I spread my arms and legs to slow my descent. I must have looked like a falling star from the shoreline that raced toward me at breakneck speed. I forced my head back and spotted Isaac’s attacker veering off as he tucked in his wings to dive for me. I held out for as long as I could before I streamlined my body, crossing my ankles, cupping an elbow with one hand while the other covered my face and nose.
He didn’t make it in time.
I hit the water with the impact of a semitrailer truck smashing into a concrete pylon. Bones crunched and my insides crumpled as white-hot agony raked down my spine like an oyster knife scraped around the shell. Impact shattered me into a million pieces, then the cool rush flowed over my face and I didn’t feel anything at all.
Chapter 12
“Open your eyes,” a firm, masculine voice ordered, and I obeyed without hesitation. A dark-haired man with a piercing hazel gaze had made me the center of his focus, and his raw power stung the hairs on my arms to attention. Cord, I wanted to cry. Alpha, the wolf howled. “Good girl.”
“How are you not dead yet?” Abram’s face appeared in my field of vision, too close and too large, distorted. “I’ll tell you. You’re damn lucky, and I’m damn good, and you’re damn lucky I’m good.” He forced my left eye open wide and swiped a light across that blinded me. “You should have been born a cat shifter, ’cause you sure as hell have eight more lives than the rest of us.”
“Abram,” Zed, my best friend in the whole world, rumbled. “Back up off her.”
“Stop crowding the healer. All of you.” Cam’s blonde head popped into view, and she shoved Zed back. “Give him room to work. You can chew him out later.”
“I’ll be right outside, Delly.” Zed lowered his forehead to mine. “Goddamn you for scaring me like that.”
“Sss,” I hissed, trying for sorry but failing.
“Sorry means you won’t do it again.” He huffed. “We both know better.”
Strong fingers flexed through mine, and I tilted my head to see who held my hand. Joy inflated my heart to overflowing as I whispered, “Isss.”
You’re okay, I wanted to say. You made it down in one piece. Thank God.
“I couldn’t hold on.” He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles, unable to meet my eyes. “I tried to…but I was too late.”
I squeezed his fingers to let him know I understood. He wasn’t born to the skies, and he had been dead on his feet. Rilla was too great an aerial adversary. Weak as he had been, he had gotten me more than halfway down. I couldn’t have asked him for more.
“Time for the flip, people. We need her on her stomach for this.” Abram gripped my forearm. “What the hell? Are those silver burns? Guess we’ll be treating those too.” He barked out more orders, his position as healer overriding the alphas present. Gentle hands lifted me, too many for me to count, and I was turned to lie on my stomach on a cool metal tabletop. “Keep her occupied. Don’t let her fidget.”
A terrified awareness crept over me, an icy cold that might be temperature or fear encasing my spine. I registered Cord’s hand on one of my shoulders and Cam’s on the other. A flash of hurt slashed my palm, and then the strength of the pack bond flowed through them, sank into me and eased the worst of the pain. Their combined efforts lifted my consciousness away from my body and into a safe, dark space that pulsed with warmth and love from my pack.
“Sorry about that. We had to reinitiate the bond.” Cord’s voice rang clear in my head. “It must have severed when you crossed realms.”
I jerked at the surprise of experiencing a presence in a mind where I had been the sole occupant for so long, and they gripped me harder to keep me in position.
“Keep talking,” I begged, my rusty mental speech slurring with fatigue. “I forgot how good this feels.”
Butler, Tennessee, was too far from Wink, Texas, for the pack bond to function. I had been alone in my head for the duration of my incarceration. The spell that kept me in human form most likely would have blocked their attempts to contact me even if proximity hadn’t been an issue. Had I been allowed that connection to pack, I would have been a model inmate. Okay, so model was a strong word.
“You got Tiberius back. We knew you could do it.” Cam rubbed my shoulder, a soothing gesture that had been alien to her before she joined the pack and learned to accept the warg need for touch. “I’m proud of you.”
I glowed beneath her praise until her meaning registered. “You knew Thierry was sending me?”
