by C. M. Owens
I dematerialize and land back up in the spot where I met Darius, then immediately close my eyes to watch her.
“I’m not going to turn down a run on the Alaskan frontier,” Thad says as he starts undressing.
Roslyn starts undressing as well, but my attention stays focused on Ella as she just stares into the woods in the direction I am. She blinks back tears, and I swallow down the growl of my own beasts that are seeming to fight with me for the first time in so long.
Without even undressing, she tips her head back, and a shift takes over. I watch the fabric tear from her body as she drops to all fours, the lycan ripping its way into form.
A roar rattles the air in both my mind and echoing through the woods to my ears as well. She turns away from the direction I’m in, shaking her head and huffing like a frustrated beast still locked in a cage, beginning her pacing.
Thad shifts, watching her warily as she continues to shake her head, but the worst part is when her lycan eyes look in my direction again. The sadness there is fucking miserable, and my jaw grinds when it feels like she’s staring directly at me on purpose.
Her head tips back and a low, agonizing howl ignites the air. I open my eyes, unable to look at her any longer as I run a frustrated hand through my hair.
Standing, I turn and kick the chair so hard it breaks apart. With a growl, I grab the pieces and launch them across the canyon behind me. Another feral growl escapes me as my fangs elongate and my claws descend, despite the fact I’m trying to retract both.
I start my own pacing, back and forth, working to keep my skin and not shift with her.
I listen to that gut-wrenching howl again, growing distant as she likely runs in the opposite direction.
Gripping the wooden table in front of me, I take several slow breaths, boxing my mind, fighting every instinct she draws forth. But I can’t seem to force myself to leave. To go home. To do anything but stand here gripping this motherfucking table.
The table explodes, and splinters rain down around me. Another growl escapes me, and I curse her with every breath as I start shrugging out of my clothes, shifting before I even finish.
Her sad howls guide me as I race through the woods, scaring docile creatures into frenzied panic as they scatter away from me.
Chapter 19
ELLA
The others race at my sides, and I soak in the freedom of sprinting through the woods. The freedom of escaping the clutches of my power’s grip, like I’m outrunning it, is anything but liberating, though.
My speed hastens, and Thad struggles to keep up, Roslyn too. But it’s been too long since I had this much room to run, so I don’t hold back.
My hind legs kick off the base of trees far older than I am, and I shift directions, leaving a zigzagged trail for the two of them to follow, almost smiling, even if it is a sad smile.
But then a scent catches my attention, and a growl vibrates in my chest as I skid to a halt and turn around just as Slade’s lycan form bursts through the trees.
His growl matches mine as we stare each other in the eyes, a challenge in the air. Thad and Roslyn stop short, staying back, even as Roslyn’s wolf whines.
Slade turns his eyes toward her, and I dive to be in front of them, growling louder as I take a step toward him. His attention returns to me, and we begin circling each other, eyes staying locked.
He leaps first, and I leap too. We crash in the middle, and roll to the ground until he slams down on top of me. I snap twice near his face, and he roars over me as when I dig in with my hind legs and try to heave him off me.
His mouth suddenly moves too fast, and I’m tossed to my belly and his jaws close around my neck. I go still, feeling his grip tight enough to remind me of my position, but not threatening me.
A sense of calm almost seems to wash over me, but then the tears threaten to return. He releases my throat, but I leave it exposed as I remain lying on the ground. My body shifts back, even as he stays in lycan form, looming over my much smaller frame.
“Are you happy? You’re more dominant. You’ve proven your point now. I couldn’t have dominated him if you couldn’t,” I say on a hushed whisper, my eyes staring vacantly at his paws when he steps in front of me. “You were right. I was wrong. Now will you just leave?”
He leans down, his snout nudging my cheek like he’s pushing away my tears as he grunts a frustrated sound. He sniffs my neck, nudging me again before releasing another frustrated sound.
“I’m not shifting with you. I’m not fighting with you. I just want to run free for a while before I face my mother. I need this. Please.”
He shifts back, bones popping into place until I see his human feet in front of me. His feet turn and start moving, and he goes to drop down on the ground, his eyes closed as he tries to get his breathing under control.
Still on my belly, I pull my hand up, resting it on the ground beside my face as he curses and throws something, before once again running his fingers through his black hair.
His eyes are teeming with so many emotions when he looks at me again.
“Why do you really hate me so much?” I ask him when he simply stares at me instead of leaving.
“Don’t be fucking stupid, Ella. You know I don’t hate you,” he bites out angrily, his hand twitching like he’s feeling all the tension that’s been gnawing at me.
“Then why not even bother to try? As you’ve said over and over, you’ve spent centuries planning your move. You want everyone to know your death was what ended this, want everyone to know the things they did to you was their end. I get that. But why can’t it be Alton’s end instead, and you just be mine?”
He looks away, his jaw ticking again as he brings his knee up and lets his foot start to bounce, his other hand coming over his lap.
“They spent centuries trying to take you,” he says quietly. “And I had to fight to keep them out of my head. It’s not like they were in the room with me. Didn’t have to be.”
