River of No Return

  River of No Return

  The Twenty-Sided Sorceress: Book Nine

  Annie Bellet

  Copyright 2018, Annie Bellet and AnneMarie Buhl

  All rights reserved. Published by Doomed Muse Press.

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to doomedmuse.press@gmail.com.

  Cover designed by Ravven (www.ravven.com)

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio (www.polgarusstudio.com)

  Electronic edition, 2018

  If you want to be notified when Annie Bellet’s next novel is released and get free stories and occasional other goodies, please sign up for her mailing list by going to: http://tinyurl.com/anniebellet Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.

  This book is dedicated to Matt.

  Thanks for the sandwiches and unconditional love.

  Table of Contents

  Softpaw

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Alek

  Chapter Three

  Alek

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alek

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Also by Annie Bellet:

  About the Author

  Softpaw raised his head to better catch the scents in the wind rolling down the valley. It was late evening and Halfheart hadn’t returned to the pack. They’d had a successful hunt the day before and the pack was lazing around at the edge of the pines along the valley’s base. The spring had been hotter and drier than usual and the stream here was little more than a trickle through the grey and brown rocks.

  It wasn’t unusual for Halfheart to wander off, especially after a hunt. Especially, Softpaw thought, since the pack had come back close to Wylde. The grey wolf had been with Softpaw’s pack since the previous autumn and was still getting used to life here in the wilderness, living in the open, away from humans. Softpaw pushed away his worries with a snort and turned to look over his pack. He had a dozen wolves with him at the moment. Some, like Snowdrop and Bird, had been with him for many years, others were newer, though Halfheart was the newest at the moment.

  They came to him through referrals, or sometimes just straggling into the vast wilds that made up the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. All of them weary of the human world, all of them broken in some way. Softpaw looked to Bird, the big red wolf resting his head on a tree root. Some, he thought, were very broken. Bird would likely never take human form again. His physical wounds had healed a century before but the mental and emotional scars remained.

  The verdict was still out on Halfheart. He’d lost his mate to a horrific car accident and spiraled into an angry depression. Freyda, the Alpha of Alphas and Halfheart’s pack leader, had sent him to Softpaw, worried that the wolf would lash out at humans, worried that the Council and its Justices would then come destroy him. Halfheart had picked his pack name, something that Softpaw, who was known to the human world as Aurelio, did not require, but they all did it. The name change seemed to provide separation from the pain of who they had been, of whatever had driven these wolf-shifters to the wilds and into his pack.

  Softpaw worried that he had brought the pack too close to Halfheart’s home town. But the Bitterroot pack always came closer to Wylde in the summer and fall. Between the presence of the druid in this part of the Frank, and the local shifters keeping bans on hunting wolves and other predators written into the law around these parts, it was safer for the pack as a whole. But perhaps not for Halfheart’s broken heart.

  He was dragged from his dark thoughts by Snowdrop. The white wolf emerged from the shadows of the pines and approached him with a wag of her tail. They touched noses and then she playfully bumped his shoulder with her head as she sat beside him. Softpaw reached out to her mind with his own and felt the easy connection. Snowdrop stayed with him because she loved him almost as much as she loved the wilderness. She had long ago accepted they would never be mates, for though Softpaw cared deeply for her, and though she’d been his second for over a century, and his rock through the pain of losing his daughter, there was no fire in him for her.

  An impression of a grey and brown wolf ran from her mind to his with the feel of a question. Snowdrop was worried about Halfheart as well. The telepathy Softpaw was capable of wasn’t strong in reverse. He could put words into the minds of his wolves, provided they let him in, but what he got back from them were more feelings, images, impressions, than true communication. Still, it was enough that shifting for human speech was unnecessary. With the longer-term members of his pack, they could get by on wolf vocalizations and body language alone much of the time.

  For while his pack looked like wolves, if twice to three times the size of real wolves, they were shifters in the end and they had human impulses, instincts, and needs buried under their thick fur. Human minds that Softpaw could touch with his own.

  He hadn’t touched Halfheart’s mind yet. Softpaw usually waited at least a couple years or until the new pack member seemed settled before doing so. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever met another shifter with telepathy and his gift was not something he shared with too many. Some of the broken ones who came to his pack never learned of it. He used his instincts on whom to trust.

  Snowdrop bumped his shoulder again, less gently. Softpaw growled at her but without any teeth in it and turned his head so his nose caught the scent of the wind again. There, the smell so faint he thought he’d imagined it the first time around. Wood fire with a hint of chemical to it. Not a wildfire, for there would have been more sign in the birds and insects. Which meant humans. Not far. It was time to move the pack.

  “Too long,” he said into Snowdrop’s mind. “He’s usually back before dark.” The sun was a red-orange disk on the horizon, staining the grey peaks in the distance the color of raw meat.

  Snowdrop lifted her head and scented the smoke, her mind feeding him worry and danger in the shape of shadowy men.

