“Perfect.” I put them on speaker and pulled up my GPS. Let me give you the coordinates to where we’re at. Let’s meet here…what time?”
“Seven in the morning,” Renee answered. “We’ll be there at seven.”
Seven felt like a lifetime away. After the way we had left things, I couldn’t get to Marcus and my sisters fast enough. The world grew wider and more dangerous with each passing moment and we were stronger together. I may not agree with Marie’s decision, but the succubi had gotten that part right.
Fifteen
I woke to the quiet creaking of a door being carefully shut outside of our apartment, to the sound of someone trying not to make any sounds. I jerked up in bed. Bits of morning light filtered through the curtains. My sisters and I had first thought we’d sleep in the park, the spot we’d said we’d meet our coterie and Marcus, but after an hour of trying to get shut-eye with humans wandering around, unknowingly alerting us to their presence, we gave in and decided to take Marie up on her offer. Only for a night. I mean, we’d rationalized, how likely were Hunters to choose this one night to storm the succubi galere?
Pretty damn likely, as it turned out. Except, they weren’t storming, they were sneaking. I rushed out of bed and pulled my jeans on.
“Olivia,” I whispered, buttoning my pants. “We’ve got company.”
Olivia jumped out of bed, ready to go, her jeans already on.
I eased the bedroom door open. No one had entered our temporary domicile yet, so I hurried to Celeste who already had her ear to the front door.
I gave a nod toward the door and followed suit with my sisters who were allowing bark to sweep across their arms.
We silently counted along with Celeste’s fingers. One. Two. Three!
Celeste swung the door open and bolted into the entryway of the apartment complex, hands out, attack ready.
I pushed out behind her. Squeals of delight met us as my aunts and Shawna gathered us into a group hug. Shawna’s little white dog yapped in excitement at our feet. Relief swept my bark away. I had my coterie again. Finally.
Marcus hung back, waiting for his turn with me, which he’d eventually get, but not before I squeezed every member of my coterie in a thankful embrace. I almost lost them, and if the Hunters had taken Shawna, again, it would have killed me. But I didn’t have to worry about that anymore. Shawna was here, rubbing my arm. My whole coterie was here.
“You said seven,” Olivia declared, pulling out of the group hug.
Marcus took that as his opportunity to wrap his strong arms around me from behind and I turned in his embrace to face him. I relished the moment, breathing in his scent. He moved and smiled with ease, as though he felt perfectly fine. I checked his neck, moving aside the black collar on his cotton shirt, and looked his hands over for wounds anyways. I thought to press my lips into his skin, kissing each spot my eyes grazed for signs of a bruise or a cut, but with my coterie nearby, I figured it wasn’t a good time. Later, I told myself. I’ll give him a more thorough inspection later.
“I know I said seven,” Renee countered Olivia’s declaration of what time the members of our coterie said they’d arrive in Portland. “But we couldn’t sleep. We had to get out of Washington and reunite with you three. When you weren’t at the park where you’d said you’d be, we came straight here, remembered the way from when we’d dropped you off.”
“It’s so good to see you,” Celeste sighed, looking a little less heartbroken than she had yesterday.
“So,” Patricia said, taking a look around the quiet apartment complex. She smoothed her hand over the ornate banister. “They’re all gone?”
“They are,” I said, gazing around. The place didn’t seem right sitting nearly empty like this, almost eerie. “Their check-in at the Hunter compound is today, and once they don’t show, the Hunters will probably be out in force, trying to keep what happened in Washington from happening here. So we should probably go too.”
“The incubi leader, Aleksander, got us an Airbnb, but Faline is being stubborn,” Celeste tattled. I felt like we were little kids again and she’d caught me trying to explore the woods beyond our property line.
Marcus flashed me an unsettling look.
“We should take him up on it,” Olivia added. “There’s no way the Hunters will find us there and it’ll give us time to plan what’s next.”
