Flower broke his hold and swiped her tongue over his cheekbone. Ick. I reached down, gripped the back of her frail neck, and peeled her off him. Her bruised eyes glared up at me, but she didn’t attack. She did, however, hiss at him as he stood and dusted off his pants. Oddly enough, she didn’t have a go at me. Maybe, given her species, she took issue with men.
“You followed me,” she accused. “How did you know where I would go?”
“It’s what I do.” At least this week. Apparently, I’d made a mistake by solving one fae-related case. It seemed to have given my alphas the mistaken impression I was a competent detective. “We need to speak to Branwen. Can you tell us where to find her?”
“How do you know about Branwen?” She leaned in and sniffed me. “You’re not fae.”
“No, I’m a warg.” No point in lying to her when her senses were so keen.
“He’s fae.” She bared her triangular teeth, serrated edges gleaming, and spat. “He’s a pureblood.”
“Yes, he is.” I tightened my hold on her. “And he’s mine. If you hurt him, you will regret it.”
A deep wrinkle formed between her eyebrows. “How do you own a pureblood?”
“I don’t own him,” I said, realizing she must have taken me in the literal sense. “He’s my mate.” To make sure she got that it was reciprocal, I added, “We belong to each other.”
She appeared thoughtful. “Why do you and your mate wish to see Branwen?”
“We’ve been sent on a mission by her brother, King Rook of Faerie.”
The girl whimpered and hunched her shoulders like it might help her escape being in the same room with his name.
“Are you afraid of Rook?” I asked in a quiet voice.
“N-n-no,” she stammered. “H-h-he saved me.”
Hero-worship rang clear in her voice, and already I liked him better for it. “Then why do you reek of fear?”
“Did he…?” She gathered her courage and straightened back to her full height. “Did he ask us to return?”
“To Faerie? No.” Poor kid. She was terrified he might summon her back. “He wants you to stand and fight with the earthborn fae, with the conclave, with us, and with humans if it comes down to it.”
A spark ignited in the obsidian depths of her eyes, a hatred that burned hot and fresh and ready. “Branwen said the day might come when we had to defend our new home against those who would come for us.”
Isaac and I shared a loaded glance. He kept still and quiet since the purity of his blood irked her despite the fact he was earthborn and had more reasons to fight for home and family than the Bloodless. “Does this mean you’ll take us to her?”
“Yes.” She presented me with a small, plastic dolphin figurine. “They’re moving down the coast. They’ll move to a new spot every night until they reach the…” She twisted her bare foot on the tile. “I’m not supposed to tell.”
“Keep your secrets. I don’t need to know.” I patted her shoulder like I might to soothe a frightened pup. “I’m here on the king’s business, and once I deliver my message, I have to return home to my own people. The war is coming, and it will be here sooner than you think.”
Hunger sharpened her gaze, and she wet her lips with a black, fleshy tongue. “Good.”
“Dauphin Island,” Isaac said softly. “Am I right?”
Flower offered an imperious nod, unimpressed he had picked up on the clue.
“Dauphin, huh?” I studied the plastic figure in my palm. “Tell me we aren’t about to board a ferry.”
“We aren’t about to board a ferry.”
I waited for the other shoe to drop. “But?”
“No buts. Smaller coastal ferries aren’t outfitted to carry RVs this length, not that it matters in this case. We can’t very well hide a massive, invisible RV on a small ferry deck.”
I sagged against the sink. Maybe Zed wasn’t the only one made a teensy bit nervous by the prospect of floating with several large, heavy vehicles across the ocean. Picturing the chunky RV taking up the center of the ferry he had described made my eyelid twitch. Plus, the regular commuters and tourists and… No. I wasn’t down for all that. Or any of that, really.
Isaac put his phone to work searching our route. “Looks like it doubles the length of the trip, but we can be there before noon if we leave now.”
Flower shifted until her back hit the wall. “It takes me two or three days to make the crossing.” She worried her thumbs together. “You can wait for me there, and I’ll make the introduction when I arrive.”
