by Unknown
They stopped outside the lodge, and he bent to open the door, then stepped inside with Kenna in his arms, leaving them standing in the driveway.
Quickly, he strode down the hall, where he laid Kenna on her bed, then eased down so he was sitting beside her.
“How are you?” he whispered.
“Okay.”
He knew it was a lie. Taking her in his arms, he held her as tightly as he dared and whispered, “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”
“For what?”
“For not trusting you.”
She moved her head against his shoulder. “You . . . shouldn’t.”
“We can talk about it . . .”
“No.” She reached to press her fingers against his mouth. “Finally, there’s a way out of this for me.” Her gaze shot to the pile of papers. “I couldn’t tell you . . .” She stopped and started again. “But I figured out that maybe I could write it down. One word at a time. Then I could fill in the little words and put the whole thing in order.”
“That was clever of you.”
“We’ll see,” she said in a thin voice. “Take them to . . . to Rinna.”
“What?”
“Take them to her,” she repeated. “Please. Talk to her. I think she might understand. But you can’t do it here.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” she said in a thin voice. “But you have to go. I . . . I can’t do it.”
As she spoke, she gave him a look that twisted his heart, and he understood that if they tried to discuss this with her, he’d only trigger the pain in her head again. With a low sound, he swept the papers into a pile, picked them up, and went back down the hall. Outside, he found his visitors still standing awkwardly in the driveway.
ALONE in the bedroom, Kenna tried to calm the jumble of emotions surging through her. In the space of a few minutes, everything had changed.
Talon was a werewolf!
His cousins were werewolves. One was married to a werewolf—from Kenna’s world.
She wanted to leap up and run back to the group of people who had come here without Talon’s asking.
Would he send them away? Or would he let them help? And what could they do?
Hardly daring to hope, she turned on her side and hugged her knees, waiting to learn the outcome of the discussion they would be having.
Talon had been so tender with her. She’d wanted to stay in his arms. But she knew they had to settle this. And she knew that when he understood the full extent of her lies, he might end up hating her.
TALON studied the three people standing awkwardly outside. Ross seemed pretty calm. Logan, the other cousin, folded his arms across his chest.
Talon sensed that he was a hothead. Could he send him away? Maybe, but then the woman would leave, too. And Kenna needed her.
After a long moment, he muttered, “I guess you can come in.” He probably didn’t sound like a gracious host. But that had never been the way with the men in the Marshall family. They were each the alpha male of their own pack, and that created problems with werewolf social relations.
When they followed him inside, he led them to the living room, then turned to Rinna. “Kenna sent me to you,” he said, “because it hurts her to talk about it. Whatever ‘it’ is.”
“Yes.”
“You might as well sit down,” Talon said.
They sat, and he continued to study them as he rolled up the papers Kenna had given him into a tube and twisted them in his hand. None of his visitors looked exactly comfortable. Good.
He swung back toward the hall, wishing that Kenna were part of this conversation because it felt like they were going to talk behind her back, but he understood that she couldn’t be here. With a low sound, he took a seat facing the three people who had invaded his property without being invited.
“Okay, I want some answers,” he growled.
Ross nodded. “Of course.”
“How do you know that Kenna was from an . . . uh . . . alternate universe?” he asked.
“You were trying to figure out who she was, and you gave me genetic material,” Ross replied.
“Yes, I mailed it to you week before last when I was in town getting supplies.”
“My wife, Megan, is a physician who owns a bio lab in the D.C. area. When she tested it, she recognized a marker that she had seen in Rinna’s DNA.”
“What kind of marker?”
“It’s a long story. But the short version is that their universe was like ours until the World’s Fair of 1893, when a man named Eric Carfoli set up an exhibit. He claimed he could give people psychic powers.”
“And?”
“And over there, it worked. A lot of people can tell the future, read minds, change to an animal shape, do remote viewing, speak to the dead, move objects with their minds.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Talon snapped.
“It’s true,” Rinna answered. “In our world, we cultivate those talents. We send children to special schools to increase their powers.” As she spoke, she reached for her husband’s hand and gripped it tightly, then closed her eyes. Over on the side of the room, a circle began to waver in the air, shimmering with a light that came from within.
Talon stared at the shimmering air, then at the strained look on Rinna’s face. “What the hell are you doing?”
