by Lucy Lyons
“And who will protect you from yourself when the sickness sets in? When you hurt yourself or someone else?”
“Yeah. I heard about you. You think I’m like you? What the hell gives you the impression that you get me, just because you tell my alpha your wolf wants me?” She wiped the building steam from the mirror and glared at her reflection and through it, me. “I’m not a victim anymore, and in case you missed it, I’m not available. Find yourself another female to dominate.”
She closed her eyes and my connection to her broke off. I shook the chains and snarled my rage at the stone wall across from me, and cursed aloud. A chuckle from outside my cage put my head on a swivel and I curled my lip at the vampire that peered through the bars at me.
“I felt you talking to her,” he said, his fingers going to the raw, angry wound on his throat. “I’ve never felt anything quite like that before.”
“And you’d know, because you’ve been around so long, right?” I snarled, but he shook his head.
“Nah, I’m less than a hundred years old. Nick saved me from my old master. She ran this place for a long time before Caroline, and her people took her out and gave Seattle to him. Now he runs the west coast all the way down to Tijuana, and vampires and shifters alike flock here.”
“Right, mon ami, and everybody who comes sings 'Kumbaya' and enjoys utopia,” I scoffed.
“Not even close. We’ve fought bigger, badder monsters than you, wolf. We’ve fought the original vampires, shape shifting high Fae, Venatores hunters sent by the Vatican . . .” he laughed. “You’re just a wolf who’s down on his luck, who left behind people who love him, from the calls I made while you were out.”
I jumped to my feet and strained against the chains. “You told them I was here?” I roared in fear and rage and tried to break the chains, but these weren’t like the ones back home. The silver in them made me weak, and I stayed bound despite my strength.
The vampire backed away from the bars, and I barked out a mocking laugh at him, making him stop in his tracks. “I came down here to tell you not to give up hope wolf, and to tell you to stay away from Goldie. She’s not for you, and while I feel for you, nobody’s going to let her go with you, just so your wolf can be happy. Learn to control it, or you’ll be down here for a long, long time.”
“I don’t know if that’s really for you to say, Joe,” came a dry voice from out of my line of sight. “But for now, I think you’ve riled our guest beyond what hospitality demands.” Josiah the vampire slunk out of sight, replaced by a grinning carrot top. “I’m Fin, and you and I are going to become best friends, so I can get you the hell out of that cell and go back to using it for storage, because I need the space, OK?”
He startled a laugh out of me and I leaned against the wall. “I’ll be whatever kind of friend you want me to be, Fin, if you’ll do one thing for me.”
“Oh no, I don’t kill vampires, sorry,” he said in that same dry voice and despite myself I laughed again.
“But do you check on kids in wheelchairs? Because whatever calls you guys made, probably put one in danger, and I need to know he’s OK.” Fin frowned and straightened up. “He’s my kin, my kid brother, and I had to leave him behind, so . . .”
“So I’m on it. friends or not. We don’t mess with kids, especially when they’re family,” he assured me. “But for what it’s worth, at least on your end, Joe’s an OK guy, really. We’re all a little protective of Goldie. She had a bad alpha, and I mean that in the worst, most perverted ways. You can’t just come in here and take her like some . . .thing with no freedom.”
“It’s not about me, or her. She’s my soulmate, and one way or another, I need her to understand what that means before it’s too late.”
“Before you go feral,” he broke in, but I shook my head and sighed, wishing I could go back in time and make Clay and Caroline and Nicholas understand better than I had.
“No, Fin, she needs to understand that I’m not the only one who will go feral,” I fumed. “Goldie needs to have all the information before it happens to her.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Goldie, I thought to myself as Fin rushed off to talk to his vampire boss, or his wererat boss, or Goldie’s alpha, or the witch. There certainly are a lot of people in charge for one city, Goldie, my mate. I felt a hiss, in my head, like fingernails on a chalkboard, and I knew my thoughts had inadvertently found her.
I’m not your mate, wolf, came the silent reply, and I tried not to think about the contradiction in her speaking telepathically to me, but using our soulmate link to deny that it existed. I can hear you, and I don’t care, came another searing mental hiss. I’m done letting others choose my path for me. You can’t control me.
God no. why would I even want to? I replied. Who wants a mate they have to think for? I wanted to shut her out, but I couldn’t stop talking to her, even though it pissed me off that she was letting me rot in a cage when all she had to do was touch me and I’d be almost sane again. Do you think I wanted to chase a vision across the country, leave my brother in harm’s way, just to meet you? It was the harshest version of the question, and not the way I’d intended to ask, but her rage was almost physically painful. Being blunt was the only way I could think of to chase her off until my control was better. If it even could get better again.
Her presence was no longer in my mind and instantly I felt the loss. Come on, Orson. You can’t have it both ways. Either you can handle the pain of her scorching your brain with accusations and hate, or you can handle not having her in your head. Suck it up.
There was a whisper of soft, feminine laughter in my head and I knew she’d heard me again. I cursed aloud and focused on my breathing, meditating to slow down my heart and keep the wolf at bay. It also forced me to empty my mind and shut out all distractions, both external and internal.
