Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

People said Juniper looked like her father. She takes it for the insult it is meant to be -for she sure as shit don’t look like Lily-.

Juniper has her mother’s curls, but they were the wrong tone of auburn, a bit more spiced than her mother’s golden hue. Her eyes were large and wide set, yes, just like her mothers, but they were some foreign shade of blue, so bright and hot they seared in their sockets. She was short like her mother had once been, five-foot-fuck-all, but strong across the shoulders, sturdy where Lily had been waif slender and soft like the petal of her name.

Juniper does not look like her mother, and neither did she look like James Potter.

That’s what people politely -passive aggressively- meant when they said Juniper looks like her father because whoever he is, wherever he is, he was not the man her mother had married.

All you needed to do was take one look at Juniper to see that. Five seconds in her presence scrubbed out any remaining doubt.

Juniper was a product of an early matrimonial affair from a one-night stand -not the most prodigious start to life-. Her mother went to America for her Mastery in Charms for two years, and when she came back she had something onboard that customs and import couldn’t tax her on -Juniper-.

Whatever problems that might have caused once upon a time were lost to the young Witch. She only knew the bare bones of the sordid affair that was well known but never really spoken aloud about -at least not while Juniper had been in the room-.

James and Lily had stayed together in the end after quite the rough patch brought on by the positive pregnancy potion and the two-year, long-distance relationship ruling out James as the father. James and Lily moved in together at Godric’s Hollow to try and make it work. James and Lily ended up dead on a staircase and over a crib on all Hallows eve.

One, two, three.

The three-step orphan tango -were you still an orphan if you didn’t know where or who one of your biological parents was?-.

It was a shame Juniper had never been a good dancer.

Juniper does not know her father’s name, Lily never got it from the backwater bar he picked her up in, or if she did Lily had been drunk enough to forget it come morning. Lily had told Sirius once that, from what little she remembered, he had been as big as a bear in camo, and had been ‘shipping out’ in the morning for a ‘tour’ in the ‘82^nd’, whatever those words meant. These measly scraps of information Lily retained after she had been hit with an ungodly hangover was all Juniper ever had of her father -was it any surprise she’d turned out the way she had?-.

The man had clearly been a Muggle, either way.

Juniper thinks -when she bother’s to think about the nameless, faceless entity half responsible for her conception- that it was for the best. If he was Muggle, he was likely in the Muggle world if he still breathed, and if he was in the Muggle world that meant he was far away from the shit show of the Wizarding world and the war that came to be -which would allow him to continue breathing-.

Which really meant far away from Juniper and all the death that seemed to perpetually trail her footsteps.

It was not like Juniper had any desire to look for her biological father anyhow, before, during, or after the war. It was not that she held any resentment towards him however -how could she to someone she’s never met-, Juniper just could not see the point in trying to track him down.

At best she would be a happy accident in his eyes, at worst a mistake begotten from a drunk quickie in a bar bathroom stall he’d all but forgotten about sixteen years ago.

Juniper’s passed the age of needing a father anyway, and the idea alone was enough to turn her stomach in her later teen years, conjuring images of Vernon and his heavy fists, the sound a belt makes as it comes splitting through the air, her only blueprint on what a ‘dad’ might be.

She doesn’t need a father -it’s too late for all that -.

It was not that Juniper was running away -she would never run away from anything-, just that she was… on the move.

After Fred’s funeral, the last in an extensive line that had taken months to get through, sixteen and silently Juniper packs her bag in a cold and empty Grimmauld Place, doesn’t say goodbye, catches a midnight train, and she doesn’t stop from there. She bounces across the globe for a long time. Hops from bakeries in Paris to yurts in Mongolia -she ends up favouring the great outdoors rather than the busy cities-, but she never stays in one spot for more than a week.

It’s not that Juniper was running away -running away was for the weak-, it was that after fighting a war, losing her friends and what little family she had left -literally dying alone in the forbidden forest-, she wanted to get out and live a little without the expectations of being the ‘savoir’ dogging her down.

Who could blame her?

So Juniper goes, and she keeps going, and before she knows it a year has gone by and she’s in a little American town in a place called Hope County.

Juniper was not a liar by nature -despite what the scar on her hand might tell you-. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t good at it. She’s bold and she’s brave, and for some stupid reason people trust her.

But she never sets out to lie -go on. Trust her on that. She dares you-.

Juniper sees the hiring poster for the local police department as she’s walking down the street of the rural county, merely passing through to something bigger and wilder -where she could really get lost-.

She doesn’t know what it is about the poster exactly which catches her attention. The tacky font, the overly smiley face of the copper in blues grinning at the camera, the cheesy ‘Your City Needs You’ slogan they have splashed across the bottom. It sure as hell isn’t the pay -and Juniper has enough money to get by for several lifetimes already-.

Still, it does grab her interest -grabs and doesn’t let go-, and before she knows it or understands what she’s doing, Juniper rips the poster down from the window it was taped to, finds herself soon upright in the middle of the local sheriff’s department, and begins filling out application forms under the watchful eyes of the dispatcher called Nancy -who does a double take as she walks through the door, and never lets her gaze trail far away for whatever reason- .

Juniper lies about her age of course -forges identity documents, qualification credentials, job references and personal history-. She writes down that she’s twenty-two -the oldest she dares push-, young but not underage, and Magic makes it easy. A charm here for a birth certificate, and hex there for a Muggle passport, a bit of transfiguration for physical copies and suddenly Juniper’s a whole new person with a boring, mundane, run-of-the-mill past-though she keeps her name-.

Juniper was not a liar by nature, but she sure as fuck was a fighter -and she’d been out the ring for far too long-.

Three weeks later and one interview over with, she gets the job -Junior Deputy Juniper has a nice ring to it, though everyone just calls her Rook-.

“Shit kid-“ Staci Pratt whistles through his teeth with a sniff of an impressed manner. “Where you learn to shoot like that?”

“Yeah-“ Joey Hudson agrees, though her voice was more suspicious than surprised, pistol clasped by her hip. “I thought you said you’ve never fired a sniper before?”

“I haven’t fired a sniper rifle before.” Juniper parroted back with ready agreement as she lifts her cheek from the barrelled rest, finally letting go of the breath she’d been holding in as she pressed the trigger for the final time. “But I have fired a weapon before.” -and wands counted as weapons, didn’t they?-.

Firing a gun and firing off a spell wasn’t that different, Juniper had found. Both needed precision, quick reflexes, and a hunters eye.

All of which she had.

“Your dad or ma teach you to shoot?” Staci asked as he loaded his own weapon, braced against the bar of the firing range before taking his shot. He hits the target, a middling one not very hidden, where he strikes the black tag in the shoulder -nothing compared to the five far distance hits Juniper had gotten off in quick succession. All head shots-.

