by Sierra Dean
She could hold her own, I wasn’t worried about her safety, but I also knew she wasn’t going to be able to throw a really solid punch either.
“What do you think, Memere, can we take them?”
She glanced up at me and gave me one of those cheeky I know something you don’t know smiles of hers. A wave of calm washed over me, and I was suddenly sure we were going to be okay.
I had a world of troubles waiting for me once we left the swamp, but for right now I felt absolutely certain that I was at no risk of dying here today. The prickling sensation of magic under my skin turned from rage-fueled heat into something cool and steadying.
I looked back at the dark-haired man and smiled.
He didn’t like what he saw on my face.
“Thank you,” I said to him.
“What the hell?”
“Thanks for giving me an excuse.”
Chapter Eighteen
Everything happened all at once.
After the briefest hesitation, Dark Hair seemed to realize the fight was on, and snarled at me. It was a low, menacing sound that sent a chill through me but did nothing to convince me I was in any real trouble. My confidence, for better or worse, was through the roof.
These guys had asked for trouble, and I was going to deliver.
Dark Hair shoved one of his gray-haired lackeys in my direction and the guy stumbled, then advanced on me uncertainly. This dude would rather be doing anything other than fighting me right now.
I stepped up to him as he pondered his first move and slammed my fist hard into his sternum. He let out a wheeze and as he was doubling over to catch his breath I lifted my knee into his ribs and then threw another right hook into the side of his face.
He was down for the count before he had time to think about how to come at me.
My knuckles were split and bloody, I must have hit the guy’s teeth on my second punch. I crooked a finger at the other skinny guy. “Next.”
Dark Hair curled his lip in disgust and bellowed “The girl is mine. Kill the rest.”
The new men who had arrived descended on our group, and soon we were a mass of flying fists and feet. Someone shoved Wilder into me and we both hit the ground hard, his hefty bulk landing square on top of me.
The breath was knocked from my lungs and I was still seeing stars when someone grabbed me by the ponytail and started to drag me away from the melee. I didn’t bother craning my neck to see who it was. This was a game of survival, it didn’t matter who I was fighting as long as I won.
I got hold of the man’s wrist and dug my fingernails in. Some wolves, like Mercy and Secret, had the ability to partially shift themselves into wolf form even when the moon wasn’t full. I was not so lucky, I only had my natural fingernails combined with a lot of sheer grit.
My nails broke the man’s skin and he howled in pain, dropping me on instinct.
I clambered back to my feet—the ground was the last place I wanted to be in a fight—and kicked the guy hard in the side of the face. He went down and didn’t get back up.
I glanced back at the fracas and saw that Wilder and Santiago had each managed to take down two apiece—impressive for Santiago who was, in spite of his magic, only human. Memere was nowhere to be seen, and while worry started to gnaw at me, I had to believe she was okay.
A man barreled right for me, his lips peeled back to show deeply stained brown teeth and a look of pure menace.
I lifted my hand a moment before he crashed into me and whispered, “Away.”
A burst of bright white light emerged from my hand and punched into him like a fist. For a brief second he hung in midair, staring at me with naked surprise. Then he flew backwards across the shore and over the heads of the others who were fighting, sailing right back until he landed among the high branches of a tree and dangled there, unmoving.
Nothing stuck out of his chest and he appeared be breathing. His buddies could help him down later if they felt so inclined.
I’d taken my eyes off the fight a moment too long.
Someone, and the bulk of his upper body made me believe it had to be Dark Hair, wrapped his arms around me from behind and lifted me fully up from the ground. I let out a yelp of surprise. So much for seeming like a total badass.
He started carrying me towards the boat while the others were occupied with their own fights. With my arms pinned to my side, it was hard for me to retaliate. Not that I’d been expecting a fair fight here, but this was about as far from fair as things got.
If he wanted to play nasty, I could do that.
Rather than trying to wrest my arms free, I pushed down and back, towards him. I didn’t have a lot of traction available to me, but I was able to give him a firm open-handed slap to the junk, which succeeded in doing what I wanted. He let me go.
As he sputtered and swore at me, I was able to twist in his arms, and with my hands now free, I jabbed both of my thumbs into his eyes. It was self-defense one-oh-one but there’s a reason they teach it: the moves work.
I didn’t push hard enough to pop out an eyeball or anything, but he was not enjoying himself.
Dark Hair howled and squirmed to get away from me. “Bet you wish you’d just given us the fucking boat now, don’t you?” I snarled.
“Bitch.”
So original.
He punched me in the stomach and once again I was left momentarily breathless, gasping for air as the pain of his strike seared through me.
How did Secret manage to get out so many good one-liners without being hit in the meantime? This was unfair.
His fist was about to pounce on me again, when out of the corner of my eye I saw Memere move past the wrestling bodies until she was roughly in the middle of all of us. Without saying a single word, she lifted her cane and brought it crashing down to the ground in one swift movement.
A clap louder than thunder shook the trees and made waves dance over the water. The boat bobbed like it was on rough seas.
