by W. J. May
“Joke all you want, mister. I wonder how my fire-wielding mother is going to feel about the fact that you didn’t ask permission.”
While she was only teasing, Rae still expected a look of mild terror. Her mother tended to have that effect on people. But all she got was an almost arrogant grin.
“Oh, I asked Beth’s permission already. She just didn’t know when it was going to be.”
Rae’s jaw dropped open in astonishment. “You asked my mom’s permission to marry me?!” She couldn’t begin to imagine how that conversation must have gone over. “When?”
“Ages ago. After we got back from Ireland. After I…”
“…after you jumped off that cliff?” Rae remembered it like it was only yesterday. Being trapped down in the underwater cave. Screaming for Devon as what looked like a tidal wave rushed toward her. And then…
…and then she was in his arms. He’d leapt off the cliff to save her, not knowing what would happen to him afterwards. Not knowing that his impossible need to save her would make him fly.
When they’d gotten back to the farmhouse, he and her mother had disappeared for a long time afterwards. She remembered the look on their faces when they’d finally emerged from the upstairs. The quiet, knowing smiles.
It was the first time Devon had ever called her mom ‘Beth.’
“I asked Julian, you know,” she said quietly. “I asked him to see if he could find out what you guys had talked about.”
Devon grinned. “And what did he say?”
“…he told me you formed a fantasy football league.”
A pair of warm arms tightened around her as Devon laughed again, bringing her close and leaning down absentmindedly to smell her hair. “That’s why he’s my best friend. In fact,” his face grew abruptly thoughtful, “that’s why he’s going to be my best man.”
Rae leaned up on her elbows and peered down in sudden surprise. In the flurry of everything that had happened last night, her mind had been able to focus only on a single thing.
The marriage.
She hadn’t even begun to consider the wedding… “Oh no…” her eyes snapped shut with a grimace, “Molly’s going to be impossible.”
Devon laughed again. “And that’s why she’s your best friend. It shouldn’t be a problem, though. Just give her a list of your likes and dislikes, and she’ll probably just plan the whole thing.”
Rae shook her head, her brain racing. “Actually, she might have something else on her mind…”
He cocked his head curiously. “What’s that supposed to mean?’
But even as he said it, a dozen things suddenly clicked into place.
Her mother was getting married. Her best friend in the world was pregnant. They were living in a safe house with about twenty other people. And they were about to fight an immortal man who wanted her to take over the world with him and succumb to his evil plans, once and for all.
This was not the time she wanted to be getting married.
“Devon,” she said softly, wondering where to begin, “Molly’s pregnant.”
He shot upright, tipping Rae back onto the blanket. “She’s what?! Seriously?! Her and Luke?!”
Rae nodded with a little smile, thinking about the day Molly told her. “She found out the day we all woke up in the hospital—been keeping it to herself ever since. She only just told him.”
“That’s how she found out?” Devon’s face melted with sympathetic horror. “Oh, Molls…”
To be honest, as Rae leaned back on her hands and watched him she realized that’s one of the things she loved about Devon. That he was able to care so much. Molly was as good as a little sister to him. She was sure he’d volunteer to help raise the child should anything happen to Luke.
He shook his head with a grimace. “Is she okay? How does that even work with her tatù? Does she want to, you know, keep the baby? Is there anything I can do to—”
“She’s fine.” Rae cut short the line of questioning with a little smile. “She’s really excited, she and Luke both. I think they’re going to be just fine. You’re going to have to act surprised, though. I’m sure she wanted to tell you in her own, weird, Molly way.”
He laughed shortly. “Right.” Then the smile faded from his face. “She didn’t want to go on missions, she didn’t want to train…” He bowed his head to his chest. “I should’ve known.”
“Oh, come on,” Rae chided gently. “There was no way you could possibly have known. I didn’t know. She didn’t even know. All we can do now is help her in whatever way we can.”
He started nodding quickly, probably coming up with half a dozen ways he could discreetly proffer his services, but Rae held up her hand.
“Dev, the point is, Molly’s pregnant. My mom’s getting married. There’s a hell of a lot going on. And on top of that…”
He caught her eye and his face softened. “On top of that…we’re about to charge into this revolutionary battle that will change the world as we know it, against a man who wants to claim you as his own,” he finished quietly.
She took his hands firmly in hers, holding on to them with everything she had. “Devon, you are the man I’ve always wanted to marry…” Her breath hitched in her throat. “…I just, don’t think we want to get married at a time like this.”
His fingers stiffened as a muscle clenched in the back of his jaw. But despite all that, he honestly tried to understand, bowing his head again and nodding softly. “You don’t want to—”
“No!” she interrupted, horrified he had misunderstood. “I do want to. I want to with every fiber of my being! I just…want to keep it to ourselves for a while. If that’s okay.”
Much to her relief, he looked up with a tender smile. “Of course it’s okay.”
And that’s exactly why I love you!
