"This is fucking useless," White Star mumbled, kicking angrily at a snowdrift. "I hate this place. I hate this continent. I wanna go home!"
"One more place to check, okay?" Midori sighed, scratching beneath his bandanna. "Just quit whining."
In truth, he was uneasy himself, walking through the little town they'd tracked Olivia's footsteps to. If it were up to him he'd be holed up in that cabin still, or somewhere else safe; all his instincts were telling him to stay the hell out of public for a good long while, at least until the media coverage on the girl died down, but at least she wasn't with them. He still hadn't seen himself or White Star in any coverage related to her, but that didn't mean their association wasn't known; plenty of people had seen him carry her away from the rubble of the Academy's dorms.
"The bus station," White Star stated as they rounded the corner. "You think she'd be stupid enough to take a bus to wherever she's going?"
"How else is she gonna get anywhere fast? 'Sides, it's a lot less dangerous than an underage girl stealin' a car or hitchin' rides," Midori pointed out in a low voice, shoving White Star roughly through the door. "Anyway, she looks a fair bit different now we dyed her blonde. Now shut it." He flashed a smile at the attendant as they headed up to the counter, trying very hard to appear shorter and unintimidating. "Hey, guy, you think you can help me out? We're lookin' for my niece, she did a runner last night and her mom's real worried. I think she probably tried to meet up with her boyfriend in Milwaukee."
"Oh," the employee said. He was a scruffy young man with a rather fungal goatee, and his languid tone only confirmed Midori's first impression- that the guy was a lazy and, thankfully, didn't give a shit. "That sucks."
"Well, can you tell me if she showed up here this morning? Little blonde teenager, brown eyes, uh, green coat, I think. Probably not a lot of luggage, she snuck out the window," Midori pushed, trying to look familial and concerned. It wasn't much of a stretch, really.
"I dunno. I think that's invasion of privacy or something."
"It's just the cops won't do anything for 48 hours," Midori persisted. "Stupid damn law. Who knows what the poor girl's getting herself into? Two days might be too long."
"I guess," Goatee sighed lethargically, digging a finger into his ear. "Yeah, I remember her from this morning, actually. We don't get a lot of people through here, you know? I don't even know why they have a bus station here. But yeah, she got on the 7:30 northbound."
"Oh, all right!" White Star whispered excitedly; Midori cuffed him absently.
"Can you tell me where that line stops? Can I get a, uh, list of the stops or routes or something?" he asked, crossing his fingers under the counter.
"Sure, over there," said the employee, flapping a bony hand in the direction of a dusty stand of brochures before yawning cavernously and falling back into his previous half-asleep slump. Midori nodded his thanks and, feeling deeply lucky, went over and took a map of the bus stops, shaking his head at an incredibly deluded brochure that proclaimed the pathetic burg they were in to be, 'Wisconsin's Top Tourist Experience'.
They headed back outside, huddling together in the shelter of the building's corner as the wind picked up, studying the map. "She coulda gone almost anywhere," White Star said dismally, prodding at all the little yellow stars that marked cities the buses would stop at.
"Yeah," Midori said slowly. "But, and I hope I'm wrong about this, I bet you she went right here." He poked at a little grey plane icon next to Kenosha's star. "Only place big enough to have an airport that she's got money to get a ticket to."
"Why's an airport matter?" White Star asked, swatting at something near his head that Midori couldn't see, obviously the raven, which had apparently deigned to keep quiet after they both promised to go after Olivia. "She doesn't have near enough cash for a plane ticket and she's not big on stealing."
Midori sighed and folded up the map, tucking it inside his thick jacket. "I got a feelin' she's meetin' up with her old man and he'll be the one on the plane," he said grimly, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. "You notice her duckin' out to make a phone call the first time we came through this place and you and I bought the food? She looked like she was gonna pass out when she came back and she's been all anxious ever since. It's the only thing I can think of, I mean, she doesn't think she's got anywhere else to go and she doesn't think he'll stop coming after her, she told me so the other day."
White Star scoffed and ran his hands through his already wild hair. He looked like he'd been electrocuted, and his agitated expression said he might even welcome the distraction of some light electrocution. "There's no way she's gonna go running back to the company that's been trying to kill her for months," he spat.
"Look," Midori snapped, losing the thin thread of patience he'd been clutching since he awoke to find her gone. "I don't have any other ideas, okay? We should've just taken her home, like you said, and kept her safe, but I let her go and I fucked up and I am not gonna be responsible for her livin' her life under that fucked up company and her shitty dad! Got it? All we can do is try and find her!" He pushed aside the fact that she'd be only a little better off with the Clan than she'd been with Cascadia, because honestly he didn't have a clue what else to do.
