by Gwen Rivers
Liam nods. “They’re gathering there. I’ll drive to the airport, and you can take the car from there.”
Harmony and Autumn could. Aiden would be shifting to sparks to get himself across the barrier as soon as possible.
Two exits from the airport, Liam curses. “We’re being tailed.”
Aiden checks the rearview mirror. “You sure?”
The wolf’s jaw clenches. “It turned out of the development with us and is hanging back just enough to be conspicuous.”
“Where?” Aiden turns in his seat and spies the black sedan. “Harmony? Any insight?”
She shakes her head. “This isn’t part of my vision.”
“Try and shake him.” Aiden grits his teeth as Liam spins the wheel and cuts down a side alley.
The black sedan follows. The driver fishtails in the middle of the street. The sound of blaring horns and squealing brakes fills the cold winter air.
“Oh, he’s not even trying to pretend,” Liam grunts.
Aiden rolls his window down. “Head out of the city. Don’t meet up with the others unless you’re sure you’ve lost them.”
“What are you going to do?” Harmony asks.
Aiden retrieves the vial from his jacket pocket and thrusts it at her. “Stay safe. And whatever you do, don’t let this fall into the wrong hands.”
He dissembles into a shower of sparks and drifts out the window.
Comeuppance
Angrboda and Chloe return to find me poring over family albums with Sophie.
“That was your wedding dress?” I ask, astonished to find it was a pair of cutoffs, a white tank top, and a veil.
She shrugs. “I’m not much of a dress girl.”
“Funny, neither is Nic,” Chloe winks.
“Anything?” I ask when my aunt plops down into the chair next to me.
She helps herself to a cookie and shakes her head, red-gold curls bouncing. “Diddly freaking squat.”
A knock sounds on the door.
“Are you expecting someone?” Angrboda asks Sophie.
Sophie frowns. “Garret won’t be back with the boys until after dinner.”
“Nic, stay where you are,” Chloe advises me as she moves to the door. “Angrboda, watch them.”
A small shiver runs through me. It’s not cold. In spite of the relentless wind, the house is warm and comforting, the fire crackling in the grate. No, it’s more a frisson of anticipation.
And suddenly I know who is there.
“Don’t!” I rise up out of the chair, knocking the album to the floor.
Chloe turns to look at me a second before the door is kicked in by none other than Agent Hanson.
Beside her, her wrists in cuffs, stands Laufey, Aiden’s grandmother. And as a giant, she’s a key to the pocket realm.
“I only want the girl.” Hanson has her weapon drawn. “Give her to me and no one else will get hurt.”
I fight the terror that is clawing at my insides. No, I can’t go back. I won’t go back.
“Not happening,” Chloe snarls. Her eyes begin to swirl.
Before I can blink, Hanson fires her faux Taser weapon right at Chloe. Light fills the small space crackling blue and purple streaks. My aunt shudders and collapses to the ground.
“Quick, out the back,” I shove Sophie in front of me towards the kitchen door. The tranquility of the domestic scene is shattered with the arrival of one determined FBI agent.
“I’ll cover you,” the giantess shouts over her shoulder.
Is Chloe dead? No, that’s not Hanson’s style. She likes to play with her prey. If Agent Hanson has the means to fell my aunt, Sophie and I don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.
Sophie stumbles and I pull her upright. I will get her out and then double back with Angrboda to rescue Chloe. I’ll be damned if I let that bitch take my aunt.
A growl sounds from my left, and I turn just in time to see a large black wolf streaking past us down the hill.
I freeze in my tracks. Aiden?
It can’t be. Yet it is, because a moment later, as he runs past us toward the black sedan in the driveway, the vehicle fireballs.
“Come on.” Another man has appeared from gods alone know where. He’s roughly my age with shaggy dark hair. “He told me to get you out.”
“My aunt.” I gasp as I look up into his different colored eyes. “They have her.”
