“What is it?” he asked sharply.
I shook my head and looked away.
“God dammit, Merci,” he yelled. “Stop lying to me.”
I slammed my hands on the arms of the chair. “Fine. You want the truth? I think they tortured you with the same thing they used on Benny. Those are textbook needle marks, and a lot of needle marks means a lot of drugs, or in your case, demon essence. It could have made you hallucinate, which explains why you remember steel cages.”
He stared at me. “And being lost in the shift.”
A kind of fear I had never seen before crossed Rafe’s face and it tore through my chest, made me think that maybe the truth did hurt more than it helped. His face twisted as he turned away from me.
“And I was scared out of my mind because I didn’t know enough about magic to be sure it couldn’t take you like it took Benny. So I motored it here as fast as I could.”
He lifted his arm to run his fingers through his mane of hair but winced and held his mottled side. “How could you even hesitate to tell me what you are?”
The truth was pulled up through my mouth like steel wool on a string. “It scares the hell out of me. First, a new magical world to process, then an ability, and now knowing I’m connected to something so big the city’s soul might hang in the balance. It’s enough to blow anyone’s mind. Forgive me for needing time to process. Not all of us were born knowing this stuff. ”
His oceanic gaze drew up to mine and I felt a twinge that had nothing to do with the Charm. “Merci Lanard never runs scared.”
“I’m not running now. I’ve always known the darkness was there, but I’ve faced it alone.”
“You had Ethan.”
I exhaled the truth. “And look what happened to him. To Dot. To Benny.”
Rafe slowly swung his legs over the edge of the bed and I think it was then he realized he was naked underneath the navy blue comforter. He pulled it across his lap and leaned forward on his knees.
“Look what happened to you when you tried to protect me.”
I could feel the heat radiating off his bare chest, like standing in front of an oven. I didn’t want to admit that feeling his energy, his power around me again, gave me hope that maybe we could eventually get back to that journalist and professor tag team.
The storm in my head was quiet, I was warm, as his heat flowed around us. But he was injured and I needed him better. I needed Rafe at full strength.
I pushed myself up from the chair and grabbed his bowl of spaghetti. “I’ll go warm this up for you.”
“So you do cook?”
It was only a moment of levity, but it brightened my suddenly darker world. “Brush your teeth. Put on some pants. Meet me downstairs.”
Rafe leaned against the doorframe. He’d managed a tee shirt and a pair of lounge pants.
“It’s still in the microwave.”
He shuffled into the space and pulled out a fork from a drawer, then the steaming bowl of noodles from the microwave.
I stayed out of his way and sat on the far counter by the window as he spun a huge fork-full of noodle and devoured half the bowl in one bite.
“You know your way around this place pretty well.”
I waited while he chewed. “I spend a lot of weekends here.”
“Why?”
Rafe only stuffed his mouth with another huge bite. His eyes fluttered closed as he relished the homecooked meal. His energy emanated from him and slipped around me like a warm, welcomed blanket.
“What were you researching?” he asked after he swallowed.
“Don’t you want to wait to talk shop until after the spaghetti?”
He took another huge bite, polishing off the bowl. He set it in the sink and licked his lips. “I’m a day behind, and there is a deadline, literally speaking.”
I sighed. I didn’t want to get started on it. I didn’t want to get my brain back on the murdering Demon who was after my head. But Rafe was willing to talk to me, which felt like a good first step.
“Piper wants us to look into different kinds of Demons to crack which is possessing Cartwright.”
“Look at you, all fighting with the big lads.”
“I’m just a—”
He was standing before me in the blink of an eye. He was so close, he nearly wedged himself between my knees. “No. You are in this, you are the one who can take them down. You can’t deny that anymore, Merci.”
I frowned. “What are you talking about?”
He reached out and grabbed my arm and pulled it into the moonlight streaming through the kitchen window. His hot fingers crawled up my arm as his thumb caressed the inside of my forearm where the white streak gleamed.
I studied the deep line. I’d never really looked at it, never wanted to look at it, never really even wanted to acknowledge its existence. But it had healed to be part of me now. This had started it all and I was going to end it.
Rafe looked down at the wound. “I have made it a point to know about evil, in all its forms. If they were after you because you pissed someone off, then they must have discovered something in your blood. Something different from the rest of us, Merci. It makes you a—”
“Lilin.” The truth sprang out of my mouth like a jack-in-the-box.
Rafe dropped my arm and stepped away, his eyes wide in disbelief.
The truth was out now, no need in keeping the rest of the story from him. “Piper told me while you were resting. One-sixteenth Lilin.”
He leaned against the counter and turned his gaze to the sink and the moonlit window. He distracted himself by getting a small glass of water and gulping that down.
I could feel my face, my body cool down now that he’d pulled away, and it made something flutter in my stomach, anxiously awaiting what he would ask, what he would say, or how fast he would run.
Even though he kept his gaze from mine, I could feel his tension, but was it anger or fear? I was growing more aware of what state his inner wolf was in. Maybe I was getting a little too used to being around his energy. Accustomed to the way he radiated all the time.
