by SM Reine
“I’ll grab him if I see him,” Seth said, mounting the first step to his door.
It brought him within smelling range of Summer. She bent down to sniff his shoulder. “Whoa. What were you rolling in?”
He wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to the pack knowing all about his activities without having to tell them. Seth shucked his jacket, dropping it on the front steps. “You’re probably smelling Katja.”
“That’s not silver poisoning. Is it?” Summer’s hesitance was unusual for a werewolf. She was resistant to silver, unlike the rest of her breed, and didn’t recognize the burning smell as quickly.
She was the product of Rylie and Abel’s Alpha mating: a woman that could turn freely into a wolf, whose eyes were silver instead of gold, who didn’t feel the pull of the moon. Summer said that she didn’t mind being called a werewolf, but most everyone called her a shapeshifter.
“No, it’s not silver poisoning,” Seth said.
“Then what?”
He gave Summer a once-over. She was in shorts and a t-shirt, so she hadn’t been swimming with the pack, even though she all but hummed with restless energy. She had probably been waiting for him and Abram to get home all day. And she was probably hoping that they’d have something for her to do now that they were back, too.
Summer was smart as hell—probably the smartest person in the pack. The things she could do with computers were beyond preternatural. Seth really could use her help. “What I’m about to tell you, don’t share with anyone. Okay?” he said.
Summer grinned and nodded. Little Miss Innocent. Of course, she would immediately run and tell Nash everything.
“Cross my heart,” she said, drawing an invisible X in the air over her chest using the cat toy.
Seth lowered his voice, not that it would help much if a determined werewolf were trying to listen in. “Rylie thinks it might be some other kind of disease. I need to find out how Katja became a werewolf. Anything you could find, anything at all—anything that might be off public record…?”
“I can do that,” Summer said. “Toss your stuff in there and meet me at my cabin. We’ll see how much abuse my satellite internet can take.”
Summer was a data junkie. She had mounted four monitors on her wall that were dedicated to the news; two of them showed major news networks, and the other two displayed a constant stream of RSS feeds. Everyone was blowing up about the assassin.
Summer’s cottage was less country living and more like The Matrix. She had redesigned the plans for the building so that there were twenty-four inches of subfloor to run cables through, and moved the kitchen into the bedroom so that she could use the living space for her computers. Even with venting, her hundreds of processors made it well over ninety degrees inside. Seth was glad he had left his jacket at his own cabin.
She was unperturbed by the heat. She slapped on an anti-static bracelet, pulled her hair back into a thick ponytail, and plopped into a rolling chair by the door.
“How’s this stuff working with Nash around all the time?” Seth asked, peering into a rack of blade servers. Green lights blinked at seemingly random intervals as fans blasted hot air into his face.
“He’s good about keeping his wings tucked in while we’re home,” Summer said, pushing off the wall with a foot so that her chair glided to a workstation in the opposite corner. “And all the data is duplicated as I generate it. If he accidentally explodes one of my hard drives, I’ve got everything on five other nodes in the array.”
Seth had no idea what nodes or arrays were, but he understood what she was getting at. Electronics didn’t function around angels. Backup generators didn’t help because an angel with his wings fully exposed would disable that, too. If Nash had trouble controlling his temper, he could immediately toss the entire sanctuary into the Dark Ages.
Considering Nash’s idea of self-control, Summer was lucky that the data center in her cabin ever worked.
“So you’re looking for Katja,” she said, typing rapidly. “Katja who?”
Seth had “borrowed” the ID out of Katja’s wallet. He passed it to Summer. “That’s all we’ve got on her.”
Summer tilted the card to look at it, as if searching for a watermark. “She’s cute,” she said. “Trustworthy face.”
So trustworthy that she had killed three people without ever giving them a chance to put up a fight. “Anything you can give me would be great. Where she worked, family members, friends that might turn furry twice a month…?”
“Gimme half a second,” Summer said.