“My mother died when I was very young.” Juniper pauses a beat. “And I never knew my father. I heard he was once part of the US army. Part of something called the 82^nd Airborne Division. I’m sure he’d had a run in with a gun or two during his time, but he didn’t teach me anything.” It’s not a lie, and that’s what makes it go down so smoothly like expensive liquor.

It’s not a very uncommon story either. Loads of peoples mother’s die when they were young, tons of kids don’t know their fathers. There’s nothing surprising to Juniper’s past, and it’s just sad enough that no one ever pushes for more -as they don’t this time either-.

“Well-“ Joey rushes to divert the conversation. “You got a sharp eye on you. Unfortunately-“ The older woman reached for the .50 bolt sniper rifle in Juniper’s grip -they’d only given it to her in the first place as a joke, a prank to see her pull a shoulder muscle on the recoil or fall on her arse in the dirt from the pushback-. “That’s not standard issue, Rookie. Best get back to pistol practice.”

For a moment, just one, Juniper doesn’t let up on her hold on the gun, doesn’t let Joey take it from her. It feels… nice in her hands. Heavy and solid and long, cool courage in her arms. Joey frowns and tugs again, and Juniper reluctantly lets the gun go this time. The squat butt of a pistol is pressed into her palm in its place -Juniper much prefers the sniper-.

“Who knows-“ Joey grins to crack the sudden tension. “You might be teaching Pratt here a thing or two in a week. God knows he needs all the help he can get. See this Staci? Even Rook is showing you up.”

“Oi-“ Pratt barked back, missing his shot completely in his indignant huff. Juniper takes aim again, hits her own targets, but it’s not the same. Doesn’t feel quite right.

Like a wolf with no teeth, Juniper feels a little toothless with the rifle back in its box.

Juniper was six weeks on the job when the call comes through. Something about a Project at Eden’s Gate and a Marshal on his way to their department, -a name she hasn’t heard before-. At first the Sheriff, Whitehorse, doesn’t seem so phased about it, likely thinking it was about some tax evasion or public unrest.

“They’re nuts, don’t get me wrong. All into that doomsday prepping shit.” He’d smiled at her after putting the phone down that had interrupted their bi-weekly progress report -Juniper was doing exceedingly well-. “But they’re harmless enough. You see them passing out pamphlets here and there, but they mainly keep to themselves. The most one’s done is some minor vandalism on a church door. I have no idea why Marshal Burke would be interested in them.”

When the Marshal comes he comes with a video, and any idea of ‘harmless enough’ was put well and truly to bed for permanent sleep.

The video was grainy, taken at an odd, secretive angle by a Muggle phone, and Juniper watches it play out on a laptop screen next to Joey and Staci. There was a scuffle, yelling, a man called Joseph Seed with hands covered in blood as he takes the eyes of the pinned down man thrown at his feet for some transgression or other. Joey winces away from the screen, Staci’s gone a little green, Whitehorse’s face matches his name, pale and long drawn -Juniper doesn’t bat an eye, watches the video all the way through unflinchingly, and one more time through the loop, and everybody’s so concerned with their own reaction no one sees her lack of one-.

Juniper’s had four weeks in training and six weeks on the job when Marshal Burke slapped a gun in her hand and told her to get a move on or she was going to miss the helicopter. She was now part of a task force roped into bringing Joseph Seed in for arrest.

Her colleagues take her silence as worry -not for the thrill it is-.

“There’s four siblings in total.” Hudson took the liberty of filling in over the headsets blocking out the deafening chop of the helicopter blades. “Joseph Seed, our target. Jacob Seed, the oldest brother. Keep an eye on him. He’s an army vet and could be packing heat. John Seed will likely be there too, as the surveillance we have on his ranch showed him leaving a few hours ago. We don’t know if Faith Seed will be there, she’s been hardest to keep track of, but the likelihood is high.”

“Ignore the siblings.” The Marshal demanded from the back where Juniper sat with Staci. “We’re after Joseph. We walk in, we arrest him, and we get out. Simple.”

It’s not simple though -even though Juniper’s beginning to think the Marshal is a rather simple man in the not so nicest of terms-. It’s dangerous, and Juniper had raised the notion that it might be safer -smarter- to wait until this Joseph Seed wasn’t in his own compound -surrounded by his own people and in full knowledge of the layabout unlike them-, to meet him on neutral turf, but everything she had said had fallen on deaf ears.

It was easy to see why.

The Marshal wasn’t concerned with a safe or quick arrest, not at all. He was concerned, by his own inane chatter during the short flight over the Montana mountains, about front page headlines, news interviews, and possible promotions.

He didn’t care that they were outnumbered, that they were going in with handguns and no backup relying on a single dispatcher -something was really off about that Nancy-, that they had no idea about the compound skeleton they’d have to walk through blind, possible weaponry this Eden's Gate had and could use against them, no head count on exactly how many Peggie’s -at least that’s what Staci called the followers of Eden’s Gate- would be swarming the place.

Don’t get Juniper wrong, she was up for a fight any time of day like the good Gryffindor she was, but she was also quite the good chess player -strategy was half a war won-. Going in as cocksure and careless as they were felt… lazy -and a little insulting to the guy she’d only just watched thumb the eyeballs out of one of his whistle-blowers-.

Something was going to go wrong -and she couldn’t apparate everyone out if something blew-. Juniper could feel it right down deep in the marrow of her ribs.

And that feeling in her bones didn’t ease for a second as the helicopter touched ground and her boots hit the floor. The Peggie guards at the gate had rifles in hands, grenades strapped to belts, knives in holster on thighs, shotguns flung on their backs.

They’re watched with barely concealed hatred at the small group marched for the compound gate. Juniper’s hand falls to the holster at her hip, thumb on the latch ready to flick, and for once she doesn't wish the pistol was her wand -she wishes it was a sniper rifle instead-.

Chapter Text

“Rook, I want you at my back,” Whitehorse’s voice was slow and stern, keeping track with the steady footfall of their movements as they worked their way through the gate and into the compound. From the corner of her eye, already locked into position, Juniper saw unease stretching along the crease of his brows.

“I’ve got your six,” Juniper assured quietly, voice plunging below the surrounding observing Peggie’s scope. She was the smallest of the group, easily hid behind Whitehorse’s more impressive frame, overlooked beside Staci and Hudson, disregarded by the Marshal’s outward confidence, but she was also the fastest. If hell or highwater came, which she had a feeling it would, she’d be the jack in the box that could spring forward in an ungodly surprise.

Taunts and slurs echoed in the courtyard as the Peggie’s inside seemingly riled themselves up from the mere sight of police traipsing across their holy soil, but none of them moved for their guns or weapons. The Marshal took this in stride, taking up the lead front as if it were owed to him, seemed proud of it in fact, this disquiet he sowed in his wake, but it only made Juniper… cautious.

Were the Peggie’s angry? Undoubtedly. Were they itching for a fight? Clearly. Did they seem at all shocked at the sudden rock up of the boys in blue?

