by Riley Storm
Liam turned suddenly and snarled something fierce at the shifter. Whatever it was, it was unintelligible. Wordless. Yet something passed between the two of them in that split second. The unknown rebel nodded and backed down ever so slightly, shuffling away from her.
Weird.
“Any other spells you have in there would be more than welcome,” Liam reminded her as the distance closed to less than twenty feet.
She nodded, and just like that, instinct kicked in. Magic came to her and she cast her spell.
With fewer than ten feet separating the two lines, the loyalists drew up short, stuttering to a halt, looking around wildly. The rebels, for their part, braced themselves to meet the charge that never came.
“What’s going on?” Liam asked as one the heads of the loyalists snapped around to focus on his location.
Jennifer sighed. “I cast a spell obscuring you from their vision. Not from their ears. Now go and do your jobs, will you?” She was looking at him but pointed her finger at the ten shifters slowly probing their way forward, closer to the edge of her spell.
Liam’s fist went up, and without a sound he and his men rushed forward in a wave. Loyalists went down, spinning around or tossed through the air, and just like that, the battle was joined.
“You!”
Looking up, she saw a particularly nasty shifter push through the barrier of her spell, his eyes focusing instantly on her. Jennifer searched wildly for help, but the other rebels were all caught up in the fight.
“Uh, hi,” she said, backing away, trying to think rapidly.
Fear knocked each thought away as it tried to form, her brain too situated on the hulking promise of death coming after her. Her heel encountered a raised edge, and the unexpected barrier sent her tumbling onto her backside.
“Ow!” she yelped, expecting to land on hardened cement.
But a soft bed of grass cushioned her fall. Looking behind her, she saw she’d reached one of the small dividers between lots, filled with trees and shrubs. Living things.
“Oh, you don’t want to do this,” she warned, confidence returning.
“I think I do,” the shifter snarled, lunging for her.
Jennifer slammed both hands down into the grass and let raw magic flow through them.
The entire area around her came alive as grass, weeds and even the small trees lining the little barrier lunged for the man. They grew as they went, multiplying in length and width, glowing from within as her magic powered the sudden explosion of growth.
“What the hell!” the shifter shouted, thrashing about, trying to rip himself free.
His muscles were prodigious, his strength obscene, but Jennifer screamed and fed more power to her creation. More trees bent to her will, flowing across the lot, wrapping the shifter up as branches moved like snakes around his limbs and torso, thickening and solidifying as they went.
Jennifer got to her feet, hands still connected to the growth by a stream of emerald power. “I warned you,” she hissed, and with one last flick of her hand, a rope made of intertwined grasses looped itself around his mouth repeatedly, so she didn’t have to listen to his threats.
She cut the magic off, knees wobbling as sudden fatigue raced through her body, but Jennifer shook it off. There was a fight going on. Others might need her help. She had to intervene, to stop this.
Except the fight was already over. The parking lot was a warzone. Bodies lay strewn everywhere, in various poses. Some of them, she could see, would never stand again. Others, their chests still rose and fell, but they were either unconscious, or possessed broken limbs that couldn’t support them.
If they were awake, they were staring at her, mouths open in dumbfounded shock. Not a word was spoken. If they hadn’t been swaying slightly, Jennifer might have thought them to be statues.
“Where was that at the start?” a voice asked dryly.
Just like that, the spell was broken and the rebels returned to their business at hand, dealing with the last of the loyalists, preparing the bodies for transport to either a funeral pyre, or wherever they were storing the prisoners. She hadn’t asked about that, and frankly, she didn’t want to know. Shifters could be absolutely brutal with each other sometimes.
Liam emerged from the crowd and came over to her, putting one hand on her shoulder. “Thanks.”
She frowned, looking back at the imprisoned loyalist who had tried to attack her. He still thrashed about in his natural prison, but he wasn’t going anywhere.
“For what?” she asked. “It was just one.”
“For not doing that to me when I kissed you,” he whispered quietly, still looking past her.
Jennifer ignored the quip. “I was supposed to take care of them all,” she said, noting one of the rebels being helped to the van, his leg bent in the wrong direction, blood streaming down his face. “Your men got hurt because of me,” she added in a taut whisper. “Because I couldn’t do what I needed to do.”
“They all knew coming in what might happen,” Liam growled, gripping her shoulder tighter, giving it a shake. “Every single one of them volunteered.”
“But I failed.”
He snorted. “Some of them needed the bump on the head to knock sense into them. Plus, nobody got killed on our side. So, it’s all okay Jen, trust me.”
“This is my fault,” she said, shaking loose of his grip. “None of this should have happened if I’d just kept my composure. Cast the damn spell the way I did on the field. It should have been so easy.”
Liam tried to say something, but she didn’t hear him. Her mind was on the wounded, on the hurt. And how she’d been the one to do it to them.
Jennifer was supposed to be helping the rebels, ensuring they emerged victorious, not sabotaging their cause because she couldn’t do something as simple as cast a spell.
Maybe she wasn’t meant to atone for the sins of another. Maybe she’d been wrong in coming after all.
This was all a mistake.
