“Yeah.” I thought it all through one more time. Then I nodded. There wasn’t anything I would have taken back or changed. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Fuck.” He bit it off and turned away, hands braced on the hood of the car.
“Can you take her?”
He tensed. “Don’t start on me, damn it. I hear it from Doyle all the time; I don’t need it from you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
His snarl seemed to echo for miles. “Yes!” He whirled around and stormed up to me, closing a hand over the front of my vest as he hauled me onto my toes. “I can. But it doesn’t mean I will. I don’t want to lead her fucked-up clan of maniacs and that’s what I’d have to do if I killed her.”
“She doesn’t lead. She terrifies and abuses.” I lifted a hand to his cheek. “I know what your Alpha is like.”
“No,” he said, his teeth clenched. “You don’t. You don’t have a fucking clue.”
“I think I do.” Studying his unyielding face, I brushed my thumb over his lip. “She’s like my grandmother.”
His lids flickered.
“You want to know why I don’t flee when I’m afraid?” I said softly.
The hand clutching my vest let go and he spun away from me.
“You asked about my back. Aneira children are placed on the training field when we are strong enough to lift a training sword. I wasn’t strong enough until I was six. I was slower. Weaker. I had the shit beaten out of me by cousins who were better than me, more skilled.
“The teachers pushed me hard, but they weren’t cruel. Then my grandmother started coming to practices and…” I shrugged. “I was eight the first time she took a whip to me. I wasn’t fast enough during one of the exams for the year-training. I failed. So I was whipped…in front of the rest of the students, in front of the teachers, in front of my cousins.”
I gave him a faint smile as he stared at me, his eyes so dark they were nearly black. “You probably figured out we weren’t exactly attending public schools or anything. This was at Aneris Hall—my family home, and there, my grandmother’s word was law. My blood is too weak to be a real warrior in her eyes, but she’d beat as much human weakness out of me as she could. I passed the exams when I was nine, but I stumbled at the end and they took off points, so she beat me again. After that, it was like she found reasons to do it often. Sometimes it was a monthly event. It got to be where everybody knew I’d be whipped when the school session closed. A few parents could make up reasons to not attend, but a lot of them would just sit there…and watch while she whipped me.”
“Enough,” he said.
“No.” I caught his shoulder, shoved my right arm in front of him. There were no scars—the healers of Aneris Hall were skilled and while they’d hurt me like hell, they did it without leaving a mark. “Remember when you told me I couldn’t hold my blade forever and I told you otherwise? It’s a skill I learned young—after my grandmother broke my arm when I was eight, and again when I was fourteen. All because I lowered my guard. I was eight years old the first time and I lowered my blade, Damon. I’d been practicing for four hours and I was tired. I lowered it and she broke my arm. The next time, I was a skinny, underweight teenager. I weighed eighty pounds and my weapon was a two-handed battle axe designed for a man more than twice my size. I dropped my guard in practice and while my aunts watched—my mother’s sisters—that evil bitch broke my arm and busted my collarbone.”
“Stop it,” he snarled. He gripped my head between his hands, pressing his brow to mine, eyes squeezed shut. “Just…stop, damn it.” A shudder wracked him. “Why tell me this now?”
“They could have stopped it. My aunt Rana would sometimes look at me with pity in her eyes. There were times she’d slip me food, or when my clothes were falling apart, she’d make sure I had something else so I wasn’t walking around naked. Others would look away from me because they couldn’t stand the shame they felt—I saw that on them. Some of them pitied me, but they were terrified of her. And if enough of them had said something, or if they’d all stood together, they could have stopped her. And Rana was strong enough to stand up to her, but she never did. So I suffered for it. Right now, the entire clan suffers because of one crazy bitch. And you’re strong enough to take her out?”
His hand shot out and fisted in my hair. “You know what’s going to happen if I do it? It makes me the Alpha. I’m not a fucking leader.”
“Like hell.” I curled my lip at him.
“I’m not. Not to mention that if I did, it would put you up as a target, baby girl.” Curling one hand around my wrist, he pressed his fingers on the scars. “I marked you. Right now, I’m just a grunt—a strong one, but I have no real position in the pack because I won’t take one. If I take her out, everybody around me, everybody who matters becomes a target. It’s not an issue with her because nobody matters to her and it’s not a secret. The main reason Doyle was safe was because he was a child and attacks on children are not accepted. Whether or not he’s safe now will depend on whether or not he makes himself independent of the clan. But if I take her out, people will see you as a target—a way to get to me. Fucking no.”
“I’m not that easy of a target,” I said quietly.
“No.” It was a hot growl against my lips but I turned away.
Pressing against his chest, I stared at him. “You do what you have to, Damon. But if you keep letting her brutalize and terrify people when you can do better…”
Something cold settled in me.
“I told you it was permanent, baby girl,” he said quietly. “I meant it.”
I arched a brow at him. “Then we better find a way to work through this because I can’t live knowing you look past the kind of cruelty that I had to live with, Damon. I can’t.”
The silence that fell between us was heavy and cold.
He went to get into the car, but before he could, I crossed to him. I leaned in and pressed my mouth to his. “Be safe,” I said quietly.
