LITMIR.BIZ

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after the revelation, people sometimes disappeared. Government experiments or eager private industry research, no one knew for sure, but the disappearances terrified already worried parents into a perilous silence. They could never have known that Kori’s little sister was a Binder, or that at ten years old, she’d be strong enough to tie us to one another for the rest of our lives.

      “Well, the power understood us.” And our ignorance didn’t make that binding any less real. Or any easier to undo. We’d bound ourselves together so tightly that as we grew up, the bonds chafed, wearing away at our friendship until nothing was left but resentment and anger.

      I pulled the bathroom door closed and sank into my desk chair, fending off a battery of memories I’d thought buried. It felt weird to see Anne in my office, out of place in my adult life when she’d been a central figure of my youth. Part of me wanted to hug her and get caught up over drinks, but the stronger part of me remembered what went down that night six years ago, the last time we’d all four been together.

      A reunion wasn’t gonna happen. Ever. And not just because Elle was dead and Kori was MIA. Anne had disappeared when I’d needed a friend. I could have tracked her, but why, when a dozen unanswered calls and messages said she didn’t want to talk to me? So I’d struck out on my own, and never once looked back at the past. Until now.

      “What are you doing here? Is a third ghost from my past going to show up and take me to my own grave?” But that possibility struck a little too close to home, and I had to shrug it off.

      She sank onto the couch and her composure cracked, then fell away, revealing raw pain and bitter anger, and suddenly I wanted to hurt whoever’d hurt her. In spite of what she’d done to me—what we’d all done to one another—I wanted to protect her, like Kori and I had looked out for her as kids, and that impulse ran deeper than the oath connecting us. Older. All the way back to the day Anne and I had first met, before Kori and Elle even moved to town.

      But it wasn’t that simple. I knew what she was going to say, even though it shouldn’t have been possible.

      “I need you, Liv. Will you help me?”

      No! Shock sputtered within me, synapses misfiring in my brain as I tried to make sense of what she’d just said. Of what she shouldn’t have been able to say.

      “How did you …?” But my voice faded into silence as the answer to my own question became obvious. “You burned it. You burned the second oath.” Damn it! “We swore, Anne. We swore to let it stand.”

      In spite of unshed tears shining in her eyes, Anne’s gaze held no hint of shame or regret. “You’re the only one who can help me with this and I couldn’t even ask you with the second oath binding me.”

      “That’s why we signed it!” I leaned forward with my arms crossed on the desktop, and my chair squealed in protest.

      That second oath was our freedom. It couldn’t truly sever the ties binding us, but it prevented us from tugging on them. In the second oath, Anne, Kori, Elle and I had sworn never to ask one another for help, because once asked, we were compelled to do everything within our power to aid one another. Which, we’d learned the hard way, could only lead to disaster. And resentment. And expulsion from school. And arrest records.

      “I’m sorry. I really am,” Anne insisted, tucking one coppery strand of shoulder-length hair behind her ear. “I know you probably don’t believe that, and I can’t blame you. But I truly had no choice. Will you help me,

      Liv?”

      “Hell no, I’m not going to help you!” But as soon as I said the words, breaking my oath to her, the pain began. It started as a bolt of white behind my left eye, shining so bright that everything else seemed dim by comparison. When I closed my eyes, the light sent pain shooting through my skull, and in less than a second, it was a full-blown migraine. Then came the muscle spasms—a revolt of my entire body, the consequence of going back on an oath signed voluntarily and sealed in blood by a child who’d turned out to be the most powerful Binder I’d ever met.

      Defaulting on an oath sealed by an amateur—or even a weak professional—could put you in the hospital. Defaulting on an oath sealed by anyone with real power and/or training could kill you.

      First, your brain sends warnings in the form of pain. Migraines. Muscle cramps. General abuse of the body’s pain receptors. Then it starts turning things off, one by one. Motor control. Bladder and bowel control. Sight and scent. Hearing. But never the sense of touch. Never the nerve endings. They remain functional so you can feel every second of your body’s decision to self-destruct.

      I’m a little fuzzy on the order of betrayal by my own internal organs, but among the first to go are the kidneys, liver, gallbladder, intestines and pancreas, any one of which would probably kill you eventually. Then the big guns. If you hold out long enough, you’ll lose respiratory function, then circulatory. And without those, of course, your brain has only minutes—minutes—for you to try to think through the pain and humiliation and decide whether you’re going to stick to your word, or die breaking it.

      Most people never get that far. I’ve never gotten that far, as evidenced by the fact that my heart continues to beat, in spite of several times I would have declared it broken beyond repair. But everyone has a limit. A point past which you can’t be pushed.

      “Please don’t do this, Olivia,” Anne said, when my fingers began to twitch on my desk. A second later, my legs began to convulse, banging against the bottom of the pencil drawer, but I only stared at her through the ball of light in the center of my vision, breathing steadily through the pain. “I’m not going to take it back, Liv,” she insisted, leaning forward on the couch. “I can’t. Not this time. Will you help me?”

      Her repetition of the original request escalated the process, and I gasped at the pain deep in my stomach. I couldn’t identify it, but I knew what that pain meant. One of us would have to back down in the next few minutes, or the last thing I saw would be her bright green eyes, full of tears and regret, and her stubborn lips sealed against the sentence that could make it all go away.

      “Please, Liv,” Annika begged, and this time her voice came from behind me. Water ran in the bathroom. A second later, she leaned my chair back and laid a cold, wet cloth over my eyes and forehead, and my hands twitched violently in my lap. “You don’t even know what I need you to do.”

      “Doesn’t matter,” I gasped, helpless to keep the rag from slipping down my face. Until I gave in to the compulsion to help her, I would feel nothing but the systematic shutdown of my entire body. But still I fought it. She had no right to make me do something I didn’t want to do, no matter what stupid mistake we’d made as children! The compulsion was like having my free will stripped. It was humiliating, and infuriating, and it was the reason we’d all gone our separate ways after high school without even a glance in the rearview mirror. “The point—” I growled through a throat that wanted to close around my words “—is that I … have … no … choice.”

      Leather creaked as she sat on the couch again, and the hitch in her breath said she was fighting sobs. “I’m sorry, Liv. If I could ask you without compelling you, I would, but I don’t have that option.”

      She was right—her very request triggered the compulsion—but that didn’t help. And neither did the regret obvious in her voice. “What do you want?” I whispered with all the volume I could manage, as pain ripped through my stomach again, and my arms began to contract toward my torso.

      “I need you to find someone.”

      No surprise, considering I was a Tracker, both by birth and by profession.

      The rag slipped from my eyes and I saw her wipe tears from her cheeks with an angry stroke of one hand. “I need you to find the bastard who killed my husband and return the favor.”

       Two

      For a moment, I could only stare at her, and as my resistance began to fade in the face of surprise,

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