A now familiar smell invaded my meditation a few minutes later and my body tightened in response, but I kept my eyes closed and focused on inhaling and exhaling slow, deep breaths without acknowledging Goldie outside my cell. She watched me without speaking, and as I lowered the shielding I’d clamped down on my wolf, I felt her power reaching out to me, calming the beast just by proximity.
“He really is calmer with me here, isn’t he?” she asked hesitantly.
I answered her without opening my eyes, nodding slowly. “Yeah, Cherie. We’re much better already, thank you.” Finally, I opened my eyes and found her gazing at me, her amber eyes shining with the same fear and need I’d felt since she appeared in my dreams.
“Your hair is natural, no?” I asked, and she laughed.
“Yeah, it’s a Fae color, I’ve been told, and I used to dye it brown to draw less attention to myself, but it’s a popular color for girls around here now, so I figured I’d save myself some money and let it go.”
“It shouldn’t look right with your eyes, but somehow it’s perfect,” I mused, mostly to myself. “Is that how you got your name, from your eyes?” She sighed and moved closer to the bars wrapping long tan fingers around them as she leaned against the door.
“I was my first alpha’s ‘golden girl,’” she said quietly. “My eyes are this way because he kept me in wolf form as punishment for so long, I can never change them back.” The beast stirred, but in that moment, I agreed with it, which seemed to calm it from murderous rage to simmering righteous indignation. To force a shifter to stay in animal form was torture of the most perverse kind, and I didn’t know how to answer a revelation like that and not sound trite or patronizing. “Yeah, I thought that might change your mind.”
“What are you talking about, Goldie?” I snapped. “You still don’t get it, do you?” I stood and shook out my arms, rattling the chains still manacled to my wrists. “I didn’t choose you, you’re my destiny.” I paced five steps away from her and pivoted to do the same toward her, limited by the length of my bindings. “But if he hasn’t been killed yet, I now know what I’m doing when y’all finally let me up out of here.”
I hissed and snorted a breath out my nose. “Stop being obtuse. You know our connection was different. Every wolf has a soulmate. But some of us, some of us don’t just pine for ours when we miss them on our paths. Some of us become dangerous, and have to be killed.” I strained to the ends of my tethers and leaned toward her. “You are in danger of being one of those, so stop making light of my journey here.”
She flinched and stepped back from the bars. “All I have to do is, say, touch your hand, and you’ll be well enough to leave?” I nodded, clenching my teeth to keep my anger in. “How long?”
“How long what, Goldie?” I sighed.
“How long will you be better if I do this?”
I cracked my jaw and shook my head. “Mentally, I’ll be better until I’m not anymore. I’ll never have a family, never be alpha of my people, never have true security for my brother, and honestly, I’m willing to go out on a limb and say it’ll be lonely as hell having empty sex with an assembly line of women who I can never belong to. Then eventually, I’ll go bad again, and I’ll be put down. Sound good to you?” I scoffed. “Because that’s what’s probably going to happen to you too.”
“I love Joe.”
“I don’t much care, Goldie. You don’t love me, I’m coming closer and closer to hating you with every minute you put my life on the line for a boyfriend who you know isn’t your forever mate. Doesn’t change the fact that we need each other.”
“Josiah and I care about each other, Orson.” My name fell from her lips and my gut clenched around those two syllables like a life raft, heart pounding, things low in me responding to her as if she’d just offered me her body. “But we’re just learning how to be a clan all together. If I just dumped him because some stranger showed up and said ‘soulmate,’ how are others going to react? How will the vampires know they can trust us, despite all our differences?”
“I understand your dilemma, Goldie. But right now, I need a werewolf, not a vampire fangirl. I need someone strong enough to at least give me a chance to stay off my chains, if for no reason other than to be available to leave, if your wererat Fin tells me Porter needs me.”
“Ah, you must be talking about me,” a cheerful Fin grinned as he waved an electronic card the size of a credit card in Goldie’s face. “My ears were burning. He grinned and slid the cardkey through the reader next to the door. “I heard back from the lady at the boarding house. She’ll have Porter call us when he gets back from wherever he was, with friends.” He swung the door open and approached carefully, watching my hands as he readied the silver key that would unlock me. “Apparently, he’s taking advantage of no curfew since you’ve been gone, and she asked me specifically to pass that on.”
I laughed and rubbed the sting of raw flesh meeting air out of my wrists. “I’m happy to hear that my absence hasn’t cause him too much worry.” Fin clapped me on the back and jerked his head toward the open door.
“You gotta go talk to Nick and Clay first, but how about I buy you a drink upstairs when you’re done?”
“You think I’ll be allowed to stick around that long?” I scoffed. He glanced around as if either of us couldn’t smell or hear if one of the leaders had suddenly made an appearance in the hall outside the cell. I bumped him with my shoulder and almost trotted through the door as Goldie backed up, pressing her back to the opposite wall. “Don’t worry, love. I won’t force myself on you, or any other woman.” I curled my lip in disgust as my stomach dropped. “It’s a pretty shitty thing to think about someone who’s never hurt you.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but Fin cleared his throat loudly and she snapped her mouth shut and spun away from us, practically running down the hall to get away. I glanced at Fin and he pursed his lips and shrugged, saying, “women, what can you do?” and flashed me a toothy grin.
