“Yeah, yeah.” I glanced back over my shoulder, a little surprised that he hadn’t come through the mirror yet. “Several people have used the phrase, but I’m not too familiar with it. What, is he in heat or something?” I wrinkled my nose at the thought. “That would get weird.”
She started to laugh. “Oh, it’s more complicated than that. Don’t worry. He’s not going to go spraying the grass where you live or anything. If he decides to mark his territory, it will get more personal.”
“Gee, that sounds so very reassuring.” He still hadn’t come through.
“Magic unnerves some of the shifters,” she said quietly. “Even though they are as much a product of it as we are.”
“I’m not very magical.” I could go invisible and I could call a sword. That was it.
“That’s it? You almost always have luck on your side. You have an uncanny insight into things. And you can see magic,” she murmured. “And you see it better than most others. Like her…what do you see when you look at her?”
I looked at the girl on the bed, kicking myself for not noticing earlier.
“I see a girl who’s been hurt,” I said flatly.
“That’s not what you see.”
Sighing, I stared again.
“She’s hiding,” I murmured. “Like she’s curled up in on herself and won’t come out.”
“Yes…she fears her change now. Even though she’s spiking…ah, there he is.”
I looked back and saw a hand appear through the wall. It wasn’t a mirror on this side. Just a wall. Seeing a hand poke through it was…odd. Very odd. It disappeared a second later and then a moment later, he came running through like he was ready to mow down anything in his path.
I applauded—quietly.
The mother chuckled.
Damon snarled at me.
“He keeps doing that like it’s supposed to mean something,” I said, turning back around to face her.
She smiled at me. “This is what I mean by it’s so much more complicated. Don’t worry. It will make sense in time. Come. I want you to talk to her.”
“She’s sleeping,” I said.
“Yes…a deep, deep sleep. Your voice won’t wake her. But you may help her. Come. Talk.” She patted the bed by the girl’s feet. “Talk…and I may be able to show you what you wanted to ask her. There are…awful things in her mind. Awful, Kitasa.”
I blew out a breath but before I could take a step, a hand clamped around my neck. “Not smart,” Damon growled. “She’s spiking.”
“She’s sleeping,” I pointed out. “And she’s not going to do anything. Whatever those bastards were doing, it terrified her so much, she’s fighting the spike.”
“You can’t fight it.”
“Not indefinitely,” the mother said. “But she’s trying very hard. Don’t worry so much, Damon. I can tell if she’s going to stir and certainly you’re fast enough to protect your own…aren’t you?”
“I’m not his,” I said. “Geez, are you all deaf?”
Damon’s hand tightened, just a little, then he let me go. Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that he hovered at my back, just an inch away as I settled on the foot of the bed at the girl’s feet.
“Do you know her name?”
“Lesil. Her name is Lesil,” the mother said quietly. “She was leaving school. Unhappy. The students there are unkind. She was trying not to cry when a car drove up. She knew the boy inside. He made her smile. Said he would buy her dinner. She wanted so badly for somebody to offer her a kindness…”
I knew what that was like.
“You’ve seen what happened to her?” I asked softly.
“Healing can be a deep, intimate experience.”
Bile churned in the back of my throat as I lifted my gaze and met her eyes. “Who healed me?”
She inclined her head. “You were injured in my house. A visitor. By one who is still a pupil. Naturally, it was my responsibility.”
Humiliation, rage, bitterness churned inside me.
Looking away from her, I focused on the girl. “There’s nothing intimate about seeing somebody’s most painful moments, Mother,” I said quietly. “It’s just another humiliation. Another dishonor.”
Her hand touched mine. “I know you think so…but you were never dishonored, warrior. The dishonor is, and has always been, theirs.”
I just shook my head.
“Tell me what I need to know to stop this.” Focus on the job. Just the job.
Not the witch sitting next to me, and not the man behind me, staring at me with eyes I could practically feel searing me to the soul.
“He took her. There is a drug for shifters that incapacitates them—it’s called night. I believe that is what he gave her, but I don’t know because all I can experience is what she experienced. There was clarity and happiness, and she looked at him and smiled, laughed as she stole some of his fries, then she took a drink. She realized that something was wrong...got out of the car. It gets fuzzy, but she stumbled around. There were men, a van. Then…darkness. When she woke, she was in a hole.”
I closed my eyes, fighting as memories swirled too close.
“You will not enter the Dominari, Kitasa. You will not shame this family—”
“I’m going to try, Grandmother.” I’d stood up to her. I was fifteen and by our laws, I could enter if I chose. I had no sponsor and it would be grueling work alone, but I’d run it. And when I didn’t make it, I’d drop down…and die.
The awful, lovely smile that spread across her face. “You will not.” Hands grabbing me, dragging me.
“…she wasn’t alone.”
I gasped as I settled back into my mind, the memories of that time falling away.
Swallowing, I shook my head to clear it and looked at the mother. “What?”
“She wasn’t alone,” the mother said patiently. “There were others with her. She could tell the weres by scent, but she can’t recognize magic yet. Hasn’t seen enough of it, I don’t suppose, to know the taste of it, the feel of it. So the others, she thinks they were human. I wouldn’t know if she is right or wrong.”