“Can we eat breakfast first?” Shawna asked. “We haven’t had a decent meal in days. Unless they took their food with them.” She paused. “I just realized they may have done that.”
I stayed in Marcus’s arms, trailing my fingers up and down his bicep. “Not all of it, they traveled light. I think there’s eggs and bacon in the fridge. And while we eat we can fill you all in on everything that’s been going on.” I ignored the whole Airbnb thing.
I wasn’t particularly proud of it, and when I saw Marie again I planned on letting her know I’d used her bed, but after the happy reunion with my sisters and aunts, I took Marcus upstairs to the top apartment, to Marie’s apartment. I’d told my coterie he and I would be back down when the food was ready.
I wanted to be alone with him. I needed to be alone with him.
After the swing of emotions the last couple days had brought, and my inner uncertainty about any kind of future Marcus and I had in store, I just needed him, to be with him in the moment. I needed everything else to wait its turn, to lie on the floor while this beautiful man and I created a heavenly existence elevated on the bed.
“What are you doing?” Marcus asked in a low voice, acting like the innocent man I knew he wasn’t.
“We’re in a succubus’s lair, so I’m seducing you,” I quipped playfully as I led all six feet and however many inches of him through Marie’s front door and into her bedroom.
Marcus’s attention shifted from me to the walls covered in draped tapestries and burned-down candles. “It looks like a sex temple.”
I let out a laugh. “That’s exactly what I thought when I first came here!” I thought to rephrase that. “When they first brought me in here.”
“Is that Lilith?” he asked, pointing to the stone statue of the Goddess standing proud, holding circular objects in each hand.
I nodded. And then, because his eyes belonged on me and not a stone carving or colorful fabrics, I climbed onto the queen-sized, four-poster bed. On my knees at the edge of the bed, I was at eye level with Marcus who was still standing, except of course, his eyes were pointed elsewhere. Never mind. A woman always has her tricks.
I unbuttoned Marie’s black silk shirt from my chest one…button…at…a…time until he noticed from the corner of his eye and delicately unfastened the last two buttons himself. The top fell away from my shoulders like liquid. Marcus lowered his mouth until soft kisses quickly covered my shoulders and collarbone. Chills ran through me. His touch did things to me, good things. And I wanted so much more than his lips.
As if he read my mind, his strong hands gripped my waist and pressed upward, cupping the undersides of my breasts. He stepped as close to the bed as possible, until his thighs pushed into the side of the mattress. Everything in me wanted to tear his cotton shirt from his chest, but I wasn’t going to stop kissing the tops of his tattooed shoulders to ask if he’d brought another shirt with him.
Logic slowed my thrumming heart. He couldn’t have brought a shirt; he’d been run out of town with my coterie by our enemies.
No. I couldn’t entertain reality. For just a few stolen minutes, I wished that shit would stay on the floor.
Marcus’s lips found mine as his fingers went to work unbuttoning my pants.
And for the next hour, the only reality that mattered lay entangled on the bed, breathing each other in, and wishing to the Goddess herself we could be like this always.
I wouldn’t have led him up to our own private sanctuary if I hadn’t thought Marie would approve. Based on Celeste’s disapproving expression when Marcus and I finally showed up for breakfast forty-five minutes late, I
may have misjudged the situation. Although, I couldn’t be sure if Celeste believed Marie would disapprove because I’d bedded an ex-Hunter in her room, or if it was Celeste who disapproved that she and I had now both had sex on the same bed. Either way, not an inch of me regretted it.
Okay, yeah, Celeste’s upturned brow when Marcus and I walked to the small dining table, hand-in-hand did give me pause. But only because, for those moments upstairs, it felt like those first times we were together, back before we attacked the Washington Hunter complex, back before I’d introduced him to my coterie and the other Wilds. Back before their disapproval of our relationship became a reality rather than an assumption.
