by RJ Blain
“Or she’s asleep and can’t stop you,” Amber muttered. “I heard about the hotel room incident.”
Evelyn straightened. “I didn’t. What hotel room incident?”
“She tried to steal my phone, so I made her use me as a pillow in retaliation. It was wonderful. She’s so warm.”
“Can we get back to work? Please?” While I still tingled from Elliot’s bite, I was able to wiggle my toes, which helped me gain better control over my legs. “I can’t work like this.”
“I’m working, Vicky. Hold your horses. It won’t take long to get something useful out of this.” Amber set my laptop aside and pulled out her cell, dialing a number before holding it to her ear. “Hey, Gerald? I need some banking details on several Canadian accounts—and three American ones, too. Can you hook me up? Yes, it’s about Dante’s disappearance. They’re feeder accounts for payments issued to someone we think may be involved. I have the amounts of the transactions, the dates, and transaction IDs. I just sent them over to your through Vicky’s email account.” Amber listened, making noncommittal noises. “Okay, yes. Hold on. Elliot, let the poor woman up. Gerald wants to talk to her for a minute.”
“To me?” I frowned. My wolf disliked the idea of Elliot going anywhere, as did I. “Just hand me the phone. Moving is too much work.”
“She’ll probably need five or ten more minutes before she can walk without crumpling to the floor,” Evelyn added.
Amber shrugged, hopped to her feet, and offered the phone to me. “You’ve met Gerald before.”
I vaguely remembered the man, though important details, including his last name, eluded me. My hand shook when I took the phone from the witch, but I managed to get it in the general vicinity of my ear without dropping it. “Hanover.”
“Did Richard take you hostage or did you make it to Yellowknife of your own free will?”
“Is this a serious question?”
“Very much so. You sound like you can still breathe, which is reassuring.”
Without any foundation for the conversation, I decided my best option was to play it safe and keep my tone light and my words playful, although I was tempted to find out what Gerald would do if I told him Richard had held me hostage in his basement for over a week. “Mr. Murphy is currently my slave, and I have tasked him with feeding my puppies. One horse a piece, under threat of death.”
“Ah, so you took him hostage, eh?”
“I took Anderson hostage, too.”
“Laying claim, are you?”
“He would’ve cried if I left him in Atlanta.”
“Heaven forbid. Where is Mr. Anderson now?”
“He’s around.”
“Around where? You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“If I had killed him, I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone I’d done it.”
Elliot took the phone out of my hand and held me against him with his other arm. I considered struggling for a few moments, but decided it was far too much work. When I wasn’t tingling so much, I’d worry about moving.
Until then, I’d enjoy the excuse I had for staying right where I was. Elliot contented my wolf, and between his presence and his bite, she settled into a torpor.
“I’m not dead, Gerald. In fact, I’m quite well, thank you for asking. I have a beautiful woman on my lap, and she’s not even trying to kill me yet. Okay, fine. I bit her. I don’t want to talk about Richard. He’s not on my lap, and I’m very grateful for that.”
Amber snickered, returning to her seat to work on my laptop, shaking her head at my mate’s absurd discussion with Gerald.
Evelyn giggled. “I’m so sorry, Vicky. Once you’re not so numb, bite him back. I say he’s earned it.”
“Shush!” Elliot let me go long enough to wave his hand at his twin’s mate. “Sorry about that. Evelyn’s getting uppity. I’m not brave enough to bite her. Anyway. Yes, it is true Richard is serving as Vicky’s slave right now. She said something about permitting Richard to bring our puppies into the pack if he proved he could be a good guardian today. So far, she’s gotten all three of them to exercise, and the tired, bruised Alpha is cooking. Evelyn also requested three different types of cookies, so he’ll be occupied for a while. What do you have for us?”
I couldn’t make out what Gerald was telling Elliot, but my mate’s eyes narrowed. His mouth twisted into a scowl. A sniff confirmed the anger brewing beneath the surface.
