Exile: Sídhí Summer Camp #3

by Jodie B. Cooper

  “He hurt you,” Mac said. Glaring at her, his eyes turned silver.

  “Mac, bring it down a notch, now,” she ordered. Staring him in the eye, she waited until his emotions calmed and his eyes returned to their normal pale green. The electricity racing through his body made his sun-touched hair move restlessly. “Perhaps you do not remember my standing order from several months ago. No one, including you, will harm him.”

  “I remember,” he snarled, “but that was before he pushed you into destroying your entire future.”

  “So, you intentionally disobeyed a direct order?” she asked in a lethally soft tone.

  He glared at her. Molten fire flared through his eyes, once again turning them silver, he snapped, “Yes.”

  “You will release him, harming him no more than what he already is, or I will name you Oath Breaker.”

  The calmly worded threat was not a simple one. For a Sídhí, especially one bound by blood like Mac, to be named Oath Breaker was worse than death.

  All the blood drained from Mac’s face. His hand tightened before snapping open. “My honor, my loyalty, is forever yours, my Liege. Please, forgive my transgression,” his said stiffly, formally. His voice held a note of alarm, reflecting the near panic in his eyes.

  “Forgiven and forgotten,” she said quietly, skimming the tips of her fingers down his arm. He froze and his eyes widened in alarm, but she had already turned toward the cabin. Intent on ignoring Nick as he knelt on the ground, she kept her gaze straight ahead.

  “Sarah,” Nick rasped, struggling to breathe.

  Emily hurried around his fallen body, grinning from ear-to-ear. “Mac,” Emily said eagerly, “oh my, gosh! You have gorgeous wings. My name’s Emily. I’ve never been more excited in my entire life!”

  With a word of warning on her lips, Sarah turned. Phoenix didn’t welcome questions or touch, except very briefly by a friend or family member. Like many fairy, they were rude and insular to other races.

  Adjusting their attitude had been an uphill battle when she started adding phoenix to her original guard unit. She remembered one of their first mixed training sessions. A trainer’s fingers had been burned nearly black when the man refused to release Mac during an exercise drill.

  “Come on, let’s go someplace and talk,” Emily said, reaching for his arm.

  The calm expression Mac had maintained during the fight shifted. Baring his teeth, he growled at Emily. The lethal sound filled the air.

  Emily froze mid-step. “Mac?” she asked uncertainly, confusion clouded her eyes.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said disdainfully. “For future reference, do not ever touch me. Do you understand?”

  “You’re refusing?” she asked hesitantly. The dismayed words sounded hurt, horrified. Her solid black eyes filled with tears. “No, I don’t understand. Why? You don’t even know me. Why would you reject... oh!”

  Going In Between, Mac disappeared, cutting off her rapid words.

  “Call if you need me, I’ll be near,” Mac mentally said to Sarah.

  A dozen people started talking at the same time, asking a multitude of questions. Emily looked lost, nearly in tears as she searched for some sign of Mac.

  Sarah looked around and realized the area was filling with curious teens from the nearby beach. She slapped her ice-queen face on and ignored them.

  The teens from her cabin dispersed, going in different directions. Most of them limped up the cabin steps. Poor Emily circled the clearing, obviously seeking Mac’s scent. Brianna, who appeared after the fighting was finished, stalked down the main path, going toward the commissary.

  Sarah skirted the cabin and headed toward the lake. The curiosity seekers quickly stepped out of her way.

  Nearing the lake, she angled right, into the trees surrounding the tranquil body of water. If she cut through the forest, her destination would be a short thirty-minute walk.

  “Liege?” Mac asked politely in her head.

  Knowing no one could see or hear her, she snorted. “You call me liege one more time and I will pluck all your feathers,” she said with a fleeting touch of humor.

  He chuckled in her head. “I always call you liege.”

  “Only in serious situations, not when it’s just the two of us. Stop being a horse’s butt and walk with me.”

  “You’re not alone,” he said cryptically.

  “Nick? Yes, I know he’s back there. I’m ignoring him,” she said firmly, hoping her words would reinforce her belief.

