by Rider, C. P.
Both men looked uncomfortable.
"If this had happened to one of you on the same night—morning—your fathers went missing, would you be focused on the things you couldn't change or the one thing you could?"
"We'd focus on the thing we could," Amir said. "I see your point."
I took a deep, shuddering breath. Fury moved through me like a brush fire, picking up the untamed undergrowth and weeds of the things I wasn't ready to face. Damn it, I would not cry.
"Okay, fine. You want the truth? I'm floundering. I have no idea who I am, and if I lose my dad, I may never know. Hell, even if I find my dad, I may never know, because he lies to me like it's his job.
"I shifted into a wolf tonight. I had paws and a muzzle, and I wanted to bite down and tear things with my long, sharp teeth. My fur was the color of my uncle's fur, and when I looked in Juan's truck mirror and saw myself, I wanted to scream in frustration because he must have known. The person I loved and trusted most in the world knew this enormous secret and never shared it with me, never prepared me, and yet all I could think about was how much I needed him. I have no idea how to be a shifter or a wolf.
"I'm still trying to figure out who I am as a spiker, and now I've got this to deal with? And let's not forget that my being a shifter and a telepathic spiker means that I am a crossbreed, and unless I'm mistaken, I've been one all my life."
"Neely, I told you…"
I glared at Lucas until he stopped trying to talk. "You once told me that I put off this—what did you call it again? Flaming energy? Well, I guess we know what that's all about, don't we? I'm an actual freak of nature. A natural-born crossbreed. Hallelujah and holy shit, because I know this is big, but I have no idea where to put all this … bigness I feel."
Lucas pulled up to my dad's house, cut the engine, and reached for my hand. "As you said, let's focus on the thing we can change right now. We'll discuss the rest later." He looked at Amir and then at me. "Deal?"
"Deal," we replied in unison.
Even as I agreed, I found myself turning inward, examining my behavior over the past few weeks. The alphas I'd spiked without hesitation, including the old man in Guillermo's head. Looking back at my actions with the knowledge I had now, I realized that I didn't feel an ounce of guilt about it, and that wasn't like me.
"Neely, stick close to us," Lucas said.
I shook away my worrisome thoughts and forced myself to concentrate on the latest disaster—my missing dad.
"How are we getting in? Breaking and entering?" Lucas looked a little too excited about that possibility.
"Sorry to disappoint you, but Lewiston gave me a key last time I was here."
I unlocked the door and we filed inside, Amir in the lead, Lucas bringing up the rear. I was in the middle, protected. An emotionally anesthetized telepathic-spiker-wolf shifter who needed protection?
Things had truly gotten weird.
We crossed the threshold and walked through an icy invisible wall. My lungs seized and my heart stuttered in my chest. If I had been emotionally numb before, I sure as hell wasn't now. I hooked one arm around Amir's waist and yanked him back, ramming into Lucas behind me. Fisting the front of his T-shirt with my other hand, I dragged both shifters out of the house and down the sidewalk.
"What the hell is going on? Oh, shit." Lucas's voice caught. "Neely, honey, come here."
"Move," I yelled, dragging them. "We're still too close."
"Slow down. Look." Lucas wrapped his hand around mine. Only one of the hands was human, and it wasn't mine. "We're in a human neighborhood. We have to be careful."
"She panicked and shifted to hybrid." Amir stared at my arm wrapped around him. "No wonder she was so strong." To me, he said, "You can let go now. I'm okay."
Teeth chattering from the chill I'd gotten walking through that weird wall, I shook my head. "No, I can't. We're still too close. Didn't you feel it?"
"The only thing I felt was the air conditioning and a wolf's arm. Too close to what?"
The front door flew open and a white wolf raced out with something in its mouth, and Sampson Ibarra on its tail. He was losing ground fast. Sampson was a trancer, not a shifter, which meant he was only as fast as the fastest human at best, and could never keep up with a wolf shifter.
"Stop that fucker," he screamed.
Amir ducked behind a bushy crape myrtle to shift, but I was already halfway there, so I lunged after the wolf, only to find myself with a mouthful of grass when Lucas tackled me. I bucked him, trying to get free.