He stands abruptly, and I remain on the ground as he starts pacing. “I showed Kya a fraction of what she thinks she knows about me. She saw a miniscule amount of all they did to torture me mentally and physically.”
His jaw grinds again as he looks at me, and I keep my gaze trained on his face.
“They’d have never known about you at all if Alton hadn’t told them. But he couldn’t remember your face. I’m sure he could when he saw you again, but I kept that from him in there,” he says quietly. “There are days when I have to wonder if I’ve built this place in my mind the way I did that prison. Days that I have to force myself to believe I’m really out, and that I have one last battle I get to fight before I finally have peace.”
“How did you build that prison?” I ask him softly.
“Piece by painstaking piece. One piece a day was all I had the strength for with so much of my offensive powers chained down and the constant war going on. I had to keep them out of my head when they extorted Alton’s bond to me,” he says, laughing humorlessly. “I was too strong for them to keep all of me tamped down. I killed one out of four guards routinely. It’s why I never met any of the ones in charge. They knew I’d make them my one if it was the last thing I ever did.”
“You knew everything about Alton already, didn’t you? About how defective his mind is. Why not tell me?”
He turns his back to me, letting his head hang. “For the same reason Alton hasn’t given you all the information he has on Hannah.”
He looks over his shoulder at me, sad eyes finding mine.
“His mind is fractured. Not entirely defective. Our father believed too much knowledge left you vulnerable to variables you never considered, because you think you know the worst that can happen. It was the thing he said to us the night we were attacked. He felt it coming, but it was too late.”
My breath comes out shakily.
“He believed a man actually learned more when he collected the information on his own, because it was harder to get that information. It made
that information more important then, instead of something acquired too easily and dismissed as something unimportant. You never understand when you simply hear the words.”
He looks so tired when he faces me again.
“I spent centuries falling in love with you, and I never even heard you speak. I dissected each of those repeated scenes, looking for every clue as to who you were, learned to read lips the best I could, and learned all I could about you” he bites out, even as another hot tear rolls down my cheek. “You didn’t even exist yet, and I loved you so much that I lived through hell to save you from their visions, Ella. I don’t fucking hate you,” he says, his voice so raw. “No matter how hard I’ve tried to do exactly that.”
Slowly, I begin to push off the ground, and he takes a step toward me, eyes wild as a growl rumbles in his throat.
“You were supposed to hate me. You can look at me and see I’m a monster—I don’t even have the usual, flawless immortal shell to deceive the eye, Princess. I did almost everything to make you hate me, but I couldn’t ever cross that one line. I wanted that wolf dead. I spared her for you,” he adds angrily. “Because I knew then you’d hate me, and it didn’t make any sense why I couldn’t kill her when that’s exactly what I wanted to happen.”
He runs his hand through his hair again.
“I couldn’t turn my back on you no matter how hard I tried. Hell, I couldn’t even kill an Aquarius. But still I tried, Ella. Did everything else I could to make you hate me.” He glares at me. “You’re supposed to hate me, not toss your bloody heart on the ground at my feet. Do you understand?” he shouts, his voice breaking at the end.
“No,” I say softly as I straighten. “I don’t understand why someone who lived through hell to survive merely wants to die instead of finally living. What’s the point of being strong when you spend all your time envying the weak—”
He steps so close that our bodies brush, and he leans down as he presses me back against a tree, a growl rumbling in his chest as his silver eyes level me.
“Because hope is the most dangerous thing to a man like me, Ella. Not when I had hope ripped out of me time after time again,” he says so quietly I almost can’t hear it.
My breaths rattle a little, a partial growl slipping in to match his as I run my hand up his chest, my eyes staying fixed on his. His forehead presses to mine, his breathing labored as he seems to shake his head.
“When you found out it was my pain and torment that had created your darkness, you were supposed to hate me,” he says so quietly I almost miss it. “You scarcely batted an eye,” he goes on, stepping closer.
My head tilts back, and his hands slide up my sides, roughly pulling me closer to him until our skin is pressed together. His lips lightly brush mine as he continues to speak in that barely audible tone.
“When you saw me, you were supposed to be repulsed,” he says as he drags his lips up my throat. “Yet I smelled your arousal, even before you knew what I was to you,” he continues.
“I hated you a little when you attacked Leah and Roslyn,” I confess, feeling his lips twitch next to mine when they ghost across my mouth again.
“You wouldn’t have chosen me if fate hadn’t decided for you, Ella,” he says across my lips. “Hate me a little more.”
“You don’t believe in fate. You just call things magic or fate when you don’t understand it,” I remind him, sliding my hand up the back of his neck, pulling his lips closer to mine.
He comes closer, then resists when his lips are just barely out of reach.
“I used to close my eyes when another woman fucked me, just so I could see your face and pretend I was touching you, Princess. It was the closest to pleasure I got in there, and I imagined you in there with me, stuck for all eternity, touching me and making the pain go away.”
His lips slide down my throat, his hands pulling one of my legs up to his waist as he grinds against me, causing my breath to catch.
“Does that make you hate me?”
“No,” I whisper, letting my head roll to the side and exposing my throat more to him.