“You’re pack first, Dell.” Her smile, another rarity until she mated Cord, softened her expression. “Thierry couldn’t have made the offer without our approval, and we never would have agreed if we didn’t feel you were up to the challenge. We volunteered two of our best resources as backup to keep you safe.”
Ah. That explained Enzo’s availability. He was currently in Lorimar’s employ, after all.
“Isaac holed up in his trailer designing gods only knows what. I had to issue him a travel pack so he would pare down his arsenal.” She chuckled. “Otherwise, he would have driven you through Faerie in a tank stocked with anti-magic ammunition.”
“Now, now, mate,” Cord chastised. “You can’t mock a man for protecting what’s his.”
Cam rolled her eyes. I would have joined in, but mine ached too much for cranial acrobatics yet.
“I thought you guys were anti-Isaac.” Both had warned me off him. Not that I had listened. “What happened while I was gone?”
“We’ve never been anti-Isaac,” Cord argued. “We were anti-Isaac breaking your heart.”
“And you feel the likelihood of that has changed why?” Had he given them a version of the same speech he had given me in the dungeon?
The alphas exchanged a loaded glance before Cam hedged, “I’m sure he’d rather tell you himself.”
“That is not comforting.” I squinted to see Isaac, who was thankfully absent from our conversation, and wondered what they were hiding from me. “We talked it out in Faerie, or so I thought. He didn’t mention anything that might have swayed you guys in favor of the match.”
“Gemini don’t bond easily,” Cord confided in me. “They’re so used to isolating themselves as part of their lifestyle that emotion is hard for them. They don’t always get subtle nuance.” His eyes glittered as they flicked to Cam. “Lucky for us, wargs don’t have those issues.”
“Me bonding to him was never the problem.” The scabs over my heart bled at the reminder. “He was the holdout.”
“That’s what we’re trying to tell you, Dell. He lost his ever-lovin’ mind when Thierry hauled you off to Macon. The pack restrained him before he did any real damage to the marshals responsible for your extraction. They caught him on the ridge with a rifle preparing to shoot out the transpo van’s tires. Zed wasn’t sure he would have stopped there, so he called us.” Cord loosened his grip after realizing the tension in his story had tightened his fingers. “Thierry had the vote suspended so we could be with the pack during the transition and so Cam could control her cousin. A Gemini on the warpath isn’t something the conclave was prepared to battle.”
Tears pricked my eyes, and I couldn’t tear my gaze from Isaac’s. “A psychotic break convinced you?”
“A psychotic break over a nonfamily member in a Gemini is on par with an alpha warg mauling the pack’s weakest member,” Cam said. “It’s either indicative of mental illness or—”
“—love,” Cord finished for her, not appearing diminished for his mate having compared loving him to developing a mental illness. “And neither of us can stand in the way of that.”
It wasn’t exactly a blessing, but I would take it. “Thanks, guys.”
“We need to talk about what happened in Faerie. What repercussions we should expect.” Cam touched my cheek. “We’ll talk to Isaac and Enzo first, but we want your report on record as the Lorimar beta.”
Accessing the parts of my brain filled with the information I had paid dearly to procure while in Fae
rie was like swimming through mud. Or maybe molasses. Molasses. I could really go for some pancakes right about now. And bacon. And sausage. And ham. And screw the pancakes. I wanted meat.
And caffeine.
“Dell?” Cord stroked over my head, winding errant hairs over one shoulder and out of Abram’s way. “You still with us?”
“Yeah.” I did a mental shake then filled them in on the king’s betrayal, the threat to Galina and Paavo, and the bargain to elevate the prince to a king. I warned them about the Huntsman’s presence in our woods and what that might mean for us. I saved the worst for last. After all, the pack bond was a secure connection, and with the alphas in control, they could prevent the rest of the pack from eavesdropping. Drawing in a raspy breath, I confessed to the small problem of our freeing the Morrigan and all that entailed.
“The Morrigan,” Cam murmured in a worried tone. “War must really be coming then.”