He curses and then begins to…melt. That’s the only way to explain his change, with his skin sloughing off and hair sprouting from where it had been.
Within moments he stands before me on four paws. Only the eyes are the same.
Another werewolf?
“Nic!” Harmony, clad in a thick purple parka, races toward me. “You need to get out of here. There are more on the way.”
“I can’t leave them.” Aiden is here, and Hanson has that Taser thing. The sound of weapons being discharged and a snarl from a werewolf. Energy gathers, like an electrical storm. I see Hanson and her team drag three unconscious forms across the frozen ground to her truck. One human, one giant, one wolf.
“No.” Power the likes of which I’d never known surges inside me. An eerie wind begins to blow off the churning sound. It pushes my hair back and whips sea spray. It’s not the sentient wind from Underhill, not the North wind that I know and love. It is raw, deep and powerful.
And from some dark corner inside me, there is a burning. I stare at the house, door hanging off its hinges, one wall blown out from some sort of magical discharge. Pictures from Sophie’s album scattering in the gale. My hatred for Hanson feeds the flames. The inferno erupts from me in a great torrent.
Fireballs explode from my hands, streaking down to ignite the other two vehicles.
“Nic?” Sophie calls my name but I barely hear her. I am beyond hearing. Aiden is here, he came for me. Chloe helped rescue me and if that vision I’d seen of Underhill is true, Laufey was only helping the FBI because Underhill had her lover. I won’t let these people take my friends and family away.
They are mine.
It is then, in the heat of battle, that I feel her for the first time. The One True Queen. It isn’t movement I sense but intention.
Ours. she whispers.
More power surges through me. It’s as though I am a conduit of fire, a lightning rod pulling the blaze from all over the nine worlds to this space and time. The flames meld into streams of fire, bending from the house and encircling the group. My toes don’t touch the ground as the wind propels me down the hill. Still more flames spurt out of my hands, causing the conflagration to rage higher and higher.
No more.
I see Hanson first, crouching over Chloe’s slumped body.
She looks up, and her lips part, but she recovers quickly. She props my aunt in front of her as a shield.
When I speak I don’t recognize my own voice. “Release them or I will kill you all.”
Though I see the eyes of several of her task force members go wide, Hanson doesn’t flinch. “You had your chance to talk to me and you squandered it. Now I’m going to cut your friends open and see what makes them tick.”
“Nic.” The cry comes from far behind me. Sophie is scared for me.
She should be scared of me. They all should.
I hold out my hand and skew a fireball directly into the chest of one of the unprotected FBI agents. He shrieks and goes down, rolling in the snow to extinguish the flames.
“Lower. Your. Weapons.” Each word speeds from me like a bullet.
This power coursing through me….it isn’t mine. Nor does it belong to any of the Unseelie Court. No, this is magic much older and stronger. God power, from the Trickster born of flame and wielded by a fey. My magic is still out of reach, but my daughter’s….
Agent Hanson’s eyes go to my midsection and I see the unholy light in them. “That child. It’s not you, it’s the babe.”
I see the wolf twitch. Aiden’s awake. This isn’t how I wanted him to find out.
&n
bsp; No time, there is never any time for us. The rage I feel is endless, spiraling down into the dark. My gaze turns to the woman who’d tortured me, held me captive. Held Astrid captive.
And now she’s dead.
Because of people like Agent Hanson, full of fear, wanting only to spread their misery.
I raise my hand, ready to kill them all where they stand.
“Nic, what is this?” Behind me, I hear Sophie pleading. They’d take her too. The woman who gave me life, who’d opened her home and her heart to me.
It’s come down to us or them. And it isn’t going to be us.
Aiden looks up and sees Nic hovering above the ground. Her toes are pointed down several inches above the sand. Fire is reflecting in her icy eyes, rage deeper than the water at her back.
Beside him, her aunt moans. On her far side, Laufey’s chest rises and falls. They are still alive.