“All right, Gerald. Email me when you find out. I can confirm one thing. Your guess is probably correct, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I hadn’t realized it had escalated to that level. We need to find out who is behind those accounts. If we can, we might be able to track the money to the source. If we track the money to the source, we can put an end to this once and for all. Go ahead and confirm with the Brits. Get them in on the account hunting, too. If they can secure the cooperation of the Swiss bankers, that would be ideal. Keep me in the loop.”
Elliot sighed, hung up, and waved the phone at Amber. “He knows exactly what we do: nothing.”
“It took him ten minutes to tell you nothing,” the fire witch grumbled, getting up to retrieve her cell. “How about you tell us the truth, Mr. Anderson.”
Inhaling Elliot’s scent, I couldn’t detect the sour odor of a lie. Sniffing in quick bursts, I turned enough I could shove my nose against his throat in search of the scent. “He doesn’t smell like he’s lying?”
“That’s because Elliot’s really, really good at lying when he wants to be.”
I sniffed a few more times. “Are you lying to me, Elliot?”
“Sure am.” Elliot got his hand between my teeth and his throat. Growling, I rolled off his lap and hit the floor on my hands and knees.
I rose to my feet and crossed my arms over my chest lifted a foot, planting it on his leg. “Amber, how long would I have before that Gerald fellow calls back wanting to know if this male creature is still alive?”
“Probably an hour. Also, male creature? Wow, Vicky. That’s harsh.”
“An hour isn’t long enough to kill him and hide the body.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You have pretty legs, Vicky.”
“I’m wearing sweats. How would you know I have pretty legs? You can’t see them. Don’t you mean Richard has pretty pants?”
My mate shuddered. “I don’t want anything to do with Richard’s pants, even if you’re in them.”
“Who’s in my pants?” Richard poked his head through the doorway. “This is an interesting turn of discussion. Why are you in my pants, Vicky? Wrong male. You’re supposed to be in his pants, not mine.”
I sighed. “I’m wearing your sweat pants, Richard.”
“My plan is obviously working. You didn’t even blush that time. I have a few minutes before I have to go back to the kitchen. What’s going on?”
Elliot twisted out from beneath my foot and knelt on the armchair to face Richard. “I just got off the phone with Gerald. He’s going to get on the horn with the Swiss bankers and see if we can get to the end of the money flow. He’s also going to make friends with the Brits to see what we can dig up. If we can crack Basin’s finances, we’ll have them dead in the water.”
“Made some progress?”
“We got some accounts to work with and the discrepancy source isolated. We do have a new problem to deal with, and I’ve been informed it’s my fault.”
“What now?”
Elliot pointed in my direction. “She’s a walking storm magnet. Every storm on the bloody planet is headed in our direction.”
My mouth dropped open, but I was powerless to say a word. The implications of such a drastic shift in weather planets filtered in through my shock, and a chill started deep in my chest and spread to my bones.
Richard’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Weather patterns all over the planet have gone completely haywire, and it’s all headed in our direction. It matches what we thought before. The weather is trying to heel, and it’s fol
lowing Vicky. The bloody jet streams have shifted courses across the planet, and everything’s turning into quite the mess. The Sahara’s gotten more rain in the past week than it has in the past three years combined. It’s snowing in Australia. There was an aurora across the equator. Gerald suggests we watch the news to get a better idea of the chaos.” Elliot turned to face me and thumped back into his seat. Reaching out, he clasped my hands. “Don’t you even think of blaming yourself.”
Without access to my witchcraft, without even the hint of the draining I associated with its use, I had some level of confidence it wasn’t my fault—not entirely. “I didn’t call any storms. Trust me, I know when I call a storm, and I haven’t done it.”
“Good. Now we need to figure out what’s happened and stop it.”
Amber sighed and shook her head. “I think it’s pretty obvious. Basin must have tried to manufacture a blood diamond with her witchcraft and got more than they bargained for because she’s not just a witch. I haven’t been able to figure how her being a squirrel fits into things yet, but her aura is fairly consistent with what I’ve seen of restored victims.”
Elliot squeezed my hands, and his entire body went rigid. “But you said Nicole’s still alive. Same with Dante.”
