by Sara M Zerig
A deep howl bellowed in the distance, startling them both. Delia made out a large wolf charging toward them. Knowing the wards wouldn’t allow her to take Chloe against her will, Delia settled a hand on Chloe’s shoulder and explained, “I can take you home, Chloe, but only if you want me to.”
Even in the dark, Delia could see the fear and confusion in the young St. Cyr’s face. Chloe wanted to leave but not with a stranger. Delia placed her other hand over her heart, saying, “My name is Delia Kincade. On my life, I will take you to your parents’ home if that is what you want. But you must want to leave here. Do you?”
Recognition flashed in Chloe’s eyes. The wolf was only a few strides away when Chloe confirmed, “Yes!”
In an instant, Delia took them from the windy desert to a guest room in the St. Cyr’s residence. She helped Chloe into the bed and covered her with a blanket, but Chloe shoved it off, speaking incoherently. Her hair and skin were damp with sweat, her lips cracked and bleeding. Delia knew it was more than the heat that had gotten to Chloe. Whatever was wrong with her was really wrong.
She tried to call Aidan through her own mirror, then Aaron—there was no answer. Delia focused her mind and located her mother at the Lachlan residence. She transferred directly to the Lachlan’s study, where her mother was joined by Cara and Abby.
“Delia?!” Serena’s face flushed, and Delia knew her mother was embarrassed. It was plainly rude to appear uninvited in someone’s home. The home’s wards let her through only because she was an adult clan member.
Delia did not pause to explain herself to her mother. She rushed across the room to take Cara’s hand, saying, “Chloe is not well.”
Cara allowed Delia to transfer them directly to the guest room. Chloe was unresponsive now. Delia wasn’t sure if she was sleeping or unconscious. Cara drew to the bed, eyes wide. She raised her hand over Chloe’s form to assess her injuries. Two glowing orbs sparked in the air as Serena and Abby arrived behind Cara.
“The heat?” her mother asked Cara. Serena was also a healer. While they were both able to heal a multitude of ailments, Serena specialized in pregnancies and infant care, whereas Cara specialized in war wounds.
“In part,” Cara answered. There was a neutrality to her voice like she was treating someone other than her own daughter. “But there has been some other internal trauma. I cannot read it clearly.”
“Can you heal it?” Abby asked.
“I can break the fever, and when she wakes, we can rehydrate her and find out what happened,” Cara said, placing a hand above Chloe’s head to begin the process.
“Where did you find her?” Abby asked Delia.
“Alone in the desert,” Delia told her.
“Alone?” Serena asked incredulously. “Outside the dwelling walls?”
“Yes. She was calling for Cara, but Cara’s necklace was here.”
Cara remained unruffled by the conversation going on around her, concentrated on Chloe.
“She was in a rush to find me,” Abby said by way of explanation. “Serena, you should stay with Cara. Two healers are better than one. I will call you as soon as I have an update on Nikki.”
Serena nodded, and Abby transferred away. Cara stepped back from Chloe and consulted with Serena quietly a moment. They needed a basin with cool water, a washcloth, and plenty of drinking water, Serena said. Cara thought they may also want a pot of warm tea spelled to calm the nerves. Delia summoned a basin, water pitcher, and tea pot from her mother’s kitchen to appear on the end table beside the bed. The witches turned in unison, looking as though they had forgotten she was there.
“Thank you, Delia,” Cara said.
“Of course.”
“And Delia, thank you … for bringing my daughter home.”
Delia spoke out loud what she had thought for the second time today: “I am honored.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
If Dane hadn’t watched her go with his own wolf’s eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it. He had recognized Delia as the witch who transferred Chloe away, but she would not have been able to take her without Chloe’s consent. He shifted to human form, transferred to his cave to dress, and then transferred to Colton and Stevie’s home in a matter of minutes. After updating Colton, he found Kimi in her room, talking with Ritt.
The pair sat side by side on the bed, talking quietly. The more emotional part of the conversation was behind them. Dane concentrated on Ritt, hating to be the bearer of more bad news. “Chloe left.”