The air abruptly returned to normal, and Rinna opened her eyes, looking like she’d just run a long race.
“That’s the beginning of a portal between the worlds,” she said between deep drafts of air. “I can’t open one by myself or even with Logan’s help. But if there were more people with talents, we could do it.” She kept her gaze on Talon. “I could change to the form of a white bird, if you want to see me do that. But we’d just be wasting time.”
“You can do that?”
“Yeah,” Logan answered for his wife. “Like she said, there are a lot of people with special talents in the other universe. And their DNA is different because Eric Carfoli changed it.”
Talon tensed as another question popped into his head. “What about religion in the other universe?” he asked, addressing Rinna.
“We have many religions. Many gods,”
He nodded, remembering that Kenna had said “gods,” not “God.”
Ross gestured toward the papers that Talon had rolled into a tube and was twisting in his hand. “What are those?”
He looked down at them, feeling like he was holding a bomb that was about to explode. “Something Kenna wrote. Just a few words. One of them was ‘portal.’ ”
Talon looked at Rinna. “She told me to give them to you.”
Slowly, he unrolled the papers, then reached across the coffee table and laid them down, smoothing them out.
His gaze stayed on Rinna. As she shuffled through them, she gasped.
“What?”
“She wrote ‘slave.’ ”
“Which means what?”
She shifted in her seat. “In my world, we have slaves. I was born one. I think she was trying to tell you that is her status.”
“No!”
“I understand why you don’t want to believe it,” she said gently. “But life is different there. You have fewer choices. Less freedom.”
“And no modern conveniences,” he said, reluctantly bolstering their case.
“Yes. I guess you noticed that she didn’t know how things worked here.”
“I thought she came from some primitive community up in the hills.”
“Yes.” Rinna shuffled the papers. When she came to the last page, she looked up at him with rounded eyes. “She’s telling you her master sent her here as a spy. And I think she was trying to say ‘another universe.’ But she didn’t get that far.”
He stood up, reached across the table, and snatched the pages away. Because he simply didn’t want to believe how bad the news was, he shouted, “I don’t have to listen to this.”
“Yeah, you do,” Ross said
in a hard voice.
Outrage bubbled from the depths of Talon’s werewolf soul.
“This is my den,” he answered in a dangerously calm voice, reaching for the hem of the borrowed shirt he was wearing.
If Ross wanted to fight, they would do it in wolf form.
Rinna’s voice reached him through the anger simmering in his gut.
“And your life mate is going to die or go insane unless you let us help you,” she said.
He felt as though she’d punched him in the chest.
“No!” he gasped.
He saw Rinna’s gaze had shifted from him to the hallway. With a feeling of dread, he turned so he could see what she was looking at.
It was Kenna, standing there, white-faced, her hand on the wall to steady herself.
When she saw he’d discovered her, she fixed her gaze on him. “If you care for me, let them help me, please.”
“Care for you?” Rushing to her, he gathered her close.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE PLEADING LOOK on Kenna’s face almost ripped his heart out.
Lifting her into his arms, he carried her to a big leather chair and sat down, cradling her against himself.
Since he’d clashed with his father and left the family home, he’d been making decisions for himself. The right decisions. In this situation, he was utterly lost. When he looked up and saw the others watching him with sympathy, he wanted to take out his frustration on them. But he had come around to the opinion that they were his best hope.
Bending toward Kenna, he whispered, “We’ll figure it out.”
“I’m going to need help,” Rinna said. “From the other life mates. A lot of them have powers.”
“Are they from the other universe?” Talon asked.
“No. They come from this one. But they were born with talents most people here don’t have.” She looked at Ross. “Can you call Renata and Antonia, Jacob’s and Grant’s life mates?” she asked. “They’re the closest. And also Sara, if she can get here in time. Renata is the reincarnation of a goddess,” Rinna added in a hushed voice.
“Oh yeah?” Talon asked.
“A goddess!” Kenna breathed. “And she’s willing to help me?”
“She’s mortal—now,” Rinna said. “And of course she’s willing to help you. You’re Talon’s life mate.”
“His what?”
Talon gave Rinna a fierce scowl. It wasn’t for her to give Kenna that piece of information. That should be his privilege.
She caught the expression on his face. “You haven’t talked about that?”