Definitely not.

And that was worrying, wasn’t it? There should have been at least a few surprised guffaws, splutters, even shocked stares. There wasn’t one though. Not a single wince or flinch or flap of a jaw in their general direction. Almost as if they knew they had been coming all along.

Maybe they had.

Maybe they thought this was an eventuality and not a possibility. Your leader takes the eyes of a man, and you’ve gotta’ at least start thinking about handcuffs and bail money.

Still… still.

A wintry breeze made the hair on the back of Juniper’s neck stand on end -The rabbit in the headlights-. She just didn’t know which one was the four-by-four and which one was going to be the smear on the road by the end.

Juniper refuses to reach into the collar of her shirt, to the broken locket she knows lays hidden at her breast. Half of it was missing, lost long ago-

Seventeen years ago, actually.

And the ghost of her mother, the one who’d left her this tarnished chain and shattered ornament, wasn’t going to help her here.

Instead her hand falls to her gun. 

As the doors to the church were swung open, Juniper heard the congregation inside before she saw them. They were not particularly loud, boisterous, or overzealous in their sermon, but with a quiet sort of reverence that gave her goose bumps.

She breathes in deep through her nose and holds the breath in her lungs. Holds it for so long it almost burns behind her ribs. She has a gun on her hip and a wand out of sight strapped beneath her shirt sleeve on the soft underside skin of her forearm. She’s armed, she’s alert, and there was still a waveringly disquieting precipice Juniper didn’t realize she was dangling over but felt all the same.  

Like when one stood on a pier and stared down into the ocean. You knew the fall would be great, you knew it was dark below the tide, but your mind could never really conjure just how deep the waters went.

Just what would happen when she stepped through the door?

Juniper can’t answer that, but she moves in with the rest anyway, unsure where this sudden dread of hers was coming from and why it would be there at all. She’d been in worse scrapes before, worse odds too, a rural county cult was nothing compared to Death Eaters and prophecies.

So Juniper walks forward, walks on, and she tries to ignore the imagined tire screeching she hears as the rabbit in the road freezes somewhere in her mind’s eye.

Joseph Seed stands at the very end of the church, raised on a plinth amongst melted, crooked, strewn candles. The sole window behinds him lets in the setting sun, bathing him in a heady golden light that bounces off his bare chest and belly.

The light catches most on the myriad of angry, red scars he’s carved into his own flesh between his tattoos. Words in jagged lines. Sins in sharp stripes. Juniper picks out Lust down low, Greed on an arm, Sloth on a pec.

She’s more a Wrath and Pride person herself, as Tom Riddle and maybe Malfoy could attest.

Still, there he is, their target, the so called ‘Father’. So close and yet so far, separated by a sea of bowed and bent Peggie’s kneeling and cooing like a bunch of baby birds beneath his speech. It’s impressive how he holds their attention.

Sickening too.  

Joseph Seed doesn’t acknowledge them, because of course he doesn’t. He’s preaching, agitating, stoking fires in the minds cracked wide open below him. His speech is aimed at them, however. Focused on contempt and disrespect. It chaffs against Juniper’s ego -she did have a problem with her pride after all-, but she keeps her face carefully blank, hand fixed on pistol by her hip.

As they move forward, she ignores the Peggies in favour of the siblings behind the man of the hour. They come up to the pedestal their brother is preaching on, closing in with practiced ease, and Juniper notices not one of them appears even slightly concerned -that too stings her ego-. She doesn’t know which one is which, only that the women in the white dress must be Faith Seed, but Jacob and John are interchangeable at the moment.

It doesn’t really matter in the end. Names mean jack shit. Juniper only cares if they wanted to make trouble or not.

It is, nevertheless, the red-head that catches sight of her first with a sharp blue glare. Juniper expected the gaze to flicker by, to skim over herself and to the others, counting stock of the enemy over the trenches, but it doesn’t.

It lands, it sticks, and something indecipherable grows there between the blue and the black. His head cocks ever so slightly, wolfish in the tic, the evening light catching his own scars, less pink, aged and worn well, looking like burns that splatter on his face and condense down into his neck. Juniper supposed they concentrated on his chest, might make a ruin of an arm beneath the camo he wore -strangely, she notices the worse of the scars on his face match the bolt of lightning one on her own-.

That too didn’t matter, because he was looking at her, and looking at her, and looking-

Staring like she didn’t make sense to him, as if he can’t make heads or tails of her, as if it’s the first time he might have seen a copper, the first look of surprise she’s seen all evening.

It unnerves Juniper more than it should, this look, this surprise, really. More than if he’d snarled or snapped or barked out an insult.

And then the Father steps down from his platform, begins walking towards them, Peggies parting like the red sea for him, and Juniper’s own attention is snapped away -rule one of hunting, don’t take your eye of the beast lurking in the underbrush-.

Joseph Seed’s hands float towards the ceiling with open palms as he walks, heavenward with words hell bound. “And I saw! And behold, it was the White Horse,” his gaze is hidden behind a pair of yellow sunglasses, thin and flimsy, but there was no mistaking as his eye shifted over to glare at Whitehorse, “and Hell followed-“

It takes Juniper an embarrassingly long while to realize he’s stopped talking, ranting, even longer yet to clock on that his words have died as his eyes have finally landed on her, standing behind Whitehorse beside Staci, prepped and ready for a rumble.

The clock tics on, somewhere outside a crow croons, and as Juniper matches the stare with one of her own, the dread comes back tenfold. Why?

Because there was something there, she thought. Something there in those concealed eyes she’s seen before, something that reminds her of Trelawny and tea leaves and the sound of crystal balls hitting rugs. She thinks for a split moment that she’s made a grave mistake, one of her worst, before she stomps down on it viciously.

Is that it then?

Is this how he’d done it? Gathered all these desperate people to hang onto his every whim?

Joseph Seed is no Wizard, there’s not a wand in sight, but Juniper, after living a life of prophecy and divination, can sniff out a Seer from a hundred foot.

He might not even know what he is himself. 

“Oh,” Joseph breaks his own silence eventually, in quiet surprise -why the sudden shock?- which somehow made it all the more worse. Juniper would rather go back to the religious ranting and raving than the steady, sole focus laid bare upon her. “Oh.” And then he says the worst thing he could have. “How old are you?”

Juniper keeps her hand on her pistol strap and her face blank. “Twenty-two.” If anyone’s surprised by her English accent leaping out in rural Montana, no one shows it.

And Joseph Seed bats right back too fast and too keen. “Try again.”

Her teeth clamp behind her lips as the muscle in her jaw jumps. Whitehorse is looking now, bewildered and confused by this odd swerve in conversation, and Juniper does what she does best. Swing back. “I said twenty-two.”

Joseph Seed took a small step towards her, and Juniper fought down the urge to skitter back, to pull her pistol out and say fuck it. “No you’re not.”

He knows. Somehow the fucker knows. How does he know?