She hummed under her breath as she worked at the computer, leaving Seth to stroll through the racks. Anywhere that the walls didn’t have metal bolted to them was plastered in posters—travel advertisements for places like the Bahamas and the Eiffel Tower.
Seth had never been all that good with computers. His father had put a rifle in his hands around the time that he learned to walk, but he never rested those hands on a keyboard until the required computer competency courses in middle school. He could get around enough to check his email, find files, but that was about it.
Summer, on the other hand, was a wizard of advanced computing. She assembled her computers and wrote the code for any program she needed. All of the racks bore her thumbprint in one way or another: flower stickers on the case of a server, a neatly-patched cable where she had substituted a Band-Aid for electrical tape. It was simultaneously the most incredible technology he had ever seen and the most quaint, too.
The fans screeched into higher gear as she forced her processors to scrape through databases, limited only by the bandwidth of her satellite internet. Seth thought he could feel the temperature rising in the room.
“Hey, kid. Can I open a window?” he asked, flicking aside one of her heavy curtains.
Summer laughed at the nickname. It was kind of a joke between them. She may have been his niece, but they were about the same age. “No windows, old man. I painted them all shut.”
“Homey,” Seth said.
She grinned. “For me, it is.”
Summer folded her long legs underneath her as she pounded away. Katja’s driver’s license was propped up against the keyboard.
“She’s a movie reviewer,” Summer said. “Seems popular. Ooh, she didn’t like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I’m pretty sure we can’t be friends now.”
“When did you see that?” Seth asked. Summer and Abram had only been on this Earth for a few months. Seth hadn’t even seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and he’d spent his whole life there.
During Rylie’s pregnancy with the twins, the Office of Preternatural Affairs had passed legislation that made it illegal for preternaturals—like werewolves—to be around children. That meant no teaching, no daycare, and definitely no parenting. At risk of losing the babies, Rylie had made plans to move to an alternate dimension known as a Haven, where the OPA would never be able to reach her.
The twins had made it to the Haven. Rylie, Abel, and Seth hadn’t. Time ran at a different speed over there; by the time a week had passed on Earth, twenty years had elapsed in the Haven. Summer and Abram had returned as adults. Rylie had missed her children’s lives. And Summer had definitely missed romantic comedies about wacky intercultural marriages.
“Rylie and I have been marathoning her favorite movies,” Summer said. “Just wait until I finish running gigabit fiber to the sanctuary. I’m going to download a million movies and do big shows outside in the courtyard every night. Also, Katja went missing three years ago.”
Seth blinked. “Uh, what?”
“Yep.” Summer swiveled her screen so that he could see the missing persons report. “Gone for three years. Vanished at the same time as her partner, Charla Hannity.”
“Did they ever find Charla?”
After a moment of more typing, Summer said, “Yeah.” She turned wide eyes on Seth. “Two weeks ago.”
The door opened, and Nash entered. He was shirtless again—still?—and even though there was no hint of wings a
t his back, a single feather fluttered on the draft of the swinging door. “I’ll go talk to Charla,” Nash said. He must have been listening from the outside.
Summer got all flushed when she looked up at him. It was exactly the way that Rylie used to look at Seth. The same fluttering eyelashes, the same slightly parted lips, the same spots of color on her cheeks. But when she spoke, it was with Abel’s sharp edge. “She’s in New York. You’d have to leave again.”
He sauntered into the room. His low-slung jeans looked dangerously close to slipping off of his hips. Seth tried not to roll his eyes. “If there’s a carrier of a disease that harms werewolves, I should be the one to confront him. I’ll be immune.”
“So would Abram,” Seth said.
Summer didn’t look like she was a fan of either option. She folded her arms under her breasts, frowning severely.
“I travel faster than any of you,” Nash went on. “I can fly there in minutes. You’ll forgive me if I don’t want to carry Abram in my arms on the way.”
“But you could carry me,” Summer said.