His shock at discovering his grandmother in the vehicle that had been tailing Liam’s had nearly made him materialize in the car instead of on its roof. When Laufey had opened the doorway to the mortal realm, he’d gone right through, trusting Harmony and the werewolves to follow.
He’d hung back, ready to strike. Never imagining that the FBI would have the means to take down one of the Fates, even temporarily. And whatever that weapon was, it made his knees buckle and his mind check out for a few minutes.
And he’d woken to chaos. And talk of a…baby?
He shakes his head, his ears ringing from the explosion from when he destroyed the SUV.
No, it can’t be.
But Nic, the reincarnated queen of the Shadow Throne, is wielding fire. And not fey fire. God’s fire pouring out of her.
The change in her scent. It is an addition, but not of another male. Of a child.
She’s carrying my child.
But they hadn’t…it couldn’t be.
Yet in his heart, he knows the truth.
Fear pierces Aiden’s heart even as the wolf surges to the surface, making a grab to be in charge. Protect her. Protect them.
He will. The rest will be sorted out later. He tries to focus all his energy on shifting back to human.
“Nic,” the small older woman says from behind his fearsome mate. His eyes turn and he looks at the mortal. “Nic, don’t hurt them, baby. Please.”
“They want to kill us,” his mate spits. “It’s us or them.”
“If you kill them, they will never stop hunting you,” the female says. Her voice is choked with emotion. “Please. I just got you back.”
Aiden shakes off the last of whatever that magical stun weapon did and shifts. There are gasps from the outmatched federal agents. Calling his own fire, his palms alight and they fall back. He moves swiftly to the center of the circle, where the agent, Hanson, is fumbling with her weapon. He kicks her arm from behind and the thing goes flying. Angrboda dives for it and plucks it up.
He releases the flames and grasps the woman in charge around the throat. With the enemy secure, he turns to face Nic. “She’s right, love. You can’t kill them all. They aren’t yours.”
She lets out a shuddering breath, shaking her head so her blonde hair falls in waves, covering her face. “You don’t know, Aiden. You don’t know what they did to me in that place. They killed Astrid!” Pain rips at her voice.
The wolf bares his teeth. It wants the taste of this woman’s blood.
No. Aiden’s will is stronger than the wolf’s. He has a mate to protect and a child on the way. He will not let the wolf out.
Sucking in a deep breath he says, “We’re not going to let her go. We’re going to take her with us.”
“Take her with us,” Nic repeats a second before her eyes roll back in her head. Abruptly the flames die out and she falls to the ground.
“Take me where?” Agent Hanson tries to pry his grip from her throat. He grunts as her elbow digs into his solar plexus but doesn’t let go.
His eyes are on his mate.
“You wanted to see where the magic happens? Be careful what you wish for, mortal.” Angrboda steps forward, weapon aimed at the band of mortal soldiers. “You just, might get it.”
With the threat contained, Aiden rushes to Nic’s side. Her eyes dart behind closed lids.
Trusting Liam and the other wolves to watch the feds, Aiden carries Nic into the house through the hole in the wall. He puts her down on the couch. Chloe is brought in by Angrboda who then returns for Laufey. The other woman trails behind him as though in a daze.
“You must be Aiden.” The mortal’s smile is shaky, but after just witnessing what happed in her back yard, he couldn’t blame her. “I’m Sophie, Nic’s mother.”
Any other time, that announcement would have shocked him. But he is too focused on his mate.
“What’s the matter with her?” Sophie puts a hand to Nic’s forehead.
“Magic overload,” Angrboda’s voice is harsh as she settles his grandmother on the rug beside the Fate who had once tried to kill her.
“She’s an immortal queen,” Aiden says.
But the giantess shakes her head. “She’s not a fire wielder by nature. All of that magic came from the child.”
“Can you help her?” Aiden asks.
“I’ll do my best.” The giantess begins chanting under her breath.
Sophie pulls him to the side. “Will she be okay?”