  “Rouse the pack,” Softpaw mind-spoke to her. “We will track our own.”

  Halfheart would likely have left little trail, but it didn’t matter. With a heaviness settling in beside the feeling of dread in his belly, Softpaw turned his nose to the smoky wind again. His instincts were almost never wrong.

  He would find his wolf in the direction of the humans. He just hoped that he wouldn’t find tragedy there as well.

  It was a beautiful wedding. The ceremony was held out in the woods behind where The Henhouse, Harper’s mother’s bed and breakfast, had stood before it was destroyed in the fight against my evil ex-boyfriend. Ezee had insisted on it, wanting to bring a good memory back to a place where we had all had so many good memories and cozy Sunday dinners together.

  Before I ruined everything.

  I shoved the thought away and swiped a tear from my cheek as I watched Ezee walk down the grassy path to where Iollan, the huge red-haired druid, waited. Iollan had on a great kilt woven in shades of greens and browns. His beard was trimmed and his hair hung in heavy deep red ringlets around his face, his dual colored eyes shining with love as he watched Ezee walk toward him.


  Ezee wore a fitted deep purple coat that swirled around his legs, looking more like he belonged in the Matrix than in the woods. His tooled boots were shined and his hair neatly combed and oiled. They had gotten the official documents done at the County Courthouse two days before, but this was the real wedding, it was evident in my friend’s eyes and on every face of the small group gathered to witness and celebrate.

  Alek squeezed my hand as we watched the priest, an owl-shifter from the Nez Perce reservation who had once helped us bury Tess, begin the ceremony. Iollan held to old gods and as far as I knew Ezee held to knowledge as his religion, but they wanted to be married by someone who knew the twins. The priest had helped raise them, from what I’d gleaned during the few conversations either twin would have about their history. Two older women from the twins’ tribe that Levi had introduced as cousins were present, seated in front. The rest of the attendants were myself, Alek, Brie and Ciaran, Harper and Rosie, Vivian the town vet, and of course Levi and his wife Junebug. Ezee’s student and my employee Lara was there as well. She had become one of the gang over the last nine or so months. That hadn’t stopped Brie from baking enough food for an army and the delicious smells from the folding tables we had set up earlier warred with the scent of forest loam, grass drying in the sun, and the warm June breeze.

  “Do you, Iollan Drui, take this man, Ezekiel Chapowits, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for as long as you both shall live?” the priest was saying.

  “They left out honor and obey,” Harper stage-whispered to me from where she stood at my side.

  Her mother, Rosie, must have pinched her because Harper jumped a little but quieted down.

  I suppressed a grin. Ezee and Iollan, who was known around town as Yosemite because of his red hair and mysterious ways as a man of the wilds, were not really the obeying type. They made it work and I was on cloud nine that they had, despite a long, rocky start and nearly getting killed a few times.

  Telling myself to stop thinking about death and destruction, I made it through the rest of the ceremony without crying too much. Then they were kissing and embracing and Alek pulled me into his arms to join in on the fun while everyone was distracted. I kind of hoped he wouldn’t ask me about marriage any time soon. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the institution and we hadn’t seemed to need it. More paperwork now meant more to deal with in fifty or a hundred years when we were supposed to be ancient and dying, paperwork we’d have to get redone in whatever new identities we procured later.

  “Food time?” Harper said, her smile big but also strained.

  I pulled her in for a hug. “You okay out here, furball?” I murmured into her hair. She’d actually braided it up for the wedding, though we hadn’t been able to talk her into a dress.

  “Yeah,” she whispered back, squeezing me tight. “It’s just, I wish he were here.”

  “Me, too,” I said, thinking of how much her brother, Max, would have loved this moment, thinking of all the happy times he was missing. “Me, too.”

  We managed to shrug off our melancholy thoughts and embrace the newly wedded couple.

  “When are you going to walk the aisle?” Levi asked me as we busied ourselves with cornbread, bbq ribs, and macaroni salad. He and Junebug had picked a spot across the table from Alek and me.

  “Don’t make me waste this delicious bread by throwing it at you,” I said around a mouthful.

  “We are mated,” Alek said. His tone was firm, hard even, with a hint of growl to it that I found intensely sexy at the moment.

  “Okay, okay, message taken,” Levi said with a laugh, throwing his hands up in surrender.

  “Married people want everyone else to follow them,” Harper said as she set her loaded plate down next to mine.

  “You’d have to get a date first,” Levi said. Then he froze as he clearly realized what an asshole he sounded like. “Shit. Sorry. I’ll just shut up. Look at this delicious bread!”

  Harper stuck her tongue out at him. “When I find someone who turns my crank, I’ll let you know. Actually, I won’t. I’ll be too busy cranking.” She waggled her brows. “Sadly Jade stole the only person around here with manners, so it might be a while.”