So that was her real problem. Not because she didn’t want Nash to go, but because she didn’t want him to go without her.
Approval burned in Nash’s eyes as they shared a long look that made the cottage feel way too small. It was a private moment—too private for Seth to witness.
Summer and Nash had met in Haven, which had been a prison for the angel for countless millennia. The way Summer told the story, she had woken him up from a long, cold slumber with her sexy body. Nash didn’t talk about it at all, but the way he looked at her made it clear that his fascination with Summer ran a lot deeper than her skin.
Seth coughed into his hand to remind them that he was still there. It didn’t help. “I started this investigation,” he said. “I’ll finish it, too. But thanks, Nash.”
“You just got back,” Summer protested. “You’ve barely been here an hour.”
An hour too long.
Seth plucked Katja’s driver’s license off the keyboard. “It’s fine,” he said without meeting Summer’s eyes.
If he looked at her—if he let her look at him—then she would know what he was thinking. Summer wasn’t just smart when it came to computers. She had as big a heart as her mother’s. She would see through Seth’s eyes right to the gnawing void of loneliness beyond. He couldn’t handle that.
He moved to leave the cottage. Nash grabbed the door, holding it open. “See me before you leave. I’ll make a summoning stone. If you come across trouble hunting the source of Katja’s disease, I can be there to help within minutes.” Nash extended a hand to shake.
Summer wasn’t the only one who could tell what Seth was thinking. Nash knew that Seth wanted to leave—and not just for the one investigation.
Seth found a weak, quavering smile within himself and shook Nash’s hand. “Thanks, man.”
Nash nodded once, then closed the door behind him.
Seth didn’t sleep well that night. Even with a wall separating their bedrooms, he could hear Abram snoring—the same as he had every damn night of their hunt for Katja. It didn’t help that his bedroom was the size of a modest closet. The air was stuffy. His twin bed felt laughably small.
He kicked off the sheets and hung his legs over the side of the bed. It had to be getting into the forties outside, edging toward freezing, but he was still sweltering in nothing but his boxer-briefs. Seth picked his way into the living room, stepping over all of the bachelor clutter he and his nephew had been collecting to check the thermostat. It was sixty-six inside. The claustrophobia was entirely psychological, and had nothing to do with heat.
Jerking on a pair of sweats and a t-shirt, Seth headed outside, wincing against the spotlights that made the sanctuary’s main road as bright as high noon. They were done with the repairs on the sanctuary and had dialed back on nighttime construction as the nights began to grow colder, so they didn’t really need the spotlights anymore. Yet they had turned them on every sunset anyway and left them running until dawn.
Behind the cottage was shaded, though the lights caught the waterfall and made it sparkle like cascading starlight. A moist chill clung to him as he headed down the path to the lake.
The bushes rustled. Seth stopped, his hand reflexively twitching toward the shoulder rig he wasn’t wearing. He had no guns at all.
It sounded like an animal was moving in the underbrush along Rylie’s fence. He followed the rustling noise and saw a pair of glistening orbs among the leaves.
The tension drained from his shoulders.
“Still angry at Summer?” he asked, dropping to a crouch.
Sir Lumpy slipped out of the bushes, a twig stuck in the knotted clumps of his belly fur. It looked like he had been rolling in something sticky. His purr was almost as loud as the waterfall as he bumped against Seth’s shins, dragging drool across his skin.
The cat was impossibly old, but despite the ratty fur and a couple of missing teeth, he was still getting around as easily as a much younger tomcat. Living with an entire pack of werewolves didn’t perturb him at all. He had grown up with Summer; to him, the wolves were nothing but a gaggle of unruly kittens that needed a good swatting once in a while.
He also didn’t like many people aside from Summer, so Seth enjoyed the opportunity to stroke his hand down Sir Lumpy’s chubby flank.
“You should forgive her,” he said. “She loves you enough that she dragged you across a universe to keep you in her life. She’ll always come back for you.” Seth sighed. “Dammit, I’m talking to the cat.”