"Humans," he hissed into my ear. "I need to change you back right now. They're watching us through the windows."
"I can do it," I said, but he was already pushing calming alpha energy into me the way Juan had. It was less invasive than what I went through with Alpha Juan, but that might have had to do with Lucas's and my bond—also, I wasn't naked this time.
But I was freezing. Still so cold.
"Amir will track the wolf," Lucas said. "Let's go inside and get away from prying eyes."
Every nerve in my body iced over. "No."
"Neely?" Sampson jogged to where Lucas and I were crouched on the front lawn. "What's going on?"
An eagle took flight to the left of us, flying in the same direction as the white wolf.
My teeth would not stop chattering. I'd gotten an unnatural chill in there.
"Did you do something to the doorway to my dad's house?"
"Nothing but walk through it. MacLeod's got the air conditioner turned up to Antarctica." Sampson rubbed his shoulders. "Froze my ass off."
Lucas looked from me to Sampson, obviously puzzled. Had he not felt the unwholesomeness of that cold?
"What are you doing here?" I pushed to my feet and Lucas did the same.
"Trying to find Lewiston and your dad. They disappeared and the agency would like to find them, so they sent me." He shivered. "Damn, it was cold in there."
I stared at the front door, puzzled. There was definitely something wrong with that entryway. Even the trancer had felt it, though, like Amir, he'd assumed it was my dad's air conditioning.
It wasn't air conditioning, I was certain of that. "Was the white wolf inside the house when you got here?"
"Yeah. She grabbed something and took off."
"What?" Lucas stood beside me, staring into the sky—looking for Amir, I assumed.
"Radio or cell phone or something like that," Sampson said.
"What would an arctic wolf need with a cell phone?"
"What would she need with a radio? Hell if I know, Alpha Blacke."
While the two males talked, I stared at the house, uneasy. Intuition scratched at the back door of my brain. My subconscious was picking up something that my conscious mind wasn't.
Cold air. What was significant about a wall of cold air?
"Maybe Neely could look inside and see if anything is missing." Sampson shrugged. "The wolf came out of one of the back rooms. Looked like the master bedroom."
No way was I going in there until I figured this out. "Sorry to disappoint you, but this is the second time I've been to my dad's place. I wouldn't be able to tell you what was supposed to be in there."
"Wouldn't hurt to take a look," Lucas said.
"No point."
Cold. Shivering. Cold spot.
A ghost? Of course not. I'd been listening to the witches too much. A teensy tiny cold front? Some sort of low-pressure system specific to the atrium in my dad's open floor plan ranch house?
I shook my head at my own idiocy, then stopped.
Cold front. Low pressure system.
Weather.
My conversation with Alpha Juan came back to me.
"We can't cause physical harm like this."
"What could do it then?"
"A witch? A mystic? A mage? I don't know. Something capable of wielding magic, I'd imagine."
"Magic. Mage, witch—mystic," I said. "Meteorological, like Barney. Something to do with affecting or predicting the weather."
"If yo
u don't want to, I'll go in and poke around, see what I can find." Sampson flung this over his shoulder as he stepped onto the sidewalk leading up to the porch.
"Stay away from the house," I said.
"What? Why?" The trancer didn't stop walking. In fact, he moved faster.
"I think a mystic did something to the house. Don't go in there."
Lucas's gaze went from me to Sampson. "Ibarra, you should listen to her."
"I just walked out of here. There's nothing wrong."
Exasperated, I snapped, "Sampson, although I would love nothing more than to watch you take a long walk off a short pier, I have a feeling I'm going to need your help finding my dad, so stop walking. There is something wrong with that house. Stay away from it."
"What is it, Neely?" Lucas asked.
"I don't know. I need time to think about it."
I glossed over the trancer's mind. The dumb shit was going to ignore my warning. He thought I was irrational and that my judgment couldn't be trusted. Which meant the only way I could stop him was—
"Fine. If that's the way it's got to be, just remember you asked for it." I drew energy from Lucas and Sampson, and locked onto Sampson’s brain waves. The trancer and I had a history and I had spiked him a couple of times before, which made it faster and easier.