Oddly enough, it was the Marshal who inadvertently came striding in to save the day, accidentally, careless in his drive to get this over with, seemingly the only one unaware by the sudden shift of tension in the room. “Rookie, arrest this son of a bitch.”

“The voice told me,“ Joseph Seed drifted as Juniper unclipped the cuffs on her belt, making moves to detach herself from the group and make the short distance over to slap them on the wrists of the preacher. She tries not to notice how he’d adopted a soft smile, his arms reaching out for her, open palmed, supplication, in contrast to her own steady on her bindings and weapon. “You were coming. I doubted, but here you are. The lost lamb come home-“

Juniper’s snort cuts him off, slices in and cuts down as she finally comes to a stop in front of him. “If this voice of yours really knew anything about me, there’s no way in fuckin’ hell it would call me a lamb.”

His smile grows, white teeth in a white face, almost as if they were sharing an inside joke, just them, just two, but, anew, the Marshal’s patience is waning thin. “Just put the cuffs on him, Rookie!”

A low-slung warning rumble sounded from the stage behind Joseph, and although Juniper doesn’t really know exactly where it had originated, she doesn’t need to guess all too hard which Seed it had come from.

Right.

Yeah.

She was arresting their precious preacher, not bantering over breakfast blueberry pancakes. They were walking on thin ice already, and with every hesitation, every moment she lingered, that was one more flip of a coin for everything to go tits up.

Joseph, however, seemed intent on dragging this out as long as possible, as Juniper slipped the cuffs open. “Rookie,” he mused, still smiling, “falls flat compared to Juniper.”

Juniper freezes, cuffs open in hand, blinks, blinks again, and quickly glances down to the badge on her breast. No, she wasn’t wrong. All is said was Deputy Sheriff J. Potter.

Seers saw shit, yes, but in that ambiguous, confusing, obtuse way that practically made the gift pointless. Symbolism and allegory and imagery wrapped up in a dreamlike fever. They typically couldn’t pull out details like names and faces. “Family tradition, isn’t it? Naming girls after flowers. Your mother had a name like it too, didn’t she? Lil-“

“Rookie, I am ordering you to arrest him now.” Marshall snapped her out of it again, made her remember where she was, and the smile on Joseph’s face shifted, sadness simmering, anger rising behind the aviators. It’s too late though, the spell is broken, the shock replaced with agitation.

Juniper wasn’t used to being caught on the backfoot, not any longer, and feeling like she was on the ropes reminded her of a different time, fighting against Tom, losing Sirius, being the little girl locked in a cupboard, helpless and hopeless, and suddenly she’s angry -there goes the wrath-.

Joseph didn’t show any signs of resistance as Juniper slapped the handcuffs on, tightening them a little viciously too far. “God will not let you take me,” was all he said as the locks clicked.

“Good,” she scoffs “I would really like to see him try.” Juniper snarked back as she tugged on the cuffs, yanking Joseph Seed towards the door.

There’s that smile again. Small and soft, and secretive, as if he knew something she didn’t -he did-.

Things, decidedly, go tits up. Yet, Juniper was proven right in the long run. There was something wrong with Nancy.

She was a fuckin’ Peggie plant who didn’t send through their request for backup.

Everything kicks off the moment the placid preacher is dragged from the church. Peggie’s go foaming at the mouth, and they barely make it back to the chopper and up in the sky with the Seed before someone’s shooting off a bloody bazooka, and they were coming back down as fast as they’d gone up.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind but now I see-“ Juniper’s in the back with Staci and Joseph, and the latter’s staring again, singing, even as a blade is blown off and sirens from the cockpit up front begin ringing their ears, as there’s a sudden, sharp lurch to her gut that tells her she’s going down very, very fast.

It's a good thing, then, that Juniper thinks faster. 

They’re not so high up that the crash will be fatal, perhaps coming away with a broken rib or two, concussion guaranteed, even the less sturdy muggles beside her.

She has a choice to make and a few seconds to do it.

There’s no way to reach Whitehorse and Hudson up front in the cockpit, fruitlessly scrabbling to get the chopper straight. Neither can she reach the Marshal, on the other side of the back seats.

But Staci is beside her, and Joseph is in front -reaching distance-.

Juniper stretches out just as the chopper goes into a sickening tail spin. She gets a hold of Staci by the collar of his shirt, snatches Joseph’s wrist, and they seem confused, baffled really-

“I’ll come back for you,” Juniper shouts over the roar, towards the cockpit, and Whitehorse is turning, but it’s too late. There’s a crack of air, a hot-flash of magic, and the three are gone just as the chopper smacks right back into the ground below.

They land with a lurch and a roll, and Staci vomits all over the floor, curling over as he dryly wretches even more. “What,” he stutters out over a swipe of his mouth, owlishly blinking around himself at the abrupt change of scenery. “How-… I-… Where-“

Juniper was pushing herself off the floor, hissing at the twinge of pain from her knee where she’d landed wonkily, dusting herself off as Joseph Seed, still in handcuffs, seemingly came aware of himself too, unfurling from his own hunched over position. At least he didn’t vomit, at least none of them were splinched in Junipers panic, but there was a decidedly grey sheen to his face from the first-time apparition. “How did you-“

“Oh,” Juniper cuts him off with a glare as she finally righted herself fully “what? Your little voice didn’t give you the heads up I have a few aces my sleeve too?”

She doesn’t pay him much more mind, instead jutting her chin to Staci now coming to a stand. “Watch him, will you?”

She’s moving then, towards the rack at the end of the room, pulled invisibly to what she knew was hidden there, Staci’s still bewildered voice trailing her “is this the firing range?”

Yes it is, and the only place Juniper had thought to go to. They’re going to need it for what comes next. “We need the weapons,” she searches through the shelves, hunting, finally coming to the long grey weapons case hidden low down on the third shelf, bingo, “if we’re going to pull this off.”

“I don’t understand,” Staci hazarded, lost and low, still slightly dazed. Juniper dragged the large case out of it’s home, hauling it to the nearest table where she slapped it down with a deafening jolt. “I don’t understand how we got here or-“

Juniper broke the lock on the case and flipped the latches. “Snap out of it,” Staci wavered “we don’t have time for a mental breakdown. Suck it up and move on. Questions can come later. We need to get Whitehorse and Hudson back first. They're still with the Peggies and Merlin knows what they’re going to do when they realize Papa Preacher here is missing.”

“Right,” Staci still appeared more than a little stunned “and how do we do that exactly?”

Juniper threw the lid of the case open, smiling at the glittering barrel of the .50 bolt sniper rifle shining back from its foam rest. She ran her fingers down it, cold metal calming, a cool pluck that tugged at her nerves, her hand tightening into a strong grip around the snout as she pulled the heavy gun free. “Simple,” She turned around, using the strap of the gun to sling it safely over her shoulder and propped against her back “thanks to my fast thinking, we have something they want.”