Sir Lumpy sat on his haunches and began bathing his face. It was not a pretty face. His eyes bulged in opposite directions, and his nose looked like it had been slammed into one too many walls. He also bore more than a few battle wounds from various tangles in the forest. What was it with Gresham women and hideously scarred guys?
Seth continued down the path to the lake. The cat followed, weaving in and out of his legs.
The lake was quiet now. The pack had enjoyed many summer nights swimming and drinking well after midnight, but the water was too chilly for even the bravest of wolves. Waves sloshed over the muddy shore, and Seth’s feet slurped as he walked, sinking in to the ankles. He climbed onto an outcropping of rocks near the waterfall to sit under the mist.
He leaned back on his arms, gazing across the churning waters as he tried to imagine life without the pack. A life without waking up to a dozen coffee-crazed wolves fighting over the last pot of blonde roast in the kitchens. A life that wasn’t measured by the phases of the moon. A life where he didn’t have to watch his brother and ex-girlfriend constantly hugging and kissing and looking guilty when he walked by.
But what could he do in the greater world? He could go back to college, become a doctor. Except that the Union had started recruiting kopides out of college. They would almost certainly find him like that.
No college, no pack.
What else was there?
Seth realized that the thudding he heard wasn’t his heart or the beat of water over the rocks, but something pounding within a nearby cottage—the one they used for transitioning werewolves. It was shaking again, as if Katja were throwing herself against the walls. He thought he heard a low, distant keening noise, muffled by the silver-reinforced walls.
They were still trying to heal her with partial transformations. Judging by the position of the moon, it had to be two in the morning—twelve hours since Abel had disappeared into the cottage with her.
Motion drew his eyes to the far end of the shore. A pale figure entered the moonlight, standing in the lake with a long skirt lifted around her knees by the waves.
Rylie looked scared. She had a hand clapped over her mouth and eyes so wide that Seth could see the glint on them, even at that distance.
She was Alpha now. She couldn’t be scared where the pack could see her. But out by the lake at night, alone with the forest, she could let it overtake her. Her shoulders began shaking first, and then
her body, until she sank to her knees in the chilly water and cried. Her sobs were quiet enough that Seth couldn’t hear them. Katja’s pounding was louder. The waterfall was louder. Hell, even his own heart was louder.
He moved to climb off the rock. He couldn’t help it—he had never been able to stay away from Rylie when she looked that hurt.
But Abel appeared before he could get down, sloshing down the shore to kneel beside Rylie. They folded against each other, arms and lips tangled.
Seth froze, hands locked on the mossy stones, unwilling to be seen. But they were distracted enough that they didn’t look up when he dropped back onto the shore. And neither of them saw him walk away rubbing his chest. His heart was hurting again.
Katja kept pounding at the inside of the cottage.
Seth didn’t sleep.
Seth was packed before sunrise. He was surprised by how easily everything that he cared about fit into a single backpack: his Beretta 9mm, a werewolf fang that he used to wear as an earring, a set of lock picks wrapped in leather. Even after adding a couple of outfits, he didn’t have to fight to close the zipper.
That was his entire life in the backpack—past, present, and future. Guns and werewolf fangs.
He did a quick once-over of his room again, but even though he had collected a few other odds and ends over the years, there was nothing else that he felt compelled to keep. Most of the things he treasured about life at the sanctuary couldn’t be taken with him. Not the singing of birds outside his window, the crisp morning air, the murmur of voices as the pack roused at dawn.
But there was one other thing he could take. It was the hard lump at the bottom of his pillowcase—a palm-sized journal that had been dirtied and beaten and opened so often that its spine was soft.
His mother’s diary.
Seth hefted the book in his hand. James Faulkner had left the book for him the last time that he visited the sanctuary. Inside were seemingly endless pages of his mother’s rantings. He had read them a dozen times in an attempt to understand what she was saying, and now its shape was as familiar in his hands as a gun.