  A soft thump sounded behind her. A moment later, with his midnight wings folded tightly at his back, Mac walked-up beside her.

  “What happened?” he questioned.

  Her silence was its own answer.

  “I’m not leaving until you tell me why you did it,” he insisted, ignoring her death-like glare. “You put up with his nonsense for months. Then you up and have your lifeBud burned out. Blast it all, Sarah, you’re not simply my liege, you’re one of my true friends.”

  Refusing to let angry tears spill down her face, Sarah clenched her teeth together. She didn’t want to talk about it, but Mac could be as persistent and irritating as a swarm of gnats.

  Not wanting Nick to overhear, she spoke in hushed tones, quietly telling Mac everything that had happened over the previous week.

  From the growl Mac uttered, she wasn’t successful in hiding her distress from him.

  “Camp is for having fun. I could capture a member of the dragon council then we could have some fun. I guarantee we would have the details on how to open and shut a gateway by the end of the week,” he said solemnly without a hint of humor in his grim expression. He meant every single word.

  Part of her charade was kidnapping and torturing people, but she had never harmed an innocent party, at least, not without permission. He knew that. She looked at him as if he was crazy. Oh, he pretended to be certifiably insane, but over the years, she had arrived at another conclusion. His crazy attitude was a mask, much like the one she herself wore.

  “When your lunatic suggestions start sounding like a good idea, I know I must be tired.”

  He chuckled, breaking his unusually somber mood. “At least I helped you take your mind off the moron following us.”

  “He’s not a moron,” Sarah snarled. “While we’re on the subject of morons, where were you yesterday? If you had been near enough, you would have witnessed the mite attack.”

  His face tightened with remorse. “I was trying to stay far enough away so you wouldn’t see me and send me home. Then, the one time you call for help, I wasn’t there,” he said guiltily.

  She didn’t doubt his regret, but she knew he wasn’t telling her the entire story. “In other words, something caught your attention and you wandered away,” she said, snorting at his look of chagrin. “You are worse than Emily. Your curiosity is going to be the death of you.”

  “Maybe so, but yesterday was work related. I caught one of the dragon guardians shooting cadets with tranquilizer darts. After drugging them, the guardian electronically tagged them and called in a pack of trolls for retrieval.”

  “Trolls?” she asked. Shock sharpened her voice.

  “They had a gnome trainer that was using those little ear-bud transmitters that Garrick suggested we use with the sasquatch. If I had thought, even for a second, that you might need me, I would never have followed them.”

  She brushed her fingers against his, forgiving him of any wrongdoing. “I know that,” she said quietly. “Now, tell me what you found.”

  “While I was at the troll facility, waiting for the one they called Mistress, I slipped out of the In Between. I wasn’t sure which valley I was in and I wanted to see what other valleys might have the same dimensional footprint. I moved through several layers, including Haven Valley and Earth.”

  Sarah glanced up at him, eyebrow arched. “I take it some poor soul had an angel sighting?”

  Mac snorted. “I checked. The area was a small hay field. There were moun
tains on either side. There were no people, no buildings, nothing of humanity anywhere near.”

  “But?” she prompted.

  “A group of children were playing amid the stalks of grass,” he said with a pinched look.

  “Children? In the middle of nowhere? How do you manage to attract such, such...” she held her palm up in defeat as she searched for the perfect word.

  “Bad luck?” he asked mournfully.

  “I was thinking chaos, but bad luck works.” She sighed. “So, did you find out where the troll facility is at? And, who is the Mistress?”

  “Yes to both, the trolls are in Dragon Valley, northeast of the main campground in a very small, secure area. Mountains surround the little valley. As far as I could tell, unless you want several days of hard climbing, the area is only accessible through a single connecting gateway. After I realized the location, I wanted to return to you so I called General Cory. He sent Jarvis and Lambert to keep watch. I was ready to leave when Guardian Clara showed up,” he said with a snarl, eyes going silver. “She’s been on our terrorist watch list for years, and when the gnomes called her mistress, I got all the confirmation I needed. I would have been happy to maintain a silent presence and let the evidence build-up against her, but that bloated witch started torturing those kids.”