And of course, that thought led to another, how Marcus really was on the outside. My coterie had accepted his help in taking down the Hunter complex and his support of Shawna. But just because they approved of him, did not mean they approved of us. Not to mention, the other Wilds didn’t approve of Marcus, not even as a helper, or a giver of intel. So if he’d stood back when he and my coterie had first arrived and shared hugs of absolute relief…stood back from a group of Wilds who actually accepted him…then how much worse would it be for him when we reunited with the other Wilds to complete our mission?
If there was still even a mission to complete.
I hated that my mind wandered to Alek and Marie. Aleksander was a male, but because he wasn’t a Hunter, he and his pacifist ways would probably be more welcomed by other Wilds than Marcus. Not that any part of me held any type of feelings for Aleksander. It was just that as I sat beside Marcus and scooped cold eggs onto my plate, I realized where the line had been drawn, and that Marcus was not on our side of that line. Which, in my mind, made absolutely no sense, seeing as he’d put himself on the line more often than Aleksander turned that opportunity down.
I caught Celeste’s look of discomfort.
“You worried about Marie?” I asked to clear the air and break the uncomfortable silence brewing between the two of us. If she had something to say she might as well get it out rather than constipate herself holding it all in.
“Why? Should I be?” she retorted.
“You tell me,” I responded in what was turning out to be a cat and mouse chase with words. Only, I couldn’t be sure who played the role of the cat and who played the mouse.
I took a bite of cold toast, wet with congealed butter.
“Everyone is tired and tense right now,” Olivia said with arms outstretched over the table. The other coterie members had no way of knowing the bubbling feud between my sister and me, how she clearly felt my being with Marcus was unfair while her love languished underground. A decision Marie made, I might add.
And so I let them all know. “She chose to go, Celeste. Don’t blame me for that. Blame her.”
“Marie didn’t want to go; she did what was right for her galere, for her sisters.” Celeste’s eyes bore into mine, tears trapped behind lids. “She parted from me, the person she claimed to have feelings for, for the good of her kind.”
Shawna and my aunts stopped to listen. One of them gasped at Celeste’s revelation.
“And how does that have anything to do with me?” I asked.
Celeste shook her head. “That’s what I can’t stop going over in my mind, that exact question. Because I think the answer is nothing. It has nothing to do with you because I don’t think you could leave the person you have feelings for, for the good of your kind.”
I sprang from my seat and Celeste mirrored me.
“Whoa!” Olivia yelled, stretching her arms out, one to each arguing sister. “This has gone too far! Celeste.” She turned to my standing, dark-haired sister. “It’s okay to be upset that you’ve finally found this special person, this special bond with someone you can actually have a future with, just to have it ripped away. You can be angry about that. You should be angry about that.”
“Because she won’t go into hiding with them!” Celeste yelled, pointing her head toward me.
“Oh my Goddess. I cannot believe you’re even considering giving up,” I exclaimed, ready to rip into her with my words.
“And Faline,” Olivia yelled, now turned to me. “It’s okay that you feel betrayed by the succubi galere, who promised to help and now they’re turning tail and running. But that’s their right, to change their minds about what’s best for them is their right.”
“To leave the other Wilds in captivity should be okay with me?” I said. “Well, it’s not. It just put the rest of us in a more dire situation than we were already in.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like to be a succubus,” Celeste added, tears rolling down her cheeks. “They can feel everything, all of it, our fear, our hurt. When we all get together, they have to feel all of our burdens. Now imagine if one of them were caught by a Hunter, imagine how that’d feel for them.”
Fire burned in me. “I don’t have to imagine it. I got to see it through our sister. Our. Sister. And if your precious succubus could feel our sister’s pain, then why didn’t they help her with it? If they knew, why didn’t they do anything?”
“You have no idea, do you?” Celeste walked around the side of the table, and Olivia moved too, to stay between the two of us. “Shawna’s PTSD isn’t just a feeling, an emotion. The effects of it are, and Marie wished more than anything she could remove the effects, but the relief would only be temporary and then Shawna would know the pain all over again. Marie was helping by stepping back on that one. And yes, our sister is rescued. Marie’s sisters helped make that happen. And now that they’ve seen those effects, they’re not willing to risk that happening to one of them!”
