breathe for the first time since Sam had dismissed her, high in the Colorado mountains. Before Carly had corrupted him, before Samantha had killed her and used her blood to cure the corruption she had put on Sam. Before Sam had died and she had brought him back. Before Jason had disappeared and she and Sam had become quasi-suicidal terrors to the New York demon community.

  She had held her breath for such a long time, and the release was more than she could cope with at first.

  They opened the windows.

  They wrung the bird’s neck.

  They slept until mid-afternoon then just went out walking.

  None of them had much to say. Not yet. She knew that Sam and Jason had had the conversation the two of them needed to have, for now, and that the three of them were too fragile to reach out and grab the future and drag it toward themselves, the way they usually did.

  It would come.

  But not yet.

  A handful of days after Jason got back, it happened.

  “What do I tell Kara?” he asked as they slurped their fingers and dripped sauce from their barbecue burgers at lunch. Sam looked up, and Samantha felt the stab of guilt - deep and potent - that they’d all three of them been holding off. Sam shook his head.

  “Nothing?” Jason asked.

  “You tell her anything you want to,” Samantha said. They both looked at her. She shrugged. “Look, who I am, it isn’t a secret. It’s just that only a few people could get it. If you want to tell her everything, do it. I’d rather it didn’t get out to the rest of the Rangers, but…” She paused, looking for words. “I like her. Do what you need to, to make it right.”

  Jason sucked on his thumb and wiped it on another napkin.

  “I need to call her.”

  “I should call Carson,” Sam said.

  “And Doris,” Samantha added. Jason looked at her for a moment.

  “You don’t have anyone to call.”

  She shook her head.

  “The people who think I’m dead are going to go on thinking it,” she said. Sam frowned.

  “There are people?”

  She knew what he meant.

  “I have family,” she said. “Who and where they are has been hidden very carefully over the years, so I can’t tell you much about them, but they are out there. And they think I’m dead.”

  “Our lives suck,” Jason said. She snorted.

  “We picked them,” she answered. He didn’t argue.

  One by one they reached the point of more-is-too-much and gave up on the gargantuan burgers and wandered out into the late afternoon drizzle. Samantha was happy to be back in her jeans. Something that brushed her skin instead of gripping her calves as she walked. Carter had given her a hard time about it every time he had seen her, but it was half-hearted. He knew what the change meant, and he seemed to be relieved by it, if she read him right. She sarcastically thought that he was worried she was going to try to compete with him.

  “Where to?” Sam asked, shading his eyes against the wet haze and looking up at the sky.

  “Today we go get Gwen for good,” Jason said. “Charge up your phone, get on the computer. Today we come back from the dead.”

  <><><>

  Kara had answered on the third ring.

  “Sam?”

  “Hey, baby,” Jason had answered, meaning it and - for the first time he could remember - wanting her to know that he meant it. There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Kara?” he tried again.

  “Tell me who this is,” she said, her voice flat. It was like a punch to the gut.

  “You know who this is,” he answered. Sam and Samantha, thinking he was dead, had taken a last job and vanished afterward. It was the universal sign for Rangers that they had died. They just failed to come back. Doris, Jason’s closest-living mother figure, and the rest of her family had believed Jason to be dead, and had let Sam and Samantha go, expecting never to see them again. The Rangers would all accept it as part of life, but it would have been particularly hard for Kara. They went back a long way.

  “I don’t know where you got this number, but don’t call back.”

  She hung up.

  While it hadn’t made the list of responses he might have expected, it wasn’t the worst, either. He handed the phone to Samantha.

  “I need proof,” he said, pushing the redial button as the phone sat in her hand. She narrowed her eyes at him as she put the phone to her ear.

  “Chicken,” she accused. Sam laughed and hunched lower over the counter in the little studio apartment the two of them had taken while he was being held.

  “You get to do it next,” Jason said and Sam laughed again, nodding.

  “I know.”

  It wasn’t fair. Doris would cry and gush. Carson would be psyched, and Tanner would be stoic. Kara was going to throw knives at him. If he ever got her to believe him.

  Samantha blinked in surprise and pulled the phone away from her ear.

  “Wow,” she said. “Happy to hear from you, too.”

