Zane (Keepers Of The Lake Book 6)

by Emilia Hartley

  “I see you found Alistair’s kids,” she said with her gritty, smoker’s voice.

  A tall shifter and a short, purple-haired shifter both looked uncomfortable. They glanced at one another before looking back to the witch. It all made Chelsea feel like she was watching a private moment. This wasn’t about her.

  Why was she here?

  “And you should be dead by now,” Jude purred. Her nose twitched. “I can smell the cancer eating you from the inside out. Are you using the souls of others to keep yourself alive?”

  The witch cocked a wry grin. Chelsea lunged forward, hands fisted at her sides, but Zara grabbed her. Zara gave a nearly imperceptible shake of her head.

  “I should be dead,” the witch croaked.

  “Then why aren’t you, Sybil? Why did you come back?”

  Sybil bent over with a cough that shook her bones. It sounded like her lungs were trying to tear themselves out of her. Chelsea thought she would watch them flop onto the floor, blackened with smoke, at any moment. That, or Sybil would choke to death right in front of her.

  But the witch didn’t die. She just turned a horrible grin up to Jude. The clan leader scowled.

  “It was never a curse,” Sybil said. “I didn’t make the spell to hold Alistair infinitely. If I had, then there would have been nothing in the world that could break it. Good magic can always hold dark things. I made the spell with Alistair’s guidance. He wanted more power and the lake was a great big, untapped source.

  “I told him that I could bind him to the lake, but it would take years before he could harness the power of it. He knew you were all coming for him. We both thought it would buy him time, but he doubted a mate would be able to break him out of the spell. He didn’t want to chance his survival on finding a woman since he had already tried and failed twice.”

  To this, Sybil gestured to the tall man and purple-haired woman. They both glared back.

  Cole was the one to break, his groan becoming a growl. The sound grabbed Chelsea’s spine and summoned a flight or fight response. Her knees shook. She swallowed a mouthful of air and did her best to keep from pressing her back to the wall behind her.

  This was a room of people stronger than her. And the witch who put Zane in the lake.

  Chelsea was just a human. She was frail. She wouldn’t survive if a fight broke out.

  But it would be worth it if she could use this to find a way to save Zane from himself.

  “You’re telling me,” Cole began, “that Alistair could have been the one with Zane’s out of control power? Have you seen what Zane did with it? Can you imagine that power in Alistair’s hands?”

  Sybil shrugged. “I am paying for the things I did. Alistair brought me down a dark path and now…” she gestured vaguely to her chest.

  Her lungs.

  Sybil shook her head and tapped the pack of cigarettes in her hand. “I don’t know why you brought me here. There’s nothing I can do. The floozy in the back broke the spell. It’s not a problem anymore.”

  Chelsea stormed forward. She forgot her fear. It was overwhelmed by indignation and a deep desire to get her mate back.

  “You might be a witch, but I listen to murder podcasts. I could kill you, hide your body, and no one in this room would rat me out.” Rage filled the carved-out hole in her chest. She hated this, not knowing where Zane was. Knowing that he was hurting because she was incapable of showing affection.

  Fear made all sorts of uncomfortable thoughts slither through her mind. Could the lake take Zane back? If he chose the lake over her, could he stay there indefinitely? She imagined herself a fancy widow, standing on the edge of the water, mourning what could have been.

  Worst of all was the feeling that war was coming. Her shoulders prickled with needling pain from being held too tightly together. She forced herself to relax, but it didn’t do much. She was still stiff and uncomfortable as she searched the surface of the lake outside. There was no sign of Zane, but she waited for the moment that he would descend upon them.

  Could she stand between him and the clan?

  He wouldn’t hurt her. Even though she’d done enough to hurt him, Zane would never harm her. She knew that as well as she knew the back of her own hand. Chelsea doubted herself. She didn’t know if she had the strength of will to stand between two snarling dragons.

  This world was strange and dangerous. She knew the human world could be just as dangerous, but when immolation was only a breath away, everything seemed just a little scarier.