White Star leaned against the building, looking away, lips pressed together tight, and Midori realized with a start that the kid had shot up another good inch. For a moment, as White Star's green eyes narrowed in thought, Midori might as well have been looking at Grey Star, and it shook him. Olivia'd done the boy more good than either of them realized, she'd softened him, and though White Star would probably rather drink bleach than admit it, he was obviously worried about her. Suddenly Midori couldn't bear to think of the kid returning to the Clan compound alone, growing older and colder and merciless, stepping back onto the dark path that he'd only just turned aside from.
"We'll find her," he said again, gripping White Star's shoulder for a moment, and then he pulled his hood back up and headed back inside to buy tickets, keeping his back to the single camera and praying that the bus wouldn't be crowded; the whole reason they'd headed to the sparsely populated, rural bits of a godforsaken state like Wisconsin was to keep out of the public eye as much as possible until the media furor died down and they could set about sneaking home.
White Star crossed his arms and slumped over ridiculously in his seat the whole bus ride, spending two and a half hours straight pouting with dedication that Midori almost found impressive. He didn't even react when Midori started humming obnoxiously in his ear; Midori had to actually pretend he was about to pluck out some of the kid's hilarious first attempt at facial hair to get a reaction.
"What?" White Star exploded, smacking Midori's hands away from his patchy partial moustache.
Trying valiantly to bite down his grin and viciously grateful for the brief moment of normalcy, Midori said, "When we get there, if we find her, what do you want to do?"
"Whaddaya mean, we're gonna bring her back!"
"Back where?" Midori said carefully. "Back to Japan and the Clan? It'll be a bit still before I feel safe sneakin' over the border to anywhere, so if that's our plan, we'll be dodging around just like we've been for a few more months, unless Grey Star stops being an ass and sends some help."
"Okay," White Star said after a moment, looking around carefully to make sure no one was listening, though of course Midori already had, and anyway there were only six other passengers. "So, whatever, fine. If I apologize to him he probably will." He grimaced at the thought.
"What if she doesn't wanna come with us?"
"I-" The kid frowned. "Well, I'll convince her. Feels kind of shitty to just leave her all alone, you know."
Midori beamed at him and ruffled his hair in an excess of relief at hearing him say something openly human. "Yeah. Except what if her father doesn't want to let her go?"
"Wha-"
"We've got four guns between us, limited ammunition, and not a damn thing else except a few blades. He runs Cascadia, I'm pretty sure they've got killer robots or something. We can't take him and whatever backup I'm sure he brought by ourselves if he decides it's finders keepers," Midori said firmly.
White Star brooded unsubtly, kicking the back of the empty seat in front of him. "I guess we'll play it by ear, right?" he said finally. "If her dad's there we'll just look at the situation and go from there."
"Man, your planning skills are gettin' so good."
"Shut up, old man."
The employee at the bus station in Kenosha was much less cooperative than the previous one; she flat-out refused to tell them anything about whether or not she'd seen a little blonde girl disembark, and her skeptical glare made Midori pull White Star away almost immediately, cursing silently. That lady looked exactly the type to remember faces on the news, and though neither Midori nor White Star had gotten their pictures linked with the terrorist witch Lord Death was hunting, it had been mentioned that she was possibly traveling with a boy and a very tall man. They had no better luck asking the bus driver, either.
"Well, now what?" White Star said wearily, once they were outside and walking down the slushy sidewalk.
"I have no idea," Midori admitted, putting a gloved palm over his aching eye socket. "She coulda gone anywhere. I wish like hell we still had those fancy tracking things." His younger self would never have thought the day would come where he'd long for technology, but damn if it didn't make life easier.
"Yeah." White Star kicked a rock hard enough that it nearly took out some lady's poodle; she glared at him and he snarled right back, so viciously that she paled and crossed the street. Then he stopped dead in his tracks, eyebrows raised. "Oh," he said, then, "Okay. Bird says he can track her, maybe, because witches feel different, or something."
"And the feathery dickhead's just now telling us that? Christ, I hate that thing. Can it- I mean, are we even in the right city? Can it tell?" Hope and fear pulled equally tight on his heart.
There was a moment of silence as White Star listened to the thing, then he said, "Well, try harder!" Another pause, then, exuberantly, "Yeah! It says she's that way." He pointed and then took off so fast that he nearly slipped in the snow.
"Wait up," Midori shouted uselessly, following at once. White Star slowed for a moment to let him catch up, then swerved into an alley that stank, even in the cold, of garbage. Nonetheless, it was cover that they desperately needed, and they stayed on the back streets as they ran. Every so often White Star would skid to a stop and hiss profanity at their unseen guide, apparently his method of encouraging the thing as it got its bearings and sniffed Olivia out; Midori stayed silent whenever that happened and concentrated on getting his breath back.
