by Kit Lane
From the horrified expressions on their faces, none of them liked boat travel any more than flying.
I bit my lip. “Guys, what are our options here? We have to get across the country and if you go wolf, you’re likely to be caught.”
Matt chuffed in annoyance. “We don’t have any options.”
I felt battered by the waves of misery emanating from all four wolves.
“Surely, you must have had to fly before. What about emergencies?”
“My pop flies to China to see his family,” Lee said. “It takes him a week to recover afterward.”
“What does he take?”
“I don’t know. The pack doctor gives him something to knock him out on the flight.”
I turned to Ronin. “Have you got any ideas?”
Ronin shook his head. “If I had access to the network I could find out, but…” He shrugged.
I rubbed my temples. This was too much. I needed to think. “Ronin, you must know an herbal remedy to give wolves if they feel sick?”
“Sure. We give them willow bark tea.”
I nod. “Let’s find out if they have willow bark they can steep into a tea or infusion to take on the plane.”
“It won’t help,” Matt said glumly.
Ronin, on the other hand, gave an approving nod. “It can’t hurt to try.”
His eyes glazed over and I assumed he was talking to Lily. Two shamans on the case would help. There had to be something they could give my wolves to help.
“Lee, is there any chatter on the network?” Matt asked.
Lee’s expression grew even grimmer. “The loss of the wolves has made them angry. The local wolves are talking of war against the Fae.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Matt snapped. “They must know by now they’ve got no chance of winning.”
“The wolves around here have no alphas or leaders. The last alpha was killed when he led an assault on the Fae. They’re restless and angry. I think they welcome a chance to fight.” Lee shook his head. “We have to get out of here, Matt, or we’re dead.”
I watched the frustration, misery and anger in Matt’s expression. These were his people, trying to kill him. Matt’s natural reaction as an alpha was to bring them into line, but there was nothing he could do, except wait.
And wait we did. Long hours of doing nothing. One by one, the wolves climbed onto the bed, shifted, and fell asleep, noses buried under tails, Kyle the last to give in to his exhaustion and boredom. I wanted to join them. I was as tired as they were, but strangely wired too. I paced around the small amount of space around the bed. None of the wolves twitched a paw.
“You can ask questions.”
I jumped as the Queen’s voice rattled inside my head. “Questions?”
“I can hear them rattling inside your brain,” she said. “Come with me and I’ll answer them.”
I glanced at the doorway, and she was there, smiling at me.
Something was off. I peered a little closer and I saw the dark marks under her eyes and the lines around her mouth. The Queen was under stress, just like we were. I glanced at the rest of the Cinco. They were still fast asleep.
“They won’t wake up until I tell them to,” the Queen said.
“You’ve drugged them?” I stared at her, horrified, and then sat down next to Matt. He didn’t move a muscle at my hand in his fur.
“They were getting in the way of our conversation.”
I wanted to argue, but she had a point. I wanted to know about the Fae, about my mother, about the revelation that I was somehow related to the Queen of the Fae, a being whose birth was lost in the mists of time.
“Just how old are you?” I blurted out.
She looked startled and then amused. “Older than the first creatures on the earth,” she assured me.
I had the feeling she wasn’t joking.
“They will be safe here?” I ask.
“No one will harm them,” she assured me, and I had no real choice but to follow her out of the bedroom, leaving the sleeping wolves behind me.
Chapter 46 – Matt
“Matt, wake up. Wake up, dammit.”
Kyle interrupted a vivid dream of me kissing Alex, surrounded by the other wolves. I’d had too many of those dreams recently. She was pliant in my arms, clad in gray silk, her eyes closed and her ruby-red lips parted.
“Matt, if you don’t open your eyes I’m gonna throw a jug of ice-cold water over you.”
I tried to open my eyes. I wanted to cooperate with my hunter, but I was still lost in the dream. As I watched Alex, I shifted and sat at her feet. She smiled again, then she put a finger to her lips and—
Drops of ice covered me from head to toe. My nerve-endings protested at the agony. My eyes flew open.
