Jack answered the phone on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Jackie? It’s me.”
“Riley!” Jack sounded panicked. “Have you spoken to Reed? Do you know what’s going on?”
“Yes. He just told us. They’re coming to Greenwood. To get me.”
“Will and Reed and I will work with your Colonel to make sure you stay safe. Don’t worry about a thing. Keep yourself indoors and out of harm’s way.”
“No. I’m practicing my abilities every day so that I can defend myself.”
“I don’t want you defending yourself!” he snapped. “We will take care of it! Okay?”
No, it’s not okay! I don’t want any of you to die! Riley took an unsteady breath and chose one of the many questions that had been swirling around in her head the last few days. “Jack, I need you to tell me about our parents. It may help me find my powers.”
He hesitated. “Well, dad was a raven, like me. His light was gold, about the color of butterscotch.”
“What was he like? As a Miyala, I mean.”
Jack sighed. “I suppose it will come out eventually. His warrior name was The Ripper.” Xander nodded slowly as Jack continued, “He was the Terrapin chief until about a year after Mom died.”
“He was?” And I knew nothing. “How come he stopped?”
“The clan cut him loose when he continued to mourn Mom’s death after the official mourning period ended. They had no choice. He wasn’t meeting his obligations at all. He shut down completely when she died.”
“He couldn’t move on,” Riley remembered.
“No he couldn’t,” Jack said quietly. “Not even for us.”
They sat in silence, lost in memories. Xander squeezed Riley’s hand.
“If our father was the chief,” Riley finally asked, “does that mean you’re going to be chief someday, too?”
“Eventually. In our clan you don’t have the title of chief handed to you, even if you’re born a prince. You have to pass a series of tests to prove yourself worthy. I’ve passed them all so far, but I’m not looking forward to what lies ahead. It’s not an easy thing to be a chief in Terrapin. Even with powers like Dad’s.”
“What was his power?”
“Well, he had two. The one he was famous for was the power to separate people from their animal spirit permanently, making them Veiled forever. Instead of an Unveiled man, you’d end up with a man and a holy animal who no longer had a connection to one another. He could rip that connection apart. But he could only do that once every few weeks because it was physically painful for him. It hurt his joints somehow. It hurt him so much that you’d find him a few hours later rolling around on the ground screaming, unable to walk.” Riley remembered more than one instance where her father had behaved that way.
“He could also dull other Miyalas’ senses,” Jack continued. “When he did that, however, it made his own senses sharper. That also caused him pain.”
“And then he drank,” Riley continued, already knowing the end of the story, “to make it manageable again.”
“Yes. I did what I could to help him after Mom died, but he didn’t want my help. All he wanted was her. When she was alive it was she who managed his pain.”
“What about Mom? I take it she was a warrior, too.”
“She was a clan member. We don’t call women ‘warriors’ in Terrapin. She was a rattlesnake. The same shade of blue that we are. In many ways, she was the perfect complement to Dad.”
“Why did she… die? Really?”
“I don’t know. I was a kid then too, and no one will talk about it now that she’s dead. That’s our way: people’s problems die with them. But I can tell you that Mom and Dad’s marriage was arranged. That happens a lot in Terrapin. When a man accepts a woman who’s also in the clan, unless she is already married she is given to him as his wife. So, when Dad accepted Mom, the clan immediately married them. But she was never happy. Not with him, not with the clan... not with anything, really.”
“That part I remember,” Riley said softly.
“Riley, please don’t blame her anymore for what she did. Like every other poisonous snake, she fought long and hard with depression. In the end, she lost her fight. She did love us.”
“Just not as much as she hated her life.”
“Yes.”
Riley licked her lips and asked the question that had been on her mind since she’d seen Alley’s drunken dreams. “Have you accepted anyone, Jack?”
“No, not yet. I have some control over that because of my power.”
“What is your power?”
“I can split myself in two.”
Riley almost dropped the phone. “How is that a power?”
He chuckled. “I can duplicate myself. Physically. I can make another body exactly like mine and put half of my spirit and consciousness inside it. My warrior name is The Doppelganger. Dopp, for short.”
Whoa. “So you can be in two places at once?”
“Yes. Literally. And I am almost always in two places at once for my own safety. I’m a prince who can’t take command yet, and I have a lot of enemies. About a quarter of the men in my clan want me dead so they can put themselves or someone else in power instead. Over time I have discovered — painfully — that I can’t be killed as long as I am separated. If one body dies, the remaining piece simply takes over.”
Xander’s eyes grew wide. He shot to his feet and began pacing back and forth across what little floor space there was in the Colonel’s office.