23
Liam found her sitting on the edge of her bed, staring blankly at the wall.
He didn’t know what to do. She’d been like that ever since the conclusion of the fight at the train station. The spell they’d expected her to cast had failed, and now she was losing herself in some sort of downward spiral of dark thoughts. If she didn’t pull out soon, who knew where she might end up?
She was needed. The rebels needed her. Needed her to get back to work, get on the horse and start working on her magic again. Stronger. Harder. Faster. She needed to be all of those three with her spells. If she wasn’t, then the assault on Moonshadow Manor would be over before it began.
Leaning against the doorframe, he watched her, wondering if she would even react to his presence. Was she aware and ignoring him, or had Jen become so lost in her own world she didn’t even know he was there?
“What do you want?”
Well, I guess that answers that question now, doesn’t it?
“If you’re here to try and cheer me up, don’t bother.”
Liam’s mouth closed in a hurry as he mentally adjusted his tactics before trying again. “Well, you’re in one hell of a good mood. Did you eat yet? Are you PMSing?”
“Nice try,” Jennifer said, still not looking at him, her voice back to dull monotone. “I’m not stupid. I can tell when someone’s trying to provoke me.”
“How wonderful for you,” he said dryly. “You must be so popular at parties.”
“I don’t go to parties.”
Give me strength.
Clenching one hand into a fist, Liam took a count of five to breathe. “Did you ever ask yourself why that may be?”
“What?”
“Why don’t you ever go to parties?” he asked, phrasing the question differently.
“What does that have to do with anything?” she asked.
“I don’t fucking know. You’re the one who took the question seriously. You tell me,” he fired back, frustrated at the asinine conversation topic.
“Go away, Liam.”
“Let me think about that one.” He tapped his chin twice. “No. I think I’ll stay. In fact, if you don’t talk to me like an adult, I may even just come sit on the bed and irritate you some more.”
Jennifer sighed, but she finally moved. It was only to throw herself back onto the bed so she could stare at the ceiling, but any reaction was better than no reaction.
“Seriously, are you back to acting like you’re fifteen again?” he snapped, coming close to losing his patience with her. “Have you never failed before in your life?”
“It’s not that,” she tried to tell him, but he waved her protest away.
“Yes, it is. You’re having a pissy fit because you failed. You’re embarrassed, maybe you feel a little guilty, but mostly you’re just being a bitch because you didn’t succeed. Don’t lie to me, I know you well enough by now at least to call you out on that.”
Jennifer sat straight up and glared at him. Her eyes were tinged with a green brighter than the usual shade, an echo of her magic perhaps. Liam held up his hands, urging her to stay calm. He’d gotten what he wanted, a reaction, but now he was thinking better of pushing so hard again.
“What do you want?” she repeated, eyes not wavering.
“I want you to stop making this out to be a colossal failure. It’s not, despite the thoughts going on in your head, you know. The spells worked.”
She sighed and lay back on the bed. “It didn’t work, Liam. Or are you blind as well as dumb? You saw it as well as I did. It failed.”
“No. It didn’t,” he said fiercely, trying to get her to see it through his eyes.
“Then why did your men still have to fight, hmm? Riddle me that? I’ll tell you,” she said, getting up from the bed and pacing back and forth along the far side. “It’s because I failed. I wasn’t fast enough. I wasn’t strong enough.”
“No, you weren’t strong enough,” he agreed.
“I failed.”
“Those are not the same things,” he snapped, punching the doorframe. Some wood splintered under his blow. Cursing at himself, he started pulling slivers out from under his skin. Idiot.
“What are you talking about?” Jennifer asked, looking at him. “They very much are the same thing.”
“No. They aren’t. Can’t you see that?” He struggled to pinch a piece of wood with his fingers, the tiny irritant not wanting to come out.
“See what?” She faced him, arms crossed, eyebrows raised in challenge to the reason he had yet to give her.
“That you were right. That we needed this live-fire exercise. Because you were right.” Cursing, he shook his hand as his thick fingers drove another piece of wood deeper under his skin.
“I was right?”
It hurt him, in ways a woman would never understand, to admit so bluntly she was right. It just felt…wrong, to say that. But it was also the truth, so he made himself say it.
“Yes, you were. If we’d not gone ahead with that trial, and just waited to surprise the loyalists during the attack on the Manor, things would have gone badly. Very badly. My men, and others, would all have likely ended up dead. Now instead, a few of them have boo-boos. The poor things.”
“I don’t know, Liam,” Jennifer said, but he could see her resistance waning. She knew he was making a very valid point.
“Yes, you do. I can see it written on your face Jen. You’re not stupid. This is all brand new to both of us. You’ve never been in combat, never attempted to take down so many people at once, with a spell you’re still essentially unfamiliar with, on a grand scheme. All you need to do, is up the power of your spells.”
“How?”