Groaning, he kisses his way back up it, teasing me with a hint of fang.
“Simone fucked me, Princess. She was my favorite, which is why she’s still alive, even after she left you for dead.”
A smallish growl escapes me, but I’ve heard Kya talk about what a shell of a person Simone has been since then. Hell, I felt sorry for her the one time I glimpsed her.
He twists words around his actions. It doesn’t matter what a person does if you don’t have the right why. At least not in our world. The why decides if you’re a monster, a hero, or simply broken.
I’m one of the first two, depending on which version of me I am in the moment.
Slade’s always something in between the first two, when he’s not busy being the last.
“Does that make you hate me?” he asks a little harsher.
My eyes find his and hold, as he searches them like he’s desperate to win this battle. But this one is my battle to win.
“No,” is all I say.
Our eyes stay locked for so long that I’m worried we’ve frozen this way somehow.
“Enjoy your run,” he finally says before he’s suddenly gone, and I let my eyes flutter shut as I slap the tree behind me.
Chapter 20
SLADE
“Flowers?” Kane asks, confused.
“Just plant them, then have one of your witches—dark or light user—spread them as far as possible,” I tell him distractedly.
He sits down, reading over the document. “You just need to get Alyssa to sign that,” I add.
“Should be an interesting discussion,” he grumbles. “Hopefully she won’t be too pissed at me.”
I allow him to read the rest of the document in silence.
“It makes cohabitation possible without the threat of rebellions. The fickle flock will err toward survival, and their chances increase with us,” Kane says to me, as I scrub my hand over my face. “How’d you get him to agree to this? He wouldn’t bend at all when I spoke to him.”
My eyes meet his. “He knows I’m as strong as he is, and he saw what they did to me.” Absently, I gesture to my face and bare chest.
He looks away, clearing his throat.
“He doesn’t want beings capable of that running wild on a planet where he’s still the outsider. Certainly not without the queen at his back to fight against a never-ending war,” I go on, looking at the picture of Ella he has on the desk.
“If they fight with us, that will render her harbingers useless.”
“She’ll have some surprises still up her sleeve, so hope it’s enough.”
He hesitates, studying the document in his hand. “Did this soothe Ella’s beasts?”
“Don’t feel bad for calling me. She has no idea you did,” I say instead of answering, since Ella’s beasts aren’t screaming for dominance the way she thinks they are.
I’m not going to admit what has her beasts pacing. At least not yet. Not to him.
He blows out a frustrated breath. “I didn’t really understand your purpose in my daughter’s life until this moment, but she almost went to try and dominate a dragonite king on her own,” he says quietly, and I hide my fist at my side as it forms. “She’s too young to her power to understand her limitations, and honestly, so is her mother, but Ella is fighting an internal war the best way she knows how. An internal war too different from my own for me to help her. I could help Alyssa,” he goes on, sounding...
I can’t do this.
Not now.
And again, sure as hell not with him.
“Now that you’re indebted to me, I want to see Gavin,” I tell him, and he blinks out of whatever fatherly conundrum he’s struggling with.
“If I let you in a room with Gavin, you’ll kill him. And I assumed helping Ella wasn’t much of a favor to ask, considering you do that freely and often.”
“This was different. I save Ella from act
ual danger, and for all we know, she might have dominated him. She’ll always let me dominate her.”
His eyes narrow on me, and my lips twitch.
“No pun intended,” I add.
I think he actually thinks I’ve already taken his daughter. And for whatever reason, I’d rather him think that. Mostly because I’m a dick like that.
“You wouldn’t have done it if you weren’t worried,” he argues.
Leaning up, I put my elbows on his desk, holding his gaze. “I betrayed her, while all of you, including her, try to go on pretending the inevitable isn’t bound to happen. She’s going to eventually be unable to fight back her true nature. Ready or not, she’s not going to stay in the shadows the way you want her to. I’ve just helped you delay that.”
He looks weary when he drops to a chair. “I don’t know what to do, but now isn’t the time to figure it out,” he says as he runs a hand over his mouth.
“Shit changes. Quit sending her on meaningless errands and start putting her in more important positions. Think like lycans. Think like wolves. Think like every beast inside you. Stop thinking like a man.”
“Lycans and wolves battle themselves to the top,” he growls. “Regardless of what you say, she won’t—”
“She won’t have a choice,” I say, finishing the sentence differently than he wants me to. “Continue to suppress her, and she’ll eventually be forced to challenge one or both of you. She’ll never live with herself if that happens.”
He flings everything off his desk, panting for air as he leans on it.
“When you’re finished with your tantrum, take me to Gavin,” I tell him again. “Trust me when I say I’ve earned this, because you have no idea—”
I stop talking, unable to go back and look at Ella’s eyes in my memories, but I blow out a breath as I pinch the bridge of my nose and allow my eyelids to lower for longer than it takes to blink.
Ella’s screaming into the air, her body shifting as her eyes go from silver to black. She’s been at this for two days, still in Alaska. Her body shifts when she’s on the brink of the madness, then she does it all over again in a pattern.