Ritt stood. “What do you mean ‘left’?”
“She left with Delia, a witch from her clan.”
“What? How?”
“Chloe must have consented,” Dane said, knowing that didn’t make things better for Ritt but needing to be clear.
“What can we do?” Kimi asked.
“We can ask for a meeting, but now the St. Cyrs will dictate when and where.”
Ritt paced, scrubbing at his face in frustration, his nails and teeth beginning to change. Dane empathized. His mate was a world away, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. Much like Dane could do nothing to change what had happened to Kimi.
“Shift,” Kimi suggested, “go for a run. We’ll figure out a plan in the morning.”
Ritt eyed her silently, and Dane realized he did not want to leave his mother alone with him. He swallowed back the urge to remind them both that Kimi was his responsibility now. He knew that Ritt thought of him as a brute who could not be trusted to protect his mother. He was a brute, even by Shifter Realm standards, but Kimi would never be safer than she was at his side.
After some wordless exchange between mother and son, Ritt left. Dane turned his attention to Kimi. This conversation would be even harder than the last. She moved toward him but then slowed to a stop, trying to read him from a few feet away.
“I assume the shifter who hurt you is dead.”
“He is,” she confirmed.
Dane’s instinct was to close the gap and gather her in his arms, but he knew he couldn’t do that. “I can be patient.”
“Patient?” Alarm reflected in her eyes.
“We can start slowly, with the Earthen shifter marking.”
“It is all we need to complete the bonding,” Kimi reasoned.
“In the Earthen Realm it is,” Dane clarified, “but it is barely recognizable here. It won’t last.”
“Then we could redo it,” Kimi suggested hopefully.
“Kimi, at some point—”
“No!” She stepped back, her voice rising frantically. “I cannot be marked like that.”
Dane remained still. This was not his mate, or at least, not a side to his mate that he cared to see. His mate had bravely taken his hand and left her home realm behind. She had shed her clothes before a group of virtual strangers, uninhibited and had hunted with shifters easily twice her size, undaunted.
This fear was consuming her, crippling her spirit. Understandable as it was, it was equally unacceptable. The horror she had endured as a child was still assaulting her, overtaking her adult life. Dane could not allow that. It took some effort to convey the patience he had promised her in his voice when he spoke.
“It will take time, and I will be patient. But you are a survivor, Kimi, not a victim. I will not let him take this from us.”
With that, Dane left Kimi to absorb what he had said. He couldn’t browbeat her with the rationale. He couldn’t muscle the past out of her head. He could only keep his vow to be patient. The rest was up to her.
Ritt ran for miles, until his limbs were as exhausted as his mind. He shifted back and took in the vast midnight desert with human eyes. A soulless, evil shifter was his father. It was a possibility that had never occurred to him in all his musings over who his dad was and why no one ever spoke of him. Kent had killed him. If Ritt could dig him up, bring him back to life and kill him again, he would.
A part of Ritt wanted to know his name, where he came from, and how he came to be such a monster. Another par
t of him wished he still didn’t know the truth. The blood of that shifter flowed through his veins. It could mess with his head if he let it, but Ritt knew there was not a living cell in his body that could do what his father had done.
His mother’s harsh, general mistrust of others and her overprotectiveness when he was a child made sense. She knew firsthand the worst that could happen. It seemed a cruel fate that Kimi would then end up mated to a brutal shifter here, where the marking, as she had so succinctly put it, was more of a mauling.
Ritt wrestled with the thought of that marking as a tradition in the Shifter Realm. His first thought was to reject it as barbaric. But then, to humans, his marking of Chloe was also barbaric. Ordinary as it was to shifters, it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing they could share with her human family.
Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Saville, I’m in love with your daughter. But instead of marrying her, I’m going to bite her so that every other shifter who meets her knows to back off.
Right. That would go over like a hooker in church. Just as he could never intentionally hurt Chloe, though, Ritt was sure Dane would not intentionally hurt his mother. He didn’t know how they were going to work through the marking issue. It wouldn’t be overnight. But they were mates; they would get through it together.