“Ethan pegged me.”
“No ordinary human could be as fearless as you.”
He finally looked up and there was a hint of a smile in the very corner of his eyes, but something else was keeping him from actually revealing his mirth.
“All I got was the Charm and the penchant for self-destruction. I don’t have power like you guys do, or at least not enough anyone can detect. But apparently, it makes me a great target for a demon.”
I was waiting for him to get angry, for him to tell me a Lilin shouldn’t be here, that Demons should be burned at the stake like they’d burned so many others.
But he wasn’t running. He was looking at me with this expression I couldn’t read. “How does it actually work, your Charm? You mentioned a storm.”
I had the words now to tell him what had been happening since I was a teen. Though I described to Ethan what I thought it was, some obsessive compulsive behaviors, the books and Piper had given me language and a context to understand what was actually going on in my brain. More importantly, I wanted to tell him. I wanted him to know everything.
“Something will happen, like a question or adrenaline, and the magic swarms in my head, like a thunderstorm. Then I have to look someone in the eye, focus the storm, and lock into them. Then I ask them a question and I pull the truth from them. I’ve been using it my whole life and never even knew it was magic.”
“And that is everything?”
“That’s all I know as of this moment.”
His hands tightened around the edge of the counter. He seemed to be formulating something, working his own words around into the right order. I only hoped it wasn’t another argument.
“When the Great Shifter War happened, I was on Jovan’s side.”
“What?” I questioned reactively, immediately putting my hands over my mouth; I didn’t want the Charm to get in the way of his truth.
“When the call to arms went out, my pack and I were on his side, not Piper’s. Jovan didn’t just call all the Shifters, he’d been recruiting for months. He came to me and I said yes. I’ve been possessed by a Demon before. Voluntarily. Knew exactly what was happening the whole time.”
I slipped off the edge of the counter and shrank the space between us. I knew about the Great Shifter War, but I hadn’t expected this. Rafe was so kind all the time, so gentle, so funny and considerate. I couldn’t believe that he was evil. But I did remember something that Piper had told me, that a person with something broken, something scarred, could easily be controlled.
I wondered what Rafe’s something was. He had never mentioned his life much before Philadelphia, never gone into details about Scotland. But then again, I hadn’t offered many details either. But I knew the truth of it in my gut. And I was possibly the only person who could prove that to him.
I would know a lie if I heard one and I was willing to risk him seeing me as a monster to help him understand what I had always known.
“Are you under his control now?”
“No,” Rafe said quickly.
“Have you been at any point since the day that Piper saved you?”
“No.”
“Do you want to be under his control?”
“No.”
“Then why are you worried about it? According to the Guide, half of the Shifters on the planet were under Jovan’s control.”
Rafe turned away. “Because I was supposed to be strong. I was Primo and I should have been stronger than that. It was my responsibility to keep my pack safe, but I was weak and they all suffered.”
“The book said no blood was shed that day.”
“No one was hurt, but because of me, my whole pack fell to him like dominos. They will carry that stain with them for the rest of their lives.”
“So afterwards you stayed here as penance?”
“I figured if I was that weak once, then maybe I should be here, close to the Den Mother, to keep me out of trouble. My pack chose a new Primo and went back home. I haven’t spoken to them since.”
“So why does Levi hate you? You did the right thing for your pack.”
“Piper is the only one who knows the whole story. Levi thinks I stayed because I wanted to control this pack. He’s always been jealous of Piper’s attention toward me.”
I watched him stare out the window at the moon for a good while. I had to know. Had to know if the Demon still had a way to control him again, not just for me this time, but for the whole pack, once and for all. “What gave him a way in?”
“Pride,” he said, still looking out the window, his arms crossed over his chest. “I was young, twenty-two and barely had enough power to be Primo.” He turned back to me and leaned against the counter. “He offered me enough to be the strongest Primo in Britain, to take over the other packs even.”
“But you’re good now. You just said so to a human lie detector.”
His jaw dropped for a moment and then he closed it. He watched me and I didn’t even dream of trying to figure out what he was thinking. He would tell me if he wanted and I would be patient for that. Patient for the first time in my life.
He was good now, had been fighting the good fight for seventeen years. But now I was here. This Demon in sheep’s clothing. His darkest secret was that he fell victim to a Demon, and one was standing right in front of him. He wasn’t safe with me. No one was.
“I need to sleep.” I winced at the bitterness that flooded my senses from my own deception.
He frowned. “No, you’re running. What did I say?”
I had to look away from him because the answer was on the very tip of my tongue.
He grabbed my arm and took my chin, forcing our eyes to one another’s. His words were low yet piercing between us. “This might be the one time in your life where someone will understand the truth about what you are and will never judge you.”
My pounding heart kicked the confession out of my mouth. “I saw the Demon speak through Benny, be inside his head and control him. And I knew exactly what that felt like because I’d been there moments earlier, compelling him. It puts me in league with a Demon, Rafe. A Demon who is feeding and corrupting and killing its way across the city.”
“But, Merci, it’s not the ability, it’s how you use it.”
