by Tate James
“Jesus, it feels like ages since we’ve placed a good wager,” River muttered with a sly grin. “I’ll take that bet. You clearly misunderstand our girl’s powers of persuasion.” His hand tightened on mine, and my stomach flipped with butterflies at hearing him call me our girl.
Despite the fact that I was openly involved with several of them, it hadn’t been a topic we had really ever discussed as a group before, so hearing him so casually own it made my heartrate skip.
“Kitty Kat, what about everything here?” Caleb asked, a serious look on his normally relaxed face. “With Vic and the shifters?”
“I think we have got as much information as they’re willing to part with. If what Vic said about the geas is true, then I don’t know what other options we have short of physical torture...” I chuckled but saw the small tilt to Cole’s head that told me he was actually considering torture as a possibility. “No, Cole. No torturing the innocent shifters. Okay, so we’re heading back to New York, and Vali and Austin are going... wherever they’re going.”
They guys all stared at me with confused frowns, and River gave me an amused look, tilting his head to the side with a half grin. “Kitten, you do know that HQ is in Seattle, right?”
“What?” I gaped at him, sure I must have heard him wrong. “No, it can’t be... Seriously? This whole time, the Omega HQ was less than two hours’ drive from Cascade Falls?”
“Yeah, we kind of thought you knew that?” Caleb grinned, and I met his amused gaze.
He got it.
“Wait, so for years your agents have been hunting my ass down, trying to pin down the infamous Fox, and I was going to school right under your noses?” I covered my mouth to hold back the laughter, but it bubbled out of me anyway.
“Until we found you, let’s not forget,” River reminded me, tightening his grip on my hand, and I rolled my eyes.
“As if there was no magic involved there.” I chewed my lip as the thought occurred to me. Did that mean that the way I felt for them, or them for me, was just because of magic?
“Na-ah,” Caleb snickered. “Not getting off that easily; you obviously weren’t paying attention to Vic’s story. The Ban Dia chose their dianoch. Chose being the key word there. If the six of us are it for you, then you’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Kitty Kat.”
Six.
My gaze flew over to Austin and found him staring back at me just as intently but with that infuriatingly unreadable expression. Was he one of my dianoch? He must be. When I’d been shot, barely a handful of hours earlier, he’d been able to help me heal with just a kiss. Okay, a pretty amazing kiss, if I was being honest with myself, but... Austin? He hated me. Oh God, now he’s going to hate me even more.
“I think that’s a situation that can work itself out in time,” he said softly to his twin, but his gaze remained locked on mine.
“So, back to Seattle then?” Wesley clarified, pushing his glasses up his nose and accepting the phone Caleb was holding out to him. “I will arrange us a seaplane back to Anchorage, seeing as the mountain road is, er, blocked. Then we can split up from there. Sound good?”
“Perfect; let us know when it’s all booked and what our E.T.D. will be, Wes.” River nodded. “Let’s clean up Victor’s house a bit before we go.”
“God forbid we never be allowed back here,” Vali snorted in his dark, smoky voice, and I wasn’t sure whether to be amused or turned on. Damn men were messing with my common sense.
River had a good point though; we should definitely change the sheets in the spare room.
3
The trip back to Seattle was over in a flash. Except for the changeover in Anchorage, when Vali left for Las Vegas and Austin for San Francisco, the whole journey had passed in a blur. Most of the time I had kept to myself, tucked up in a chair at the back of the jet while I turned this new information over and over in my head. It was a lot. Like, really a lot to have just suddenly learned about myself. Nothing I thought I knew about myself was true. Not my name, not my age, hell not even my damn species.
Why hadn’t we stayed and questioned Vic further? At the time it had all seemed really logical; there was nothing else to ask. But the second we were airborne, my mind started clamouring with unasked questions like they’d been sitting there waiting for a door to be opened.
“Sweetheart,” Wesley murmured, running a gentle hand down my arm. “We’re here.”
I jerked my head up and saw the guys standing in the aisle, waiting for me. “Sorry, I was...”