  The witch studied her. Chelsea tried not to squirm beneath the woman’s gaze as it felt like grime covered fingers touched her skin. The smell of tobacco intensified. It burned Chelsea’s nose until she wanted to gag.

  “Well, that’s curious,” the witch said with her gravelly voice.

  “Sybil,” Cole warned.

  Zara took Chelsea’s hand. The urge to slink behind Zara gripped her frantic heart, but she somehow managed to stand her ground.

  “The girl is impervious to magic,” Sybil said. “It rolls off her like water.”

  Sybil got to her feet, slow as everyone in the room watched her. Chelsea stiffened when Sybil approached her and held out her hand. Growls circled the room in warning. Sybil told them to calm down, that she just needed to see something.

  The old woman’s touch was cold. The sensation that slipped over her skin was colder still. Sybil made a sound in the back of her throat that was almost like a confirmation even though Chelsea didn’t think anything had happened. Then, Sybil passed her hand over her own face.

  Chelsea’s vision blurred, but only over Sybil’s face. When Chelsea looked from shifter to shifter, she could see them just fine. Thoughts of Sybil slipped from her mind until she almost completely forgot about the witch. Chelsea whimpered and furrowed her brow, summoning the image of Sybil in her mind.

  Still, when she opened her eyes again, she couldn’t find what she was looking for. What she wanted was gone. No, not completely. There was a scent in the air. Tobacco, so strong that it burned. Chelsea gagged. A form appeared out of the corner of her eye.

  Memory returned like sand in a glass, tiny pieces came together to remind her of where she was and what she was doing. The old woman. Magic. Something strange about Chelsea.

  “So, I can work magic on myself and that seems to do the trick,” a voice said. “But only for a short while. Zane went and found himself a spellbreaker. I didn’t think those existed anymore.”

  “A what?” Chelsea asked the voice in the room. She squinted at the blurry shape until it became clear. A face, hair held aloft by hairspray, deep lines etching her face. Sybil, the witch that cursed Zane.

  Chelsea’s stomach flipped. The situation reminded her of something, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Déjà vu haunted her. She’d been through this. The exact spell Sybil had tested on her.

  “You’ve been busy,” Chelsea breathed.

  Nothing had changed. Not really.

  There was still a key on top of Cole’s porch light. It was slightly rusted from the damp air and had a fine layer of grime over it, but the key worked all the same. Zane let himself into the cabin.

  There was evidence of a woman living there, but Zane still felt like he was walking back in time. He ran his fingers down the folded plaid blanket on the side of the couch. A brand new television was sitting on a duct-taped console. Zane snorted because it was just the kind of thing Cole would do.

  Zane searched for evidence of Alistair’s return, but he struggled to find it. He didn’t find a manifesto for taking over the human world on the shelf. There wasn’t a schedule, declaring what time they would attack the nearby town, stuck to the fridge.

  Further into the cabin, Zane found a small room in the process of being repurposed. There were test patches of paint on the walls, one a bright and cheery yellow while the other was a serene shade of soft green. Under both was a crib.

  His chest tightened. He saw himself out after that.

  This wasn
’t what he thought he would find. Evil people didn’t try to have families. Not when they were planning to hurt innocents. There wasn’t time. At least, that was what Zane had thought.

  He followed a familiar scent in the air. It brought him past Asher’s old cabin, where the back wall was boarded up. Zane paused. His fingers tingled. He curled them into fists, but it never went away. Like a memory, a nightmare came rushing back. A beast made of water crashing through the wall, over and over again.

  His beast roared. The sound threatened to shatter his skull. He groaned and bent over double while fighting back the pain. The beast slashed at him from the inside out. It commanded him to listen. He shoved it back. This wasn’t the truth.

  Zane was not the monster. He couldn’t be.

  Pain still throbbed in the back of his head, but he forced himself to move on. He followed the scent on the air to Alec’s old cabin. Charlotte lived with him. Zane shouldn’t have been surprised. They had been made for each other. Zane kept Alec’s secret for years. Alec made his mate a dragon and told the world that it was an accident.