I pulled my face out of his grasp. “You all keep saying that. But it’s not, is it? This isn’t an ability. This is me, this is who I am. My job, my drinking, the hunger for truth. This is who I have always been.”
He didn’t seem to have anything to say to that.
I straightened my shirt, pulling the knit sleeves down over my hands, hiding the scar and the memory of his fingers. “You have fought your one temptation and built a life for yourself. But me? I will use the demonic ability every time, no matter how much it hurts me, no matter how much chaos it causes, because it’s who I am.”
I pulled away from him and took a few steps toward the door. “Get some rest, Rafe. You’ll need it for tomorrow.”
I was almost out the door, was almost free of the weight in his gaze.
“Don’t you want to know why I got angry with you?”
My feet stopped moving. I willed them to go, to flee, but they seemed to want to hear his answer. I turned around but remained in the doorframe. “I lied to you.”
“Well, yes. I mean, I had told you everything about our world and then I find out about this huge secret. So yes, I was pissed. But it wasn’t like I had told you everything either. I don’t run from anger, Merci. I deal with it. It’s part of the package.”
I looked up at him and our eyes locked.
“I ran because I was scared. Classic animal instinct.”
“Of me?”
“Of the fact there was nothing keeping me from getting what I wanted.”
I gasped, catching the last bit of oxygen as it left the room. Rafe crossed the kitchen as he spoke, a slow stalking as he joined me in the doorframe. “When you were Ethan’s human partner, I could do what I wanted, be open with you, and didn’t matter what I felt because I couldn’t do anything about it. You were human, and I can’t be with a human.”
He ran his fingers up my arm and his hand rested at the base of my neck. “But when you weren’t, when you were one of us, you suddenly became a freedom that I haven’t let myself imagine in a very long time.”
My cheeks burned and a different sort of sizzling covered my skin, another sort of magic I hadn’t experienced in years.
“I’m surprised you haven’t asked the one question I was sure you would.”
The moment our eyes locked, the question was pulled from my tongue. “Why did your wolf find me and not Piper?”
Everything about him softened. “There’s my brilliant journalist. Ask me with the Charm.”
I couldn’t fight it. It was like ringing a doorbell in a house full of dogs. It was summoned, and even with his heat around me, I still knew when the magic settled in. I didn’t flinch when the chill ran down my spine, when the Charm gathered up inside my head. I had to tread water for a moment in his blue eyes before I found the spot and dived in. Our connection wasn’t static but more of a smooth rope tethering us together.
I licked my lips. “Why did your wolf find me?”
His eyes watered, and I knew he felt the Charm this time, had opened himself up to the truth as well. He was going to face it, head on, and not look away.
He smiled as he answered. “Because you have become my home, Merci. Where I feel safe and welcomed.”
Rafe leaned forward and I kissed him. His lips were soft but firm, and it was obvious he knew what he wanted too. My knees went weak when he lowered his shields, bathing me in his scent, the feeling of his warm fur again my neck, the taste of him in my mouth.
He wrapped his arm around my waist to hold me and turned us to press against the doorframe, bracing me with his solid body, keeping me close and upright. He brought the other hand up to my face,
to curl around my jaw, to kiss me deeper.
I wrapped my arms around his middle, ran my hand around those wonderfully wide shoulders. I wanted to lose myself in that warmth, where the questions stopped and there was only blissful silence.
He hissed and pulled away, leaving me wanting in midair. We were both panting, skin hot. Rafe looked at me in the moonlight with those sparkling blue eyes, his cheeks flushed.
“What’s wrong?” I pulled my hands away from him.
“Even Primos need time to heal.”
He nestled his face against mine. Our chests pressed against one another as he kept me pinned to the frame of the door. His body felt delicious, the long line of his muscles, his strength. And knowing exactly what was underneath the tee shirt didn’t take away from the heat of the moment.
It was freeing. A wave of emotion hit me hard. Safe. I felt safe for the first time in a long time. I was relaxed for the first time in a long time. Like I had someone to share everything with. I felt lighter.
“That was really nice.” His breath caressed my neck, and my skin tingled behind my right ear.
“I was afraid I’d be rusty.”
He smiled. I could feel it on my cheek, in the shift of his chest muscles as he slid his hand down into mine, our fingers entwining. I’d studied his hands, but I couldn’t imagine how perfectly they would fit into my own.
It was that exact moment I knew I was sunk. I knew there was no avoiding this truth now. He had his own wounds and he knew everything, my truth, my heritage, my issues, and yet he was still standing here, weathering the storm.
“I think we should get you to bed, Professor MacCallan. We have a long day of book reading ahead of us.”
I’d never seen an eyebrow arch quite as high as his did as he asked, “Will you be staying with me?”
I shook my head. “You’re injured, and I need my sidekick back to one hundred percent.”
I pulled him toward the stairs with our joined hands.
“Sidekick?”
“Fine. Partner.”
He stopped walking across the living room and turned me toward him. “Is it really partner, Merci? Not to sound needy, but for all I know, you just have a soft spot for wolves.”
The Truth About Night Page 23