Ritt wished he was with his own mate now. Like the others, he had been bewildered when Chloe took hold of his mother and placed a hand on Dane’s chest. Chloe closed her eyes and furrowed her brow in deep concentration while Kimi and Dane stared wide-eyed back at her. The three of them visibly trembled as one. When the tears began to pour down the sides of Chloe’s face, Ritt finally snapped to action. But by the time he reached them, Chloe had let go.
Hindsight was twenty-twenty. She had told him that the visions took a toll on her physically, but he had been too upset to see Chloe was more than just remorseful. It wasn’t shame that had her holding her head and telling him to go. He didn’t know how she had managed to share his mother’s memories with Dane, but the act had obviously been too much for her.
It seemed they were constantly dealing with issues born of the fact that Chloe wasn’t a shifter. Chloe had stepped up to protect Ritt when he didn’t need protection. It was sweet and galling at the same time. Did she really think Ritt couldn’t hold his own against Dane? If she did, she sorely underestimated him.
It was possible that Chloe assumed Ritt would have to fight all three shifters. Lok and Colton had aligned to send the message that they supported Dane, but they would not have interfered. No shifter worth his salt would find honor in a fight of three against one. But Chloe didn’t know that. Evidently, she also didn’t know leaving this realm without him was about the worst thing she could have done. He needed her, and whether she was in the right frame of mind to realize it or not, she needed him.
Ritt took in the moonlit desert plain around him. Before finding Chloe, this would have been his paradise; it was a realm that had literally been made for shifters. But this shifter had been made for a witch, and he would find no peace in any realm without her. This shifter’s paradise, without Chloe, may as well be Ritt’s personal hell.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Delia sat beside her mother in Chloe’s room, on standby. Chloe had been sleeping for three days. Sleeping, not resting. She continued to mumble incoherently here and there as her body shivered and shook. It was as if she was trying very hard to awaken. Cara had managed to break the fever the night before, and this seemed to ease Chloe’s restlessness a little.
“Cy will be returning soon,” Serena mentioned, not so casually.
“You mean Cy and Max.” Delia got straight to it. “And yes, I have heard of Max’s engagement.”
The Lachlan brothers had been assisting the Elven Realm in community planning for the past few months, and in that time, Max had begun courting a witch from another clan. Although he had been the singular object of Delia’s affections for years, she knew it would happen eventually. A seer himself, Max would only ever want to marry another seer.
Max had the ability to predict the outcome of a plan or project, which was of particular interest to leaders in the magic realms when planning communities or revisiting local laws. The more details he had, the more details he could give on that outcome. Max could not be sure if marrying another pureblood would bring children with seer abilities as strong as his own; seers could not predict their own future. But it was likely all the same and a practical move.
Delia’s antithesis in nearly every way, Max was steady and consistent, while she was considered flighty. He was traditional, and she was unconventional. His powers were known throughout their realm and others, while Delia’s powers, if she had any, lay dormant. The romantic in her once saw their differences as striking a lovely balance, but Max did not share that view. Over time, Delia had come to accept that. It still hurt, though.
Serena looked her over, a trace of pity in her eyes. “Are you all right?”
Ugh, Delia did not need yet another reason to garner the sympathy of others. It was enough to be powerless in the Age of the Xxyryn. She told her mother what she had been telling herself since she had learned of Max’s engagement. “I am fine.”
Serena looked unconvinced. A motion from the bed caught Delia’s eye. Delia was relieved on multiple levels to report, “Chloe is awake; I will get Cara.”
Chloe awoke in a large, fluffy bed covered in pale pink blankets and pillows, dressed in a white nightgown, and feeling like she had been hit by an eighteen-wheeler. She blinked rapidly, mentally acknowledging that she was awake, although her head was foggy. She wriggled her fingers and toes and moved lead-like arms and legs. She could move, but she was sore and weak.