I watched her sleeping face. It was a help, but it wasn’t—
“I have images in mind,” Es said softly. “They take them out. Run them, while men chase them. For…sport.” She spat the last word out like it was something vile.
Everything inside me went cold.
“So that’s it then. That’s what it is. They take kids and hunt them down.” I’d been right. It was all about a game. A sick, twisted game. Fury gripped me. I wanted to shriek with it. Instead, I tugged out Doyle’s picture.
I showed it to the mother.
“Did she see him?”
She stared at the picture.
Then she looked at me. “I don’t know. There is a boy, blond, handsome. But he’s…changing.”
I shot Damon a look over my shoulder. “This is a recent picture, right?”
“Yeah.” Then he shrugged. “But if he’s spiking hard, he could change fast.”
“Not that fast…”
He cocked a brow. “The spike can hit some pretty weird. Like two or three years of growth spurts shoved into two or three weeks. It’s why some of us have to eat around the clock—why that wolf kid might have been in such bad shape. His body didn’t have the physical reserves to heal him because the spike was using them all up.”
Okay.
Okay.
Blowing out a breath, I looked at the girl.
The mother had wanted me to talk to her—
“You were in hell once,” she said quietly. “You know what it’s like to fight your way out. And survive.”
Closing my eyes, I rested a hand on the girl’s foot. She flinched at the touch, but I didn’t move away. “Hey, Lesil. You need to wake up. I…uh…” Blood crawled up my neck and I had to fight not to cringe at the shame and anger twisting, vying for control inside of me. “You got away from them, but if you don’t wake up…they still win.”
The mother was watching me with mild disapproval.
I shrugged. “Rage and fear kept me going for a long time. Sometimes it’s what you need to get you moving.” Glancing back at Lesil, I murmured, “She’s already choking on the fear. Maybe the rage can be a lifeline. Once she’s not drowning, we can give her another.”
Her lips pursed. “That’s not the witch’s way.”
“But neither of us are witches.”
Turning away, I strode to the wall. “I assume I just go out the way I came in?”
She didn’t answer.
I hoped it was a yes. I’d rather not walk right into a wall.
Chapter Sixteen
I made him drive.
He glared at me and started to argue.
I just threw the keys at him. He didn’t catch them so they hit his chest and then the ground. I shrugged and walked around to the other side of the car, flopping in the passenger’s seat. He had it shoved way back and I had to move it forward in order to not feel like I was sitting in the back seat.
Resting my head on the padded headrest, I started to talk.
I’d been ruminating out loud for a minute before he finally climbed in and shoved the seat back enough for his long legs.
“Anybody ever told you that you’re a pain in the ass?” he asked conversationally.
“All the time.” I rooted through the cloth bag Kori had shoved into my hands on the way out the door. She’d mentioned the little black pot would help with mosquitoes. My only hope was that it didn’t smell like piss or something even more vile.
To my delight, it smelled rather pleasant. Herbal, certainly, but nothing unpleasant.
“We should get a map of the park,” I said. “You have an idea of where all we covered yesterday?”
“Yes.” He stretched out an arm.
When he started toying with my hair, I tensed up.
It didn’t stop him.
Closing my eyes, I told myself to concentrate. That was what I needed to do. Concentrate.
“Good. So we mark where we covered and then find another section—”
“We need to backtrack, actually,” he said, rubbing his thumb down my neck.
I batted his hand away. “Backtrack?”
“Yes. You saw the hunters. I didn’t have to time to go over their back trail, but we need to. So that’s where we start. We’ll grab some food—and you’re taking more than granola bars.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch.” I’d already come to that decision, thank you very much.
“I’m serious, kitten.”
“You’re always serious.”
His hand spread open over my neck and despite my intention to ignore it, I almost groaned at how good that felt. I was tempted to lean into—
And then I realized I was—
“Damn it,” I snapped. “Would you stop? I thought I made it clear, I’m a little freaked out by the fact that you keep touching me even though just an hour or so ago, your Alpha was telling you that you might be killing me soon.”
“Nice opening into that talk we need to have,” he said, his mouth firming out into a hard, flat line. “Thanks for that.”
And his hand didn’t move.
“I made it clear—I am not going to kill you. Got it?” He shot me a glowering look that oddly enough didn’t leave me with the urge to cringe in my seat. “Even when you do make me want to do something violent. I’m not going to hurt you. Period. Ever.”
“Uh-huh.”
He snapped his jaws shut with an audible crack, like he wanted to bite something. “You’re so fucking difficult.”
“That’s funny coming from you. Really.”
“Would you shut up, and listen?” he growled, the low, pulsing sound echoing through the car. “You present a problem to her if you don’t find the kid. Since she said she’d kill you, she’s going to feel like she has to. But I’ll tell you this. It’s not love that’s motivating her. She doesn’t give a damn about Doyle. Never has, never will.”
“That’s a shock. Poor kid. Does he have anybody who cares about him?”
A tense silence stretched out and finally, Damon sighed. “Yeah. Me.”
It was the very last thing I expected to hear.
Gaping at him, I said, “What?”