  She put the phone back against her ear.

  “No, yeah, i
t’s me.” She chewed her tongue between deep-back molars as she listened. “Yup.”

  She held out the phone.

  “Identity confirmed,” she said, going to lean against the counter next to Sam. Jason looked at the phone for a second before putting it to his ear again.

  “Are you going to kill me?” he asked.

  “Thinking about it,” she said. “Where have you been?” It was an accusation. It wasn’t that she thought he was cheating on her. They both had profligate sex with anyone who interested them. The betrayal here was much more fundamental, and much less complicated.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Chicago.”

  “Can you come to New York?”

  “City?”

  “Yeah.”

  She paused.

  “I’ve got a job to finish. Need moonlight tonight. If it wraps tonight, I’ll hit the road and be there tomorrow night.”

  “Stop in Ohio if you need it.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Elliott.”

  He smiled to himself.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  There was a very long pause, during which he could hear her breath soft on the other end of the line.

  “It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Yeah. You, too.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  There was a warmer familiarity in her voice now. It made him ache.

  “See you soon.”

  He hung up, and realized the look that must have been on his face too late. Sam snorted.

  “Better not let her catch you looking like that,” Sam said. Jason rubbed his face with his hands and tossed the phone to Sam.

  “Call Doris.”

  He nodded and dialed, wandering away. Jason found Samantha watching him.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just realer. You aren’t a fantasy.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her and she rolled her eyes.

  “Stop. You know what I mean.”

  He did. He woke up every morning expecting to find himself back in that room, tied to that chair, waiting as he had every morning for years on end for Brandt to come in and hurt him. His body didn’t know how to expect anything else. He’d sat in the middle of a time differential between the planes, and his body, unable to age, unable to die, had all the same experienced eighty or a hundred years of mornings - sunless, changeless, only morning by virtue of the fact that he woke up - the same way. He’d stopped pulling against the restraints a few years in. Now, he woke up and his arms weren’t where he expected them to be, and he worried in the panicky, animal corner of his mind, that they were gone. Again.

  He swallowed and forced his mind away from it. He could feel the weight of those years, not just on his mind, but on his soul. Samantha had helped him a lot in the first few days, but there wasn’t a lot more she could do, now. He needed time to heal. He pulled her across the tiny laminated floor that marked the boundary of the kitchen and held her against him. She put her arms around his chest and held him tight. They weren’t romantic, he and Samantha. They had tried once, long ago, for Sam’s benefit, but it had always felt like a jest. They’d been through a lot, though, and when he had disappeared, she had made the demons’ lives miserable - both directly and indirectly - looking for him, ultimately searching hell for him. She’d never given up. He was as close with his brother as the two of them could be, as fraternal twins who had relied almost exclusively on each other since they were teenagers, but they had never been touchy. Samantha, he could hold, just to have a warm human body against his, to prove to himself down where he still doubted that it was over.

  It was over.

  It seemed to him that she appreciated touch as much as he did. He didn’t have a clear picture of what had happened to her and Sam while he had been gone, but he got the strong impression from both of them that they were coming out of a nightmare, too.

  “What do we do next?” he asked, rolling the side of his face against her hair.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t wanted to think about it.”

  He hadn’t either. Sam had had a clear agenda of things he had wanted to do, but they were all in reaction to things they had been doing all along. After they’d done all of those, most of the sense of direction had passed. Samantha slept on Jason’s chest at night, and when they got up in the morning, they did whatever their feet and their stomachs wanted to do. It was like being in the recovery ward of a hospital after the three of them had been feverishly sick for months. They saw the world through new eyes.

  “I think it’s time,” he said. She squeezed him harder, but didn’t move to let go.

  “Doris is upset,” she said.

  “She should be,” he answered. He didn’t understand the bond that Sam and Samantha had. It was magic, literally, and they could each feel what the other was feeling, and had a sense of distance and direction for the space between them. It had proven useful more than once, but Jason was still figuring out how much they had relied on that bond while he was gone - and how much they had learned to do through it.

  “Sam?” Sam said. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Not Jason?” she answered. Sam shook his head. She took the phone, easing away from Jason to go sit on a bed.