  That was the worst thing his old clanmates did. Other than that, they had been good people. Cole never missed a day of work on the water. Heath kept them all in line, even Zane and Asher. Alec was the one behind them, fixing everything they managed to smash.

  What happened?

  Zane wondered if the curse around him had infected the clan. Could it seep into the earth and take ahold of his old family? Could it taint their minds until they were ripe for the taking?

  There was no way Zane was wrong. He saw Alistair with his own eyes. The man had returned. The only reason he would come back was if they had forgiven him. Forgiveness for the things Alistair had done required a change of mind, where the clan no longer saw him as a villain but as an ally.

  These weren’t the friends he remembered. He clenched his fists and backed away from the cabins. The echoes of those friends remained, but he told himself they were facades. It was a trap meant to lure Zane into thinking everything would be alright. He wouldn’t be so easily tricked.

  The beast inside him thrashed. Its rage was cold and searing, but he couldn’t tell who it was directed toward. Did his beast hate the clan that betrayed it? Or was it angry with Zane for something?

  His first thought was of Chelsea. He could feel her in her hands, against his chest, whispering in his ear, like she was there with him. He ached for her, a hole in his soul that he could never fill. Maybe, if he could find proof that the clan was up to no good and he brought it to her, then he could convince her that he was right all along.

  Chelsea would have no choice but to apologize, maybe even take him back.

  “Relentless, aren’t you?”

  Zane spun. His beast found the target of its rage, but Zane couldn’t quite focus on him. A man stepped out from between the cabins. Zane took an instinctive step back and water lapped at his heels. The beast in him brushed against his skin. It asked to be let out, to run.

  “You were right that I returned, but you had the wrong person,” the figure said. The voice was familiar and nagged at the edges of Zane’s mind.

  He had heard it recently. He heard it ten years ago. The fog in his head was slowly clearing. A phantom hand gripped his, and Chelsea’s scent embraced him, like a part of her was still standing with him. It cleared his head and his vision sharpened.

  Before him was the man from the bar, the one who tried to shove Chelsea into his car. Zane snarled, but the beast in him slammed against him. The snarl turned to a roar. The beast knew something Zane did not.

  “My son looks like me, does he not? Spitting image, really. I had high hopes for the kid, but he’s let me down. The other one, well…she was a surprise.”

  “Alistair,” Zane growled. Like that, all the doors in his mind flew open.

  His face wasn’t the same. It had been changed, ever so slightly, and a spell pushed aside the mind of any who dared look too closely.

  13

  Sybil shrugged. “No worries. It will all be over soon. The pieces have been in play while you were too distracted with your friend in the lake. I didn’t plan for it to work out this way, but it was rather nice.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jude asked, a menacing rumble threaded through her voice.

  Sybil acted like she didn’t know what was going on, raising her brows in question even though a grin was slowly curling her lips.

  “Son of a bitch,” Asher cursed. “You told us you stopped working with him!”

  Chelsea’s toes went cold. It was such a strange sensation that it distracted her. She could think of nothing other than the cold tingling in her shoes. The revelation sparking gasps around the room was momentarily lost on her. Once it sank in, though, the cold began to spread.

  “Alistair,” she whispered, like just speaking his name would summon him.

  What it did summon was the smell of hot, ashy breath. Her head stung as she recalled the way a man tried to shove her into his car. His nails bit her skin, but they hadn’t been nails at all. The man knew Zane was coming and his impatience got the best of him, even to the point where his fingers shifted.

  Claws had grazed her scalp, not nails. The man she met in the bar, the one that nearly kidnapped her, hadn’t been just any man. It was Alistair. And the witch’s magic had masked him from both her and Zane.

  Chelsea looked to the tall shifter, the one that most closely resembled the solemn man in the photo. While there were similarities, she could easily pick out the differences. Like father and son. For a man that had been trapped in a lake for ten years, though, spotting them might have been more difficult.