Every single person who had been on their feet went flying.
Dark Hair went ten feet through the air and landed in the water with a loud splash. Hollers and screams filled the hair as the men were tossed about like ragdolls in a hurricane. Santiago was lifted up, but Wilder, who’d been on the ground, managed to drag him back to the earth before he was thrown into the nearby trees.
As the debris settled, I got to my feet and took in what was left.
All of the men who had attacked us were now writhing on the ground, groaning, or out cold entirely. There was no one left to fight. Wilder had a smear of blood near his eye, but I couldn’t tell if it was his or someone else’s. If it was his, the wound had already healed enough I couldn’t make it out.
Santiago, surprisingly, didn’t look too much the worse for wear after going hand-to-hand with a pack of feral werewolves. Maybe he was tougher than I gave him credit for.
“Damn,” he whispered in an awed tone. “She didn’t even say anything.”
I wiped my dirty hands off on my equally dirty jeans. “She doesn’t have to. She casts through pure intention.” Memere could simply think a spell at someone, no magical words required, and she could make it happen.
In a lot of ways that level of magic was probably a hundred times harder to control than anything Santiago or I were capable of—or would ever be capable of—because she needed to be able to make sure she didn’t turn every passing thought into an action.
If it were me I’d be making cars vanish every other day because I didn’t like where they had parked, or accidentally changing peoples hair and makeup choices for them simply by thinking, oh no girl, why didn’t anyone stop you before you left the house.
To be totally honest, no woman in her twenties needed the power to cast spells using only her mind, and no man needed that power ever.
I tapped the side of the boat. “We’re going to want to get out of here before they get up.”
“Are we just leaving them?” Santiago asked.
I couldn’t t
ell if he was hoping I’d take them to a hospital or finish them off. Either way, it wasn’t happening. They’d made their beds the minute they decided to attack us. But I also wasn’t going to run around snapping necks.
“Do you want to kill them?” I asked him.
He said nothing, which was its own kind of concerning. I think a very real part of him was considering whether or not he actually did want to kill them.
Santiago was darker than I gave him credit for. There was a reason Cain went to this guy when dirty deeds needed doing.
He and I locked eyes across the distance and for a long-held breath neither one of us said anything or moved an inch. I wasn’t going to tell him to off these guys, but he was obviously waiting for something. My permission? I had no idea.
“Let’s go,” I said finally, my voice low and serious.
I helped Memere into the boat, and she sat calmly at the front. Wilder offered me a hand, which I took, and he and Santiago climbed in behind me.
We could have walked back to Memere’s tree in less time than the boat ride took, but we weren’t going back to the tree. For one thing, I had no intention of helping Santiago find her home. He’d be back here every damn week pestering her for something new. And I also wasn’t sure if we were being watched by other members of the feral pack.
We navigated the waters slow and quiet until we found the place where Wilder and I had pulled our own boat ashore the day before. We left Santiago to his boat, and I made sure Memere was safely on dry land. She stood in the boggy peat and gave me a soft smile that had a foreboding sense of sadness to it.
“Can I send them back?” I asked her, referring to the spirits. “Without dying?”
She turned her palms up and shrugged. “The only one who knows that is you.”
Santiago stared at her in amazement, and I suspect he had believed she either couldn’t speak or never would.
“But I don’t know.”
Memere lifted one foot and pushed my boat off the shore, sending Wilder and I floating out into the brackish bayou water.
“I guess you’ll find out.”
Chapter Nineteen
My phone was already buzzing the second I plugged it into the car charger. I was coated in sweat and dirt, and wanted nothing more than a long, hot shower and a night in my own bed, but the influx of missed alerts I was getting told me that wasn’t what tonight held for me.
Santiago had followed us back to the mainland, where we returned the two boats to Bess, who made a comment about Santiago finding his friends after all. “I was sure we’d be pulling his corpse out of there in a few months,” she said with a much too cheery smile. “Pleasant surprise. Looks like I made it to day fifteen hundred after all.”
His car was parked next to mine. It was an old Ford pickup that seemed both wrong for him, but also completely perfect. There was rust around the wheel wells, but for the most part it was in incredible shape considering how ancient it must have been.
I sat in the front seat of my Dart as the phone came back to life, and Wilder and Santiago were giving each other a wordless stare down. I just needed them to behave a little longer, then we could all go merrily in different directions.
Come to think of it, I wasn’t entirely sure why Santiago was still here.
Once my phone stopped its endless vibrating I was able to go through the missed texts. Wilder had kept his phone off while we were gone, and evidently had messages of his own because he wandered off a few steps, eyes transfixed to the screen.
Several of my messages were from Magnolia, and started with, I know you’re out of range, but call me when you get back and ending with You need to come home now.
Surprisingly there was one from Amelia, and the presence of Callum’s second-in-command in my text inbox was an unsettling one. It meant nothing good was in the body of the message.
Get to the compound immediately.
Yesterday.
Then there was one from Callum. Just one. Sent this morning.