“She is,” the fire witch confirmed.
“Dante is, too. I’ve no doubt. They probably went after Vicky first, and that’d be enough to set him off. Someone hurting his twin’s precious mate? Add in the fact if it was obvious to him they were after her, he’d try to get her out just to thwart them.” Evelyn lowered her feet from the coffee table, lurched to her feet, and wobbled towards the hallway. “The bad weather’s a good thing, you know that, right?”
“What?” Richard blurted. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Not wise, Richard. Don’t call the pregnant bitch insane,” Amber hissed.
“Stuff it, both of you,” the woman in question snapped. “Use your fucking heads for a change. Basin is made up of Normals and a few fringe supernatural—weak ones who wished they didn’t have their powers. That shadow witch whore was likely their ace in the hole. They aren’t able to control the weather, which means they don’t have control of Vicky’s witchcraft. No one does. That could be a very bad thing, but it’s a lot better than Basin being able to do whatever they want with the weather.”
“She has a point,” Elliot admitted, relaxing his hold on me. Pulling free, I retrieved my laptop from Amber and sat on the couch.
Snowflake crawled onto my lap and rubbed his head against my stomach, wagging his tail so hard his entire body shook. With a small smile, I stroked his fur. “Maybe we should do a little research before we jump to any conclusions. At this point, it’s accurate I can’t use my witchcraft. From my perspective, it’s gone. I can’t sense the weather. I have no idea why these storms are following me. I didn’t call them.”
“At least one of you can be reasonable about this. Good. Figure it out. I’m going to check on the puppies before checking in with Lisa and Alex.” Evelyn wrinkled her nose at Richard, huffed, and waddled away.
“Her feet are bothering her, her head probably hurts, she’s likely getting kicked by numerous pairs of little arms and legs, and if she doesn’t have a craving for Frankencookie, I’ll be very surprised,” Richard muttered, joining me on the couch. “With my luck, with a pickle on top and a scoop of ice cream on the side, in a flavor I don’t have.”
Snowflake flattened his ears and bared his teeth at the Alpha Fenerec.
“I will eat you, you runty little fox.”
I abandoned my laptop on the coffee table, picked up Snowflake, and cradled him against me. “You’ll do no such thing, Murphy. He’s my fox.”
“No, he’s mine. I dealt with bringing him across the border, I got him his shots, and I didn’t eat him. Mine.”
I narrowed my eyes and matched Snowflake’s teeth bared, silent snarl.
A crack of thunder rattled the walls.
“Okay. You win. You can have him for now. He’s mine later, though,” the Alpha grumbled, glancing up at the ceiling. “I’m going to view the timing of that as evidence the storms are attuned to Vicky. Please don’t get mad. In fact, stay nice and calm forever, or at least until you resume having control over the weather. Then you can beat the snot out of me before clubbing your mate and dragging him into your den to do whatever you wish with him.”
I bowed my head, sighed, and wondered what I had done to deserve Richard as my Alpha.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It wasn’t until Richard herded us into a different sitting room, one with a television, that I understood the severity of the weather conditions.
Winter storms happened, but the satellite imagery of Earth showed dense clouds enshrouding the entire planet, making it impossible to tell where one ended and the next began. I couldn’t tell how anyone could guess the storms were converging on Yellowknife.
“Vicky, you’re a badass,” Amber declared, pointing at the television. “We need to figure out how to turn you off.”
“On,” Elliot corrected, halting in his pacing to lean on the couch behind me, his hands resting on my shoulders. “We need to figure out how to turn her back on. I think the problem is she’s off.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” the fire witch admitted.
“From my understanding of her approach to magic, she doesn’t actively use it unless something is going wrong. For example, a few years back, when that storm battered the east coast.”
I grimaced at the reminder of the hurricane I had called shortly after Samantha’s death. In order to restore weather patterns to normal, I’d redirected a hurricane, ramming it into a blizzard and creating havoc for the east coast of the United States. “That’s true.”
The damage hadn’t been as bad as I had feared it would be, although I still carried the weight of at least twelve deaths on my shoulders.