“No,” he snapped.
“I’m sorry. I should have . . .”
“It’s okay,” he said, wondering what he’d gotten himself into.
Ross gave him a direct look. “They’ll come with their werewolf life mates. Is that okay with you?”
“You’re asking permission?”
“Yeah.”
He thought about it for a few seconds, wondering how he was going to stand so many of his cousins in one place. But he knew he was going to have to do it, because he had no choice. Still, there was something else he had to say.
“That money I found in the woods. I’m pretty sure the guy who buried it tried to burn down the lodge today. There’s some danger in being here.”
“With extra werewolves patrolling the area, he shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Let’s hope.”
Kenna turned toward Ross. “Thank you.”
He nodded and stood, pulling his cell phone from its holster. “I’ll go make those calls.”
“And check the guy’s license number while you’re at it.” Talon gave the tag number to Ross, who wrote it down and stepped outside.
Rinna stood and walked toward Kenna. “I think I can help you sleep. That might be the best thing for you now.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go back to the bedroom.”
Talon stood with Kenna in his arms and carried her down the hall where he laid her down once again.
Then he stepped away and let Rinna take a seat on the bed.
“I’m not a healer, but I have some skill with going into another person’s mind.” She swallowed. “My master tried to take that skill away from me.”
Kenna was hanging on her words.
“Can you open yourself to me?”
“What do I have to do?”
“Don’t resist me.”
When Kenna nodded, Rinna pressed her fingers to Kenna’s forehead. She closed her eyes, but opened them again after a few moments.
“I’m having trouble reaching you.”
Kenna’s lower lip trembled. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think it’s your fault, but I can’t break through. Not by myself.”
Kenna nodded.
“I’ll have to wait for the others.”
“Okay.”
WHEN Rinna left, Kenna took her lower lip between her teeth.
“Don’t.” Talon slipped onto the bed and gathered her close. “I know this is hard for you.”
“And you.”
When he stroked his lips against her cheek, she felt compelled to warn him, “It’s not over. I mean the thing that’s wrong with me.”
“I understand.”
She wanted to say so much more, but she knew that if she did, the pain would come zinging back.
“We’ll fix it,” he said again, but she thought he didn’t sound as confident as usual.
“Maybe this will defeat even you.”
“We’ll do it!” he insisted, and she prayed to the Great Mother that it was true. She had found this man who had become everything to her, but there was no future for the two of them unless . . .
Even that wayward thought sent a dart of pain into her head, and she winced.
He raised his head, looking at her in alarm.
“I just have to keep my thoughts away from . . . my problem,” she whispered.
“Yeah.”
He pulled her closer, and she snuggled in his arms. She wasn’t free yet, but she could see how it would be for the two of them, if Rinna and the others could help her.
The shimmering promise of what the future could be made her want to weep, but she kept from shedding any tears, because she knew that Talon would think she was sad, not happy.
“What’s a ‘life mate’?” she asked in a voice that was barely above a whisper.
She heard him swallow. “Wolves mate for life. So do werewolves. When one of the men in my family finds the right woman, they bond.” He dragged in a breath and let it out in a rush. “I knew it was you, almost as soon as I met you. But I fought it.”
“Because you couldn’t trust me,” she managed to say.
“Partly. And partly because I couldn’t see myself settling down.”
“And now you can?” she dared to ask.
“Yes. With you.”
“It might not work out.”
“We’ll make it work,” he said fiercely.
She wanted to spell out her doubts, but she knew that wouldn’t help either one of them, so she asked, “And one of your cousins has a life mate who . . . who is the reincarnation of a goddess.”
“Apparently. I haven’t spent much time with my family, so I didn’t know about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the way things have been for centuries. There’s only one alpha male in every wolf pack. Each of us has his own pack.”
Family had been important to her, and being alone like that sounded sad to her, but she didn’t want to say it. Instead, she murmured, “But it seems like Ross and the others have gotten together.”
“The guys who are mated,” he said.
Was that something she could give him—a connection with his family? She hardly dared to hope for so much.
She had been without hope for so long that it was impossible to believe in a real future for herself, for the two of them. But for now, it was wonderful to simply lie here in the arms of the ma
n she loved. She wanted to tell him how she felt, but she wasn’t free to do it, not yet.