In addition to being a death omen, the Morrigan’s other gig was as a goddess of war.
“We’ll handle Thierry,” Cord promised me. “Call me cynical, I get the feeling she won’t be all that shocked to hear the news.”
“You think she planned this?” I tilted my chin in his direction then regretted the slight movement.
“She gave Isaac her blood, didn’t she?” Cord’s lips pursed. “You don’t put a loaded gun in someone’s hand unless you expect them to pull the trigger.”
A worrisome thought occurred to me, an inkling that maybe we had facilitated a trade.
The conclave got its half-blood army.
The king got his most vicious ally returned to him, hobbled and bound to his will.
All things considered, I wasn’t sure which side came out the winner.
“Will Tiberius be enough to get Dell off the hook?” Cord must have been wondering how the Morrigan’s freedom would influence Thierry’s goodwill toward the pack, and me.
“Without knowing Thierry’s part in all this, I can’t say. I’ve worked for the conclave a long time. I understand how the magistrates think. Bringing Tiberius back was an act of atonement and a gesture of our support for their laws. Besides, Thierry owes me for what she borrowed. Dell’s freedom was the cost, and I expect to get paid.”
“It’s all right.” I shoved away those depressing thoughts. “All the good deeds in the world won’t change the fact I broke out of prison to do them.”
“Not necessarily,” Cam hedged. “That thing she borrowed?”
“Yeah.” Thierry and the alphas constantly jockeyed for more aid and more support, so I hadn’t given it a second thought.
“It was Theo.”
“I saw him at Macon.” The jerk. “He wore a Meemaw aspect and caused a distraction while Thierry got us to the tether.”
“Sort of,” Cam hedged. “He was brought in to impersonate you, Dell. The Meemaw aspect was just his way in.”
My jaw might have dropped had there not been a table beneath my chin. “What?”
“Better to ask forgiveness than permission,” Cord paraphrased.
“Theo has been covering for you since you left. Right now, no one knows you’re gone.”
Roiling in my gut almost caused me to toss my cookies as I realized Thierry had yet another means of saving—or damning—me. The only way to calm my stomach was to push those thoughts aside, so I did, focusing on the technical aspect.
“Where is he getting the blood?” I wondered. “He can’t hold an aspect that long without a fresh source.”
“He took his first hit off you the day Thierry sent you through the portal. They couldn’t afford to have anything peculiar show up when the guards searched Theo and marched him back to your cell.”
“I thought I scratched my hand on the walking stick.” I rubbed my fingers together. “What’s been tiding him over since then?”
“Thierry lifted the blood samples they took during your physical. Enzo magicked them up, gave the enzymes a boost to fool Theo’s system into believing it’s straight from the tap.” She hesitated. “Don’t be mad at Isaac for not mentioning the plan. It was my idea to keep it from you. We didn’t know if the magicked blood would work or for how long. We didn’t want to get your hopes up if a clean swap couldn’t be made.”
Being reminded of Theo’s peculiarity got me curious all over again. “Why didn’t you ever tell us he was different?”
“We don’t talk about it. None of us. There’s a stigma to being born that way.”
“The mutation of his abilities has happened before?”
“Yes, and it never ends well. Gemini like Theo tend to die young. People can accept us borrowing attributes from them, but not assuming their identity. We’re very careful not to mention it, even to each other. There was a time when Gemini had their own tribunal, and being born that way earned a child the puppy-in-a-burlap-bag treatment.”
“Gemini drowned their own kids?” Rage trembled through my limbs.
“Gemini are fae, and fae are…not human.” Sadness tinged her thoughts. “Our ways aren’t your ways, and warg history is riddled with gnawed-on skeletons placed in closets too.”
I couldn’t argue her point. Wargs were a brutal race. The fusion of wolf and man had melded us into apex predators comfortable with our position at the top of the food chain. Had fae never come to this realm, that was a spot we would occupy solo.
“Is that why Theo lives apart from you?” It had always seemed odd to me that as close as the brothers were, Theo kept his distance.