“You heard me.” He dragged a hand down over his face. “The boy has been living with me since he was five. He was a mess after his dad died—acting out the way a kid will. Had a tantrum and the Lady belted him in the mouth. If he wasn’t a shifter, it would have killed him. He spent two days in the Lair’s medical ward as it was. I offered to take him home with me to let her have some time to adjust to the loss of her brother before taking on the hardships of raising a child…and he just never went home. He’s more my kid than anybody else’s.”
“Your kid.” I slammed my head against the headrest. Or I tried to. His hand was still behind my head and kept getting in the way. “So tell me something…did she send you here to help me, watch over me, or are you helping look for the kid?”
“All of the above.” He shrugged. “I’d heard you were good at this sort of shit and I wasn’t having any luck on my own. So I got her to thinking we needed outside help. Then I sort of suggested to her that you’d be likely to cause trouble so maybe I should make sure you stayed on task.” A smile tugged at his lips. “Probably some of my best work there. Subtle as hell, and you have to be subtle with the Lady.”
“You’ve basically been working this from the get-go, haven’t you?”
“I’ve been doing what I can to find the kid,” he said shortly. “You’ve been everything from a shortcut to the biggest complication imaginable.”
“Yeah?” I twitched as his fingers threaded through my hair.
“Yeah.” He sighed. “At first I thought I’d fucked it up, because we were spinning our wheels, but then you started untangling all these knots, things I didn’t even think to look for.”
“Sure as hell doesn’t seem like I’ve managed to untangle any knots. All I’m doing is hitting dead ends.”
“The witch, Keeli. The wolf kid.” Strong fingers dug into my neck, working the tense muscles there. “I don’t know if I would have bothered reaching out to Banner. You did. You also reached out to your connections with the witches, so we see a pattern—non-human kids getting grabbed. Although it’s weird that the Alpha’s nephew would have been, too.”
“I don’t think he was grabbed. I think he ran.” I closed my eyes. “At least that’s what I thought. I’m going to assume he was better off living with you than he would be with the Queen Bitch.” I smirked as I said it but he didn’t say anything. “Was he happy with you?”
Damon was quiet for a long moment. “Yeah. Mostly. But word got back to her that he was getting close to his spike. She started making noises about him coming home and he hated the idea. He was terrified of her. She’s his monster under the bed.”
“Gee. Imagine that.”
A short sigh burst out of him. “Why do you have to keep doing that? Are you trying to piss me off?”
“Do I have to try?” I groaned as his fingers hit a tight spot on my neck. “I’m almost tempted to just shut up. I’m afraid you might stop doing that.”
He laughed. “Your neck is a mess.”
“I’m a mess,” I pointed out.
“You also didn’t answer me.”
“Shit. What do you want me to say? You work for and obey a cruel, insane bitch who doesn’t have the soul to care for her own nephew. You’re her enforcer and from what it sounds like to me, she points you in a direction and says kill and you do it. She’s a crazy, murderous bitch and you’re her yes boy.”
I closed my eyes and wondered if maybe that wasn’t a dumb thing to say, considering he already had his hand gripping my neck.
“Would you stop looking like you expect me to break your neck or slit your throat or something?” he snapped.
I clenched my right hand, frowning a little. It itch
ed. But not much. “Well, if I really felt like you were going to do that, I’d have my sword in hand. If I’m certain I’m that close to death, I plan on going down fighting.”
Silence fell.
After a few minutes, he murmured, “I guess that’s a start.”
A start to what?
“She’ll want to kill you just because she said she would and it will look better in her eyes to do what she said, despite the fact that it doesn’t make any sense,” he said finally. He stroked a hand down my shoulder, my arm, then rested his elbow on the console. His hand curled into a loose fist as he drummed it on the molded plastic. “Everything is about appearances, power and what pleases her. So the way to work it is to make it unpleasant, work against her power, and cast an air of impropriety—that’s all it takes to make her decide it’s not worth following through. She doesn’t give a damn about keeping her word if it doesn’t suit her. So if it’s more trouble to kill you than not, then she won’t lay a hand on you.”
“Okay…and you’re telling me this…why?”
“Several reasons.” That dark, glowering look, the one that spoke of storms and anger, rolled across his face. “Pay attention, kitten. You’re learning shit about the Alpha that some people have tried for years to learn.”
“And you’re telling me why?”
“Knowledge is power. Haven’t you heard how important is it to know your enemy?”
“Sure.” I smiled at him serenely. “So…what’s your sign?”
“Cute.” He folded his hand over mine and twined our fingers. “You need to know this shit.”
“I never considered her my enemy. She’s an obstacle at the moment,” I muttered.
“She wants you dead.”
“No. She’ll want me dead if I don’t succeed.” I looked out the window and saw the sign for the small town near the entrance of the park coming up. “That doesn’t make her an enemy yet. I know my enemies.”
Brooding, I fought not to fall back into those memories.
Useless waste—
“Your grandmother.”
Closing my eyes, I shook my head. “Please don’t.”
“Your demons,” he said, shrugging. “They’re not the problem right now. Neither is the Alpha. You need to focus on your allies. Who wants you alive…and I guess your family isn’t among them?”
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