Shaman Read online

  Shaman

  Sam and Sam Book Two

  Chloe Garner

  Second Edition

  Copyright © 2014 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

  For all the people who understand whynot

  SHAMAN

  Jason woke before his alarm went off and lay in bed, just breathing. He stared at the ceiling, then pulled his arm out from under the covers and looked at the date on his watch, knowing perfectly well what it was going to say. He had been quietly counting down to this day for weeks, now, planning a silent day of remembering.

  It had been six months since they had left Samantha in a hotel in Colorado.

  He sat up and looked around the empty room, letting it affect him like he normally wouldn’t have, then went and showered and shaved, buzzing his hair again for something to do, then went and sat on his bed.

  It was so quiet.

  He thought of Samantha, and of the days before they had left her, and let himself feel the ache of loneliness. He had tried calling Carter a dozen times, but no one had ever answered the phone. He had even called the hotel, six or seven weeks later, but no one even remembered her. She had vanished, and he had known with a concrete certainty that there was nothing he could do to find her.

  For three months, he had woken up every morning regretting that he hadn’t gone back into the hotel after her. He wondered, again, how things would have been different.

  His phone rang and he reached for it mechanically and put it to his ear.

  “Yeah.”

  “Jason? Say, hi, Allison,” the woman’s voice said.

  “Allison?” he asked.

  “Can you get away from Sam for a minute?” she asked.

  “Sam is with Carly. They probably aren’t even awake yet,” he said. “Is that you, Sam?”

  There was a pause.

  “Can we meet?” she asked.

  He stood, grabbing his duffel bag, and headed out of the room.

  “Just tell me where.”

  <><><>

  He sat down across from her in the little diner and she looked away. He sucked on his lower lip for a second, then asked the waitress for a coffee and looked back at her.

  “It’s damn good to see you,” he said. Her eyes darted over to him and away again.

  “I’m still not sure I’m doing the right thing,” she said.

  “Why did you go?” Jason asked. “Why did you let us go?”

  “He said the words,” she said. “He sent me away. It took me weeks to figure out something wasn’t right.”

  She played with her straw as the waitress brought Jason’s coffee.

  “So… Sam’s girlfriend…”

  “She’s a bitch. She travels with us, now.”

  Samantha closed her eyes.

  “She sits in my seat?”

  “She found your stash that first day. Threw all of it out the window. A whole bag of Doritos basically exploded on the car behind me,” Jason said. He was secretly more angry about the chips than the car. The gummy worms he had been able to live without, but the chips and candy? What had they done wrong? “And it’s like she enjoys not eating real food. I haven’t had a burger in two months. Sushi. Tofu. Authentic Thai.” He rubbed his tongue against his front teeth and took a drink of his coffee. “Heather banned us from her house completely, after Carly took Elizabeth out partying one night and brought her back high out of her mind.”

  He glared at his coffee.

  “And, oh,” he said. “And they had sex.”

  “I figured that was already in evidence,” she said, looking away. He shook his head.

  “No. In the back seat of the Cruiser.”

  He held for dramatic effect.

  “While I was driving.”

  She frowned, looking at him straight for the first time.

  “That doesn’t sound like him,” she said.

  “He isn’t him, any more. We still do our thing, but he can’t wait to get back to her every day.” He paused. “Kara asked about you.”

  She looked out the window, then back down at her drink, fidgeting with the straw.

  “If it makes you feel any better, and I’m not actually sure it should, I’m pretty sure she’s a demon.”

  “She is not.”

  “Carly, not Kara.”

  “Oh. Sure. That makes more sense.”

  Samantha sighed and looked up at him with sad eyes.

  “I’ve been following along behind you for a few months. Just didn’t know what else to do, at first. Then I started seeing the fliers. The news.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jason asked, his stomach sinking.

  “In about half the towns you’ve been to since I started paying attention, a little boy has gone missing. Usually between three and six. Once he was eight. I found a couple of them.”

  Her eyes burned hard for a moment, then she looked down.

  “I’m not sure yet if I’m here to kill her or save him. I thought I’d give you a chance to weigh in.”

  “Can’t we do both?” he asked. She looked up again, hanging her head slightly below her shoulders. She looked exhausted.

  “I always know where you are. Where he is, anyway. He sent me away, and I can’t tell what’s going on with him, any more, but I always know where he is, like a string pulling at my chest. He tried to cut the bond, but it didn’t cut clean. Also, I never released him. He shouldn’t have changed how he felt about me. I still hold his pledge of loyalty, but… I assume he doesn’t even think of me?”

  “Best I can tell.”

  “She’s got a grip on him. Until I find out what it is, I can’t promise you that killing her won’t kill him. And if I just get him loose, she’s going to glitch out, and I don’t expect we’ll ever see her again.”

  Jason looked at her for a long time.