“There’s no chance of that.” A humorless smile twisted his lips. “Making amends to the Alpha comes with blood and pain, baby girl. But I’ll survive it.”
My gut twisted as I leaned back, staring at him. “What?”
Damon just shook his head. “Will you wait for me?”
“You know I can’t.”
A hooded look came across his face and he tangled his hand in my hair. “Then I guess I’ll just have to move up my timetable,” he muttered, tugging my head back. I groaned as he pressed a hot kiss to my neck. “You stay safe. And don’t go out alone.”
Our first stop was the bait store where Damon had bought me the bows.
It was a bust.
As in completely.
“It’s closed up,” I said quietly, staring at the vacant place.
There wasn’t even any merchandise in the store.
No sign in the window or anything.
“You were just here, right?” Kori said, a frown on her weathered face. The mother had insisted I take the other witch. She’d promised protection and Kori was one of her strongest hands.
So Kori had my back for the gamut of this, it seemed.
I had to admit, I was pretty okay with it.
“Yeah.” We circled the building, but it was an exercise in futility. There was nothing. No cars. No notes about what had happened. Nothing. “He knew something, that son-of-a-bitch. And when we got the kids out last night, he had a warning, somehow, and cleared out.”
“Damon said there were cameras. Maybe this dude was one of the ones in on it,” Kori offered. She glanced down the road and then circled back around, motioning for me to follow.
I sighed and did, rubbing my itching palm while I did so. “There’s nothing here to see, Kori. Can we head on to the park? It’s a day long thing—several days—just on its own.”
“In a minute, in a minute.” She crouched on the back step, studying it. “Hmm. Perfect.” Dragging a finger through the dirt, she whispered under her breath.
I shivered as I felt the magic dance in the air.
I couldn’t define it, couldn’t understand. But I could damn well feel the magic and hers was strong.
“Ah, yes…there we go. Dude was scared when he packed out. Big time scared. Running for his life kind of scared.”
Staring at her bowed head, I asked, “How can you tell?”
“It’s in the earth. Earth has lots of secrets and she whispers it to those who can hear.” With a sly little smile on her face, she shrugged. “Like me.”
She muttered a little more under her breath and I felt the rise and fall of her magic. Finally, she sighed. “There’s more to follow but I can’t do that and help you. Let me call Es and she can decide what to do. We can do that on the road, though.”
“Can you call another weapon besides the sword?”
I closed my eyes.
I really didn’t want to waste my breath talking to Kori. Kori, however, liked talking. A lot.
Swiping the sweat out of my eyes with my forearm, I stared at the back of her rainbow-hued head. She was red and orange today. Like a damn phoenix. “What?”
“The sword. I saw what you did the other night. And the sword is amazing—I tried to touch it, you know—”
I stopped in my tracks, glaring. “You what?”
“Heh.” She turned around, a cheeky grin on her face. “Guess that’s off-limits. Same as your sexy cat? Don’t worry, I only like the male species as a once-in-a-while thing. The sword is way cooler than the cat anyway.”
Mine. Both of them. Possessiveness prickled inside me as I stared at her. “When did you mess with my blade?”
“Oh, I didn’t. I tried.” She shrugged. “I saw it on the floor while Damon was pumping the water out of you and I was just going to put it up out of the way. But when I went to touch it, it was like it…” She paused and rubbed her hands. “It doesn’t want me.”
“She hates anybody but me touching her.”
Kori nodded. “Yes. I felt that. Her, huh?”
I just stared at her.
She grinned back at me. “So, can you call anything else?”
“No.”
Black brows arched over her eyes and she cocked her head, studying me. “Ever tried?”
I jerked a shoulder. “She’s the only one I feel that connection to.”
“Hmmm.” She shrugged and turned back around. “Might be useful to try and learn it. The sword is a cool bitch, but sometimes, you need a different kind of tool. My best magic is of the earth.” She pointed off the path, waving her hand at the field of grass undulating between us and the water. “I can make that open up and swallow anything that walks over it. But sometimes I need fire and if I have to, I can throw it around almost as good as Tate does. Not for as long, of course, and it won’t burn as hot, but I can do it. Now, Tate…she’s short-sighted. She’s got a touch of earth inside her, but she won’t mess with it. It could come in handy if she’d learn how to work it, but she won’t.” Kori glanced at me over her shoulder. “Know what separates the superior warrior from the middle-class one, Kit? It’s learning how to use every weapon, every tool at your disposal.”
“Wow. You sure use a lot of words to say that very profound sentence,” I drawled. Disturbingly profound. I looked at the compound bow I carried, thought of the sleek, lovely bow back in my car. And even that was enough to stir her song…I could hear her now. Whispering in my mind, the beat of her drums, thudding in time with my heart.
Well, shit.
“Work on it,” Kori said cheerfully. “You never know.”
Kori’s ability to hear the earth whispering came in handy.
By halfway through the afternoon, we’d managed to find two pits.
Nobody alive, but one of them held a corpse. Kori stared at it hard for a minute and then said, “Not a witch. Shifter of some sort.”