Staci, for the first time, diverts his attention down to the man still sitting on the ground in cuffs, eerily silent, staring at Juniper unblinkingly. “Hostage exchange.”

Juniper nodded “hostage exchange.” She parroted back before snatching the ammo box left on the table from the last shooters and throwing it in Staci’s direction where he scrabbled to catch it before the loose bullets went scattering across the floor. “Now load up, buttercup. Go around to the back rooms where they keep the grenades. We might need them.”

He does, thankfully, without question, ambling through the door with an unsteady gate. Juniper knows she’s on borrowed time in that regard. Staci was clearly in shock, wasn’t thinking right and more on autopilot, but he would soon and then she’d have to explain magic to him.

Fantastic.

“The Voice told me you’d be special,” Joseph ultimately gets out. He’s bounced back faster than Staci, Juniper spies from across the room. He doesn’t look as dazed anymore, and his smile is no longer small or soft, it’s wide and warm and almost blinding “but I never dreamed of this.”

Juniper, unceremoniously, rolled her eyes. She’d let him get into her head back in the church, for a moment, for a breath, but that was still far too long. She wasn’t going to allow it to happen again. “Surprise.”

The sarcasm only makes the mad bastard laugh, loud, long, a noise that reminds Juniper of a breeze ruffling through the canopy of a forest. It’s a cosy noise, homey, makes her feel a little less rigid-

And then his eyes fall to the gun in her hands, and his smile washes to that secretive little humour that’s really starting to annoy her. “That’s Jacob’s favourite too.”

“Good for him,” Juniper kicks off from the table, marching for the preacher on his knees, slipping in behind, refusing to get into a conversation Joseph Seed is clearly trying to bait her into “he has some taste, at least.” she prods his shoulder with the barrel of her gun. “Now on your feet, and let’s hope your siblings don’t do something stupid that means I have to put a bullet between those aviator shades.”

Joseph wrangles himself into a stand, and Juniper had almost forgot how tall the lanky man was upright “the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.” With another prod, more vicious than the last, Joseph begins to move.

“Good thing I don’t have a father, eh? Now move,” for some reason, that only makes Joseph laugh even harder.

Chapter Text

“For the last time,” Juniper declared as she slapped the radio down on the rickety table she has a preacher tied to, “give me the radio frequency the Peggie’s use or-“ she lingered here, loitering on the inherent obtuse threat of it all, her face, her tone, her words, “you’re really not going to like what comes next.”

Joseph Seed is still and silent with clasped hands cuffed behind his back. He has been that way for the last hour since they left the firing range for more… discreet accommodation. A small, deserted hunting cabin not far off the beaten track. It was cold here, the heating and hearth were knackered, a thick layer of grime blanketed every flat surface, but Juniper wasn’t at all concerned with allergies or dust mites.

Only that there would be less chance of someone stumbling across them accidently, culminating in being captured by a cult.

Juniper, after getting Pratt to change into his civies as she had done, thought it best to get far away from anything related to the local Sheriff’s department. Be that building or blue uniform. So here they were instead, decked out in jeans and jackets in the middle of fuck-all-nowhere, duffels loaded to the straps with supplies, everything they could fit or find from the back lockers of the County range, and some more… ‘out there’ supplies Juniper needed, trying to get a silent man to talk.

And talk he must.

Eden’s Gates Prophet was missing in action, and the last any of the remaining Seeds or Peggie’s knew was that he had been on a chopper going down over the compound. Similarly, they would see Juniper and Pratt were likewise absent from the crash site too. Juniper doubted even the Peggies couldn’t put those two together and come up four.

By now roving bands of armed religious zealots were likely on their merry Witch-burning way to the Sheriff’s department, jumped up on the thought of rescuing their saviour. Juniper had magic on side, yes, clearly, but she was only one person, one person against who knows how many cultists, and even a Witch wasn’t bullet proof.

“How old are you?” Joseph asked in that way he does, softly, quietly, challenging. Juniper rolled her jaw along with the question. She could just march across the short distance, grab the preacher by his thin face, crane his head back and dive into his mind with a Legilimency to get her answer. It would be over quickly, quicker than this line of questioning-

But, and it was a big but, Juniper wasn’t… delicate in mind magics. Snape had once said she had all the delicacy of a baby hippo. If she did go the fast route of digging through thoughts, she was more likely to liquify Joseph’s recent memories into amnesia-alphabet soup than get any real answer she wanted. Needed.

“What is it with you and knowing her age, man? Let it go-“ Staci was as frustrated as Juniper was, on edge as she was, and he didn’t seem afraid to show it. Yet, he also couldn’t see what Joseph was putting down with his reply. A game of tit-for-tat.

If Joseph wanted to play, Juniper could play too.

“Seventeen.” She throws back with a prickle of the scar on the back of her hand “now give me the frequency.”

“See? She’s twenty-t-“ Staci splutters when her words catch up to him. She can feel him fight through cough at her side as if he’s almost swallowed his tongue. Not once, no matter the interruption, has Joseph taken his eyes from her, nor she from him. It’s almost like Staci wasn’t there at all-

If he didn’t keep speaking. “Seventeen? Seventeen?! But I saw your birth certificate and documents when you applied-“

Juniper flashes Staci a look, like the hot handle of a skillet, finally breaking the connection between her and the preacher, and Staci comes to himself with a jagged nod. “Right, yeah, that whole… voodoo shit-“

“Magic.” Juniper corrects, perhaps somewhat unkindly. It’s not Staci’s fault, of course, and he doesn’t deserve her ire. That belongs to Joseph Seed and the run around he was giving her. All this is new to Staci, and not only new but something that had come along out of the blue and blown his world six foot sideways.

Staci didn’t know much, they didn’t have time to get into the intricacies of the Wizarding world as they drove over to this cabin with Joseph in the back of a stolen van under a notice-me-not charm, but Juniper had given him the basics. Enough, that is, to keep him on side, placated, and not whittling a stake or gathering kindling to burn her upon.

Muggles did so love prepping a barbeque when so much as a Tarot was mentioned.

Seemingly, Americans more so. 

“Magic.” Staci fixed for himself, although a little less confident in nature than Juniper. “I mean, yeah, after being able to, to, to… to teleport, what’s a little document forgery?”

“Seventeen years,” Joseph interceded, echoed, redirecting the flow of conversation, a small smile playing coy at the corners of his lips, “Jacob would have been leaving on his second tour of Iraq then. It would have been in fall… October. Yes, October. The leaves would have been turning orange and yellow and red. Tell me, did they match your mother’s hair?” Juniper-

Well, Juniper rolled her eyes, if only to ease the unsettling weight in the bottom of her belly that felt like it was pinning her down to the ground. Whatever hard-on Joseph Seed had for her mother, why he kept bringing up this bloody Jacob Seed around her, to her, why exactly he was so obsessed with her age, Juniper couldn’t pin it down.