“I don’t know, mon ami, but I’d best figure something out soon, or my gator’s cooked.”
Fin laughed aloud and clapped me on the shoulder. “Around here, we say ‘goose is cooked,’ but I like your way better. Man, that accent alone’s got to be giving our girl trouble. Maybe you should just talk to her . . . you know, about anything other than soulmates.” I scowled at him, but he just snickered and pointed to our left as we approached the end of the hall lined with iron barred cells. Finn hadn’t been lying either. All of them were full of boxes and computer equipment and office furniture.
“What happened? The office supply store have a going out of business sale?” I quipped as I followed him down the new corridor.
“Ah, pretty much. Caroline came into her trust fund and did some depression shopping over finding out that her parents had tried so hard to provide for her future, but the Venatores tried to keep it for themselves.”
“Those are the hunters y’all been talking about? The ones who hunt vampires?” He nodded and I blew out a short breath. “We could’ve used some-a-them a long time ago. Lost entire bloodlines to the war.”
“Your people are probably where the legend of vampires versus werewolves came from,” he mused. “My people never had a problem with vampires, just the stigma of being rats in our animal form.”
I snorted angrily. “There’s no shame in any animal form. Anyone who tries to say they’re better jus’ cause they’re something different got no place in my tribe.”
“As long as they aren’t vampires, right?” Fin countered. I frowned at him. Werewolves had been at war for their existence, not because they were bigots.
“It’s not the same, Fin. Not even close.”
“Maybe not, Orson, maybe not. But no vampire will do you harm here, so what reason do you have to hate our clan?”
I felt my eyebrows knit together as my frown deepened. “I won’t harm your vampires, if that’s what you’re worried about, Fin. It’s not easy to find out that your worst nightmare actually exists, and you walked right into a nest of ‘em. But I saw shifters and vampires standing shoulder to shoulder without flinching, and so can I.”
“That’s good to hear, Alpha,” Nick’s low, mellow voice echoed from the room we’d just stopped in front of and Fin froze in place, just as he was about to knock on the wall to announce us.
“I prefer peace, Messieur Vampire,” I sighed. “I’m not here to bring you a war.”
“And yet, Alpha wolf, that appears to be exactly what you’ve done.” Nicholas was standing with his back to us, looking at something on the floor in front of him. I stepped inside the room and felt the air strain against me as I pushed through some sort of magical shielding and my nose was assaulted by the smell of fresh blood and death. The vampire looked over his shoulder at us and moved to one side, revealing the body on the floor at his feet and gestured at it with his hand.
“I know him,” I gasped, fighting to control the wolf that leapt to awareness and raged inside me, trying to get at the master vampire.
“Yes,” he replied. “Who did you tell about Goldie, wolf?” Her name froze me in my tracks and my eyes shot to his face.
“No one. I didn’t have her name until I was already down here, so who could I have told?”
“Then it was you they were after, they just happened upon her. I’m afraid our security was forced to take his life and we didn’t get to question him.”
“I can tell you who he is, but first, did he hurt anyone?”
Fin answered when Nicholas wouldn’t. “Steven’s in the medical wing, he’s shifted and is sleeping off the rest of the damage. Marco got a little scratched up, but he’s fine, didn’t even need to go wolf to heal.”
I nodded and took a deep breath. “This is Woody, one of Skoll’s. Skoll is an enforcer for Thaddeus, but he has his eye on the thro
ne.”
“Your nemesis is named after tobacco chew?” Fin snickered and I chuckled.
“No, idgit, S-k-o-l-l as in the wolves of Ragnarok.” The wan smile he’d startled out of my fell away from me as I faced the master vampire. “I know you can do whatever you want to me and I can’t stop you, but I had no idea anyone had followed me this far, I swear. Is Goldie OK?”
“Yes, alpha, she’s fine. He grabbed her because she was near the stairs, she’d just opened the door and was walking out I needed to make sure that you hadn’t kept them a secret.”
“And you believe me just because I told you so?”
“Vampires can smell lies, wolf. You haven’t lied to me yet, and that’s enough for now.”
“Please. All I need is the chance to speak with Goldie alone and unchained, and I’ll take my trouble out of your territory. You have my word.” I spread my hands in helpless apology. “None of this was ever supposed to happen. I just want to get back to my brother. Can I have my things? I need to check in on him.”
Fin glanced at the master vampire and back at me without answering. I looked at the vampire, my hackles raising, and he motioned for us to leave the room and the body behind. “Take care of the body, Fin. No need to give our enemies a reason to come poking around.” Fin nodded, and Nicholas motioned for me to walk with him. My legs were wooden, and bile rose in my throat at the thought of being alone with the vampire, but I followed him deeper into their underground fortress.