“He’s safer alone. He can mimic anyone, anything. He can live any life he wants, and he often does.”
A chorus of angels sang in the back of my mind, and I got it. I understood in that moment the source of Isaac’s drive to push his own limits. His brother, his twin, a man who would naturally be a rival, had been born with an exceptional gift. What must have started out as sibling rivalry had become a habit Isaac had carried over into adulthood. Perhaps that explained his fascination with gadgetry too. Maybe it wasn’t, as I had thought, to augment his limited magical abilities, but a means of boosting his inborn ones.
Pressure in my spine caused me to gasp. “What’s Abram doing back there anyway?”
Neither alpha answered me, which convinced me I probably didn’t want to know.
As if he’d overheard my question, Abram announced, “Almost done. I need all but necessary personnel to clear the room.”
“I’m staying.” Isaac made it a statement.
“I figured,” Abram groused. “That’s why you get to play nurse. Go wash your hands and glove up.”
Nudging the alphas aside, Isaac knelt in front of my face so that I could see him. “I’ll be right here, beautiful. I’m not going anywhere.”
Later, as the pain short-circuited my brain and I drifted in the darkness, the warmth of his hand a beacon that kept me centered, I decided I might just believe him this time.
Chapter 13
While convalescing, I read an article in Popular Mechanics about how to survive a fall from thirty-five thousand feet. There was a quote in there, something about how liquid doesn’t compress. How it’s like concrete. According to the writer, hitting the ocean, or Lake Watauga in my case, meant I might as well have plummeted onto a parking lot instead of into a fluid body of water.
Slice it however you want. The end result is a very thorough splat.
Recovering from a fractured, well, everything, required three full weeks of rest, drugs, magic and surgeries before I began feeling like myself again. I hadn’t known it was possible to hurt so much and survive. Never again would I complain about shifting. That agony was fleeting. This ache was as persistent as a thirsty mosquito, pestering me the second I got comfortable. The downtime made me obsessive about all the things I couldn’t change.
Thierry, who had taken the news of the Morrigan’s release in stride, decided it was in the prince’s best interest to remain at Stone’s Throw with the pack until the assassin appointed to murder his parents had been captured. T
he downside of this was twofold. The pack had to protect Tiberius while close to the rift and within easy grasp of his aunt, and Theo had to continue impersonating me while I healed or else he risked exposing us to scrutiny that could get the prince discovered. Right now, Rilla knew we had Tiberius, but she wasn’t sure if he was hiding right under her beak.
Theo had risked so much for me. I wish I had understood how much at the time so that I could have thanked him. Any magical failure on his part would announce to the world that he existed. Cam made it sound like the Gemini council had disbanded, something about it being difficult to maintain control over a people so scattered. Still, if any of them took exception to his existence, he could be hunted down by his own people.
The burden of that possibility was more than I could bear. I had to heal. I had to return to Wink and get back in my cell before his duplicity was exposed.
But first, Branwen. Locating the king’s sister posed a challenge. Would the start of a war tempt her and her army out of hiding? How autonomous was her station? Did she require direct orders to intervene? Would the pendant be enough to sway her to our cause? Would she trust me based on jewelry alone?
And it would have to be me who approached the unwitting general. I still wore the pendant, since it wasn’t coming off without magical intervention. Any attempts at removing it, magical or mundane, resulted in the chain retracting to garrote-tightness. Thanks to my convalescence, I was holding us up on that front too.
Grr. Stupid bones. Clearly, I should have drunk more milk as a pup.
“Are you ready for a walk?” Isaac asked from the doorway of his bedroom.
He had decided I was staying with him, in his RV. I’d been unconscious at the time, so it had been kind of impossible to argue the point.
Once I got over being grumpy about missing my own bed, I had to admit this arrangement made the most sense. I’d required a nurse in the beginning, and I could barely fit two people side by side at my place. That would have made entertaining the pack members who stopped by to check on me impossible too, when visitation was the best part of all this. Everyone brought food. Mmm.
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