“Thinking. Yeah, we know.” Wesley smiled at me gently and held out his hand. “Come on; we’re better off facing Director Pierre sooner rather than later.”
Taking Wesley’s hand, I followed the boys from the jet and down onto the tarmac where a black SUV sat waiting.
“Can’t believe I’m only just now asking this, but where do you guys all live? Do you have a place here in Seattle?” I buckled my seatbelt as I took the window seat in the very back. Without Austin or Vali with us, there was a bit more room to move, and I didn’t end up squashed into the middle seat again.
“No, we move around for work so much that we don’t really have a home base, as such. We each have homes in different cities, but those are mostly just for holidays and visiting family,” Caleb answered, taking the other window seat in the back with me. “Aus and I have an apartment in San Fran that he’ll be staying at while he’s there, but we’ve probably only been there, maybe, twice in the last year? Had to give away all our potted plants.”
“You had potted plants?” I asked, surprised, and he snickered.
“No. Can you imagine me and Aus keeping damn plants alive?” He grinned, and I couldn’t help following the curve of his lips with my eyes.
“Aus managed to keep that damn cat alive,” Cole commented from the row ahead of us, and I raised my eyebrows at Caleb.
“Austin has a cat?” I was a bit shocked. He didn’t exactly seem the type to snuggle on the couch with a purring ball of fluff.
“This is no ordinary cat. You’ll see when you meet him. Aus gave him to our neighbour, Mrs. Flores, when we got accepted into Omega Academy, and she has been keeping him healthy,” Caleb informed me with a mysterious sort of look. What the hell did that mean, anyway? No ordinary cat.
“What about the rest of you?” I asked, curious to learn more about these men who were suddenly looking like seriously permanent fixtures in my life. Could I call it a life? What I had? Ugh, philosophy hurt my brain.
“I’ve got a place in Switzerland that my mom and brother live in.” Wesley nodded. “There is an experimental spinal surgeon living there that my bro wanted to try out, so I got them a place to live nearby, seeing as it’s a pretty long process.”
“That’s why you weren’t super-concerned about Dupree coming after them?” I clicked. Back when Dupree—the mad scientist hell-bent on restoring magic to supernaturals through any means possible—had kidnapped and beaten Lucy within an inch of her life, threats had been made against the guys and their families. At the time, Wesley was the only one that I’d known had direct family who could have been at risk. The fact that they were half a world away made his lack of concern make a whole lot more sense.
“Yeah. Also, their place is not far from the Omega office in Zurich, so we have some pretty top notch surveillance in place for them.” He shrugged, like it was no big thing, but the fact that he’d gone to such lengths for his mom and brother was incredibly sweet.
“How about you, River?” I asked, and he looked back at me from the passenger seat where he sat beside our driver, who the guys had recognized and greeted as Frank.
“Family estate in England.” He grimaced. “Haven’t been back there for years though.”
He didn’t seem to want to elaborate, so I didn’t push him any further and instead prodded Cole in the shoulder.
“And you, big guy? Where’s your house?” I deliberately said house and not home, seeing as these guys clearly didn’t think of the property they owned as home.
“Montana,” he replied, turning in his seat to look at me with a half smile pulling at his lips. “I have a little piece of land out in the middle of nowhere there.”
Caleb snorted. “A little piece of land? Cole has six hundred acres. It’s a fully functioning horse ranch.”
“What?” I exclaimed, looking back at the lethal weapon of a man wrapped in a leather jacket, with colorful tattoos peeking out at the neckline. Somehow, I was finding it hard to picture him in cowboy boots and a hat. But hell, it’d be hot as fuck.
“I like horses,” he muttered, a little sheepishly.
“Cole set up one of the most well-respected horse ranches in the whole damn country,” Wesley explained. “He has people from all over the world clamoring for his horses.”
“But who runs it all? Takes care of the horses and everything?” My mind was officially blown. I was so damn impressed.