She took in the large room. Straight across from her, a door was opened to a bathroom. To her right, a golden light streamed through sheer white curtains over glass doors. To her left, Cara stood at her bedside. Chloe recognized Delia beyond Cara, sitting in a chair near the door; a lady who looked to be related to Delia sat beside her.
“Cara?” Chloe sat up too fast and suffered sharp, stabbing pains at her temples. She sat back again.
“Your head?” Cara placed a hand atop her head, and Chloe felt the ache dissipate considerably. Cara raised a tall glass of water to her lips. “Drink this.”
Chloe’s sips turned to gulps. Cara refilled the glass, and Chloe drained it again. Three glasses down, her mouth was less dry. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Three days.”
“Three days?” She had been wrung out by visions before, but not like this. This was bad. Music and romcoms weren’t going to cure this. Anxiety welled within her. “Where is Ritt? Is he here? Is he OK?”
“Why would he not be OK?” Cara inquired.
“Have you talked to him?” Chloe pressed. “Does he know I’m here? That I’m OK?”
Cara drew back slightly. “Are you?”
“I will be. I just needed to get away from there.”
“The Shifter Realm? Why?”
Chloe sighed. “It’s hard to explain.”
Cara offered her hand. “Then show me.”
“No!” Chloe jerked upright in the bed, her whole body rebelling at the idea. Kimi’s vision would probably be more of what Chloe felt indirectly, but that was bad enough. She drew in a steadying breath. “Trust me. You don’t want that vision.”
“All right,” Cara soothed. She sat on the edge of the bed. “What can you tell me?”
Chloe lay back against the pillow and closed her eyes, thinking on how best to relay things to Cara. She didn’t want to betray Kimi’s confidence. Again. “Kimi, Ritt’s mom, she has—had—an awful secret.”
“Something she had done?”
“No, something that happened to her. She had been protecting Ritt from it. But her mate needed to know, and I had to show him. Or at least, I thought I had to show him,” Chloe said, struggling with self-doubt.
Cara gave a slight shake of the head, brow pinched as she tried to follow. “Kimi’s
mate lives in the Shifter Realm?”
“Dane.”
That fact was met with mild surprise, but Cara asked, “And what happened when you showed him?”
“It was too much—the vision—it wrecked me.” Chloe lifted a heavy hand to wipe at hot tears. “It wrecked them. And Ritt didn’t understand. He was so angry, and it was all too much for me. I couldn’t stay there.”
“It is over,” Cara reassured. “You are home now.”
No, she wasn’t home. Ritt wasn’t here. Her empty stomach clenched tight, and her face flushed. “I have to see him.”
“Shhh …” Cara touched a hand to her head again, and Chloe felt her shoulders relax. “Drink this.”
Chloe took two sips from a teacup Cara held to her lips and then eased back onto the pillows. Her eyelids grew heavy. The room went black.
When Cara was certain Chloe was asleep, she asked Delia and Serena to stay while she updated Aidan. She found her husband in his study, Chloe’s cell phone on his new desk. Cara had found the phone in Chloe’s shifter dress and charged it to discover that Nikki had been calling and texting regularly.
The spell had partially worked; Nikki believed that Chloe was in Australia. But she also described her run-in with Will and Aaron in her texts, asking if Chloe knew them. Nikki should not remember Will at all and should have never seen Aaron. Cara had replied on Chloe’s behalf that no, she did not know them, but it sounded like an immature practical joke. Reception was poor where she was, Cara had written, but Chloe would call her in a few days. Chloe was in no condition to make that call to Nikki yet, but Cara hoped she would be up for it soon. Her Earthen friend was persistent.
Aidan had consulted with Aaron and Will on a new plan. He continued to keep watch over the exterior of Nikki’s home from his desk. Rising from his chair when Cara entered, Aidan immediately inquired about Chloe. “Is she awake?”
“She was for a short time, and she was able to tell me what happened.” Cara took a chair across from Aidan. “She says she shared a traumatic experience between shifters—took the memories from one shifter and shared it with another.”