“You bastard!” I surged up and toward Kyle, who stood his ground, holding a large glass jug. A trickle of water dripped onto the bed.
“Alex is gone,” Ronin said.
I stopped in my tracks. “What?”
“Alex has gone again.”
“Where?”
Kyle shrugged. “Can you feel her?”
I focused inward and tried to sense her presence. There was nothing.
Ronin grunted. “I can’t feel her either. Lee is trying to track her.”
I ran my hand through my hair, getting another cold shower from the ice water. It was welcome, chasing the sleep from my veins. “Dammit, where’s she gone? I thought she’d gotten over the need to run.”
“What happened if she didn’t run?” Lee asked as he came into the room.
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“I slept like the dead.” If Lee clenched his jaw any tighter, his teeth would crack.
“We all did.”
“You don’t understand,” Lee said, “I don’t sleep like that. I always have a conscious stream into the network. I woke up with no memory of the last few hours. That never happens.”
“What are you saying?” I was sure I wasn’t going to like what he was about to say.
“We were drugged, knocked out, whatever you care to call it. Alex wasn’t. I think she’s with the Fae Queen.”
Ronin nodded. “I’m always aware of you, but I can remember nothing.”
I thought about it before I spoke. Alex was related to the Queen. It made sense for them to get to know each other. The fact her Majesty took the rest of the Cinco out of the equation made me furious. I was her alpha. No one took her away from me. No one.
“Matt?”
I blinked, distracted by Kyle. “Yeah?”
“You’re growling.”
I was? I sucked in a breath and exhaled slowly. “Sorry. You’re probably right. We’d better go find her.”
“If they let us,” Lee said.
I gave a curt nod. “They’d better.”
I knew our powers were puny compared to the Fae’s, but I wasn’t taking the loss of my Quinto lying down.
“Have you gotten over the alpha bullcrap?” Kyle demanded.
Had I? I consulted my wolf who snarled at me. “Not yet. But Alex needs an alpha and that’s gonna be me.”
Kyle and Lee looked at me. I glowered at them. “Shut up.” Ronin didn’t even bother to hide his smirk.
“We didn’t say anything,” Kyle said.
“You didn’t need to. I can hear you smirking in my head.” I headed to the door. “Let’s go.”
“Uh, Matt, clothes?” Lee said.
“No clothes. We might need to go wolf.” Lee and Kyle shifted into wolves in a heartbeat, Ronin a fraction behind. I stayed as human, although I didn’t bother getting dressed. No one here would worry about trivialities. I needed to be able to talk to the Fae. They came to my side and I gripped their ruffs, feeling their life-blood pulse under my hands. “Let’s get her back.”
We weren’t locked in and there was no one standing guard. We made our way back to the main chamber. The few Fae who passed gave us wary glances, but no one tried to stop or challenge us.
&
nbsp; “I can’t sense her yet,” Ronin said.
Of all of us, he’d grown closer to Alex. The fact he couldn’t feel her worried me.
The main chamber was empty except for two Fae talking to each other on the far side. I recognized one of them as Lily, Ronin’s shaman friend.
“Friend might be pushing it,” Ronin murmured.
“You know what I mean,” I said out loud.
Ronin padded ahead and Lily’s expression was unreadable.
“Alpha. Ronin.” She inclined her head at Kyle and Lee.
“Shaman.” I could manage the niceties at least. “Where is our Quinto?”
“She’s talking to the Queen.”
I gritted my teeth. “Please take us to her.”
“She’ll be returned when the Queen has finished.”
I heard a low growl. To my surprise, it was Ronin who’d growled, his teeth bared and hackles up.
“Ronin?”
“This is the wolf,” Ronin said. “He’s furious at being kept from his mate.”
Whoa! We all turned to Ronin. Mate? Who said anything about a mate? I knelt to look Ronin in the eyes. The wolf didn’t flinch, didn’t submit; a measure of how angry and distressed he was.