  “How is she?”

  “Sounds like everything is okay,” Sam said. “She’s mad.”

  Jason grinned.

  “I bet she cried.”

  “Oh, she did. You’ll get your earful next,” Sam said.

  “Been looking forward to it for longer than I can count,” Jason answered. Sam smiled.

  “I bet. You want a drink?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sam went to the fridge and brought back a pair of beers and handed Jason one. Jason opened it on the edge of the counter.

  “I don’t want to sign online,” Sam said.

  “Yeah. At least I’ve got a good excuse.”

  “No one knew you were gone,” Sam said. Jason wrinkled his nose.

  They hadn’t said anything about him yet, and Jason didn’t know if Samantha understood the importance of it, but they were both stalling from getting in touch with Simon, their Seeker.

  “At least you took her out,” Jason said.

  “Yeah.”

  Simon had sent Sam and Samantha, and presumably Jason, though he had been missing for months at that point, to fight a sorceress that had killed a number of Rangers. The Rangers had thought she was a wraith, a flesh-eating creature with varying levels of intelligence and hygiene, and it was true enough. They just fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the world. Rangers - and their Seekers - believed that the world was full of diverse creatures that it was the Rangers’ job to hunt. Samantha had insisted from day one that there was no such thing as a vampire or a werewolf or a zombie or a wraith. That there were only three kinds of creatures in the world: angels, demons, and humans. Wraiths were humans that used dark magic - involving the consumption of blood and organs - to become immortal, but the immortality corrupted them. They eventually de-volved into zombies, their higher brain functions a victim of the corruption of the magic.

  Mother, though, the sorceress they had tracked for months, was the queen of the wraiths. An ancient woman, she had lived off of the energy of the people she turned into wraiths, and the Rangers that had gone up against her had had no hope of killing her. From the excited pieces of the story Sam had told him, it had sounded like a hell of a fight for Sam and Samantha. After that, though, the three of them hadn’t reported in, and they would have been presumed dead. For most of the Rangers and their friends, it would have just been sad. For Simon, it would have meant starting over.

  Seekers took their work seriously. There were a lot of Rangers, but not enough that the Seekers could send them up against things that were likely to hurt them. The system for assigning a Seeker to a Ranger was complicated. The system for keeping all of the Rangers doing the type of work they could manage, as far as Jason had ever wanted to understand it
, was ‘really complicated’.

  He and Sam had been two of the best. They had gotten a lot of the jobs that the Seekers didn’t think anyone else could manage, and Simon had grown up with them. They’d never been moved over to another, better, Seeker because Simon had proved himself as fast as the twins had.

  Leaving him in the lurch, then, by pretending to be dead, would mean that all of his qualifications would be stripped, he would be assigned to a new Ranger - a brand new, wet-eared one - and he’d be off investigating strange cats and people who jumped at shadows. Jason knew Simon would handle it okay. The man was even-tempered, friendly, and pragmatic, but he and Sam had been close at one point. It was possible Sam would have considered Simon his best friend. There had been a window of years where Simon and Sam had talked more than Sam and Jason had.

  Jason watched Samantha as she talked to Doris, knowing it was time to push, but unwilling all the same. He sighed.

  “You get the laptop charged?”

  Sam squinted as though someone had shined a light in his eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s time, dude.”

  “I know.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  It would be worse if he heard it from someone else, and as soon as someone mentioned it to their Seeker, Simon would know. They gossiped like little girls.

  Jason hopped up onto the counter, leaning over his knees to miss the cabinet, and drank his beer. A few minutes later Sam was online and Samantha brought Jason the phone. She took his beer and leaned with her ribs against his knees while she drank it.

  “Hi, Doris,” he said. He heard the rush of air that told him she had been holding her breath.

  “Jason.”

  “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  “Jason Elliott, where have you been?”

  “Doris, if I could have called, I would have. You know that.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m okay. Sam’s taking good care of me.”

  “Which one?”

  He smiled. Samantha wouldn’t tolerate anyone calling her Samantha; it wasn’t often confusing, but he had liked to tease her by making up names for her. He hadn’t thought about that in years. He put his hand on her head.