“We don’t have that kind of time, kiddo.” I hated pressuring her, but we had to push forward before Branwen migrated again. Otherwise, we’d be playing catch-up until we ran out of time, or she hit the West Coast. “Is there a specific reason you’re afraid of vehicles?”
“They’re small,” she whispered, shoulders rolling forward. “I used to…” She started rocking. “I lived in a box, under Master’s house. I don’t— I don’t like cars. They’re too tight. I can’t breathe in them.”
A pang arrowed through my heart as it broke for this poor girl. “Sweetie, have you ever seen an RV?”
She shook her head, but she must have if she spent time walking the roads. There were campgrounds aplenty near the beaches too. The problem must be that she didn’t understand what the rolling boxes contained.
“Can you trust me? Just for a minute?” I backed out of the cramped room. “I want to show you something.”
“Show me the amulet,” she demanded. “I want to see it first.”
“How did you—?” I shook my head. The hows didn’t matter. Clearly the girl’s senses were acute if she could sniff out the purity of a person’s blood and the presence of foreign magic on me. I pulled the pendant from my shirt and let her examine it. “Good enough?”
Flower bobbed her head. “It’s identical to Branwen’s.” She brightened, and I was pretty sure the orbs of her eyes weren’t empty for once. “You really have come to sound the horn and call us all into battle.”
Blasting horns sounded more the Huntsman’s speed than mine. I wasn’t unleashing the Wild Hunt. I wasn’t calling feral dogs down upon prey. I would be welcoming damaged children like this one to join our cause, to pick up weapons or use the ones they were born with, to end lives and perhaps be killed themselves.
Swallowing the sour taste in my mouth, I exited the cramped room that grew smaller each time I recalled the tremble in her voice when she thought we came to haul her back to Faerie.
“How old are you?”
I jerked to a halt at the sound of Isaac’s voice.
“Two hundred and eleven” came her answer.
I might not have been walking, but I almost tripped over my feet all the same. Two hundred and eleven?
“How long have you lived among the Bloodless?”
“Nine months,” she said, pride clear in the angle of her chin. “I have been free for the period it would have taken my mother to produce another child.”
That’s when it hit me. Pontianak. This girl must have been the cause of her mother’s death. How else had a spirit of her caliber procreated? The alternative, that somehow Flower had died in childbirth, caused my gorge to rise.
“Isaac.” I don’t know why I said his name, except that I wasn’t sure I could handle her confessions. If she told me her mother had been part of the reason she’d spent centuries in a box under a house, I was going to start breaking things. Mothers protected their young. They provided for them. They did not let them be shut away in boxes under houses or be abused.
Except… Sometimes they did.
Had Flower’s mother recognized the same rebellious spark in her that mine had seen in me? Had she decided her daughter was better off broken, living half a life, than dead? Had her mother done the best she could given her own circumstances? Or had her mother sought to bring her as low as she had fallen? Crushed Flower under the heel of her mother’s experience before she had the chance to blossom?
; “We need to make sure we aren’t followed when we leave,” I managed through a tight throat. “Isaac can make us invisible, but I’ll have to hold his hand, and you’ll have to hold mine.”
Warm and familiar, his fingers tangled with mine. “I can manage all three of us long enough to get out if we hurry. I should have time to recharge before we reach Dauphin Island.”
“I’m sorry you’ve drawn the short end of the stick this trip.” I dipped my gaze. “You’ve done all the heavy lifting.”
“This is good practice for when we get home.” He anchored me in place with his grip. “The road to being the best beta you can be is paved with delegation. Trust your people and their skills. Let them shine once in a while. That sense of being valued binds them to you, and the pack.”
“How did a loner like you get so damn good at plating up advice on being in a pack?” I wondered.
“It’s how Gemini run their family units too, even small ones like ours. Caravans split the workload, assigning positions to the people best suited to them. We each have a role, and it makes us feel like we’re contributing something.”