The unknown of it all, of what Joseph Seed was clearly edging towards, unsettled her more than she was comfortable with. He knew something, saw something, had stitched something together Juniper had missed, and that did more than merely sting her pride.

It made her cautious.

Joseph Seed was clearly a smart man. A smart man who, Juniper would bet her money on, was charismatic, compelling, and who pulled people into his orbit like the sun pulled in planets. You can’t form a cult around yourself with anything less. People like him knew what to say, how to say it, and how to get what they wanted without you being any the wiser.

Juniper didn’t know how her mother, Jacob Seed, and her age could have anything to do with anything someone like Joseph Seed could want, how they could possibly be linked, and therefore, didn’t know how to defend against it.

It felt like Juniper had her flank wide-open, and Joseph was evidently sniffing around for something. Nevertheless, Juniper did know she wanted none of the crazy the preacher in handcuffs was trying to push on her. In her.

She was crazy enough as it was. Crazy and on a mission.

Juniper had people to save, colleagues to rescue, and she didn’t have time for mind games or picking apart parables. Every second, every minute, every hour Hudson and Whitehorse were in the Peggies ‘care’ was another second, minute, hour, they could be getting tortured. Juniper refuses to be the little girl alone and scared in the bottom of Malfoy Manor listening to her friends screams of agony again.

And maybe, just maybe, she was itching for a good fight too.

There was an old saying about having your cake and eating it too, and it was a shame, a damn shame, Juniper couldn’t remember how it went.  

Leaning across the table, locked and loaded, Juniper bared down on the man who had caused her recent headache. “Listen, and listen closely,” two blue eyes blink behind the yellow glass, “you’re going to give me the frequency right now, or I’m going to leave this cabin and find a Peggie. Once I do, I’m going to bring them back here to take a message, and do you know what that message they’ll be carrying back to your brothers and sister in a box will be?” Another blink, another cold drift of stifled gust through the rusty-ruddy wood of the cabin, “it’s going to be your tongue.”

Joseph’s face doesn’t wash white, neither does his suited shoulders shiver, there is no outward sign of trepidation, of fear, at Juniper’s warning. Yet, it was as clear as day, as clear as his blue eyes behind the yellow sunglasses, that he believes her, believes she’d do it, and oh, oh how she would if he kept pushing her this way.

In ways she can’t quite name but hates all the more for it.

Instead, the small smile blooms. “Your father’s fire keeps you warm, but it will also burn you in the end… but you are not ready to listen yet,” yet, he says, not if, not maybe, yet, as if it was a given Juniper was going to ever listen to this madman with a rosary. “You hear my words but miss their meaning. Soon you’ll see. You’ll see. A broken chain is all it takes.” Juniper was about to reach over, grab him by the back of his head, right by his bloody man bun, and slam his fuckin’ face down onto the table when finally, finally, he gave her the code.

Snatching the radio back up, tuning it to the right station as she headed for the exit, Juniper didn’t spare Staci a backwards glance. “Keep and eye on him will you?” His answering yes was drowned out by the slam of the door.

Juniper takes a deep breath, steels herself for what she is about to do, prod the sleeping bear, and presses the button, bringing the walkie-talkie up to her mouth. “I have your brother, Joseph,” she asserts into the crackle of the line and to whoever was on the other end listening, “so let’s not beat around the bush, shall we? You have my colleagues; I have your preacher. You give me Whitehorse and Hudson,” Juniper hesitates with a huff, “and I suppose the Marshal, and I’ll give Joseph back. Decline the offer and I’ll send your brother back to you.” A beat, “In pieces.”

Her thumb lifts, the line clicks and then promptly falls silent for a long, long while. So long, in fact, Juniper thinks Joseph has gotten one over on her, thinks of heading back into the cabin and living up to her threats, thinks, maybe, his brothers and sister might not care that much for him and her assumed prized prisoner wasn’t much a key to the kingdom after all-

But the line clacks, there’s a drag of a breath, and a deep voice comes over the static. “Deputy Potter, is it?”

They know who she is then. 

“The one and only,” Juniper replies swiftly, softly, as if she didn't have a care in the world. She doesn’t know which brother this is, Jacob or John or John or Jacob, but it’s one of them, has to be, and now that she has them on the line she wants to get this whole thing over with. “I’m guessing this is either Jacob or John?”

There’s a break in the line, a moment taken too long, and the one on the other end is obviously debating on how much he wants to tell her. She doesn’t blame him, really. The less your enemy knew the more you had to use against them. “This is Jacob.”

The name doesn’t help put a face to the voice. Juniper’s still unsure which brother had been which back in the Church, but it does give her some ground to cover. What had it been Joseph had said? Jacob would have been leaving on his second tour of Iraq.

Jacob Seed was a veteran then, which meant he knew how to fight. He knew tactics and strategies, how to play dirty. It would make what was to come that much harder. Nonetheless, Juniper knew how to fight too, had been a soldier in her own way in her own war.

Still, it was best to tread on carefully.

“You have what I want, I have what you want,” Juniper emphasizes, “there’s an Elk Jaw Lodge not far from the bottom of the Whitetail Mountains. Do you know it?” The Whitetail Mountains had been the first place Juniper had thought of running to after leaving the range. She doesn’t know whether it was the cover of dense trees, or the fact she had spent a year on the run hopping from forest to forest, but she felt most safe in the woods. Most importantly, since coming to Hope County and getting a job, the Whitetail Mountains had been where she’d spent most of her free time.

Juniper knew this place better than any other, better than the Henbane or the Farm houses, and that, fingers crossed, would give her an upper hand.

There’s a gruff noise from over the line, a little like laughter if it came from the maw of a big dog, and the voice rumbles through the walkie-talkie brighter than it should be given the topic of conversation. “Oh, I know it.”

“Meet us there in an hour,” Juniper snipes back, “we’ll exchange hostages there. You can bring two men with you, any more and you’ll never spot us leaving. Any funny business,” impishly, Juniper doesn’t let slip that she’s the one planning on doing the funny business, “and I have a bullet for each of your siblings.”

The line lingers with a crackle, the beat of her heart, and Juniper counts them coming between her ribs. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. “One hour.” Jacob agrees after all. Juniper does not say goodbye, doesn’t reply, and neither does Jacob as she pockets the walkie-talkie onto her belt with a clip.

From behind her, the shack door opens.

“Green light?” Staci asked as he trundled down the broken porch, skipping over the last two broken boards.

“Green light,” Juniper hummed back, “one hour.”

“Please tell me you have a plan?” Staci shuffled next to her in the long, overgrown grass, “there’s only two of us, and you know they’re not only going to bring a few men. We’ll be lucky if they don’t fly in on chopper.”

“Oh, I know that” Jacob is a veteran, and Juniper… Juniper knows what that means. In a not so pleasant way, she’s one too. You don’t give the enemy ground to come forward before laying mines for them to trip on.