After almost an hour of running about, doubling back a few times and eventually working their way towards a rather run-down, suburban bit of the city, where the lawns were brown and wild and nobody would meet their eyes, they turned a corner and White Star stopped again. "Here, he says she's here," he wheezed, bending over with his hands on his knees for a moment before lifting one hand to point at the grungy mall before them; it was obviously abandoned, the neon signs dark and weathered, but a single set of tire tracks led across the otherwise pristine, snowy parking lot and around the corner of the building.
Midori spat thick saliva from his mouth and said breathlessly, wiping his forehead, "Finally." He desperately wanted to take a moment to rest, but the thought of Olivia drove him on.
They checked their weaponry and crossed the parking lot, the cold steel of their guns almost painful in their palms. There was no point trying to sneak up; there was no cover of any sort, only a few small, leafless trees scattered about the edges of the pavement. Midori was sweating and it was from more than their desperate run. A situation like this made his skin creep. Walking up blatantly to a situation like this, to the man who could very well be the biggest arms dealer on the planet…
He made a snap decision just before they rounded the corner of the mall. "Stay here," he said to White Star.
"Fuck you," White Star said, immediately and predictably.
"No. Listen, this is insane! This goes against everything I've ever taught you and I'm a fool for it! There's no way I'm takin' you down with me," Midori hissed, almost pleading, holding White Star forcibly by the hood of his jacket.
White Star's eyes were huge and his gun was shaking. But when he said, "Clan doesn't abandon each other," his voice was resolute.
"We might need help getting out of here quick," Midori said sharply, half-considering just dazing the boy with a good blow to the jaw, but then from somewhere above their heads came a soft pop.
It was almost a gentle noise, quieter than a balloon popping, but it put both of them on the ground and tight against the wall. "Shit, shit, shit," White Star was chanting, hands over his head. Midori squirmed forward in the freezing snow until he could peer around the corner of the building.
"Oh," he breathed, and then he hauled White Star upright and they took off towards the glimmering force of nature that was their witch. She was half-crouched, snarling at a sharply dressed man with even colder eyes set in a face nearly twin to her own. It seemed the shot they'd heard had merely been a warning.
Midori and White Star sprinted to flank her, and miraculously, the sniper on the roof didn't take them out. Mr. Deering, appearing quite unperturbed even as flurries of slush began to whirl around his daughter, raised a brow at them. "So the clan's been keeping you as a little pet, then. You were her support, weren't you?" Mr. Deering said after a moment, examining Midori with dark eyes that were painfully familiar.
"Don't touch them," Olivia spat. "Don't you dare!"
"Don't touch her either," White Star added grimly, shoulder-to-shoulder with her, gun steady at her father's chest.
He looked at them for a long moment, the silvery blade in his hand vibrating with something that sounded almost like laughter. "You all know I could have you killed in a heartbeat," he told them, sounding quite pleased with himself and not at all worried. The fact that they hadn't been shot dead in their ridiculous dash to Olivia had Midori very worried, though.
"Bullshit," White Star snarled.
Mr. Deering laughed, and Olivia screeched in ear-shattering rage. The air around them grew so cold that flowery crystals of shining ice started to seep across the trampled snow. "I'll never go back with you! Never! Even if you drag me back in chains I'll die before I work for you again!" Her words were strong and her hands were still tipped with the cruel talons of a witch, but her voice broke audibly.
Dramatic, but clear enough, Midori thought, swallowing dryly as he watched the light glinting off the sniper's scope; certainly there were others in the buildings nearby, and he felt like he wanted to climb out of his skin at the thought. Any moment a bullet could strike his unprotected back, and he cursed himself and everything all at once. This whole chaotic mess was most decidedly not the way a top Star Clan assassin should run things.
Very quickly he ran through their options; he didn't think Olivia could pull off any fantastic witchwork, not reliably, anyway, considering how unfamiliar she was with her powers still- she'd flat out refused to use them since the Academy.
He and White Star were fairly useless too at the moment. "This is a rather public place," he said brusquely, struck by a mad idea and deciding instantly to go for it; a stalemate like this could only end badly. "Maybe you ain't the only one with backup in hidin'. It'd be a crying shame if the papers got ahold of photos of you meeting with the little witch girl everyone's been hunting, eh? Especially since Death already knows Cascadia was involved." Mr. Deering said nothing, but there was a tell-tale muscle jumping in his temple, and Midori's heart leapt so painfully it was almost difficult to talk. "Clan aren't stupid," he bit out, and the brutal rage roughening his voice shocked him. He glanced at Olivia, at the sparkling tears rimming her opaque rainbow eyes, and let himself think of Shannon for the first time in a long time. "We're just as good with a camera as we are with a blade."
He let that sink in, watched Mr. Deering's back stiffen slightly, then bit his lip to muffle a wildly inappropriate and somewhat hysterical snort when White Star sneered, "You fucking stupid old asshole! You thought Olivia was dumb enough to just call you up and go back to you after everything? She planned all of this. I guess she was right, you really were dumb enough to think you could snap your fingers and she'd come running." Olivia, to her credit, didn't let on to her surprise at that.