“Ronin, how long have you known?”
“My wolf has known since the first moment we met.”
“Does Alex know?” Lee asked.
“How could she? She doesn’t have the same instincts we do.”
I nodded and gripped his ruff again. He needed to know I had his back. I needed him to know I expected him to keep it together. We were outgunned and outclassed in the Fae world. Ronin whimpered in my head, but he made a serious attempt to relax.
I stood and focused on the Fae. In the time we’d taken to have this revelation, the other Fae had vanished, leaving Lily alone. She didn’t seem bothered about being alone with four wolves. She probably didn’t have a lot to worry about.
“We are worried about her.”
Lily cocked her head and studied me for a moment. “She is fine.”
“We don’t know that,” I pointed out. “You have blanked our sense of her.”
“You’re just going to badger me until she returns, aren’t you?”
I inclined my head. I didn’t care how annoying we got. We weren’t moving a muscle until we saw Alex again.
Lily huffed. “Stay here. I will talk to the Queen.”
We waited, a man and three wolves, barely blinking while she had her conversation.
“What if they’ve taken her?” Kyle asked.
No, the Fae Queen had no reason to do that. Still, my nerves ratcheted tighter as we waited. Ronin’s admission had thrown a curveball. We were Cinco, and now we had a mated pair in our midst. That was one issue.
The other was a doozy. If Ronin and Alex were mated, why did I keep dreaming about Alex being in my arms?
Chapter 47 - Alex
I followed the Queen through the twists and turns of the Fae… what? Tree? Empire? Castle? “What do you call this place?”
“It just is,” the Queen said, without turning around. “We don’t have names for things like Others.”
“‘Others’?” I wrinkled my brow.
“Non-Fae.”
“You have a name for that,” I couldn’t help pointing out. “Two, in fact.”
I took a grim satisfaction in seeing the Queen’s shoulders stiffen. I wasn’t happy at what had happened to my pack. I wanted to know about my family, but these men were family too and they should’ve been by my side. There was a derisive sniff from the Queen. She was obviously aware of my feelings. I nodded to myself. Good.
“The wolves have stopped attacking,” I said.
She shrugged. “They can waste their entire species. They won’t break our barriers.”
“Why do you hate wolves?”
The Queen stopped and turned on her heel. “They are primitive. Savage. We are an ancient species with magic beyond imagining. Wolves are little more than the first creatures that crawled out of the pond.”
I gazed at her, staring into her blazing green eyes and saw a world I didn’t recognize. This must have been how it had been in the beginning. I gasped at the deep jeweled tones of the first world, one she had reigned over epochs before the first man had walked the earth. How devastating it must have been to watch mammals take over and man to tear down the forests of the Fae.
“You see?” she demanded.
“I see.” I saw. More than I wanted to.
“I could flatten every civilization with one word.”
She was truly terrifying in her power.
I swallowed around the lump in my throat, not wanting to show her how scared I was.
“You have that power too. You are Fae.”
“And wolf.”
She waved her hand as if it were irrelevant.
It wasn’t irrelevant to me. Especially as I had discovered I wasn’t human. “I am half-Fae, half-wolf. A hybrid.” Not a human.
The Queen’s sharp eyes fixed me speculatively. “Do you feel the power inside you?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
I couldn’t deny it. The power had been growing inside me since we visited Aunt Ruth’s, and here, with the Queen, it was undeniable. I felt like I would burst with the energy inside me.
How many girls went for a road trip with a pack of shifter wolves, only to discover they were related to the oldest living being on the planet?
The Queen stepped forward and placed a hand on my shoulder. Energy coursed through me. It was as if every nerve in my body snapped at the same time. “If you stay here, you will be safe, and I can teach you how to use your power.”
I shook my head. “I need to find my father. The Cinco needs to find my father.”
“The wolves are not your problem.”
“Is there any point trying to explain my connection to my pack?”
