She’s going to paint herself too much of a target, and now we know she can’t walk the walk.
“Fucking fast vampire,” Damien mutters under his breath, leaving me to smirk.
“What’s the hurry?” I ask as he barrels out in reverse, and then slingshots us onto the road.
“I have a beta for the first time in ages, and he has a sister on her way to Sanctuary. What do you think the hurry is?”
I scrub a hand over my face. “Let me guess. Some ‘rogue’ shifters have attacked.”
“Shocking. I know. I’ve been preoccupied. I should have warned him this was possible so he could have accounted for it and sent decoys out to distract her,” he says under his breath. “Talbot may not know yet; at least, I hope he doesn’t. Shera caught wind of it and immediately called it in.”
“She’s my favorite beta,” I remind him. “Of course she caught wind of it. She’s kept me better informed than any prior beta. She’s not going to be happy about these new combat trials, though. I dread that conversation.”
He revs the engine, cutting a curve so sharp I’m certain we’re going to skid off the side. Somehow, he manages to keep control, never wavering.
I really need to get the lead out and learn how to fucking drive. It looks damn fun.
“Shera’s always held her own in combat with large House betas,” he says.
“But now those Houses will acquire more and more physically strong betas. Since we entered times of peace, we’ve all strayed toward the more useful betas, as opposed to the best combatants. Shera’s the most unevenly matched and relies a lot on her reputation to instill hesitance. Consistent fighting will eventually ebb that hesitation, expose all her weaknesses, and ruin her edge,” I grumble.
He’s quiet for a moment.
“How is it my beta is the one we should be talking about right now, given the reason we’re on this mission, and yet it’s your beta we’re discussing?”
“Because my beta is better than your beta, and I’ve had mine longer. Now she’ll go to Emily’s House, because she won’t be able to fight my battles and win, once they get her number in the fighting rings. They’ll single her out and make a mockery of her. She’s a survivalist first, even as she remains loyal. Emily’s House will have fewer disputes.”
“Yes, but Idun is about to turn my beta against me by ripping his sister to shreds, and then pretend it was a rogue pack. He’ll lose all faith in me when there’s nothing I can do in retaliation. We never manage to prove she’s behind these things,” Damien carries on, grinding his jaw. “It’s just up ahead. They weren’t too far—”
I catch the scent of shifter blood in the air, and I’m out the door before he can finish. After leaping off the side of the bridge, I drop through the air. My eyes land on a car that’s turned over on its side, as I land in an easy crouch.
It takes a moment to really believe what I see. I’m standing in the middle of a bouquet of dismembered body parts.
As I stare around in confusion at all the carnage, Damien drops to my side, his breath snaking out.
“His sister is just a succubus, right?” I ask, definitely smelling some strong, old shifter bloodlines.
The scent of those bloodlines makes them undeniably Idun’s crop.
My eyes lift and roam over the abandoned car, smelling the slightest hint of succubus.
“She’s supposed to be a weak succubus in need of Sanctuary,” Damien says in response, no longer sounding convinced of that. “They’re not blood-related. It’s an honorary title, to the best of my knowledge.”
“How strong is your beta? Could he have done this?” I ask, stepping over a familiar face.
Literally. Just the face is on the ground and staring back at me with only one partial eyeball.
She was one of Idun’s finest.
Damien lifts his phone, the line already ringing. I hear Talbot’s voice come over the line.
“Alpha, how can I oblige you this morning?” Talbot asks too cheerfully.
“Any word from your sister?” Damien asks, his tone giving nothing away.
“How kind of you to ask, Alpha. She’s been safely delivered to Sanctuary, as of just a few moments ago, and Violet is in the process of setting up a meeting with the Neopry House to discuss the attack my sister met along her way,” he says with far too much casualness.
Damien and I both blink at each other a few times.
“We literally just left her behind in the woods. It certainly didn’t take that long for us to reach this,” I point out, motioning to the carnage. “We’re gone for ten bloody minutes and she’s preparing for war?”
I turn and quickly climb back up to the vehicle, impatiently drumming my fingers, as I wait on Damien to finally catch up.
He’s angrily jerking the door open, spraying a litany of curses, as he sits down, grips the steering wheel, and glares over at me.
“Why do I feel like we’re missing something?” he asks as he cranks the car and spins us around.
“Because we’re missing something big. Maybe you should get to know your beta a little better. I’ll have Shera dig up some stuff on him as well.”
As he drives us back, I pull out my phone, getting some important things done to make this day more productive. And to distract myself from the fact our errant little monster is not making any damn sense this day.
“Are you texting Vance or Emit?” Damien asks, his entire tone and body tense.
“Neither. I’m shopping for Violet’s wedding gift.” I pause, holding up a finger. “Actually, I just found her gift. I do love the ease of purchases these days,” I tell him, feeling all too merry now that I’ve found this gem.
It’s a pencil holder with a ribbon corset around it. I think someone had us in mind when they designed it.
“Are you fucking serious right now? There’s a small pack of dead shifters, and our girlfriend is going to once again press Idun’s buttons. All while failing to mention any of this to us,” he gripes.