The guy had a point. I had resources, a lot of them. The pack was small but strong, and the Stoners made for solid reserves in a pinch. I had sidelined them for too long. Sure, they’d run two or three missions now, but it was time for them to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us. I wasn’t the only one being stretched thin. I had to provide relief for me and the pack. And that meant calling in the reserves.
While I mulled over the best way to implement these new changes, Isaac went alkonost and then reached for me. Invisibility swept over us, and Flower gasped. She walked forward, waving her hands in the air, and slapped me across the face. Ouch.
“Still here.” I rubbed my nose. “Hold still, and I’ll bring you in.”
She did as I instructed, flinching when I touched her clammy skin. Once I held her hand, the magic encapsulated her too, and she blinked at us in shock.
“You can see me?” She touched her chest as though amazed to find she was whole.
“Yes.” I kept the smile from my voice. “As long as we’re joined, we can see each other, but no one can see us.”
Except Isaac or those of his ilk. There would be no half Geminis among the Bloodless, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other fae able to pierce magical veils with their sight. I didn’t bother asking Flower for dossiers. Clearly she didn’t spend enough time around her fellow Bloodless to know their skill sets. And as evidenced by her loyalty to Rook and Branwen, even if she possessed that knowledge, she wasn’t likely to share it with us.
We exited the building with only our footsteps to announce our passage and hit the pockmarked parking lot as a bolt of lightning forked over our heads. Oh joy. Bea must have woken from her nap.
“Here we are,” I announced, using the hand joined with Isaac’s to point in the general direction of where we had parked the RV. Isaac, able to see it clearly, adjusted my aim three inches to the right. “This is our home away from home for the week.”
“I don’t understand.” Her black marble eyes dulled, and a wounded expression slashed her features. “Is this a joke?”
This would have been a great time for us to unvanish the RV, but that was an impossibility.
“It’s not a joke. Scout’s honor.” Then again, the hand signal I was flashing might have been one I picked up from Star Trek. “This is the trust part, kiddo. Our ride is invisible, but I need you to believe me when I say it’s huge. There’s plenty of room for you, and you won’t feel cramped.”
Nervous the third member of our party might frighten her, I kept Tiberius’s presence to myself. A teen girl from this realm would flip out at the chance to meet a Faerie prince. A teen from theirs? She was more inclined to chew off her arm to escape his notice than fawn over him.
“I’ll close my eyes,” she decided on a whisper. “You have the pendant. It will be fine.”
Isaac led us to the RV and cracked open the door, I assumed, based on the clicks I heard as a tumbler caught and then released. He took one step up before a gale-force wind blasted us in the face, and a ball of purple feathers hit me square in the gut.
Oh, joy. The prince had decided to let his pet stretch her wings while we were gone.
Impact knocked me backwards, ripping my hands from theirs and sending me rolling across the blacktop. I leapt to my feet, a dull ache in my tailbone, and braced for Bea’s next assault. I was so focused on the bruise spreading across the sky I failed to notice the young man peeling off a nearby tree like a strip of bark.
Zed had cautioned us we might be watched, but I doubt this was what he’d envisioned. Dollars to donuts, this boy represented yet another faction interested in surveilling us. Based on the location, and our present company, Branwen was my bet.
He dipped his rootlike toes into the dirt, and for a minute nothing happened while I shifted my attention between the two threats. Tendrils exploded through the earth and wrapped my ankles, the move so sudden I lost momentum and toppled forward onto my hands and knees, where more grubby strands bound them together. Behind me, Isaac was likewise restrained in a burst of dirt clods and roots.
“What are you doing, Arno?” Flower demanded. “She has the pendant.”
Suspicion narrowed his eyes. “Show me.”
“I’d love to, but unlike you, I can’t sprout another hand. Either come over and look or let one of mine free.”
“I’ll show him.” Flower huffed when it became obvious neither option appealed to the boy. She crossed to me and knelt. “Excuse me.” Her fingers brushed my cleavage as she dug the pendant from between my breasts then held it up, triumphant. “There. See?”
The roots binding me slurped back into the dirt, and the boy’s toes solidified into mostly humanoid feet. “Mistress has been right worried about her brother. She’ll be chuffed to see you’ve come on his behalf.”