“Stop it!” Shawna screamed from the living room. She balled her fists at her side. “Stop talking about me like I’m mental or not here. I’m here. And I’m not mental!”
Abigale rushed to her daughter’s side. Shawna’s fists loosened.
“I care for Marcus,” Shawna went on. “He’s helped me a tremendous amount. More than I’ll ever be able to repay.” She shot a glance to the man sitting near me and then looked back toward Celeste and me. “So if Faline wants him around, I’m all for it. Because shouldn’t I get a say in this? He did help rescue me after all.” She paused and exhaled. “And if the succubi are scared and want to hide, I don’t blame them. No one should have to go through what I went through. And I wouldn’t ask anyone to volunteer to risk making that sacrifice.”
“But there are Wilds still going through what you went through,” I said on a breath, feeling exhausted and somewhat defeated. My sisters were my life, and to know one of them held contention for me…it hurt.
Only Marcus sat at the table. The rest of us stood, in a silent tense state, waiting for someone to make a move, to spew the next accusation that would set another off.
The front door to the apartment burst open, catching us totally off guard, and each Wild jumped into attack mode.
“I’m a friendly, an incubus!” the young-looking male announced before we could pounce, his hands in the air. I recognized him as the incubus we’d met in the incubi underground, lover of the succubus Heather.
Still, the bark suddenly covering my arm stayed put.
“The succubi,” he said, panting. “They never returned. They went to the Hunters and they never returned!”
Sixteen
The incubus smartly kept from crossing the threshold into the apartment. And we smartly waited for him to catch his breath and explain what the hell he was talking about before jumping at him for answers.
When he could finally stand straight and breathe at the same time, he looked to my aunts who’d gathered near one another, as he explained, “Their leader—”
“Marie?” Celeste asked, cutting him off.
He regarded her for a moment and then went back to talking to my aunts. I assumed he figured the hierarchy of a huldra coterie resembled that of an incubi hoard—elders were in charge. He figured wrong.
“Yes, Marie, I believe that’s her name.” He paused as thou
gh Celeste had confused his thoughts and crossed a few wires. When he got back on line, he continued. “Their leader took them all to their check-in, to the Hunter complex.”
“Wait,” I interrupted, now my turn to confuse the poor guy. “Why they hell would they do that? They had sanctuary underground with you all.”
The young incubus’s blank eyes met mine. He didn’t even try to offer up an explanation.
I re-approached my question in a way that maybe he’d understand and therefore answer. “When were they due back?”
“Due back?” he asked.
Damn, I’d crossed his wires again. I peered at the time on the microwave. “It’s almost nine o’clock in the morning. What time was their check-in?” I said.
“Oh.” The light of understanding lit his eyes. “It was at seven-thirty. I would have been here sooner, but I went to the rental first, where Aleksander said you’d be.”
“Their check-in was only an hour and a half ago?” I double checked.
He nodded.
“Okay, then.” I turned to ease Celeste’s worry. “They haven’t been gone long. Maybe their lesson session ran over. Maybe a new rule was enacted that they’d have to learn about.”
“Who sent you, exactly?” Celeste asked Mason, who now leaned against the door frame.
“Aleksander,” he answered, and maybe it was just me, but I thought I heard reverence in his voice when he uttered his leader’s name.
“He wouldn’t have sent someone if everything was normal,” Celeste said to no one and everyone.
“They’re incubi,” I reminded her. “They’ve not had to deal with check-ins a day in their lives. They don’t know what’s normal and not normal. Wasn’t Aleksander just saying that dealing with the Hunters was a necessary difficulty for Wild Women? Clearly he’s so far out of the loop that any thoughts or feelings he has on the topic are irrelevant.”
Wild Women Collection Page 37