Second Chance: Paranormal, Tattoo, Supernatural, Coming of Age, Romance (The Chronicles of Kerrigan Sequel Book 3)

by W. J. May

  …rather ironic.

  Gabriel seemed to be thinking the same thing. And he seemed to be having a very, very difficult time not blaming Devon for what he’d done. His eyes flickered out the back window for a moment to the car behind them, before returning to her skin with a vicious glare.

  “It’s not his fault,” Rae whispered, knowing his thoughts.

  Gabriel’s lips thinned to a hard line. “Hold still.”

  She did as she was told, flinching when the needle dug in once more. But she couldn’t just let it rest. A part of her needed as many people to say it as possible. Maybe if they believed it was true, then she could start to believe it herself. “Gabriel, I’m serious—”

  She broke off with a tortured cry at the same time that Gabriel cursed aloud and glared towards the front. The car swerved again, and they were tossed up against the side.

  “Really, Angela?”

  ‘Angela’ only made an appearance in times of great stress. When all other stores of patience and calm were long since destroyed.

  “What do you expect—it’s chaos out here,” Angel shot back, doing her best to cut along the side of what looked like a massive build-up in the center of the freeway. But she flashed them an apologetic grimace in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry, guys, but we’re not the only ones trying to get away from the pandemonium. How’d you ever survive going to school here, Rae...” her voice trailed off.

  Rae ignored the last comment, too focused on the pain as she settled back down and on what Angel had said first. Of course they weren’t the only ones racing away. Because everyone else was just as freaked out as they were. They were all heading for the hills together. Frightened enough to scatter, rather than unite.

  “Rae.” Gabriel gently pressed her back into the seat, and they started again. The pain was just as excruciating as ever and Rae closed her eyes, trying to focus on something steady.

  “It wasn’t Devon who did this,” she tried again, more to herself at this point than to anyone else. “Blaming him isn’t going to make it any better.”

  Gabriel sat quietly as he worked, and when he tied off the final knot he sighed. “I know that.” He leaned forward and bit the string free, the edges of his lips sending little shivers up Rae’s sides. “I couldn’t break free to save you. He couldn’t break free to save you, either. I can’t blame him for failing to do what I wasn’t able to do myself.” He leaned back to examine his work, taping a bandage over it with another sigh. “But knowing that…doesn’t help.”

  Rae sighed as well. No, it doesn’t.

  * * *

  The solemn procession of cars that left the Kent mansion that morning could not have been a more different sight than the mad scramble that returned. From the second the doors opened it was as if their panic became a tangible fog, spilling out the open windows and quickly blanketing the sweeping lawns beyond. Coming right up to the doors of the house.

  “Rae!” Molly screamed the second they were outside. She was outraged to have been placed in a separate car—but in the chaos of the moment there was little she could do. “Rae, are you alright? Did Gabriel get you patched up okay? You should have let Alicia do more before you sent her off to Luke—Luke was fine. I tried calling in the car. You’re not picking up your—”

  “Yeah, Molls. I’m fine.” Rae caught her by the shoulders, well-familiar with the breathless rant. “I left my phone in the courtroom, I think.” She brought a shaky hand up to her head, watching as the rest of the cars emptied out onto the drive. “I don’t know, everything’s a little—”

  “Of course it is,” Molly interrupted fiercely. “You got stabbed! Again!” Rae wished she would lower her voice but, if anything, pregnancy had only amped up her rather exuberant personality. “I thought we agreed, no more stabbings. Wasn’t that the new slogan?!”

  “Yeah…no more…” Rae trailed off faintly as Devon exited the car behind her.

  Aside from that one, horrified moment when he’d fallen to the ground at her side, looking on in horror as Alicia slowly mended the wound, her beloved fiancé hadn’t allowed himself to come within ten feet of her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. Rae could sense that. But it was more like he was literally unable. Not physically capable of risking her safety for even a second more. Even if it meant chaining himself to a tree somewhere until they figured out what was going on. Even if it meant taking a knife himself.

  Sure enough, the second his boots hit the gravel he spun around in place—scanning the tiny crowd for her. They found each other quickly. But the second their eyes met he made no move to get closer. Instead, he did probably the last thing in the world Rae would have ever expected.

  “Simon,” he said bracingly, taking a step back.

  It was called softly, but Rae could hear it all the way across the yard. She looked on in wonder as her father’s head snapped up and followed her fiancé’s gaze. A second later, Devon’s jacket was secure in Simon’s fist. Like it or not, the guy wasn’t going anywhere.

  “When did that happen?” she murmured quietly, speaking to no one in particular.

  Molly, however, remained completely oblivious.

  “Here, let me see—”

  Before Rae could stop her, the tiny redhead had pulled up her shirt with little to no regard as to who might be watching, peeling back the side of the bandage so that she could examine Gabriel’s work. Although the move was lost on the majority of the people limping past them inside, the sight was enough to stop both Devon and Simon dead in their tracks.

  And to earn a vicious reprimand from Rae. “Would you stop that?!” she hissed, pulling it back down with a flush of guilt. Her eyes flickered up apologetically, but the damage was already done.