“She’s strong.” His gaze is focused on his mate, willing his own strength into her to help her heal. “Thank you for keeping her safe. For making sure they are all safe.”
She smiles, but her expression is worried. “The FBI?”
“We’ll take care of them, Ma’am.” This from Liam who stands poised in the doorway. “A word, Aiden?”
“Not now.” The growl escapes before Aiden thinks better of it. The wolves have been a tremendous help, he needs to muster some gratitude. But his mate is in his sight and she is pregnant with their child. Nothing can force him from her side.
Instead of leaving though, Liam enters through the damaged siding. “Some of the pack are feeling a little…nervous about the feds. We don’t like the idea of killing mortals, regardless.”
“We’re not going to kill them,” Aiden says, his attention still fixed on Nic. She looks so small and delicate, not the being of immense power he’d witnessed earlier. She reminded him of his father, eyes wild, flames spurting to the sky to illustrate her wrath.
“Taking them to Underhill will be killing them,” this from Laufey, who is struggling upright.
He kneels by her side. “What are you doing here?”
She stares at him, her expression bleak. “Had to come. Underhill has Fern. The dead are everywhere.”
Aiden pulls in a deep breath. He knows how much his grandmother loves Fern. The same way he loves Nic.
“How is she?” This from Harmony who appears by his side.
Nic’s mother does a doubletake as she spots his sister’s purple face. Her lips compress, but then her eyes return to where Angrboda is standing to her full height.
“It’s done,” Angrboda sighs as though exhausted. “She’s sleeping now. I’d suggest moving her to a proper bed and letting her wake up on her own.”
“I’ll show you where she’s been staying,” Sophie puts a hand on his bare arm. Later, he will probably regret introducing himself to Nic’s mother while naked, but at the moment he can’t be bothered to give a damn.
In one fluid movement, Aiden scoops Nic into his arms and carries her up the pokey staircase to the room on the top floor. It’s cramped but clean and smells of her. He sets Nic down on the candlewick bedspread.
“She knew you’d come for her,” Sophie says.
He turns to face her, Nic’s mother. “I’m her mate.”
She tilts her head to the side. “Do you know what they did to her in that place?”
He swallows and shakes his head. “If I could have taken her place there, I would have.”
She lets out a slow breath. “I guess that answe
rs my question of whether or not you’ll protect her.”
“I live and die for her.”
“Don’t leave her again. I’ll bring you some of my husband’s clothes.” The mortal says and leaves them alone.
Aiden kneels down beside the bed. So long. He’d waited so long just to be near her again. To be free to love her.
“I’m sorry.” He holds her hand brings it up until he can rub his face against it. “I wish I had known about Gretchen, about Fenrir. I should have stayed close to you.”
Her breaths are even, her posture relaxed. She doesn’t move, not even when his hot tears splash her knuckles.
“I’ve missed you more than you will ever know,” he breathes and then, tentatively slides his hand to her midsection.
A shock goes through him as he feels the life inside her. Winter apples and crackling embers. The One True Queen of the Unseelie Court.
His daughter.
“Hi,” he whispers to the life there. “It’s your dad.”
“Gods, that sounds weird,” a soft voice murmurs.
His head jerks up to find her ice-blue eyes fixed on him. “Nic?”
Her hand strokes his hair. “You really are here.”
“I really am.” Grasping her hand, he pulls it to his cheek so that he can nuzzle her.
Her lip trembles and she shifts as though intending to rise.
Alarm fills him at her abrupt movement. “What are you doing?”
Her only answer is to slide off the bed and into his waiting arms. Her body shakes with full spasms as her emotions drain out of her like water through a sieve. He holds her close and breathes her in, not knowing what to say, only sure that nothing will ever come between them again.
Until I heard Aiden talking to me, or more accurately, to my stomach, I thought I was having another of those lucid dreams. His scent, that unique combination of cedar, sage and wildness that only Aiden possesses lures me into his waiting arms.
His breaths are ragged as he buries his nose in my hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”