Smiling too broadly, I hold my phone up to show him the pencil holder. “Isn’t it perfect?”
His eyes cut to me and narrow.
“I only picked you to come with me because of your desperate need for bloodshed and worrisome speed. Not your stupid fucking random train of thought,” he says between gritted teeth.
I give him a bored look. “What can I use my desperate need for bloodshed and worrisome speed for at this moment, Morpheous? I’ve told all of you to rein Violet in. Instead, you make me look like the prick every time I try, and now she’s off the rails. Congratulations. The tension is about to get suffocating in our small town. It’s possibly time to evacuate the humans.”
He opens and closes his mouth, no words leaving him, though his ire does seem to double.
“I should have picked the Van Helsing,” is all he says. “Never again.”
They always hate it when I’m right. We’re too far down the rabbit hole to turn back now.
I guess I’ll finally be going to war with Idun.
We’ll see how we fare when it’s four against one, instead of three against two.
“The necklace may as well be a farce,” I tell him. “It gave her some added bonus powers, somehow, but in the end, the fear she’s accumulated even from the grave has made her strength undeniable. You feel her presence. It’s more commanding than ever. She’s not even bothered trying to retrieve the necklace.”
He says nothing for a long minute, until he reaches for his phone.
“There’s a heap of severed shifter betas someone left to be found, and Idun doesn’t seem to know about it. Yet. Or she’s pretending she doesn’t. Violet either does or doesn’t know what’s going on, and it’s getting harder and harder to tell what she’s up to these days. I don’t know anything anymore, Vampyre. I’m tired of pretending I do.”
Glancing out the window, I smirk.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” I ask.
“No. Not really,” he quickly confesses. “I’ve been on my
own for a long damn time, shirking all the responsibility I could manage to shrug off, because I got sick of this game. We’re getting sucked in, and it’s because Violet’s getting sucked in. She’s simply too young to realize she’s doing exactly what Idun wants.” He pauses, as though a thought has occurred to him. “Avery could have taken that many beta shifters.”
Avery is an impressive knight. It’s certainly possible and the most plausible explanation.
What’s done is done.
There’s no way to go but forward from here.
“I hope Violet’s ready for the fight she’s about to pick. Idun’s playing her. But, at least I’ll finally be able to prove my loyalty.”
“I hope you have some tricks up your sleeve, Vampyre,” he says.
I smirk with false confidence, not letting on that I’m doubting a great number of my plans. Aside from a nuclear detonation—that will likely not be okay with Violet, since she fancies humans—I don’t see many chances to weaken Idun—neither physically nor within her House.
She broke free from the frost tank sooner than I’d hoped, and she was completely healed. The loss of the necklace hasn’t rattled her confidence even a little.
My cards are quickly falling on the table, and they’re not matching up with Idun’s hand as well as I’d hoped. I almost think she left me that necklace on purpose, sacrificing a little, in an effort to set me up for failure, in the event I finally betrayed her.
As if she gave me a trinket to make me feel more powerful.
I used to love her for being so dangerous.
But that’s before she became my enemy.
I never believed such a day would come.
Chapter 21
VANCE
“Fuck’s sake, Violet, where the hell are you?” I snap.
“Over here,” she calls, as I push through more of the thick forest.
“It seems like every time you answer with that, your voice comes from another direction,” Emit gripes from somewhere across from me.
“That’s because I’m lost!” she says, as though that’s somehow an explanation.
“That’s not an excuse for your voice disappearing from one second to the—”
There’s barely a rustling to my side, and then the breath is nearly knocked out of me, when Violet boulders into me. I grab her at the shoulders, and her head slings back, revealing wide, surprised eyes.
“Vance!” she shouts like some startled wild animal.
“Surely it can’t be that surprising to find me after several minutes of me whacking through the forest and shouting your name,” I state in a dry tone.
She opens her mouth, as if to speak, when Anna suddenly appears at her side, grinning for no particular reason.
“Oh, Violet, they’re waiting for you. Talbot has done everything you requested,” she tells her.
My brow furrows at the cryptic message, and Anna vanishes from sight.
Violet gives me a timid smile, pushing a long piece of hair out of her face. Her hair’s a mess, actually.
“The forest doesn’t agree with you,” I note, since it looks like she’s been camping for a week, rather than stuck in here for less than ten minutes.
“Sorry. Something really important has come up,” she says very abruptly, before suddenly darting off.
She’s a terrible runner, and it distracts me from the fact we need to have a very serious conversation about what her monster really is.
A poor man’s Simpleton monster.
How can I break her heart that way? She genuinely thinks she’s fierce.
I’m left scratching my head at the bizarre, frustrating start to my morning.
Oddly, Talbot’s car drives down the small side-road, barely slowing down long enough for Violet to hop in, and then they race off.
“Something’s amiss,” I mutter to myself.
“What’s not right is having briars stuck to your cock,” Emit retorts from the woods, swearing vengeance on a prickly bush of some sort, given the rest of his muttered commentary that I barely pick up bits and pieces from.
“If anyone’s cock deserves to get stabbed by briars, it’s yours,” I assure him, distracted by the day’s random events.