  Simon tightened his grasp to an almost painful degree, his fingers clawing into the back of Devon’s mangled shoulder without realizing what he was doing. Five small streams of blood leaked through the front of Devon’s jacket, but despite how it must have felt the guy looked like he hardly noticed what was going on himself.

  His eyes were locked on Rae. Riveted, without the slightest chance of moving. Staring at her ripped shirt as if he could still see the damage just underneath. The damage he’d done.

  “Devon…” she called tentatively.

  But he was in his own world. His head jerked once, as if he’d been slapped. Then he took a half-step back, further into Simon’s restraining hands, looking a bit like he might be sick.

  Molly’s crimson ponytail whipped back and forth as she followed Rae’s gaze, then she bowed her head with sudden understanding. “Sorry. I thought you guys had already talked.”

  Rae pulled in a deep breath to collect herself as her fiancé was whisked away. Presumably to be politely murdered somewhere by her estranged father. “Nope. No talking. In fact, if I know Devon he’s never going to let himself get close enough to talk to me ever again.”

  Molly’s face tightened sympathetically, but she tried to coax a smile. “Good thing you guys have that fox ink, then. You don’t have to get close. The two of you are probably some of the only people on the planet who could carry on an entire conversation from separate buildings. No need to see each other at all.”

  Rae shot her an incredulous look, and she lifted a shaky thumb’s up.

  “See…problem solved.”

  The two of them shared a quick look before Rae’s composure broke and she chuckled quietly. Sure. Problem solved. Why not? At this point, a protective space requirement between her and her fiancé was probably the least of her problems anyway. It was certainly more manageable than anything else going on. Leave it to Molly to put things in perspective.

  Then chuckling turned into painful coughing, and she threw her arms around Molly’s neck for support. “Just get me inside, you psycho. And try to remind me why we’re friends.”

  As Molly launched into what sounded like an oddly pre-rehearsed list with gusto, Rae lifted her eyes to see Devon still watching her from across the drive. Simon had been distracted
by Mr. Fodder, and while Molly was obliviously prattling on the two of them shared a private moment.

  I’m sorry. The wind gently danced his hair across his forehead as he mouthed the words from the other side of the drive. I’m so sorry.

  Rae’s lips turned up in a sad smile. I know.

  The next second, they lost sight of each other once more.

  With the authoritative air of a pregnant woman used to getting what she wants, Molly elbowed a path straight for the coveted recliner in the living room. It was a chair which she had taken to using as something akin to a throne, but she graciously allowed Rae to use it instead. “Only until Alicia gets back and finishes healing you the rest of the way,” she warned. “I don’t want to set a precedent here of lax requirements. This thing has to be earned.”

  Rae flashed a weak grin and painfully leaned back against the cushions. “Noted. And you don’t need to try to cheer me up, you know,” she added more seriously, gazing up at the waves of tension straining her friend’s face. “This isn’t exactly new territory for me.”

  In hindsight, she almost wished she hadn’t said it. For one of the first times she could remember every single shred of whimsy, spirit, and defensive humor melted from Molly’s face. It left her looking years older than she was. Wilted, somehow. And chillingly grave. “Yeah, Rae. It actually is.”

  The defeated expression burned into Rae’s mind, promising to haunt her for many nights to come. But before she could think of a single thing to say, a throat cleared in the center of the room.

  “Are we all here now?” Commander Fodder did a silent tally. “Is this everyone?”

  Such as it was.

  Rae could think of no shortage of times when she’d gazed around the room, only to see her friends looking as though someone had tried to beat them to death. On most days, that was exactly what had ended up happening. The years had hardened them, and heaven knew they were no strangers to breaks, and cuts, and bruises. To be honest, it was a bit of a novelty now when they were all patched up and clean. It had long since become a joke that at least one of them had to have some blood on them.

  But this… this was something different.

  A long time ago, Rae’s old mentor—the infamous Jennifer Jones—had told her something that she would never forget.

  A punch hurts a hundred times worse when it comes from a friend.

  Rae couldn’t think of a better phrase to summarize the feeling in the room. These were no ordinary war wounds. They were looking at friendly fire. Every hurt, every tear, every drop of blood that had been spilled had been come at the hand of someone else sitting in that very room.

  Father beating son.

  Friend attacking friend.

  Lover stabbing lover.

  A belated chill ran through her shoulders and she hitched herself higher up onto the recliner, well-aware that she was leaving a crimson stain in the plush fabric. She needed a healing tatù of her own. One to fix this. Didn’t she have one? If so, why wasn’t it working?

  “This is everyone,” Beth answered him.

  She was perched on the far sofa, sitting snugly in between Angel and Gabriel, a usually inseparable pair who suddenly couldn’t seem to look at each other. It was a vantage point from which she could watch her ailing daughter and her estranged husband at the same time.

  Fodder glanced around for a moment before nodding curtly. A second later he dropped his head, trying desperately to come up with something to say.