“Three weeks ago you didn’t know they existed,” she said flatly.
“Twenty-four hours ago I didn’t know you existed.” My tone was just as flat.
The Queen’s expression softened. “Touché. You are so like your mother.”
I bit my lip. I wasn’t anything like my mom. Dad had been the bundle of energy. The one who’d taught me to ride my bike and rappel off cliffs. Mom was just… Mom. She was the one who’d taught me to cook and made sure I got to school on time. She’d seemed to take a pleasure in these simple tasks. It was the way it was. I never thought about it until this moment.
“Why did she leave you?” I asked.
“She fell in love with your father.” The Queen’s lip curled.
I frowned. These were my parents. Falling in love wasn’t a deadly disease, even if it was cross-species. I was rapidly coming to realize humans weren’t the only species with prejudices.
“They could have both stayed here.”
“Wolves and Fae don’t mix.”
No kidding. “So you threw them out?”
“She left, but she returned to visit many times until your father was branded a traitor.” Her exclamation was torn out of her. “I begged her to stay, to leave him, but she said she’d found her mate and had to leave. I never saw her again.”
I frowned. There had been a hesitation before the last sentence. Somehow, I didn’t quite believe her, but for now I’d take her words at face value. “They were very happy together.”
“Even though he was a traitor.”
Back to that. My wonderful father branded a traitor by nameless, faceless wolves. “My parents lived ordinary human lives and they loved each other, and they loved me.” I couldn’t help the sob that burst out.
“Not human. Never human. You came here many times and saw magic, used magic before she erased your memories. You were Fae.”
“And wolf.”
“And wolf,” she acknowledged.
“Did I ever shift?”
“I don’t know,” the Queen said, and I felt a sharp pang of disappointment. “Your mother never mention
ed it. You seem more disappointed by that, than pleased at the idea of using magic.”
“I don’t know how to use magic.”
“I can show you.”
“Can you show me how to protect my Cinco from the other wolves?”
The Queen paused, and then she smiled. “Now you’re thinking like a member of my family. Yes, I can show you how to do that.”
“You are my grandmother.” And I’m going to use that to keep us safe.
“Yes.”
I held out my hand. “Good to meet you again, Grandma.”
Maybe I was just petty enough to take pleasure in her shudder.
Chapter 48 - Ronin
Matt’s fingers dug hard into my ruff as we waited; a show of dominance and an unspoken comment that I’d fucked up. I didn’t need the bite of pain to tell me what I already knew. My wolf, on the other hand, was smug and he didn’t care who knew. He radiated fucking smugness as we waited for Alex to join us.
Waves of anger and confusion rolled off the other wolves, no matter how much they tried to control it. Even Mister Ice-box, Lee, who I struggled to work out what he was thinking, radiated a confused what-the-hell.
Now was just about the worst time to deliver a mating declaration. I’d known Alex was my mate since I’d met her, but we’d been running for our lives, and there had been so much to deal with. The days we’d spent at Aunt Ruth’s had consolidated the mating urge, but I’d held back, knowing my focus had to be on healing Matt. My wolf had grown impatient at my refusal to claim her. And this was the result.
Alex still hadn’t returned, and Kyle shifted restlessly next to me. Matt calmed him with a touch to his neck, a lighter soothing gesture than the one he was giving me. It was going to take some time for my alpha to forgive me. Would he forgive me? Did he want Alex for himself? I’d had as many dreams where we were in bed as a Cinco as I had making love to her myself. I fidgeted as my wolf rumbled. He had issues with the idea of sharing her.
Matt’s fingers tightened in my ruff and I subsided. No doubt I was broadcasting my feelings like a pup.
“Where is she?” Lee muttered in our heads.
We all rumbled our agreement. We’d been waiting a long time. The worse thing was the silence in my head. Since the moment we’d sensed Alex, she’d always been there; a leaking ball of confusion, but with strength and love mixed in. At first, her presence had been distracting, even at times a little annoying. Now there was silence, and I hated it.