He’s going to bring more men, because Juniper would do the same in his shoes. He’s going to bring more men, and he’s going to try and make sure Juniper, nor Staci, not anyone else, would walk away from something like this to do what they’ve done again.

It would be a message not only to the Sheriff’s department, but to whatever resistance there might still be brewing up in Hope County.

It's fighting smarter not harder.

In the end, if it comes down to a fire-fight, an all-out gun-blaze, despite her magic, Juniper doesn’t think she’d come out of it merely shaking off gunpowder. All they would need is one good shot, where she’d need to hit however many times perfectly for every armed person Jacob brought to the ring.

So, in turn, she needs to fight smarter not harder.

There’s only one way Juniper knows how to do that.

Bluff.

“Oh, I have a plan alright,” Juniper swung her rifle off her back, settling the barrel over her shoulder, her shiny-metal ticket to winning this scuffle, and Staci’s mouth screws up in apprehension, puckering in alarm, “but you’re not going to like it.”

Chapter Text

“I’m not sure about this,” the voice on the other end of the two-way radio indorsed its sentiment loud and clear. “I’m really not sure about this.”

Rolling her eyes as she perched herself compact and unseen into the foliage of the tree, Juniper lowered the scope of her rifle she was using to snoop the area with, yanked off the wireless pinned to her flannel pocket, and bit back. “Now is not the time to lose your nerve, Staci.” Realizing how waspish and cold she sounded, Juniper tried again a little softer but no less determined. “The Seed envoy is due to arrive in about ten minutes,” just for good measure, “and I can’t do this without you. So I need your head in the game, and I need you on your toes,” and just to hammer how important this was, “or we’re not coming away from this cabin with all our limbs attached.”

“I know,” Staci breathed down the line. “I know,” Juniper once more raises her scope, sweeping it down and over to the small clearing before the lodge where Staci was standing next to a handcuffed Joseph Seed. “But why do I have to be down here by myself?”

“Because,” Juniper stressed with all the waning patience of a run-ragged mother being asked by her child why they can’t have ice cream for dinner for the seventh time in the same amount of minutes. “You can’t do what I do. This whole plan hinges on the fact that Jacob and whoever he brings doesn’t know about my… abilities. If he’s going to rock up with fifteen men at his back, the one way we’re going to stop him from charging us and taking our only leverage is by making him believe we have more. Do you remember how we’re going to do that, Staci?”

Through the scope, Juniper watches the man shuffle in the long grass before he finally gave in. “By you being out there. Where, when the time comes, you’ll fire off a warning shot at the group, do that… teleport-y thing you do, fire off another one, rinse and repeat until Jacob thinks we have him and his men surrounded.”

“Correct,” Juniper huffed. “So unless you can apparate all of a sudden, I’m needed out here and you’re needed down there, where you can keep our piglet quiet and silent on the fact that there’s really only two of us,” Juniper, by the lens of her gun, watches as Staci turns deliberately to Joseph, reaching over to smooth out the duct tape over the preachers mouth. “And where you can, fingers-crossed, get this hostage exchange over and done with without so much as a hiccup.”

“It’s the fingers-crossed part that worries me.” Staci edged; concern evident. Cruelly, for just a second, Juniper wishes it was Hudson she had grabbed from the burning chopper. Hudson was foolhardy, yes, perhaps a little too brass-tacks and kick-backs, but she had a pair of balls on her. Hudson wouldn’t think twice about Juniper’s plan. She’d be in it just for the chance to stick her middle finger up at the Seeds, come success or gunfire.

But Staci is not Hudson, and it’s not really his fault. He’s a blue-boy who’s used to runaway dogs and farmer spats over a fuckin’ pumpkin patch being his main keep-the-peace agenda. It’s not kind, and it sure as hell isn’t fair, for Juniper to hold Staci’s worry against him.

It also doesn’t mean she can’t be bloody annoyed to kingdom come that if now, right here, Staci wavers they’re both going to get a bullet in the head.

“Look,” Juniper stresses, “I get it. You’re nervous. That’s okay, I am too. But, and it’s a big fucking but, Pratt, neither of us can afford to show it. Jacob Seed is a veteran. We know this much. I’m guessing he can smell weakness from a mile off. We can’t give off the stench of prey or he’s going to leap,” because that’s what Juniper would do, “so I need you to take a deep breath, remember your badge, and play the part of a wolf, alright, even if you feel like a sheep right now.”

The line is silent for a long while, and Juniper watches through the narrowed tunnel of her scope as Staci sighs once, twice, runs a hand through his thick hair that’s fringing into greasy territory, and finally brings the radio back to his face. “Yeah, yeah,” he crackles through. “We can do this.”

“Damn right we can.” Juniper bolsters, because she really believes it. If the wind is right, the tracks hidden just enough in the underbrush, for just this once the deer can skewer the mountain lion. They just have to play their cards right. “So two-four buckeroo,” Juniper’s lens filters upwards and over, towards the mountain trail she can see in the distance with the aid of her scope, through the trees where white peeks between the trunks as it hurtles down the road. “Because the Bear is coming back to his den. Three minutes out. Two vans and two open bedded trucks from what I spy with my keen little eye. Definitely not just the two men Seed said he’d bring. Chin up and eyes out, Staci. The games on.”

Pulling the gun down, Juniper popped the cartridge and checked she was loaded before patting her jean pockets to make sure she had her ammo in quick reach. She'll, of course, use her wand if needs be, but Juniper would much prefer to keep that rabbit well and truly in the hat until dire circumstances called for her to whip it out.

She doesn’t see Staci lower his radio and clip it onto his belt for the last time, but he does give her one last parting message. “Game on.”

Juniper was proven right in her emphatic simile. Jacob Seed is the first to break the treeline, stalking into the clearing of Elk Lodge like a wolf on the prowl. Seconds later, Peggies follow like confetti in the wind, armed to the teeth but, unlike their leader in camo and scars, fretfully holding onto their guns and eyeing the land laid out before them as if they were crossing a minefield and not a mountain side.

Joseph and Staci stay at the lodge, just down from the wooden decking like Juniper had planned.

“You know,” Jacob starts, skulking for Joseph and Staci when he spots his brother in chains and silver tape. “I don’t know whether you are incredibly brave or incredibly stupid-“

Jacob doesn’t get very far. Not far at all. The tell-tale whistling kathump freezes him still as a shot bares out, aimed just a few feet in front of him where it imbeds in the dirt and the grass and explodes a daisy head.

Juniper is fast after that. She apparates, far enough away that the more quiet crack of apparition is left unheard by any other ears but her own, and she raises her gun, fires at the same spot, and does it all again. And again. And Again. All from high-up perches she’d scouted out earlier, from varying degrees around the whole clearing, just to really give the sensation of being completely, utterly, terribly surrounded.  

Only after the tenth shot is rung, when she’s had to reload several times in quick precession, does she dare stop.