Many more people would die if I didn’t figure out how to put an end to the planet-wide storm.
“Basin bit off more than they could chew.” Richard pointed at the satellite image, shaking his head. The image changed to brief clips of storms around the world.
From rain in the driest parts of the world to snow in the tropics, meteorologists all agreed on one thing: no one knew what was going on. It wouldn’t be long until the religions in the dark about the supernatural would claim their particular deity was responsible for the chaos.
Old rumors, myths, and stories would resurface along with one of the many names I’d cast aside of the year. The one Samantha had liked best would haunt me, although few would remember me as Aurora, the Shimmering Wolf. They’d remember the Caretaker of the Seasons, the one who safeguarded Earth from cataclysm.
Some would blame me.
Some would believe me dead.
Unless I figured out how to rein in my rogue witchcraft, it was likely my death would be the only thing capable of reversing what Basin had unleashed. Over my life, I had learned to keep careful control over my powers, using them only when someone else threatened the natural cycle of the seasons.
The storms were following me, and I could only think of two things that could restore them to their natural course. If I regained my powers, I could calm them, but considering how dangerous handling even one storm was, I’d probably die in the process.
Alternatively, my death would scatter them until they blew themselves out. Time would revert the weather to its natural patterns, or at least stabilize it.
Was there a way I could, assuming I regained control of my powers, reverse what had happened without it killing me in the process? Calling a hurricane to counter the witch-brewed blizzard had almost killed me. It had taken CPR to prevent my death.
How could I calm the entire Earth’s weather, even if I worked on one storm at a time?
It was impossible.
“What do we do next?” Elliot gave my shoulders a squeeze before circling the couch to sit beside me. “Judging from those pictures, flights around the world
are grounded, trade has probably come to a complete halt, and there’ll be enough destruction that disaster management is going to have a seizure trying to deal with it all. If Vicky can’t control it, we have to find some other way.”
Richard sighed. “I’m not sure we can. Our one possible option is Nicole. With so many active storm fronts, she has all the energy she needs to work just about any magic she could possibly want with the added bonus of taking the wind out of the storms’ sails.”
My eyes widened. Too often, I forgot Nicole was a wizard, the only one sanctioned by the Inquisition and deemed a risk worth keeping alive. “I don’t know if I could guide her through it. But, even if I had control of my witchcraft, I can’t stop that.”
Elliot glared at Snowflake, who was sprawled across my lap. He grabbed the fox by the scruff of his neck, hauled him off me, and flopped across my lap. Once Elliot relocated Snowflake to his chest, he scratched the fox’s chin. The animal melted, sprawling over my mate, and wagging his tail enthusiastically. “She’s right. She redirected a hurricane. It almost killed her. Trying to use magic to correct that mess is suicide. I won’t allow it.”
“Nicole can feed Vicky energy so she can work her magic. She’s done it with Amber before,” Richard soothed. “That’ll let Vicky work all the magic she needs with hardly any risk at all.”
“Richard’s right. If you give Nicole a big enough power supply, she can convert electricity into energy witches can use. It’s a little uncomfortable, but when she channels energy, I can do a lot of things I normally can’t.”
“Like burn my lodge down,” Richard muttered.
“I already said I was sorry!”
My eyes widened. “You burned the lodge down?”
“Only one of the smaller buildings. I did not expect Nicole’s power to amplify mine like it did. We’re back to the beginning. We have to find Nicole and Dante, and we need to find them now.” Amber clucked her tongue. “But how? We keep hitting walls no matter what we do.”
“We wait for news on the money trail. That’s all we can do. Until then, we try to plan for other contingencies, how we’ll make the hit when we find Basin, and how we’ll handle the storms once we find Nicole.” Richard drew in a breath, held it for a long moment, and let it out in a soft, controlled exhale. “We know they’re alive. We just need to figure out how to find them. I can’t track Nicole, Evelyn can’t track Dante. We’re fortunate we found you, Vicky, since your bond with Elliot hasn’t been solidified yet.”