He snickered, having already thought this one through. “I say we start with the food line, next time we’re hungry and forced to wait. Then we go from there. It’s a non-lethal spell, which is what we both wanted. So, you can practice it on the men here to your heart’s content. Until you can take out ten of them. Twenty. Fifty. Trust me, everyone here will help, because the stronger you get with these spells, the more of us will survive when we take the fight to the Tyrant King. I know you can do this, Jen. There’s a drive in you, something I don’t understand, but whatever it is, it’s powerful beyond belief, and within it, and within yourself, you’re going to find the strength you need. I can see that.”
Closing his mouth, he took in a deep breath. Making speeches and long-winded sentences wasn’t his thing, but he could tell Jennifer needed it tonight. She needed to trust he truly did believe in her. Which he did.
The room was silent for some time, and he focused on trying to get the splinters out, using his nail to try and work it free of the skin. But it wasn’t helping.
“Dammit,” he hissed in frustration.
Jennifer sighed abruptly. “Come here,” she said, crooking her fingers in his direction.
“What? Why?”
“So I can get those out of your hand, you oaf.” She bent her finger once more, then pointed it at the ground in front of her.
Liam scooted across the room until he stood where indicated, holding out his hand and giving it to her when she reached for it. He steeled himself for the shock that came when they touched, better able to handle it this time.
There was only the slightest twitch from Jen to indicate she too felt the connection. It was like plugging a cord into an outlet, he figured. It had to be, because each time he touched her, felt her skin on his, he felt that same jolt. It wasn’t a figment of his imagination. It was real.
“These are too small,” Jennifer grumbled. “Here, hold on a second, okay?”
He didn’t have time to say anything before a spark of green slapped against his knuckles. “Ow!” he yelped as pain lanced up his arm for a split second unexpectedly. “What was that?”
“That,” Jen said, yanking a splinter nearly half an inch long from his knuckle, before pinching another one between her fingers and pulling. “Was me taking the easy way out.”
“You grew the splinters,” he said, watching her face as she worked. At such a close distance, he could see everything. It was beautiful.
“Yes.”
“You grew them, in my hand. Causing me pain.”
Jennifer looked up at him and winked, not completely able to conceal the smile on her face. “Serves you right for punching my door. There.” She handed him his hand back but didn’t step away.
“Thank you,” he told her after a quick examination revealed no further splinters needing removal. “I appreciate that. Even if you did it to hurt me.”
“Oh, suck it up. You’re such a baby,” she laughed, swatting him playfully.
Liam grinned, more at her return to a good mood than anything else. It was always nice to see Jen smile. She just looked so radiant and beautiful with a smile on her face, he wanted to do anything to ensure there was always one there. He never wanted her to frown again.
“It really did hurt,” he said in a small voice, holding out the back of his hand to her. “Will you kiss it better?”
She giggled, clapping one hand over her mouth at the high-pitched sound. “Is that what all you shifters needed today?” she teased. “Someone to kiss your boo-boos better?”
He laughed. “Yup, exactly.”
Taking his hand, Jen kissed the back of it softly. “There. All better. Do I need to do that to all the others as well?”
The thought of Jen kissing anyone else ignited an anger in Liam unlike anything he’d ever felt before. He staggered as if punched in the gut, unable to cope for a second, wanting nothing more than to punch something. Someone. Anyone that would dare to lay a hand on Jennifer, for harm, or for pleasure. She was his.
“Liam? Are you okay?” Jennifer was bent over, looking down at him.
All at once, Liam realized he’d gone to one knee at some point.
“Yes,” he said, shaking himself mentally. “Yes, I’m fine. I just…”
Looking up at her, he found himself spellbound. Never had he seem something
more—
“Beautiful.”
Jen blinked, her skin glowing with color. “Pardon?”
But Liam was done with words.
24
He came up off the floor, taking her with him.
“What are you—oh,” she murmured as his lips crashed into hers.
Okay.
She’d suspected it was only a matter of time before things between them took another turn, but Jennifer hadn’t been prepared for it to be tonight. After the way things had gone at the train station, she’d expected Liam to be furious with her.
Instead, the only time he’d shown even a hint of anger was when she’d been hard on herself. Well, that and when she’d jokingly offered to kiss his men better. Not that she would have followed through with it, but the sudden anger on his face at the suggestion had been unmistakable.
For a moment, she’d contemplated telling him, asking what had made him so angry, but in the end she’d decided against it. If Liam knew he’d looked so furious, he would grow uncomfortable, thinking she feared he would eventually deflect anger like that to her.
Silly shifter.
See, that was the thing he didn’t understand. Jen knew all about shifters. She’d read up on them, met some of them. Their tendencies, their preferences. Their jealousy when they decided they wanted someone. It was a well-documented fact by this point. She knew he would never harm her. That simply wasn’t who Liam was.
That being said, she was very eager to find out what he would do to her. Although she’d held herself back, resisting the temptation to find out just how he would feel pressed naked against her, that didn’t mean her imagination had been any less active.
And now, she thought, head falling back as he kissed her neck. Now I’m going to find out.
He pushed her back against the wall, pinning her in the air between it and his body, both of them equally hard in their own ways. But Jennifer only had one interest. Wrapping her legs around his waist, she held on hard, pulling his face to hers. His mouth opened and their tongues played against one another, warm and soft, the intimacy of the moment growing.