“You’ll take us to Branwen?” Vinelike coils encircled Isaac’s wrists, and sap oozed over his fingertips. “Just like that?”
“Only the pendant’s owner can transfer it off their person to another. Mistress’s brother gave you that pendant, put it around your neck with his own hands, or you wouldn’t be wearing it now.” Arno, whoever he was, was well-informed. “I have no reason to fear her brother, therefore I have no reason to fear you.”
“Can you let me up now?” Isaac resisted against his restraints, but not hard enough to hurt the boy.
“Right.” The pinky toe on Arno’s left foot wriggled, and Isaac was freed. “Sorry about that.”
Arno stepped into the light, and I marveled at his full head of hair styled from the tidy leaves of a hedge. He wasn’t just brown-skinned, his arms were patterned and textured like bark. His eyes were chestnuts and his teeth the yellow meat of acorns. He was as beautiful as he was bizarre.
Leaves rustled overhead, a shushing noise that carried from yards in every direction.
“I’ve sent ahead a message.” His knees groaned, the ache of dry wood bending with every step. “We’d best hurry. Mistress can only wait so long before she must leave, with or without us.”
“Are you catching a lift with us too?” I backed a step toward the RV, ready to get our show on the road. “We’ve got plenty of room for one more.”
“No. There’s no time for that.” He waggled his thorny eyebrows. “You’re going on a walkabout with me.”
I spared a lingering glance in the general direction of the RV, weighing my options. Fast was good. Leaving without telling Tiberius was bad. But the quicker we left, the sooner we could return. And the prince probably wouldn’t notice our absence until he ran out of virtual cash for his games. Arno must have noticed our tumble from thin air when Bea headbutted me in the solar plexus. The last thing we ought to do was draw more attention to the prince’s hideout, but that meant trusting Tiberius to fend for himself until our return.
Isaac shook his head once, and I nodded. We were on the same page. Tiberius would have
to babysit himself for a few hours. Longer than that, and he would have to send Bea with an SOS to Stone’s Throw.
“Step lively, you lot. Hold hands, and I can take us all through. We’ll be there lickety-split.” Arno’s expression screwed up into a frown. “Don’t let go. Whatever the trees tell you, ignore them. They like to chatter, but they don’t grasp that humans don’t live as long as they do. Lose your way, and you’ll get stuck between. It could take years to find you, if we found you at all. One thing trees excel at is keeping secrets, and with dryads all but dead on this plane, they hold on to any unwary travelers as best they can. Gets lonely, does the trees.”
For the first time in my life, I gazed around at the surplus of oaks, maples and firs, and shivered as a sliver of doubt wedged itself between my vertebrae. For as long as I had lived, trees had signified the freedom of running on all fours. Never had I considered they had any type of consciousness, let alone their own wants or needs. Suddenly I was grateful not to be a male of the species. Sorry I peed on your cousin’s foot that time. Ankle? Thigh? What part of tree anatomy did wolves mark?
“We’re traveling through a tree?” I locked my knees. “Is this like in the Harry Potter movies when the kids run straight at the wall between Platform Nine and Ten to reach Platform Nine and Three Quarters?”
“It’s all right.” Flower took my hand much as I had taken hers earlier. “It won’t hurt. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Smiling down at the girl, I took another piece of Isaac’s advice and let her be my anchor. She squared her shoulders as we reached Arno. The message was clear. We were under her protection, and she would tolerate no monkey business from the boy.
Flower wrinkled her nose as she took his hand. “What did you hang around here for anyway?”
“You weren’t there when we left.” His cheeks burned deep crimson. “I worried ’bout you is all.”
“Sometimes he pulls me through so I don’t have to walk as far,” she explained. “It’s dark in there, tight, and I don’t like it much.”
Crestfallen, the boy acted like she’d whipped a saw from her back pocket and cut off one of his limbs.
Wolf at the Door (Lorimar Pack) (Gemini Book 5) Page 24