Some ammo, after all, needed to be reserved for if shit hit the fan.

Nevertheless, Juniper raises her gun anew, if only to peer down the scope and into the clearing, fingers warm with gunpowder.

The Peggies had bungled themselves together like a warren of meerkats, wide-set eyes watery as they darted about the place, trying to find her or many hers in the treetops-

But Jacob Seed is still and silent. Still and silent for the entirety of two seconds before he’s fuckin’ laughing. With Staci’s radio permanently switched on so she can get the low-down of the happenings in quick-time, Juniper not only watches but listens.

“I’m guessing,” Jacob dismissively gestures to Staci, his voice gruff over the line “you’re the incredibly stupid one and you,” he turns his attention to the forest surrounding him, “are the incredibly brave one. I know you’re out there, Deputy Potter, and I know you can hear me. I can see that little radio your friend has tried to hide in his pocket. The lights flashing green.”

Fucking hell, Staci.

Still… still. She can work it. Work with it. Unhooking her own radio, Juniper figures Seed is close enough to Staci to hear her through the speaker.

“One more step and I’m taking your head off your shoulders. This is an SA-50 sniper I have in my hands and my crosshair is right between your eyes. You’ll be lucky if you’re left with a neck stump.” Remembering the plan, what it pins on, Juniper bluffs like she’s never bluffed before. “And I’ll have my men who, if you haven’t noticed have you surrounded, mow down you’re little fanboys which, by the way, I thought we agreed should be left at home in their playpens.”

“As you left your men at home?” Jacob bats back without missing a beat. It’s… unsettling, how easy they’ve seen through each other, even if Jacob is missing a large piece of the puzzle that is the same colour as magic. The truth is the only way a muggle Juniper would have come, would have agreed to come to this Texas hold ’em would have been if she had the men to bring with her.

Jacob knew that, and without knowing she had magic up her sleeve to mitigate the fact that she decidedly hasn’t got any men, he’d taken her being here by her having the men to do so and he’d planned for it with his own.

It feels a little bit like that strange dance you do in the street. Where you accidentally walk into someone, and they walk into you, and you both step left and right and left again, trying to slip past the other but only end up imitating.

Discomforting reflections.

“At least I brought along your preacher.” Juniper snipes back, finger now coming up to rest over the trigger of her gun, resting the radio on her shoulder and chin to talk. “Where’s my colleagues, Seed?”

Jacob does not answer her, not with words, but he nods over to his men, and they, too far from Staci to come through the line properly, shout something out behind them.

Four more Peggies immerge from the green, Hudson and the Marshal boxed in and paraded out like lambs from a paddock. From her spot, Juniper can’t see any outward signs of harm, not above bruises and scrapes that will heal but sting, but she does spot something that sends her blood pounding, heart racing, rage heating up in her chest.

“I might not be the best mathematician,” Juniper starts lowly, dangerously, as cool and hard as the metal of her weapon of choice. “But I can count to three and it seems you’re one down. Where the fuck is Whitehorse?”

“You see what’s interesting,” Jacob barters back coolly, a little too smug for Juniper’s liking, as if he knows something she doesn’t. He’s looking through the trees now, searching through the trunks. He knows she’s up high, has the angle right, but he still hasn’t got her quite pinned though he’s in the right quarter. Belatedly, Juniper remembers what Joseph had said about her sniper.

That’s Jacob’s favourite too.

He knows where to look because Jacob would be hiding in the same places she is.

Discomforting reflections indeed.

“Is that an exchange typically compares to something equal. Given you offered my brother, I thought I would be generous by handing over two instead of one. But three? Mmmm,” he hums, “That’s just greedy.”

“That is interesting,” Juniper responds, pressing deeper into her radio, holding tighter to her trigger. “Very interesting. But what is also interesting is I don’t give a shit.” She barks back. “We had an agreement, Seed. I’d let you bringing in men go because I did the same, but this? No. Grab your people while I still let you, leave Hudson and Marshal, and go back into your fuckin’ vans. Only when you bring back Whitehorse will I let your brother go.”

She must have said something he liked, something that tickled him, because Jacob is laughing again, and Juniper can only watch, seething, as the sunlight bounces of the shiny scars of his face as the skin is pulled tighter around keen, white teeth that flash.

“Good soldiers know when to cut their losses,” Jacob edges right a step, focusing down on her location though he was still a few good metres off. It was still impressive; Juniper would grudgingly admit. She hadn’t fired off a shot in a few minutes and Seed was still able to track her in the flora. “And you’re a good soldier, aren’t you, Deputy?”

So he’s picked up on that too, has he?

“Being a good soldier has nothing to do with it.” Juniper bites back, finger flexing, wishing to pull but tempering the desire. So sue her. The War was a touchy subject. “Being a decent human being? Yeah. Sorry if I have a problem with bloody cults and doomsday kidnappings. Now stop stalling. Get me Whitehorse.”

And Jacob is stalling. He might think he’s surrounded, but he’s got the men on the ground. It would be easy to charge Staci, snatch Joseph, and count those lost in the ensuing gunfire as collateral damage.

So why wasn’t he?

What's he waiting for?

“But you’re young,” Jacob says, not meanly but matter of fact, on the end of a sigh. “Still a little green around the edges. Proud. It’s that arrogance that’s going to cost you.”

“Arrogance?” Juniper asked. “I don’t see any arrogance. I see a very pissed off girl who’s patience is waning, and a ginger fuckin’ Seed who’s about to be one eye down.”

“Exactly.” Jacob laughs anew, laughs hard and long. “You’ve been looking at me when you should have been looking down.”

Juniper’s eye snatches back from the scope, her radio drops, bouncing off the branch she was perched on and falling to the forest floor. Her gaze follows it down, all the way down-

Down to the underwood where, surrounding her tree, several sets of yellow eyes stare back up with salivating maws and coats of silver, white and black.

The pack of overgrown, too large wolves notice they have her attention, and that’s when they start growling and barking, viciously scrabbling at the trunk with mean claws as sharp as stake knives, tearing off great big chunks of bark.

Wolves can’t climb, no, but they can circle, and they can alert to a position.

The red dot of a sniper blinks to life on Juniper’s chest, right where her radio once rested, where her heart was now thrumming, steadying.

Jacob had brought his own snipers. She had thought if anyone was going to be doing the sniper’ing on his side, it would have been him given his history.

Juniper had thought wrong, obviously, or Jacob knew she’d think that and played an ace. Fuck. Juniper doesn’t know which option she dislikes more. The one where she’d over assumed, or the one where she’d been seen through so bloody clearly.

Either way, she had two seconds to act and two options to take.

Take a bullet or jump down into a roving mass of killer, unnaturally large wolves.

Well... Geronimo. 

Juniper takes the dive, and the bullet skims past, imbedding into the tree as she falls backwards, splinters cutting her cheek up as she falls and falls and falls.