  His eyes turn silver, flickering with wild flames. A harsh, white glow formed around Mac’s hands. “At first it was pretty basic, ripped-out fingernails and such, but then she started spewing short burst of dragon fire at them. Just far enough away that their skin burst from the heat,” he said in a furious voice.

  Sarah continued walking, keeping her voice calm, she asked, “Did you kill her?”

  “Tried,” he said, baring his teeth as he growled. “An older dragon showed up and we fought. I think I know who he was, but I need to confirm. The damn dragon just kept healing every time I hit him with white-fire, and I wasn’t using the low volt version I used back at the cabin. The fight wrapped-up pretty quick, because Jarvis and Leo cornered Clara and managed to hurt her.”

  “And the dragons ported away,” Sarah said when it appeared he wasn’t going to finish.

  “Yes,” he agreed with a snarl.

  Sarah’s eyes narrowed in thought. Clara was extremely similar to Clarabelle. Harry, Clarisse’s dragon mate must’ve been telling the truth when he spilled his guts about the Khr'Vurr. “Was Clara a gray dragon with black spikes?” she asked, sending him a mental image of the dragon she skewered in the cavern.

  “She didn’t have spikes,” he said thoughtfully, “but on Sídhí, long before the Great War, there was a dragon clan called Vürst that had retractable spikes. I’ll check it out.”

  Without warning, he sucked in a breath and blurted. “That girl, the clan vampire with long, black hair, who is she?”

  His abrupt change of subject nearly gave her whiplash. “Her name is Emily. She is Nick’s younger cousin, and she is off limits. If she corners you with her constant questions, don’t even think of hurting her. She doesn’t see anything wrong with touching.”

  “I would never hurt a child,” he said with a curl of his lips.

  “That girl is nearly eighteen. She’s gone through puberty. In the eyes of the Sídhí, she is an adult.” Sarah snorted with real laughter. “And from the way your eyes silvered when you talk about her, you most definitely do not see a child.”

  “Fine,” he snapped, “I noticed her. That doesn’t mean I like her or anything.”

  “Prince Raymond Mackenzie in awake-years you’re only seventeen. You’re actually a bit younger than she is.” Exasperation flared through her. She hated being outside of the loop. “Are you ever going to explain why you - why all phoenix - refuse to date outside your race?”

  “No,” he said, face devoid of all emotion. “It is our burden to bear.”

  The dark blue lake appeared in front of her. A tumble of large rocks created a small peninsula into the lake. “We’ll talk later. Whatever happens between Nick and me, I don’t want you to interfere.” She didn’t wait for his answer. Crossing the stones, she hopped from one to the next, stopping on the last rock. Sinking down, she dangled her legs off the fifteen-foot drop.

  She didn’t have long to wait. From the edge of the trees, she heard a twig break. A shoe scrapped across the first rock then the second, following her own path.

  “Can I join you?” Nick asked softly, towering over her.

  “We are no longer mates so I don’t see any point in it, but whatever,” she said icily, trying to put as much distance between them as possible.

  He sat close enough that her shoulders stiffened in response. Another inch and his leg would touch hers.

  As if it held the answers to the world’s greatest puzzle, his gaze focused on the deep lake. “I disagree.”

  “You can disagree all you want, but it won’t change the basic facts. One, my lifeBud was destroyed. Two, you are no longer my mate. Three, your synth will sing for someone else within the month, and you’ll have a new mate.” She gritted her teeth together to keep from rambling any more. She’d said enough.

  He leaned toward her, pushing into her personal space he forced her to look into his eyes. Holding her gaze, he mimicked her response but with heat in his eyes, not frost. “One, you will always be my mate. Two, I will refuse any other girl my synth sings for. Three, I love you more than life itself.”

  A single tear slipped down her face. Angry at her lack of control where Nick was concerned, she swiped at the stupid display of emotion. “Right, of course, how could I forget? You can’t have me, so now you want me. Go away, Nick.”