And, I admit, kind of fun.
I spiked him. Not to kill, though definitely to hurt, which felt almost as nice as killing him would have. I've been told that a spike done this way felt like a red-hot ice pick plunged into the skull but left no lasting damage. This way I could still use Sampson to track down my father, yet also enjoy him writhing in pain on the sidewalk, which he did the second I pierced his brain.
"Stop it!"
"Are you spiking him?" Lucas did a double take, barked out a laugh. "You are. I bet that feels good."
"Yes. Does." I forced out. Sampson was the same kind of paranormal as me and because of that, he was able to resist my ability easier than most. "Fighting it. Grab him."
Lucas raced over to the trancer, locked both arms around the huskier man's chest, and hauled him back to us. I released his brain, slowly winding down the spike.
"You spiked me," Sampson yelled. "What the hell did you do that for?"
My breath whooshed out of me. "I once promised that I would spike you the second I laid eyes on you again, and I like to keep my promises—even if this one was a little late. Plus, this." I twisted a long, bushy branch off the crape myrtle tree where Amir had shifted and dragged it up to my dad's porch. Using the branch, I swung open the door, standing off to one side so both Lucas and Sampson could see what I was about to do.
"I'm going to shut down the path you used to get into my head," Sampson yelled.
"If you were smart, you would have done it after the last time I spiked you, dickhead. Thank goodness you didn't, though, because…"
I shoved the top part of the branch through the cold spot and yanked it out again.
The leaves and branches came away coated with ice. It was so heavy I had to drag it down the sidewalk.
Lucas met me halfway and I handed it over to him. He knocked on the frozen wood. "Whoa. Damn thing is frozen all the way through. Better thank her, Ibarra. She just saved your life."
Sampson cursed. "I owe you again, spiker. Damn it all."
The grin that twisted my lips was not at all kind. "Yes, you do."
Lucas folded his arms over his chest. "Nice job."
"Thanks." I smiled at them both. At Lucas with love, at Sampson with malice.
And then my dad's house exploded.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I woke up a short while later with my face buried in Lucas's belly. He lay flat on his back in my dad's front yard with Sampson Ibarra's arm flung over his head.
Lucas shoved the arm aside and mouthed something to Sampson. His brows were low over his eyes and his mouth was turned down, so I assumed he was annoyed. I couldn't hear anything except a high-pitched buzzing. From the confused look on his face and the continued shakes of his head, Sampson couldn't hear anything, either.
Rolling off Lucas and onto the grass beside him, I pushed myself into a seated position with trembling arms. My face hurt. My chest, too. Ugly gray smoke boiled into the beautiful blue sky. Fire danced over the remaining pieces of what used to be a nice house in an equally nice Austin suburb.
"My dad's going to be so pissed when he finds out that the receipt he saved from a VCR he bought in 1985 went up in flames." I laughed hysterically, stopping only when pain shot through my ribs. Explosions hurt. I'd watched enough documentaries with Chandra on weapons and explosives to know this, but the reality was So. Much. Worse.
Amir appeared in my line of sight, half-dressed. He mouthed something to Lucas, then scooped me up and ran to the rental car, where I was unceremoniously dumped into the back seat. Lucas climbed in beside me, Sampson tumbled into the passenger seat. Amir shoved the rest of his clothes into the back seat and then climbed behind the wheel and drove away.
"If I'm a shifter now, shouldn't I be able to heal myself?" I couldn't hear the sound of my voice properly, though I was pretty sure I was yelling. Given the wince I got from Lucas, I upgraded my assessment of "pretty sure" to "certain."
"Who knows?" Lucas mouthed the words and shrugged.
He cupped his hands over my ears and closed his eyes. It took a moment or two, but gradually my ears popped, and sound came rushing in. The soreness in my chest, along with the discomfort on my face and limbs, faded. Blistered skin appeared on Lucas's face and his body bowed at the waist. A minute or so later, he straightened, spine cracking as he sat up.
After a few deep breaths, he reached over the seat and did the same for Sampson Ibarra.