I looked at the corpse and tried to get a feel, but the life had been gone too long. I could read a person’s energy, but it was tied into the soul and the soul had been gone quite a while.
“Probably another stray cat or wolf,” I said tiredly, rubbing the back of my neck, thinking of my own cat.
He’d left early. It had been barely seven when he’d pulled out in that long black car and it was a bit of a drive to Orlando—two to three hours if traffic wasn’t bad. He would have been there by ten. It was crawling up on three now, meaning she’d had him for hours.
A hand touched my shoulder. “Stop it, kid. He knew what he was going back to.”
“Did he have a choice?”
“He’s the one who chooses to stay with an Alpha half the Assembly sees as bat-shit crazy.” Kori shrugged and turned away.
“If she’s that bad, why doesn’t the Assembly handle it?”
“Because she keeps her clan in line and doesn’t let her crazy outside of it,” Kori said, shrugging. “If she was like the rat you tangled with a few years ago, they’d intervene. Hell, sometimes I think people wait for that…and shit, if she’d come gunning for you? The Assembly could shut her down. Maybe that’s why Es did what she did, offering you the protection of the house, even as she jabbed at the bitch. She’ll snap sooner or later, and once she does, the laws will fall into place and she can be dealt with. She’s getting worse, I’ve heard.”
“She’s bad enough already,” I muttered, scratching at my arm.
“Yeah. But you can’t force your boy to do anything.” She sighed and settled into silence, her eyes taking on a flat look. I could feel her magic tingling my skin again.
Searching the earth, I suspected.
Something rustled in the grass and I grimaced as I caught the long body of a gator coming out of the water. Its black eyes stared at me and then moved away, headed off in another direction. Good gator. No food here. None at all.
Something whistled through the air. Familiar—
“I…”
Kori’s voice stopped.
I looked over at her.
For a minute, the red stain on her shirt made no sense.
But the glint of bloody iron protruding from her shirt made sense. A lot.
She toppled forward. I tried to catch her before she tumbled into the pit, but I couldn’t.
With a scream, I called my sword even as I flung myself to the ground.
The volley of arrows that came flying at me didn’t let up for a long, long time.
Chapter Twenty Three
It could have been an hour.
It could have been minutes.
I didn’t know how much time passed before there was a pause in the arrows coming my way. I couldn’t just fade away because they’d see me and I wasn’t going to reveal that secret in front of them, unless I had no other choice.
Arrows—why were they using arrows? I wondered. Stupid. Just stupid, although it gave me a leg up once I’d managed to crawl my way over to a tree and get behind it. I had a feeling there were four different archers. Wasn’t positive, but I thought. Judging by the various angles they were coming from and the different kinds of bolts and arrows, there were definitely at least four, but somehow I didn’t think they had a couple of people lying in wait, just to throw me off.
Regular fiberglass arrows, as well as bolts, the kind somebody would fire from some of the crossbows out there.
I’d grabbed one of the arrows closest, checked it, smelling it for some sign of poison or anything else and there wasn’t anything.
Why arrows and no guns?
Didn’t make any sense. Peering around the tree, I caught sight of a scrap of white. Another arrow whizzed by, but that was fine. I had a location now. Smiling, I reached for one of my arrows.
My aim is true—
Unlike theirs.
I heard the strangled scream and a furious swear bounce through the trees second later.
One down.
Another volley of arrows came raining around me. Sighing, I leaned against the tree. My eyes drifted to the pit. Was Kori alive—?
Couldn�
��t think about that. Just couldn’t.
After another twenty minutes, I found another target. The sound of his scream was like music.
Within an hour, it was down to just one.
And I was confused as hell. They were wasting all of this time, the ammo—why?
By the time I figured it out, it was almost too late. I heard them drawing near, another group coming to catch me in a pincer move. I didn’t have time to find another place to hide myself and I couldn’t leave Kori.
Damn it—
Fade—no choice now, not if they were doing what I thought.
I faded and took out the last target and then moved over to peer down into the hole at Kori.
The site of her locked, open gaze hit me like a fist to the chest. The arrow had pierced her heart, and I knew iron when I saw it. It would have killed her instantly. They’d been using fiberglass to pin me in place, but they’d specifically chosen to shoot her with iron…they’d wanted her dead. Witches were stronger than humans and able to heal, but iron weakened them. She could have healed if it hadn’t pierced her heart, but it had.
Slanting a look across the water where the archers had hidden, I narrowed my eyes.
If I hadn’t killed all of them, I would.
She was gone, so there was no reason to linger here.
Carefully, watching every step I took, I started to move. The path was littered with arrows and bolts and branches and I had to be careful not to touch them. I could hear them coming closer and closer now and they were quiet. Hunters, all of them, humans who liked to spend their days prowling through the wild in search of prey. Made a study of it.
Today they wanted me to be the prey.
No.
Absolutely no.
Once, I caught a glimpse of them from the corner of my eye and I could hear them as I made my way around the bend to where the archers had lain in wait. Four of them, just as I thought. Although one of them wasn’t dead. The arrow had gone through his lung just below the heart.
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