Ava’s Revenge (An Unbounded Novella) (12 page)

“He’s coming with us,” Ritter said.

I nodded. “And his so-called cargo. All of it.”

Smith stared, and Johansson looked unnerved. “You can’t do that!” Johansson growled. “They’re mine.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “You lost that right—if it ever was one—the minute you began abducting free people.”

“They ain’t people!” he roared.

I nodded at Ritter, and with a blurred motion, he crossed the room and slammed Johansson against the wall, a knife at his throat.

I moved closer until my face was near Johansson’s. “Listen and listen good. I’m only going to say this once. They are people, and you will never own or sell another one again. Ever. I will know if you do, just as I know about the many times you’ve abused and forced yourself on their women, and the fact that your own grandmother was a slave.”

He gasped at that and pulled away from me into Ritter’s knife. Three beads of blood sprang up along the edge of the blade. “If you so much as raise another hand against a Negro for any reason,” I continued, “I’m sending Ritter here after you. Now where are your papers for the people you’ve got up at the Forks of the Road? You’re going to set every man, woman, and child free, or I will kill you myself. Like I did Cardiff. But without the bullet. And far more slowly.”

He nodded, eyes wild, his entire body shaking. Ritter released him with a hint of disappointment.

“Time to leave,” I announced.

“My family?” Frances asked.

I smiled. “They’re waiting for you on the boat.”

Without apparent effort, Ritter hefted the black bag like so much garbage, his stare still pinning Johansson to the wall. Then he grabbed Johansson and pushed him in the direction of the entryway. “The boat will only fit twenty more,” he said over his shoulder.

“So we’ll need another boat.” That was a problem I could handle.

“I’ll get the others from the kitchen and meet you out front.” Frances hurried from the room.

“What about my client?” Smith asked when we were alone.

Client. His training was showing. I laughed. “You mean Amelia?”

“Yeeesss.” The reply was hesitant.

For a moment we stood staring at each other in the ruined parlor. My eyes drank in his battered face, the rumpled clothes stained with blood. Now that I knew who he was, I didn’t know why I hadn’t recognized him immediately. Every word and action shouted his identity. The attraction we’d felt in the barn resumed with force: his and mine, our emotions twining together. The feelings rushed through me, singing in my veins and threatening to block out all rational thought.

He was still waiting for further explanation.

“That woman who was just here is Frances,” I said. “Miles, I came for her because of Amelia.”

Smith stared, his battered face puzzled. “You know my name.”

Miles Smithson to be exact. If I hadn’t already deduced it, his thoughts were practically yelling it at me now. “Yes. I also know you’re an attorney with Wellison and Durham. But now it’s your turn to answer a question. How did you know to come here?”

He rubbed a hand across his chin, wincing as he touched a bruise. “Amelia wrote a letter saying she was leaving Savannah to come here to free Frances and her family. She was worried about making it in time, and Alabama is closer and the mail arrived fast. I thought I might get here in time if she couldn’t. I pulled a few strings so it would all be legal just in case Johansson had fake papers.”

I
had
told Miles about Frances in my last letter, written and mailed on the trail to Mississippi. I knew he would share my outrage, but never had I imagined that he would abandon his busy practice to travel here to help me.

“I knew where she stayed the last time she was here . . .” he began again, and then stopped. “Wait, are you with her? Is she at the hotel?”

I heard the hope and understood that despite his attraction for me, he’d give me up forever if that was the only way he could meet Amelia. She meant a lot to him. More than she should. Knowing this made me want to tell him what his letters had meant to an old lady who wasn’t really old at all.

“She’ll be on the boat.” What else could I say? He wouldn’t understand if I said that Amelia Mitchell was the name I’d made up for him and his siblings, an alias like a dozen others I’d used over the past century.

“So what is your real name?”

“Ava O’Hare.”

He stared. “O’Hare. You’re related to Amelia then. O’Hare was her mother’s maiden name.”

“Something like that.”

“No wonder you seem so familiar.” He closed the space between us with several long strides. “Wait. The cut on your face, from your fight with Cardiff. It’s healing.”

I nodded. “It is.”

He studied me for a long moment, again waiting. He did that well—waiting. I could feel Ritter’s impatience outside the front door. He should have left already to retrieve Johansson’s papers, but I’d never get him to leave me alone with an unknown, not after what had happened tonight.

“There isn’t time for that conversation,” I said. “Are you coming with us to the boat?”

“Absolutely. This has been the most fun I’ve had since law school.”

I knew it wasn’t really for me that he was coming, but for Amelia, and that only added to my anticipation. “If this is fun, you’re as crazy as I am.”

He smiled. “No one is that crazy.”

He hadn’t met Locke yet or the rest of the Renegades.

I turned to go, but his hand grabbed mine. “Is there time for this? Because I’ve been waiting it seems my whole life.” He leaned forward and kissed me.

I’d been waiting a lot longer. He’d taken years to become the man whose letters had first intrigued and then called to me. I kissed him back, opening my mind and letting some of the emotion run back to him. He wouldn’t understand what it was, but it might get his mind off the other me that he couldn’t wait to meet.

“There’s always time for this,” I said.