  While Zane was watching the clan, thinking Alistair boldly walked among them, Alistair had been working under the protection of spells. And he nearly killed her. There was no doubt in her mind that Alistair would have killed her if he managed to get away with her in his car.

  Had that been planned? Or just a happy accident in his favor?

  She staggered to the couch and dropped down into it. “He’s here. Alistair is in town.”

  An uproar drowned out her thoughts. No, her mind was just empty. She couldn’t focus enough to think. Her attention cut to the witch, but Sybil’s attention wasn’t on her. Besides, the witch said it herself. Magic didn’t work on her for long.

  The emptiness Chelsea struggled with was her own mind, too slow to absorb what was going on. Little by little, it sank in. Sybil had turned Zane into a monster while he slept. In that time, she and Alistair searched for the weakest link in the clan.

  Now that Zane was free of the spell and his mind was muddled with memories and nightmares, he was the weak link. He wasn’t as weak as they would like with Chelsea by his side, but if they killed her, then Zane was alone.

  Chelsea jumped to her feet and shoved past the witch, hitting her in the shoulder before careening out the door before anyone could stop her. While she was here, Zane was alone. He wasn’t impervious to magic like she kind of was. Zane didn’t know they had run into Alistair once.

  He needed to know. She let her feet carry her, even though the shifters behind her called out. She couldn’t stop. Not now. Her mate’s life was on the line. She didn’t know what she would do once she got there, but she would figure it out along the way.

  Chelsea had survived a lot in her life. From heartbreak to brushes with death. She would survive this and drag Zane along with her. If she didn’t save him, if her life was empty and lonely, then there was nothing left for her.

  Those were the hands that had been on Chelsea. Alistair nearly got away with Zane’s mate. Zane shuddered, cold rage stabbing his lungs, when he thought of what might happen if Alistair left with Chelsea. The beast clawed at him. It wanted out.

  It wanted to rip Alistair into pieces for laying a single hand on Chelsea. It was going to revel in hurting this man. Not just for the horror Alistair committed in the past, but for whatever he planned to do with Zane’s mate.

  Here was
the chance he’d been looking for. The water was behind him, waiting for his command. He could feel its call. Zane and the lake were one and the same. So long as they touched, there was no beginning and end.

  But Alistair was faster. His grin was a wicked slash across his face as he leapt at Zane. The man’s form blurred. Zane couldn’t keep his eyes on him. The water surged behind Zane in a great, threatening wave.

  “Sybil is dealing with your mate right now,” Alistair said.

  The wave collapsed. It rained down over Zane’s head as a chill stabbed him in the chest. He spun, about to dive into the lake and let it swallow him whole, but Alistair appeared in his way. Alistair stood in water up to his knees, but Zane couldn’t make it do anything. Not while his mind raced in fear, while his beast thrashed about senselessly. Alistair held something in his hands. A small gem hung from a bit of twine.

  “Once she’s gone, no one will be able to free you from this spell.”

  It wasn’t twine suspending the enchanted gem, but hair. Zane’s gut rebelled. Bile burned his throat. He struck out, but Alistair was gone. Zane’s fist whistled through empty air like Alistair had never been there at all.

  Cocky laughter echoed behind him. Maybe Alistair hadn’t been there. Sybil’s witchery was strange. It was messing with his mind. Zane thought of his mate again, trying to summon the feeling from before, when it felt like she was beside him and the power of the magic had dwindled.

  It wasn’t enough. Alistair worked faster. He wrapped the curse around Zane’s neck. The magic dug into him like claws made of ice. He screamed and fought, trying to grab Alistair, but Zane’s efforts were futile. His blows were slow, like he was fighting in slow motion. His vision dimmed.

  He worked with his beast to push back the curse, but it sunk into him like there was a hollow space inside him that it returned to. Alistair’s boot met his back. Water slapped Zane in the face. He tried to get up, to move, but the water rose around him. The curse was bound to the lake.