She curled back into him with a sigh of relief. “When all of us look back, years from now, this is going to be the time when all of us were terrified. When the world was falling apart. When we all thought there was a chance we were all going to die…”
She stretched up her hand again, holding her ring in the morning sun, and smiling as it sparkled streaks of light all over her and Devon. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I only want it to be good. And happy. And exactly what it deserves. I don’t want it associated with anything like that.”
Devon leaned in and kissed her softly on the forehead. “I understand that perfectly. To be honest, I feel that way, too. I just couldn’t live through another day without asking you.”
Rae rolled on top of him once more with a blissful smile, kissing him squarely on the lips before pulling back and marveling that she was going to be allowed to do that for the rest of her life. “I couldn’t either.”
He bit his lip with a little grin, and pulled her against him. “What the hell am I going to do with you, Kerrigan?”
“Marry me?”
His grin stretched even wider. “I’m going to try my best to keep this a secret—I swear to you, I will. But I kind of can’t stop smiling at the moment, and a lot of our friends do have super powers, you know.”
Rae giggled. “Who do you think’s going to figure it out first? The psychic or our emotional-bloodhound of a best friend?”
Devon chuckled. “My bet is on your fire-wielding mother.”
Rae fell silent, wondering how in the world she was going to keep something like this to herself while surrounded by all the people she loved best. “Well hey,” she leaned over him, her dark hair dangling in his face, “we’re just going to have to make it work. Don’t let me down, Wardell. This stays between you and me, got it?”
He fake-saluted and slipped her ring from her finger, placing it deliberately in his pocket. “Yes, ma’am. My lips are sealed.”
But the longer the both of them lay there, thinking about what was to come…
…the more they began to think that wouldn’t be remotely possible.
Chapter 2
“It’s weir
d,” Rae stretched out her arm wistfully, staring at her empty hand as the Scottish countryside rolled by, “I already miss it.”
The car pulled off down a private lane and Devon looked over with a frown. “Miss what?”
“The ring. My ring.” Rae flashed him a smile. “My hand feels strange without it.” She shook her left hand, trying to remember the sensation of the band and the diamond pressing against her skin in a new way. It had felt so good.
Devon’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, before his face melted into a huge grin. “Yeah, well, it looked good on you. We’ll have to put it on you again really soon.”
“Where did you get it?” she asked suddenly, remembering one of her list of questions. “I can’t imagine you found something like it here in Scotland…”
All at once Devon looked abruptly uncomfortable. He shifted self-consciously in his seat as he spun the wheel around an unmarked curb. “Well…yes and no.”
Yes and no? It wasn’t meant to be a difficult question.
Rae swiveled around in her seat so that she was looking at him straight on, folding her arms across her chest as she waited expectantly. Despite all their covert work in the field she rarely saw him so defensive, and she resisted the urge to use a tatù to pull the information right out of his pretty little head.
When it became clear she wasn’t going to let it go, Devon finally sighed in defeat and ran a hand nervously back through his hair. “I bought it the same day Jules and I bought the house in London.”
The smile froze on Rae’s face as she did some quick mental calculation. “Wait a minute…” The house in London? “That was ages ago! That’s the day you bought the ring?!”
His eyes flicked to her face, trying to decipher her reaction, before his lips curved up in a tiny grin. “Well I would have done it sooner, but I blew my first couple paychecks on this car…”
“Devon.” Rae was in no mood to be deterred. In fact, she couldn’t wrap her head around the sudden gravity of the answer to what was meant to be a simple question. “You knew all the way back then? I mean, so much has happened since…” She trailed off. To say that so much had happened between then and now was understating it by several thousand degrees. They’d gone on the run, stared death in the face countless times, started a full-fledged rebellion the likes of which the world had never seen...
But perhaps even more important—in the present context—they’d broken up between now and then. How the hell could Devon, the most practical person she knew, have been so sure?
He fell silent, keeping his eyes on the road. After a couple minutes, Rae worried he was just going to run out the clock, get back to the farmhouse before he had to answer. But just as the tips of the twin chimneys came into view, he cleared his throat.
“You remember that dance we went to? The first dance you had at Guilder?”
“The school dance?” Rae’s eyes glassed over as she summoned it from memory. They hadn’t gone to the dance together, even though she would have given anything for them to have done so. He was only her mentor at the time, and strictly off limits. As if the ‘no tatùs can mix together’ rule wasn’t enough, he’d actually had another girlfriend at the time. “As I recall, you were there with a different girl that night.” She sniffed self-righteously, half-teasing, half-unable to stomach the notion. “Scarcely even—”
“I couldn’t take my eyes off you,” he interrupted quietly, his face softening with a nostalgic smile. “That’s the first night the thought crossed my mind.” He flashed her a sudden, mischievous grin. “Coincidentally, it’s also the night said girlfriend left me for completely blowing her off to pine after another girl.”
A reluctant grin spread across Rae’s face. “Really? You guys broke up because of me?”
He chuckled. “Sweetheart, I just asked you to marry me. I think you kind of blew her out of the water in terms of who won your little war.”
A rather smug smile flitted across Rae’s face, before being replaced with a look of profound wonder. “That’s the first time you thought about proposing? At the school dance?”