“I have a friend from the UFC scene that lives on site and oversees the day-to-day running of things, and he has a team of staff. He’s part of the reason I set it up in the first place. He’d taken a bad ankle break just as his career was starting out, and instead of making it big with the rest of us, he was stuck in the hospital and rehab learning how to walk again. He was a mad horse fan, and I had stacks of spare money... With Wesley’s business help, it wasn’t so hard to get off the ground.” Cole shrugged uncomfortably again and turned to face the front.
“Cole,” I whispered, unclipping my seatbelt to lean forward and plant a kiss on his cheek. “I think that is one of the most incredibly kind things I have ever heard. Aside from Wes buying his family a place in Zurich.” I winked at Wesley, sitting beside Cole, and he grinned back at me.
“It was nothing. Just money.” Cole clearly didn’t want to discuss it any further, so I tipped his face back to me with a palm on his rough cheek and kissed his lips.
How stupid of me to sit there enjoying this lovely moment getting to know my dianoch—because I was fairly certain that’s what they all were. The only warning we got was the high-pitched screeching of tires on pavement before our SUV was hit from the side, and we were tossed over and over like a tin can down a hill.
Finally, we came to a stop.
Stupid, fucking Kit, you just had to take your damn seatbelt off seconds before impact.
While the car had tumbled, so too had I. Like a damn shoe in a tumble dryer. Radiating pain flared from every part of my body, and I knew without a doubt that I’d done some serious damage.
But I was still conscious, so there was that.
“Kitten! Talk to me!” River barked, and I heard him grunt, then thump heavily as he must have just freed his seatbelt. The car had come to a stop upside down, so while I lay broken on my back, I was looking up at the guys strapped to their seats. Caleb was slightly behind me, so I couldn’t see if he was okay, but Cole was awake. As I lay there, waiting for my magic to repair all the breaks and bleeds, I watched Cole tear his seatbelt off like wet tissue paper, then roll as he hit the ground. Roof. Whatever.
“Vixen, hey,” he panted as he righted himself and leaned between the seats to reach me. His frame was way too big to crawl through, though so he just stretched out a hand and gently grabbed mine.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “The magic is working.” My voice was a thin, pained sound that betrayed just how much pain I was in, and Cole grimaced.
“Not fast enough though. I can... feel your pain. Like a phantom limb. Hang in there; we need to get out of this car.” He released my hand and kicked out one of the windows with his heavy combat boots.
Thank fuck for armoured glass, though. Without it, I would have been grated cheese all over the pavement. Stupid, stupid move, taking my seatbelt off.
“Guess that dragon strength is coming in handy,” I croaked, still unable to move my body but mercifully feeling the crawling, electric sensation that told me my magic was working.
Without answering me, he shimmied out through the window, and I heard him talking with River in a voice too low for me to hear. The silence from Caleb and Wesley had me beyond worried though.
“Wes?” I called out to him but got no response. He was just out of my line of sight, and I couldn’t yet turn my head to look and see how bad off he was, which infuriated me to no end.
“Caleb?” I called out a bit louder while willing my body to heal faster. One of the boys groaned in response, but I couldn’t tell which.
“Vixen,” Cole said through the busted out window. “I need to try and yank one of these doors off so we can get you out of there. Hang tight.”
Without waiting for a response, his head lifted back out of sight. Seconds later, the screeching sound of tearing metal filled the small space as Cole peeled the buckled door off the car like the lid of a sardine can.
“Leave me,” I ordered as he ducked inside once more. “Get Caleb and Wesley out. They’re not responding.”
“Vixen,” Cole chastised, but I gave him a stern glare.
“No. I’m fine right here; just get them out so I can heal them when I’m done.” Cole looked like he wanted to argue again, but after a glance at Caleb behind me, he grunted in agreement.
After a lot of swearing and awkward maneuvering around the upturned SUV, Cole managed to get both boys free of the vehicle, but they looked really bad. By the time he came back to pull me out, I had almost regained movement in my limbs, and the prickling magic was no longer the burning pain of being electrocuted. In truth, I had all but ignored the pain of healing while watching the two unconscious men being pulled from their seats.