“I also can’t accept a woman when I’m separated, to answer your earlier question,” Jack continued. “I think it’s because both pieces would have to consent.”
Riley grinned. No acceptance! If Alley did charm him, she only got half of him. But would that mean he wasn’t charmed at all, or that he has only been halfway charmed? And did his other half know what was going on? “Can you, like, talk to yourself — your other self — telepathically?” she asked.
“No. I wish! It doesn’t work that way. When I separate, my brain separates, too. Each piece of me has its own experiences and memories. I don’t merge those thoughts together again until I rejoin. All I can do is talk to myself on the phone.”
“Oh.” She hesitated, then asked, “What about Will?”
“He’s a human ice block. He can make himself, other people, and the air around him colder. Freeze them solid, in some cases. Because of his power and his light being white, Dad named him The Arctic Wolf. But everyone calls him Frosty.”
I always stayed cool in his arms... Riley shivered at the memory. She had experienced Will’s power many times without knowing what it was.
Jack sighed. “Riley, you need to come home. Now. Will needs you. And you need him.”
“I still can’t believe I’m hearing this. You’ve spent the last five years chewing us out whenever we looked at one another.”
“Only because you were Veiled. But Unveiled, you belong together. There’s no question. Riley, I’ve never seen a woman who isn’t a lifer become as devoted to a man as you were to Will. Even as a child, your attachment to him was incredible. Dad said the same thing… that he would never have believed it was possible for a bond like that to exist if he hadn’t seen it himself. He did everything he could think of to try and break the connection between you two. But it only got stronger. And when he died and I finally forced you and Will to stop speaking to one another, you took it even harder than he did. You scared me to death, sweetie. I wondered a time or two if you were going to live through it.”
“I didn’t want to live through it,” she whispered. “I would never have… done what Mom did, but I used to go to bed at night hoping I wouldn’t wake up.”
Xander knelt in front of her and squeezed her hand.
“I know,” Jack said sadly. “I always hoped your love for Will would fade for your sake, although I admit, I loved you a little bit more because it didn’t. But now that you’re Unveiled, you must come back. You have an accepted man on your hands, Riley. That means your relationship with Will is no longer about feelings. It’s about responsibility.”
Riley thought of Ivan, and she swallowed hard. “I can’t come back.”
“You’re one of us, Riley: you’re a Terrapin. So were your parents. So were your grandparents.”
“Jack, I would no more join Terrapin than the Poxinosa. I refuse to belong to an organization that tortures people!”
Xander stood and began pacing again.
“Sweetie, be reasonable,” Jack answered calmly. “The only things you think you know about Terrapin are things our enemies told you. You can’t make a lifelong decision like that without even getting to know our clan.”
Greenwood are their enemies? The gulf between herself and Jack grew wider. “I know enough. I was worthless to Terrapin when they thought I was Veiled. Less than worthless: they wanted me dead! They tried to convince you to get rid of me. They forced Will to turn his back on me, to hurt me. And they hurt him because of me!” Her voice broke.
“They didn’t know who you are!” he argued.
Anguish. “You’ve always known who I am. Why didn’t you tell them?”
“This is no time to get emotional!” Jack shouted. “Look, I didn’t raise and protect you all those years so you could cut this family loose and go become a Greenwood.” His voice was dripping with disdain. “Get back here and do the job you were born to do. Marry the man you were born to marry.”
Riley’s jaw dropped. “A month ago you didn’t want us holding hands, and now you want us married?”
“I’ve always wanted the two of you to get married. But I wasn’t willing to put your life on the line to make that happen.”
And you don’t see the problem in that line of thinking? “And what job do you think I was ‘born to do?’”
“You can protect our people, and you can help us find those bundles.”
“Then what, Jack? You want me to help you cause an apocalypse?”
“Oh, for the love of... when have you ever known me to be swept away, Riley? This isn’t about religion.”
“What is it about?”
“I can’t discuss our plans with an outsider without the permission of the Terrapin council. But if you join us, I will tell you everything.”
“Absolutely not. I miss you like hell, and I love you even more, but I’m not going to live the way that you do.”
Jack sighed. “Riley, you’re a woman, and a princess of the clan on top of that. No one would ever expect you to live the way men do.”
Fury. “Don’t you ever call me a ‘princess’ again! I want nothing from your clan. Those sick, ignorant… they spent years trying to get my own brother to abandon or murder me, and now they want to stick me on a pedestal because I light up? To hell with every one of them, Jack! I’m staying right here.”
“How am I supposed to do my job as your brother and protect you from this distance?” he shouted.
“What makes you think I can’t protect myself?” Riley hissed, and then she hung up the phone.
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