It seemed too long ago to be real. Too impossible to be true.
“No,” he admitted, bowing his head with a little smile, “not proposing, per se. At our age that probably would have been considered rather stalker-ish.” They both laughed, before he sobered up abruptly. “But it was the first time I realized I was with the wrong girl. That you were the one I wanted to be with—the one I belonged with. No matter what the rules said.”
As if it was yesterday, Rae remembered the night of the dance. Of course, she’d come to remember it for other reasons. Come to remember it as the night that she was thrown in a dungeon and forced to listen to loops of her father’s brainwashing device while chained to a wall. But the dance before it stood out for different reasons.
She remembered shivering slightly in her revealing dress. Catching Devon’s eye from across the floor. The expression on his face as he stared back.
For the first time…she’d thought that maybe she stood a chance. For the first time…she’d thought that maybe, just maybe, she’d found something good.
“I didn’t think about actually proposing until the next dance we went together to after that.”
She cocked her head in confusion, peering at him out of the corner of her eye. “The next dance?” she repeated incredulously. He caught her eye and smiled. “At the royal ball.”
Of course! Another night that started beautifully, before spinning wildly off the rails…
“It wasn’t at the dance, so much, as afterwards,” he continued quietly, turning the car down the long gravel drive. “There was a second—a split second—where I thought I’d lost you forever.” A delayed shudder passed through his body, and he shook his head, suddenly sure. “I knew from that moment on, I could never be without you. You had captured my heart completely, and I’d have to do whatever it took to keep you in my life.”
A wave of emotion swelled up in Rae’s chest, and she took a deep breath, willing herself to look calm even though her heart was racing. How the hell was she ever supposed to pull off this whole ‘keeping it to themselves’ plan? Try as she might to say all the right things, no matter how hard she tried right now, she couldn’t stop grinning. “So that’s what this is all about.” She gestured to the ring in his pocket. “It’s all part of your master plot. Just a means to keep me with you.”
He bit his lip, trying just as hard as she was to stop himself from smiling, but failing just as spectacularly. “It was that or chains. Jules and I both thought this was the more elegant solution.”
“Jules?!” Rae exclaimed, whipping around in her chair. “You said you didn’t tell anyone about this! Julian already knows?!”
“Relax,” he squeezed her knee to calm her, ears perking up as the sounds of a dozen humming conversations echoed from the house, “I didn’t tell him I was going to do it today, only that I was going to do it sometime in the future. I kind of had to, actually. He saw me going out to get the ring,” he shook his head with a sudden smile, “met me at the store after having downloaded an app to match ‘the perfect ring to the perfect girl.’”
Rae snorted into her hand. “He downloaded an app?”
“We’re millennials,” Devon grinned, “what do you expect?”
They pulled up alongside the house, parking next to one of about ten to twelve cars. It was strange, Rae thought, seeing so many people here she didn’t know. Opening up this once-private place to an entire organization. Two days ago, it had been their own secret little corner of the world, the place where Rae and her makeshift family could come together to lick their wounds and regroup.
Now…?
Her eyes widened slightly as she saw a teenage boy she’d never seen before perched on the roof, trying to mount a satellite receptor for the television.
“Home sweet home?” Devon asked, watching the boy as well.
Rae sighed, unbuckling her seatbelt. “I guess so.”
&n
bsp; Yet another reason I’m glad we aren’t marching in there to tell everyone our happy news. Most of the people inside don’t even know us…
Then again, she wasn’t sure how long they could possibly keep it secret. Her eyes fixed on Molly, training with a group of tatùs in the front yard, then over to Julian walking out to a picnic table with a mug of coffee for Angel. And although she couldn’t see him, somewhere inside the house was Gabriel. Probably making some rude comment, or showing off some impossible set of skills. Completely oblivious to the giant wrench she’d just thrown into his plan for an epic affair…
No, keeping a secret from friends was hard enough. When those friends were like family, it was even harder. When those friends also came with their own set of super powers, Rae didn’t like to imagine their odds. To be honest, she was surprised that Julian wasn’t already on his way over—
But even as she thought his name, Julian looked up with a start. His eyes glassed momentarily white as he turned his head towards the barn. Nestled in his lap on the picnic bench, Angel glanced up with a similar look of worry, staring in the same direction.
Rae leaned forward with a frown. “What is—”
It was then that she heard it. The unmistakable sounds of fighting coming from the barn.
“Great.” Devon leaned back against the seat with a sigh. “Looks like our alliance is off to a great start already.”
The two of them shared a quick glance, before they were out of the car in a single breath, racing across the lawn to the tall oak doors. The barn had been placed as off-limits for training, partly for sentimental reasons, and partly because they were dealing with a huge array of powers and the entire thing was a fire-risk. But in spite of this, the doors were swung open and there was an entire crowd of angry people inside, circling around the action.
“Hey!” Rae screamed, racing forward. But no one could hear her over the noise.
Everyone was too focused on the fight—even though it didn’t look like much of a fight from this angle. More like a domination. One guy was kneeling atop another, punching him mercilessly in the face.