  “Look, I can see why you’d want to just kill her and let him face the consequences, but…”

  She laughed.

  “I’m here to let you talk me into killing her,” she said. “I still love him. But she is terrible, terrible evil, and to let her go just to save Sam…”

  “You really think I’m that altruistic?” Jason asked. “We save Sam. No question. No hesitation.”

  She smiled and looked away again, the relief she was trying to hide simply too intense.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said.

  “What do we do?” he asked.

  “I need you to be ready to run,” she said. “If Carly catches me… It’s possible that they’ll both be trying to kill me. If she even has a clue who or what I am.” She looked at him, sitting up, with steady eyes now. “I’m afraid. I’m never afraid for my life, but I’m afraid, now. And there’s nothing that you can do to protect me. I just need to know that if she shows her true colors and Sam picks her over me, that you’re going to be gone. Because once he crosses that bridge, you’ll be next.”

  “Not a chance,” Jason said.

  “No argument, or we hit stalemate,” she said. “
This isn’t negotiable.”

  “You notice every time you say ‘no argument’ to one of us, we always get our way, right?” he asked. “I’m not going to abandon you.”

  “Then there’s the other side,” she said. “If I can get Sam clear, she’s going to be just as angry, and we need to be ready to run, all three of us.”

  “Fine. I’ll get us ready to split, but I’m not letting you go in there by yourself.”

  She watched him for a very long time. His coffee was beginning to get cold. He didn’t blink. Figuratively, at least.

  “Fine. You stay out of sight and you only intervene as a last resort,” she said. He nodded. “I’m going to need your room key.”

  <><><>

  Standing in front of the hotel room door, she thought she had thought this moment through too many times to find herself at a loss, but there she was. How many speeches had she made in her head, some of them even out loud, to explain to him what he had done? the mistake he had made? And yet.

  Jason was down the hall, around a corner. She could almost feel the tension he was putting off, feeling the balancing point of this moment perhaps even more poignantly than she. She raised her eyes to the door and took a deep breath, pulling all of the discipline and power she had at her disposal into her core, then breathed out slowly. And pulled.

  He would come. He would open the door. She felt him wake up. It was the most distinct idea of him she had had in six months. He walked toward the door. Opened it.

  She took a step back involuntarily, her heart racing, and she opened her mouth. Only, he wasn’t happy to see her. Worse, he wasn’t angry to see her, either.

  He was bored.

  “Can we talk for a second?” she asked quietly. He looked over his shoulder, eyes hungry, then looked back at her. Shrugged.

  “Fine. But don’t make a scene. We figured you’d come try to get me back.”

  She felt physically ill, her stomach clenching and threatening to reject the few swallows of soda she had taken this morning, but she nodded and pulled Jason’s room key out of her pocket.

  “Privately?” she asked. He rolled his eyes and closed the door behind him. She mentally looked over at Jason, carefully keeping her eyes from following her thoughts. That was the first hurdle. He needed to get outside, now, to be ready. She led the way down the hallway to Jason’s room and unlocked it, letting Sam walk past and closing the door. She turned and looked at him.

  A flood of ideas that had no words attached to them burst through her mind, but she pulled her discipline close.

  “What?” he asked. She summoned the vow that he had made, love and loyalty, and kissed him.

  Gravity shifted directions violently for a moment, and when she regained awareness, she was wrapped around him, laying underneath him on a bed. Something was wadded up in her hand. Yeah, that was definitely his shirt. She pulled her mouth away, but he followed, and the simple part of her brain that wanted nothing more than to be happy begged her to just bask. He held her so tight breathing was hard, and as she kissed him back, harder, the importance of the moment nearly slipped away again. She turned her head and untangled her arms to push him back.

  He leaned on his elbows and looked down at her, then frowned.

  “What happened?” he asked. She shimmied sideways to try to buy herself some space, self-conscious now, and he stood. She handed him his shirt back.

  “What do you remember?” she asked. He furrowed his brow and shook his head.

  “Everything. I just can’t remember why I did any of it.” He gagged. “Any of it.”

  “We need to go,” she said. “Carly may already know what just happened, and we need to get you clear.”

  “What did just happen?” he asked as she went to the window and opened it. She looked at him.

  “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out when we don’t have an angry demon down the hallway.”

  He reached out to help her out the window, and her skin crawled away. That was odd.

  “I’d rather you not,” she said, too occupied to be confused.

  “She’s a demon?” Sam asked. Samantha stood on the ground outside the window and watched him climb out.

  “You’ve been living with her,” Samantha said. “You aren’t certain?”

  He nodded his head to one side.

  “It would explain some things,” he said.

  “So…?” Jason asked as they got into the Cruiser. Samantha checked her inventory. Her blanket was gone, her pillow was gone, the entire trove of food she had accumulated under the bench seat was gone, but Carly had missed the charging cable and music cable. Samantha smiled at those small trophies.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I don’t know what I’ve been thinking.”