We need you.
My hands were trembling as I read those three words. Callum never asked for help, he would never admit to not being in perfect control of the situation. For him to authorize Amelia to ask me to come back was a big deal already.
That he’d messaged me himself…
“Something’s wrong,” I told Wilder, drawing his attention back to me. I held the phone up so he could read the messages. He would understand the importance of the words without my needing to explain them, which was what I needed right then.
Santiago must have sensed this was a problem outside his scope, because he stayed quiet while I shared the details with Wilder. But he wasn’t silent for long.
“I should come with you,” he announced.
My head snapped to the side as if he’d just declared he was planning to run for President of the Moon. “Excuse me?”
“You’re in trouble, Genie, and I know Wilder doesn’t like me, and I know you have your whole pack, but whatever is going on with you and this spell, it’s magic, and it’s obviously beyond your control. You need me. I can help.”
“You didn’t even want to tell me what I’d done,” I spat. “Now all of a sudden you want to help? Now that you’ve gotten what you wanted and followed me out here to find La Sorciere. Now you want to help? You’re a real piece of work.”
“Just because I’m a selfish prick doesn’t mean I can’t help you,” he countered without missing a beat.
It was such an absurd statement I didn’t have a comeback for it.
Wilder sighed. “Let him come. He’ll just follow you anyway. At least if we bring him in Callum won’t have the guards eat him alive.”
Santiago blanched, but to his credit he didn’t have any sort of witty remark to add, which was probably the only reason I said, “Fine. Follow us. But stay the hell out of the way. Callum isn’t going to like me bringing a human into this situation.”
Whatever this situation was. None of the texts had given me any context clues that might help me figure out what on earth the big drama was. Which of course meant I was panicking and imagining a million different terrible scenarios, each more grisly than the last.
It seemed like a foregone conclusion Mercy had done something. Had she killed someone? It wouldn’t surprise me in the least, since she was clearly capable of it. And that was the sort of news you wouldn’t want to transmit over the phone.
And what about Timothy Deerling? Had he made his way to St. Francisville in his hunt for me? Or had he gone to my house in the city and that was why Magnolia’s messages had gotten so insistent?
What if something had happened to Magnolia?
My gut clenched and I immediately tossed my phone into the cup holder so it could keep charging.
“Get in,” I told Wilder. He didn’t need to be asked twice. He circled the car and climbed in the passenger seat. “And you,” I said to Santiago. “Just try not to get lost. I’m not slowing down for you.”
He got into his truck and started up the engine, which rattled and roared in a way that seemed exclusive to old American cars. It was comforting, in a way.
Soon our mini-convoy was on the road and headed to Callum’s mansion. I could have called to let them know I was coming, but a part of me feared what they might tell me over the phone. If someone was dead, I didn’t want to know until I got there. My head was full of terrifying what-ifs, but the real deal might be so much worse than anything I dreamt up.
I navigated the road home more by instinct than any real thought. When we passed through St. Francisville we passed the garage Wilder owned. It was evening now, and there was a light on upstairs, indicating his brother Hank was home. The Open sign out front was off and the doors were all shuttered for the night. An old Honda was parked beside the building, and a Toyota Corolla with a For Sale sign in the window was displayed at the front of the parking lot.
Hank Shaw was many things, and I could have come up with a thousand different negatives to bring up about him, b
ut it seemed he might just be doing all right when it came to running the shop.
Hopefully it was keeping him out of trouble.
With Mercy back I had some concerns as to whether or not Hank might get drawn into her plans. He’d previously been a member of her rogue pack, but had managed to escape that with his life intact. If he’d truly learned his lesson, he’d stay the hell away from her this time.
Mercy was bad enough. Undead Mercy with a vendetta?
I was learning how bad that really was.
Fifteen minutes later, we pulled up in front of the mansion and I got out of my car so quickly I forgot to turn it off. Wilder was the one to kill the engine and collect the keys. Santiago brought up the rear, and as soon as we were in the house I pointed him in the direction of a large formal sitting room.
“Sit down, don’t move, don’t wander around. If anyone asks who you are, tell them you’re with me. Don’t say anything else. Just try to stay out of trouble, okay?”
He looked insulted by my insinuation, but took a seat on one of the uncomfortable high-backed sofas and waited. I could tell he was drinking in every detail of the room. I couldn’t leave him alone too long, because there was no telling what a bored witch could get into, whether he intended to or not.
But my first priority was finding Callum.
I made a beeline for his office and burst through the door without knocking. I stopped dead in my tracks when I realized he wasn’t alone.
Callum was seated at his desk and though his expression gave nothing away, he was paler than usual. He didn’t have that usual commanding aura about him. Something had rattled his cage.
“Sorry, I thought you’d be alone,” I said stupidly. “I’ll come back.”
A man was sitting in the chair across from Callum’s and all I could see was the top of his blond head over the high back.
“No, Eugenia, you should stay.” Callum’s voice was tight. “I think His Majesty and I have a question or two for you.”