Part Four

Present Day - Kansas City, Kansas

The Greatest Revenge

“MILES STAYED EVEN AFTER LEARNING
the truth,” I told Erin Radkey in the hospital cafeteria, rubbing my finger against an ice-cold glass of lemonade. “We were married in less than a week, and he worked with us after that. Well, Locke went back to England to be with her son and to keep an eye on their descendants, but Ritter and I stayed, and our little band of Renegades grew. Ritter also kept track of Johansson until he was killed in a logging accident a few years later. Not long after, we began patrolling the West Coast as the territories were organized. We lost a lot of good people, but we did a lot of good and kept the Emporium from taking over the States.”

“I wish I could have met Miles.” Erin put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. Her hair, once burned to stubble, was several inches long now. Only a week had passed since her Change, and I claimed three centuries, but we looked more like sisters than women separated by four generations. In actuality, Erin was my fourth great-granddaughter.

“I wish you could have met him too.”

Erin was silent for a long moment. “Do you miss him?”

My heart squeezed just a little when she asked. Miles was the first man I’d loved as a wife, but not the last. I’d outlived several mortal spouses and given birth to half a dozen children. Despite how hard it always was to lose them, I wasn’t against loving again. “I will always miss him, but we had a good life, and our posterity”—I reached across the table and took her hand—“has made me proud.”

It had been too long since someone in my family line had Changed, and Erin and her younger brother, Jace, had given me new purpose. I believed Erin’s sensing ability would far outreach my own, and her dedication to her duty as a guardian of humanity would do more to help our cause than anything else we’d done in the past century. Jace would need a lot more experience before he’d come into his full usefulness as a combat Unbounded, but that he’d Changed at all bordered on miraculous. I felt rich with their presence. Even Chris, their older mortal brother, had joined our Renegade cell, bringing his two motherless children with him. We would have to bury them long before we were ready to let them go, but they made the battle worth fighting.

Erin took a long pull of her lemonade; I hadn’t yet been able to teach her that it was best sipped. “You’ve done it then,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“When Chris told me his wife had been murdered by the Emporium, I told him the greatest revenge we have is to go about our lives, raising our children, and finding happiness wherever we can.” Erin’s gray eyes held mine. “Ava, you’ve done that. Gabriel is gone, and so are Miles and your children, but you went on, found a life, and you were happy.” Her smile faltered. “For a while, after we almost lost everyone, I didn’t really believe it was possible to be happy while the Emporium exists, but now with Ritter—”

She didn’t have to say more. I understood. She had hope. “He’s different now,” I told her.

Erin smiled a secret smile that told me something had passed between them. Maybe something good. But I’d have to wait to find out because Ritter was on his way now to our location. I wondered if she felt him yet, or if she needed more time to develop her new ability.

Ritter strode into the nearly deserted cafeteria, followed by our Unbounded healer Dimitri Sidorov, who was as close to a co-leader as I’d ever had. He’d been alive for a thousand years, and we’d been working together well over a century. Shorter than Ritter by a head, he was every bit as wide, and he exuded an almost animal attractiveness.

He could kill or heal with a touch, but he was also one of the kindest men I’d ever known.

“The room is ready,” Dimitri said. “They will begin to prepare your father as soon as your operation is underway.”

Erin’s momentary surprise at seeing them told me she had been concentrating too hard on me to sense them coming. She jumped to her feet, her lemonade forgotten. “I’m ready.” After a bloody clash with the Emporium, her father needed a heart, and she was determined to be the donor. Only one focus point, so she’d survive and generate a new one. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to save his life.

Ritter stepped closer to Erin, though they didn’t touch, and emotion between them flared, too strong for their mental shields to hide altogether. Ritter was still a killing machine and the best tactical leader I’d ever worked with, but Erin had turned his life upside down this past week. I believed he’d finally found what I’d wanted for him, something more than revenge to live for. I knew that frightened him even more than he hated the Emporium, but it was a risk he took because loved my granddaughter.

Together they strode toward the doorway. Ritter was showing Erin a new pistol he’d arranged for her, the gift a mating ritual understood only by combat Unbounded and tolerated by the rest of us. Erin didn’t yet have a clue; she’d think the weapon came from our general arsenal.

She also didn’t know, and he’d never think to tell her, that it was a temporary goodbye, a placeholder until he returned from London. No way was I getting in the middle of that. They would have to work it out for themselves.

As we followed them, Dimitri’s hand brushed mine. I met his dark eyes, my breath catching in my throat. He was my best friend, and it had been a long time since I’d felt that way about a man, the first time for a man who was also Unbounded.

Soon I would have a decision to make.

Maybe it was time for a little more of the living kind of revenge.

THE END

NOTE FROM TEYLA BRANTON:
I hope you enjoyed reading about
Ava’s Revenge
. If you did, I’d love a kind
review
. If you haven’t read
The Change
, the first full novel in the Unbounded series, we have included a sneak peek on the following pages. If you have read
The Change
, we have also included for your enjoyment, a bonus sample of
The Cure
, the second full novel of the Unbounded series, which takes place in time shortly after this novella. Thank you again. Enjoy!

NOTE FROM PUBLISHER:
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