  “Water. Bridge. Enough said,” Jason said. “Where to?”

  “Just go,” Samantha said. “Any direction but south.”

  “What’s south?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, putting the car in drive and pulling out of the parking lot. Samantha turned to watch over the back seat as they drove away, braced, but it appeared that they had gotten away.

  <><><>

  They drove all day, taking various interstate interchanges to end up in South Dakota. Spring hadn’t quite made it this far north yet, and they hustled into a tiny motel in the middle of nowhere to get out of the cold. As they stood in front of reception, something caught Samantha’s attention.

  “What?” she asked, walking up behind Sam. “What is that?”

  She pulled his hair up out of the way to reveal a tattoo.

  “What?” he asked, turning. She dodged behind him as he turned, trying to keep hold of his hair and maintain line of sight with the tattoo.

  “Will you two grow up?” Jason asked.

  “Do you know about this?” she asked Jason, jerking Sam’s hair to push his head down and straighten the skin of the tattoo.

  “I didn’t know you got ink,” Jason said.

  “Neither did I,” Sam said, putting his hand over his neck. “What is it?”

  Samantha dropped his hair and snatched the key from Jason, rubbing her hand on her pants for reasons she couldn’t pin down. She marched down the single hallway, letting Jason get her bag, and opened the door to the room, pointing Sam into the bathroom with a straight arm.

  “Strip. You look at every surface of your body that you don’t see every day, and you tell me if there are any others.”

  Jason caught up.

  “What is it?” he asked. Samantha frowned, glaring at the closed bathroom door.

  “How did you not see it?” she asked.

  “It’s been cold out. He wears a jacket. You know, like a normal person?”

  “It’s a mark. She was in the process of laying claim to him. It wasn’t done, yet.”

  “He has part of a tattoo?”

  Sam came back out of the bathroom in his boxers, turning around and holding his leg out behind him. He had a pair of similar symbols on the backs of his knees. Samantha knelt and reached out to run her finger over the design, but pulled her hands back and folded them in her lap. Something tasted sick the back of her throat. She stood.

  “I didn’t know about them. How did I not know about them?” he asked. Samantha realized Jason was staring. She looked at what he saw and closed her eyes, trying to un-see it. Sam’s back was criss-crossed with scars. She forced herself to move past it. There would be time to be upset later.

  “How have you been sleeping, lately?” she asked. He turned and looked at her awkwardly, then went back into the bathroom to get his clothes.

  “Hard,” he called out.

  “Been sore at all, lately?” she asked. He frowned.

  “Now that you say it.”

  “Turn,” she said and reached up to move his hair, but couldn’t bring herself to touch it.

  “Will you hold your hair?” she asked. He pulled his hair up out of the way, and she pointed out a small section of
the tattoo to Jason.

  “That’s the part she did last night,” she said, thinking probably in her own blood.

  “So he had, what, maybe a week before she was done?” Jason asked. Samantha looked at him, impressed. He had accurately picked out the design.

  “Yeah.”

  “What is it, really?” Jason asked. “What does it do?”

  “The one on his neck is to control his mind. The ones on his knees are to control his motivation and his body. They’re snares. Very, very strong ones.” She jerked her head at Sam, who turned to face her again. “You need to make absolutely certain that no one completes those. A cut would do it.”

  “You mean… she wasn’t controlling him before?”

  “With some kind of bewitchment or spell of some kind, yeah. This would have been much harder to break. He had to reach a certain point before she could even start them. Magic that gets applied over a long time is the strongest.” She shuddered. “Those may be some of the strongest magic I’ve ever seen, for marks.”

  “I should have known better,” Sam said.

  “Yeah. You should have,” Samantha said. Both Sam and Jason looked surprised.

  “What? Free will is the ultimate gift and responsibility of mankind. You have to take charge of it. You let her do this. And I stayed away for a lot longer than I should have. And Jason should have stepped in a long time ago, too. But you should have known better. Yeah.”

  She frowned deeper and walked forward to stand right next to Sam. Glancing up self-consciously at him, she sniffed him.

  “You smell funny,” she said.

  “Smells like sex most days,” Jason said. She was too focused to let him bother her.

  “No. You don’t smell like you,” she said. “Under everything else.”

  She turned and quickly pulled the lower guts out of her backpack, bowls, vials, herb bags, mixing implements, jugs and jars of oil and water.

  “Sit,” she directed, not looking at him as she pointed at the floor in an open area of the room.

  “I don’t think I like where this is going,” Jason said.

  “Don’t care,” she said, holding up one vial after another to the light. After several minutes, she had settled on about a dozen vials, fourteen herbs, and three larger bottles of liquid. She went and sat on the floor across from him.