"We can still kill them all," the bright sword said, vibrating so hard that a humming like a thousand bees filled the air.
"Do it and your nasty little secrets will be all over every major news network in the civilized world by tomorrow," Midori said.
Mr. Deering sighed and tossed the sword carefully at the ground; with a sizzle of white light, a blonde woman so beautiful as to be entirely untouchable stood beside him, straightening her stylish jacket as she curled her lip at Olivia. "Let's go, Astrid. It seems I underestimated my daughter's... filial devotion." With nothing more than that, they turned to walk towards their black SUV, and the sniper on the roof fired another warning round that made them all flinch, clear indication of what would happen if they tried anything.
"He won't stop," Olivia cried, her glassy antlers melting away as Midori and White Star promptly grabbed her by the elbows and bolted in the other direction. "He won't stop, he only thought I was too stupid to try anything and I was, I was just going to go back to him! I was just-" She pulled her arms free of their grip and took a moment to try and breathe, gulping air so hard Midori was a little afraid she might hyperventilate.
"We don't have time for your whining," White Star said, grabbing her arm again, not ungently. "You can cry later, I promise, it'll be okay but we gotta get out of here."
"You told him I planned an ambush," she said blankly, staggering through the snowdrifts. She'd have fallen if not for their support. "So he thinks I've got even more blackmail on him now, that I can prove Cascadia's working with witches."
"Yeah, I did, maybe he'll leave you the fuck alone now, duh," White Star snapped. "Now come on already!"
She went, dazedly. They pulled the hood of her jacket up to hide the stray scales that still shimmered like fairy freckles across her cheekbones and dove into the thick of the city, slipping into the clotted masses with their heads down and their faces averted, reasoning that it was slightly better to risk being identified by a civilian than getting caught by any possible, immediate Cascadia retaliation.
They spent most of the remaining daylight shivering behind a dumpster, then Midori bought a run-down hotel room for the night and snuck the kids in.
Olivia disappeared into the bathroom immediately, and they could hear the shower running. White Star started pacing again, returning to the front door every few minutes to peer through the eyehole. "I'm gonna call him," he said at last.
"Who?" Midori asked dully, rubbing his throbbing temples.
"My brother. We're taking her home."
"No, you're not," Olivia said, materializing from the bathroom with a rush of curling steam, looking very tiny and pallid in one of Midori's shirts, which hung to her calves. The only color on her was the bruised skin beneath her eyes. Combined with the ghastly orangish shade of their half-failed dye job, she looked both horribly young and disturbingly old all at once. In all honesty, despite her earlier transformations, it was the most witch Midori had seen her. He thought numbly, pressing one palm to his empty socket, that perhaps it was something in her eyes. "I'm still leaving."
"What? Why?" White Star squawked.
She shrugged limply. "I don't want to be anyone's property anymore. That's why the Clan would want me. Not, um, not you two, I know that, but the rest of them would only take me because of the witch thing."
"Sweetheart, you're only fourteen," Midori said, curling his hands tightly into the bed's scratchy quilt. It was so bitter, but he knew the look in her eyes too well. She would leave him, and nothing in the world could stop her.
"I'll be fifteen in a few months," she mumbled, falling onto the bed beside him and putting her arms over her face. White Star came over and sat on the very edge next to her, scowling.
"You're being really dumb, even for you," he tried again.
She breathed out slowly, and it sounded painful. "I've decided. I've got to learn to live on my own. I don't want- I mean- I want to decide things for myself."
"It's a pretty scary world out there, girlie," Midori said quietly. "You don't have to leave."
"Yeah, I know," she said needlessly, and they all flopped back on the tiny bed in a depressed heap and stared at the ceiling fan for a long time. "Thank you for rescuing me," she said, once they were all mostly asleep, and then, much later, Midori heard her say, as she pushed a snoring White Star's arm off her neck to get up, "I'll keep watch."
Very late in the night, Midori woke again to see her silhouetted against the open door. "I love you both. Even Nova," she whispered, and before he could say anything she was gone.
He kept watch himself for the rest of the night, sitting in the wobbly chair by the window with his lone eye pressed to the hairline crack between the curtains, heart leaping into his throat irrationally every time he heard police sirens in the distance.
In the morning, when White Star woke, he looked around once and then said wearily, "At least she took the bird."
YO HERE IT IS CHAPTER TWO :) :)
so... i'm gonna be THAT AUTHOR and ask politely that you pretty please review if you liked this, maybe. I've worked pretty damn hard on it and it's nice to get feedback and know that people are enjoying it, you know? I write for my readers, haha. :) anyway, yeah, so thanks for reading and a big thank you to marshofsleep for betaing this ;)