  “She certainly is a thief.” Alek laid an arm around my shoulders as I snuck a rib off his plate.

  Grinning, I sucked the meat off my stolen rib with exaggerated glee. It was good to be out in the sunlight, no one trying to kill us, my friends all here and celebrating life. I hoped it lasted.

  Harper’s mother, Rosie, had come back a month after Harper had returned. She had bought the house formerly owned by Peggy the librarian, a witch murdered by my evil ex. The town hadn’t been able to come to agreement on what to do with the property so when Rose, a long-time town member, offered to take it from them, they sold it for a song. She had torn the guts out of the house and remodeled it, no mean feat in an Idaho winter, and was living comfortably in town. Neither Rose nor Harper had said a word about what was to become of the Henhouse property. I assumed there were too many bad memories now that Max was dead.

  “Is it time for speeches yet?” Rosie said, rising from her camp chair. Unlike her daughter, Rosie had worn a soft blue dress and a string of pearls. She smiled as she pulled a folder of papers out of the large embroidered canvas bag she used as a purse.

  “It isn’t so much a speech,” she said as she walked around the tables to where Ezee and Iollan sat, “as a gift. But I want to say something before you open it.”

  Ezee took the papers from her and nodded, looking at a loss for words.

  “I have lived on this land since before it adjoined a national park,” Rosie stated, surprising me. Shifters and other long-lived people tended not to talk about age and time much if they could help it. “But life changes, those we love come and go. Change is one of the only givens in this world and we can let it help us like the snake shedding its skin on the rocks, or we can cling to what has gone. This land brought me joy, it brought me family, and it has brought me sorrow and pain. The up and the down of the wheel as it turns. Sky and Earth.”

  She spread her hands wide and swept them up before turning back to directly address Ezee and Iollan.

  “Ezekiel, you are a creature of modern comfort and the modern world. Iollan, you are a creature of the wilds and the wood. This land stands between both, a place on the edge of wilderness and civilization. Take it as my gift. Find joy here. Build your family, however they may come to you. Plow my sorrows and my joys under so that you may grow your own life here.”

  Fuck it, I was crying again and this time the waterworks didn’t want to turn off no matter how hard I blinked. Looking around I wasn’t the only one who felt like someone had dumped a truckload of chopped onions into our laps. Even Alek’s eyes were bright, though he wasn’t quite shedding tears yet.

  Ezee leapt over the table with shifter grace and caught Rosie up in a hug. “We will,” he said, his voice ringing in the early summer air. “You are our family, too, and all our joy is here already.” He looked past Rosie’s head to Harper and she nodded vigorously through her tears. Her hand reached for mine under the table, however.

  I laced my fingers through hers and leaned toward her.

  “Shit, I only got them a KitchenAid mixer,” I muttered.

  Harpers laugh broke through her tears and she squeezed my hand before she let go.

  We’d made it nearly a year without a single supernatural incident or anyone trying to kill me. I couldn’t help but think about it as Alek drove us back to our apartment over my store, Pwned Comics and Games. I always seemed to start fearing another shoe dropping whenever things got too calm or too happy lately. To be fair to my paranoia, that shoe usually did fall sooner or later.

  I had made sure to keep up my magical training as well as the physical training with Alek. I wasn’t going to be leaping buildings in a single bound without magical assistance anytime soon, but I could run a few miles witho
ut wanting to fall over and never move again, and Alek said my punches almost stung, which from him was big praise.

  I pushed away my dark thoughts and instead thought about Ezee and Iollan, who were spending their honeymoon at some forest retreat with a natural hot spring. There was no room service, but Iollan had promised Ezee it was well equipped and beautiful. I hoped they had a peaceful and relaxing two weeks away. Someone around this place should get a vacation every once and a while. And when they came back, we could start planning their new home. Levi had already offered to start calling architects while Ezee was on his honeymoon. My whole group was excited for this new start and it was hard, even with my paranoid moods, not to want to engage in their enthusiasm.

  “That car has been behind us since we pulled onto the main road,” Alek said. His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and then to me as he kept driving.

  I ignored the gooseflesh on my arms. “There’s only one road into town from here,” I said. The car was just headlights in the side mirror.

  I let magic fill my blood and wrapped the truck in a bubble of invisible shielding force, just in case. It would be tiring to maintain all the way into town but better safe than riddled with bullets, I figured.

  We sat in silence as the lights of Wylde appeared, Alek tense next to me, and I trying to relax and hold the shield with minimal use of magic. The car turned off at the gas station next to the Lutheran church. My breath gasped out as I released the magic with a half sigh, half giggle.

  “We are not made for quiet lives,” Alek said with a rueful laugh as he stopped crushing the steering wheel. There were dents where his fingers had dug in.

  “I could get used to it,” I said, hoping that was true. I rubbed my twenty-sided die talisman, feeling the hard bump of Samir’s heart where it rested like a tiny ruby in the one-spot on the die.