  “No,” he said obstinately, refusing the order. “I will never leave you, not again. This is my fault. I fell in love with you the first minute I laid eyes on you.”

  Her snort of derision made him pause.

  “Yeah, I didn’t exactly act in love, but every time I turned around I was hunting for you. I wanted to be with you even though I hated what I thought you were.”

  “What you thought? I’m worse than what you first thought. Or perhaps, you have forgotten that I attacked your brother?” she demanded, trying to make him go away. His words were killing her, destroying her from the inside out.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” he said quietly. “Early this morning, after we came through the Olitiau portal, everyone showered and went to bed. I didn’t go to bed. I couldn’t sleep knowing how much I’d hurt you. I knew I loved you, but I kept seeing Richard’s face in my head.”

  Raking his fingers through his hair, he sighed. “In the end, it was simple. Either, I picked you, everything about you, or his memory. Maybe one day you’ll tell me why he had to die but I have a bad feeling his insatiable curiosity is how he ended-up on your hit list. I’ve learned enough about you to know you had no choice. You told me - repeatedly - that every action you take is aimed toward protecting your people. You wouldn’t have killed him unless he ignored your warnings. You see, I may be stubborn as a mule but I do listen.” His fingers feathered gently down the side of her face. “Lady Sarah Trellick, you are everything to me. I can live without a lifeBond, but I can’t live without you.”

  She scrunched her eyes shut and shuddered, trying so hard not to cry. She had killed people. She was a mean, hardcore assassin, not a crybaby that bawled at the drop of a hat. She looked up at him. “When Katie went for you, I heard you. You refused me,” she said bleakly, remembering the pain his rejection had caused her.

  “I didn’t refuse you. I just didn’t want to talk right then. I was saying a final goodbye to Richard. Katie and Emily are always trying to fix everything, and I thought she was trying to convince me not to refuse you. I didn’t know the blasted Dyrst’Lye was actually in the cabin,” he snarled heatedly.

  “Oh,” she said miserably. Another tear escaped, silently rolling down her cheek. He wanted her. She had destroyed everything. That’s all she seemed good at, destruction and death.

  He captured her tear with a gentle touch of his f
inger. “I had already planned to ask you to bond with me, but after saying goodbye to my big brother, I was emotionally wrung-out. I didn’t want you to see me in that frame of mind. Now,” he voice cracked, he tried to clear it, but it didn’t help. His eyes filled with unshed tears, “now, I’ve screwed-up so badly we’ll never be able to bond. If you’ll have me, I want you for my mate. Please, Sarah, please accept me as your mate.”

  When she didn’t answer, the hand holding her face began to tremble. “Sarah?”

  Pulling away from his touch, she shook her head, her heart ready to crumble into dust as she denied him. “Nothing has changed, not really. You hate what I am. You’ll never truly trust me. Every time you see me with blood splatters, your first question will be what innocent died.”

  “I trust you. I don’t understand the harsh disguise you want everyone to believe, because I’ve seen the real you. I’m not saying you aren’t scary as hell, but your heart is pure.”

  He paused, searching her face. “Trusting you doesn’t mean I won’t ask questions. I want to be part of your life; I want to understand everything about you. Without the bond, I know you have secrets you can’t share, not until I’ve proven myself to you. I’m willing to wait as long as you need. Just know this, if you refuse me, I won’t accept it. I’ll follow you, and wear you down. If it takes a thousand years, I’ll keep after you,” he said intensely, never moving his eyes from her face.

  “And when your blood sings for another? When the synth crystal in your body demands you love someone else? What then?” she asked softly, fearing the answer.

  He growled. “I’d rather not destroy someone else’s life, but I absolutely refuse to ever hurt you again. Earlier when you screamed, and I realized the Dyrst’Lye was in the cabin and actually burning-out your lifeBud, I thought my very soul was going to shatter.”

  He cupped her face with both hands. Inching nearer, he stopped just short of her lips giving her time to pull away. “I love you, Sarah. I need you more than the air I breathe.”