Emit lumbers out behind me, cursing when he trips on a set of stubborn vines. “The bloody undergrowth in this place is unnatural. You should do better maintenance on your lands, Van Helsing. Where the hell was she off to in such a hurry?” he asks as though I’ve had a secret conversation with her he couldn’t overhear.
I don’t have to bother responding to a pointless question with a pointless answer. Everyone’s in a hurry, and now I don’t even know which direction to go.
Do we chase Violet, or do we chase Damien and Arion?
Emit is busy plucking the briars from his cock, cursing some of the more stubbornly embedded ones.
“This is why most civilized folk wear trousers,” I decide to inform him, smiling like a prat, when he glares over at me.
His phone chimes with a text that has his full attention, and I watch with some worry at how wide his eyes go.
“Son of a bitch,” he growls, eyes darting up to meet my gaze, his face slightly paling, as he lifts his phone.
The screen shows Idun TV, and my heart starts pounding, when I see Talbot’s car already parked in front of the Neopry House.
The camera pans to Violet, who is flanked by Talbot and Avery, as she addresses Idun on the steps.
“Why is this happening? Why is this happening at warp speed? She just left. Given her usual dallying and safety precautions, she should barely be halfway to town,” I very reasonably state for no reason at all, since it’s a pointless observation.
“Why the fucking hell is she with Idun? At Idun’s House? With two very valuable betas?” Emit demands.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit, January Violet Carmine?” Idun asks, giving her nails a bored glance.
“We’ll skip the theatrics and cut to the part where you tried to have one of my members harmed on their way to Sanctuary,” Violet bluntly blurts out.
Emit goes rigid next to me.
I stiffen so tightly that my body immediately aches.
Idun’s gaze flicks up, a hint of surprise in her eyes, but she replaces it with cool menace in the next instant.
There’s excitement in her gaze now. That’s terrifying, since Violet’s only chaperoned by mere betas.
“Please enlighten me on whatever it is you mean, January Violet Carmine,” Idun purrs.
“You have a ruse. Everyone knows it. You send a pack of betas to break all the rules, and pretend they were misguided rogues, who were just trying to impress their alpha,” Violet states with zero preamble, finesse, or…anything really.
She’s deliberately being abrasive.
We should have immediately told her how weak her monster is next to an alpha.
Eleven minutes.
Eleven fucking minutes.
Eleven minutes was too long to wait.
She moves too quickly into conflict, even for human standards.
When I see Idun’s grin stretch across her face, my feet start moving. Emit shoves his phone at me, and I juggle it until I have it in front of my face, watching the hint of excitement in Idun’s eyes double.
It’s been too long since she was challenged. She’s drawing it out—like the cat with a mouse…a mouse that, unfortunately, and wrongly, thinks it’s a cat as well.
Emit is right behind me, shaking the ground for a few minutes, before the telltale sound of his bones cracking and skin tearing rings through the air.
A shock of dark fur only barely registers when he darts by me on four furry legs.
“Please, come inside. These sorts of things shouldn’t be discussed on the front steps. How do you like your tea?” Idun asks, enjoying this far too much.
“You need to be on two legs. Don’t run your wolf through the fucking town, you imbecile!” I hiss after Emit.
He makes a frustrate
d sound, his wolf eyes turning to meet mine, as he seamlessly shifts back, still naked.
“Yeah, because that’s less eye-catching,” I very sarcastically tell the fool. “Would it kill you to bring clothes?”
His mate is about to walk into Idun’s home, with only two betas at her side, so of course his wolf is riled. He’s more animal than man right now, and I see him struggle to keep his skin.
He hops a fence, snatching a tarp from one of the outposts, and wraps it around his waist, while I hurry to catch up.
I mildly startle when there’s suddenly a ghost singing right beside Emit. She’s singing something about being addicted to him but knowing that he’s toxic? All the while, her eyes are greedily drinking in his bare upper body.
Violet collects some of the most shamelessly imposing ghosts with awfully timed appearances.
“Why the hell is there a ghost singing to us right now?” he bites out.
Her attention is solely on him.
“She’s not singing to us, wolf. Congrats. You now also have your very own ghost stalker,” I bite out, idly wondering why there are suddenly so many extra loitering about, as of late.
Not that it’s the most important thing to focus on at the moment. It is, however, a welcome distraction from the impending nightmare ahead of us.
“If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?” she sings, curling her hand around a phantom microphone, presumably, and holding it near her lips.
“I’d rather have Anna’s suspicious ass hanging around instead of this ridiculousness,” Emit mutters under his breath, a nervous rambling by this point.
We’re not moving too fast. Nothing good happens from this point forward.
Violet is decidedly determined to find out if immortals can still suffer cardiac arrest without some sort of physical catalyst. We’re her guinea pigs.
“She’s either sadistic and enjoys torturing us by crucifying herself, or she’s a fool who doesn’t know any better. Either way, we have to find a way to rein her in before she succeeds in truly provoking Idun,” I tell him too quietly for the ghost to overhear.
Gypsy Truths (All The Pretty Monsters Book 6) Page 20