“Kelly?”
“Wendy’s wife. The gods smiled on me by making her a nurse. She’s on-shift at the local hospital right now.”
“So you found help, somehow talked them out of calling for an ambulance—”
“I bribed them. I agreed to buy their field. Wendy’s been wanting to sell it for a decade.”
“Okay, so Kelly the nurse filched supplies from the hospital to patch you up. And they helped you hide? You couldn’t let anyone know you were alive until you knew who sabotaged Berne’s plane,” Lila said, thinking out loud. “You couldn’t risk someone showing up here and finishing the job.”
“And there was Kelly and Wendy to think of as well,” Sam added.
Oz picked up the narrative. “You’d heard disquieting rumors to do with IPA—”
Sam nodded. “Yes, the trafficking thing. Sue thought there was more going on than anyone knew, but not exactly what.”
“So you crashed, which confirmed your fears, found a den where you could lick your wounds, then called Sally—how?” Oz snapped his fingers. “Wendy brought you some burners.”
“Yes. By the time I’d recovered my senses, I’d already lost a few days. I knew Maggie’d be coming to help Sally.”
Oz cleared his throat. “Funny story, which is hilarious in retrospect. We thought Magnus—ha, ha!—might’ve been in on it.”
“Hilarious, lad.”
“Not without some justification,” Garsea added. “The fire was started with avgas—”
“Fire?”
“We’ll fill you in. We’ll try to be linear and everything. So Magnus had access to avgas, and Sally told us you had specifically warned her to ‘watch out for Maggie.’”
Sam frowned. “No, I told her to keep watch for him. It wasn’t a warning.”
“So it was more like ‘don’t worry, help is coming,’” Oz guessed.
“Yes.”
This is why using small children to relay messages of dire import is a bad plan, Lila thought but didn’t say.
“Well. Once I’d warned her, my nebulous plan was to lay low until I was strong enough to—” Sam cut himself off, shaking his head. “So much is still a fog. I was out of my head half the time. One night, Wendy caught me trying to leave to look for Sue in the field—”
“Good God,” Garsea said in horrified sympathy.
“And that put me on my back for another couple of days. I never even heard you fly in.”
“Take it easy. You’ve been through a shitshow.”
“That’s the official term,” Oz added. “There’s documentation and everything.”
“Thank you, Lila. Oz. I’m sorry I didn’t regain consciousness until you were long gone.”
“You didn’t miss much,” Lila teased. “Just me being a terrible lookout. And Berne’s amoebic dysentery.”
“Ach, not that again…”
Sam laughed. “I figured you showed up to have a look for yourselves and scent the site. That was a stroke of luck for me. It confirmed my survival, put you back on your guard, and made you even more anxious to get to the bottom of things. And it sure livened up Wendy’s afternoon.”
“She suspected nothing!” Lila insisted.
Garsea snickered again, which Lila ignored because she was the bigger person sometimes.
“It was the lad’s idea, Sam. I just flew them here.”
“So your wife jammed you into a parachute and booted you out the door—”
“That’s more or less an exact description of the sequence of events.”
“—and then she just—” Lila cut herself off. She was trying, and failing, not to picture it. The chaos of the plane going down. Sam and Sue screaming horrible, loving things at each other. “I won’t leave you!” and “Shut up and pull this cord after a ten-count!” and “Think of our daughter!” and “I am! Pull the cord!”
And then Sam would’ve been gone, shoved out the door to land who knew where, and in who knew what shape, and Sue would have ridden her old friend’s plane all the way down to the mud.
That’s why she wasn’t in the cockpit and didn’t have her seatbelt on. And why she didn’t shift. Or even put her coat back on. She had no intention of living through the crash. Surviving it would have been Sue’s worst-case scenario: critically injured and helpless, unable to help her husband or her daughter, and the leukemia doing its wretched, consuming work.
Awful as it was to contemplate, Lila felt like she understood, at least a little. If I had to choose between a plane crash and dying for a month in a hospice… If it was a choice between throwing the bad guys off the scent while buying time for my daughter…well.
It’s not that it was a close contest. It wasn’t a contest at all.
“We’re here now,” Oz said kindly.
“You are. Thank you.” Then to Lila: “I’m in your debt for the rest of my life. If you ever need anything, call me first.”
“Can’t I just come see you? I feel like things get lost in translation when we rely on phones.”
“Anytime. So what’s next?”
“Sally’s safe with my foster mother,” Oz said. “She doesn’t know we came for you. We weren’t sure what shape you’d be in.”
“Feels like I haven’t seen her in years,” Sam said, his voice suddenly rough as tears welled but didn’t fall. “I’ve got so much to tell her.”
“We’ve a lot t’tell you as well, Sam. The first of which is that the bastards who killed your wife are dead or wishing they were.”
“Ah, that’s the Maggie I was counting on.” Sam let out a sigh and settled in. “Tell it all, my friend. And don’t leave out the bloody parts. Wendy!”
Footsteps, and then she poked her head into the room. “Yeah, Sam?”
“We all know you’ve been eavesdropping in the hall.”
“I didn’t know,” Lila confessed.
“Aw, c’mon, how could I not? I’ve put up with a hurt shapeshifter in my house for a week and all of a sudden a bunch of his shapeshifter friends show up? I’d have been crazy not to listen in.”
“Agreed. Want to hear all the