“You good?” Cole asked quietly, crouching above me and meeting my gaze with his cold, granite eyes. His face was tense and pinched, like he, too, was in a lot of pain but just holding it back.
“Almost.” I nodded but allowed him to scoop me up in his arms. He then did a sort of backward lizard walk to get us out of the ruined car and then placing me down carefully on the grass at the side of the road.
“Kitten!” River exclaimed, leaning over me and cupping my face with one palm. The other arm, I noticed, he held close to his body.
“I’m fine, Alpha, almost done. How are Wes and Cal?” I turned my head to see where they were but couldn’t see much past River’s broad frame.
“Not so good, love. The truck hit on their side of the car, so they’re pretty messed up. Frank’s dead.” River grimaced, and I noticed sweat beading on his forehead.
“Alpha, you’re hurt.” I pointed out, struggling to sit up now that my body was almost done mending itself. “Show me?”
Holding out a hand for his injured arm, I didn’t really think twice about what I was doing until he hesitated and moved farther away from me.
“No, love. I’ll be fine. Wes and Cal need you more.” He pushed up off the ground but noticeably avoided touching me as I, too, scrambled to my feet.
“Sorry, yeah, of course. It was just...” I shrugged as I trailed off.
“Instinct. Yeah, I know. But my arm will be fine; they might not be.” He nodded his head to the two badly injured boys lying in the grass with Cole hovering over them both. Terror coursed through me as made my way over to them.
“Do we know what’s wrong?” I gasped as I sank to my knees between Caleb’s and Wesley’s bodies and laid a gentle hand on their chests. They were both in a really bad way, I could clearly see that now, but with so much blood it was hard to tell where the worst of the injuries were. Tears welled in my eyes, and I took a few shaking breaths to hold them back.
Now’s not the time, Kit. You can heal them. They’ll be okay. They have to be okay.
Cole shook his head, and I chewed my lip a moment. “Okay, doesn’t matter. Hopefully the magic goes for the most serious injuries first.” Hopefully the magic wasn’t already too depleted from healing my own body.
My skin still prickled and pulled with magic, but I shoved it aside and focused on the two dying boys under my hands. I wasn’t entirely sure I had enough juice left to heal them both fu
lly, so I sort of hoped that by doing them simultaneously, it’d be just enough to save their lives. Hopefully. Or that was the theory.
Unlike with the little wolf girl, this healing required no coaxing or encouragement. It knew exactly what was needed. The second I opened my mind to it, I felt the odd sensation rush through my body and extend down through my fingers, pressed to the boys’ chests.
Under my left hand, it felt wet and sticky, like I had dipped my palm in a bucket of blood. Under my right, it was the distinctively silky feeling of a bird’s feathers.
Time passed with no measure as I crouched there, not daring to move until I was certain I had done everything in my power to save these two guys who had come to mean just so damn much to me. Even as I felt the magic weakening, like I was almost drained, there was still no sign of life from either of them.
As the world spun and my eyes rolled back, I sent up a quick prayer to... I don’t know who, desperately hoping that I’d done enough. That they would pull through long enough to just get some normal medical help. As I face planted into the grass, my last thought was that I hoped I hadn’t changed them.
4
When I woke, it was to the crisp, linen smell of Wesley, and I realized that it was his warm body wrapped around me like an anaconda.
Cracking my eyelids open, I found my cheek pressed into his bare chest right above his crow tattoo, and I raised a hand to stroke a finger over the delicate ink. The level of detail was exquisite, as all of the boys’ tattoos were, and I wondered again about which artist they all went to. Maybe they could take me sometime. I’d wanted a tattoo of my own for ages but hadn’t found an artist whose work I loved enough to permanently ink into my skin.
Wesley’s soft snores vibrated his chest, reassuring me that he was alive. My magic must have done more than I’d expected before I had passed out because I’d expected him and Caleb to be in a hospital or something.
He made a cute-sounding sort of snuffle, then his breathing changed slightly, indicating he was awake. His arms tightened around me, and he murmured something in a sleepy voice that I couldn’t make out.