Thank you. I sent the words into his head, hoping he was open to receiving them.
He was. You're welcome, sugar cookie. You okay now?
Yes. I leaned over and kissed him. You?
Yeah. Sorry I didn't heal you right away. I had to heal myself first. That explosion knocked me on my ass.
"Thanks, Alpha Blacke," Sampson said aloud, then slapped his hands over his ears.
"Take a minute to get used to it," Lucas whispered. The sound grated against my raw ears.
"You okay, fourth?" Lucas asked.
Amir nodded. "I wasn't as close as you all were."
Lucas side-eyed me. I can feel you wanting to talk. Give it another few minutes.
I tried, but I got impatient. "Who blew up the house?"
"Ugh," Sampson groaned. "Lower your voice."
"The white wolf," Amir replied as he merged onto a back road I didn't recognize from our trip there. The scenic route, or rather, the human law enforcement-avoidance route.
"How?"
Amir snatched something out of the cupholder in the center console and tossed it to me. "With this. She dropped it when I swooped down to grab her. Then she disappeared."
"Disappeared?" I held the cell phone between two fingers, as if it had been constructed out of razors and broken glass.
"We're talking thin air," he said. "Houdini stuff."
Lucas peered down at the phone's screen. "Why bother?"
After veering down yet another back road, Amir glanced in the rearview mirror at Lucas. "What do you mean?"
"Why bother with a phone detonator? Why wait to detonate? Why drop the phone and then disappear? Why not take it with you?"
"Because the phone is significant." I turned the plain black rectangle over in my hand. A pay-as-you-go- type smartphone, something one could pick up at DiscMart. A burner phone.
"Exactly." Lucas pushed me into my seat properly and snapped in my seatbelt.
"Worrier."
"Pays to be cautious." He belted himself in too. "Amir is driving, after all."
The eagle shifter snorted. "I'm an excellent driver. Also, you owe me combat pay for riding with Gert. Neely and I discussed it."
I nodded. "It's fair. Pay him."
The burner phone blipped. A tex
t message. Two more blips followed.
"Should I look at the messages, you guys? You don't think it's another bomb, do you?"
Lucas sniffed the phone. "The cell itself is not a bomb, if that's what you mean. Will it set another bomb off? I can't tell. Then again, if that's what the white wolf wants, she'll do it whether you open the messages or not. Might as well look at them."
There were three messages total. One was a GIF image, one was a picture taken with the phone, and one was text. The GIF was of a railroad spike. Clever—not. The second was far more disturbing. It was a photo of my dad, unconscious and secured to a chair with duct tape. The third was instructions. An address in Austin and an admonition.
Come alone.
I read it out loud.
"Well, that's just not fucking going to happen," Lucas said.
"It might have to happen if you want to help Henry MacLeod." The trancer glanced over his shoulder at me. "From what information I've gathered in the last few hours, these people don't mess around."
I set the phone on the seat. "Tell me what you know."
"Not a lot, to be honest. But we do know this Legion group is connected to the sanctuary where you were held a couple months ago. Your dad was looking into it, according to his files."
"Legion ran Garrett Harris's sanctuary?"
The idea was terrifying. I'd thought Harris was a monster, but Legion—specifically, their leader, Elijah—made Garrett Harris look like an amateur.
He frowned, shook his head. "No, those bastards didn't run it. Harris did, under some obscure governmental hierarchy. But they tried to take it over and run it through Harris. It didn't work."
"Why not? Seems as if the two would have a lot in common," Amir said as he made his way back onto the freeway and headed toward Alpha Juan's house.
"Get this. He objected to their leader's casual use of the name Elijah." Sampson laughed. "He had no problem with the murdering paranormals part, but Harris wasn't going to put up with them besmirching a biblical hero. Guy fancies himself religious."
"Guess he just overlooks that whole 'love your neighbor' thing," Amir said.
"Not at all." I glanced out the window as we passed through a neighborhood full of family houses and everyday things. For a moment, I wished the world really was as normal as a middle-class suburban subdivision at eight in the morning on a weekday made you believe it was.