  Rae almost felt sorry for him. He was clearly as out of sorts as the rest of them; he had been ever since he’d taken that not-so-merry trip with her down Simon’s memory lane. And all that was before he and his youngest son had duked it out on the Guilder lawn. As it stood, he was keeping one hand on Luke at all times. Like he was terrified of what might happen were he to let him go. “Well…I think the first thing we need to do is figure out what happened,” he began with his best attempt at practicality. “Clearly, we were all placed under some kind of—”

  “We don’t need to figure out what happened,” Rae interrupted softly, “or who did it. I think we already know.”

  Even as she said the words, a familiar face flashed through her mind. The same face that had stared back at her amidst an angry mob the night of Thanksgiving. The same face Rae had invited as a guest into her home. The face of a girl who had walked calmly up to the podium just an hour earlier, and pressed a dagger into Devon’s hand.

  She swallowed hard. “Samantha.”

  Chapter 5

  Half the room blanched in horror, while the other half blankly shook their heads. The name ‘Samantha’ was only known to those who had been living inside the mansion, and had absolutely no meaning whatsoever to the rest. Or, if anyone knew her, they didn’t connect the dots.

  “Samantha?” Beth questioningly cocked her head to the side, staring at her daughter as though worried the outburst might have less to do with fact and more to do with blood loss. “Who the heck is Samantha? Is Samantha an actual person?” she added in an undertone to Gabriel.

  He didn’t answer. He kept his eyes locked on Rae instead.

  “Her?” His voice was clipped, dangerous. “The reporter?”

  “Think about it…” Rae’s eyes danced as she put the pieces together even as she spoke. “As a member of the press, she’d have access to places that other people wouldn’t. But even so, the first time I met her was at a safe house after the kitchen exploded. She walked right into the room where I was being held just to talk to me. There’s no way in hell she could have gotten in there without some supernatural help. A tatù.”

  Commander Fodder leaned forward in his chair. “You talked to a member of the press in the interrogation room? We don’t have any record of that—”

  “Maybe she just asked you to delete it.” The more Rae thought about it, the more she was convinced. “Remember that guy we met at the Abbey, training against Cromfield? Benjamin Eeks?”

  Gabriel flushed and leaned back in his chair. Benjamin Eeks had been responsible for inciting a fight between the Council and the Knights. A fight in which Gabriel had stopped the flow of blood to a man’s heart just to prove a point. But Rae didn’t mean it as any sort of jab. And for the first time, the others leaned forward with sudden interest.

  Julian was particularly quick to get on the same page. “You think they have the same ink?”

  Rae nodded her head, a grim smile on her lips. “Nothing more deadly than the power of persuasion…”

  The coffee, she remembered. In the safe house, Samantha had told her to drink a cup of coffee. ‘You’ll need your strength for what’s to come,’ she’d said.

  Rae hadn’t been able to set the cup down.

  “I’m sorry,” Beth interrupted again. “Who are we talking about?”

  “A little while ago, we gave an interview here at the house to a member of the Guilder Student Press,” Rae explained to the adults in the room. “It was right after Simon was discovered at the house, during a time when we were getting a lot of bad publicity. Samantha made it sound like she wanted to write the other half of the story. Tell it from our side.”

  “But that’s not what happened,” Molly took over, her eyes locked on the carpet. “From the second she walked in here, all she wanted to do was talk about us. The group dynamic. Our history and our relationships.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” Luke continued, “seeing as that’s exactly what she used to play us all against each other today. Pitting me and my dad against each other, knowing the strength of that bond. Same thing with Angel and Gabriel. She used one to neutralize the other, weaponizing the last person in the world Gabriel would ever expect. It was the same thing with…” he trailed off, but his point was clear.

  Without a doubt, Rae was the most dangerous person on the campus that day. The person most capable of stopping whatever it was that Samantha had planned. What better person to set against her than the man she loved? Who else stood a chance of even getting close?

&nbs
p; “That voice in my head…” Molly murmured, her blue eyes glistening with unshed tears. “It told me to run.”

  Julian reached over and squeezed her hand. “Because you’re pregnant. She knows you’re pregnant.”

  Molly slowly brought a hand up to her belly while Commander Fodder pushed suddenly to his feet, too agitated to stay seated a second longer.

  “So, what? You’re telling me that all of this comes down to one demented girl?! A girl who decided to murder hundreds of tatùed people, but had enough of a conscience not to harm an expectant mother? How the hell is that possible?!”

  “First of all,” Louis Keene spoke for the first time, “I think we’ve long ago learned not to underestimate the extraordinary power of one demented girl.” He cast Rae an indulgent look before turning back to Fodder. “And second, if this Samantha is in fact responsible for that happened at Guilder today, I don’t think it was her intent to murder the people in the crowd.”

  Fodder and Keene usually got along very well. Rather splendidly, in fact. But the Commander was clearly hardly feeling like himself. The veins in his neck looked like they were in constant danger of rupturing, and even though he’d leapt to his feet he’d still managed to keep a protective hand on Luke, clamping down in an unbreakable death-grip upon his shoulder.

  “Really?” His eyes narrowed with an impatient glare. “You think the fact that they all spontaneously decided to attack each other was just a coincidence, do you? Or perhaps you’re simply taking comfort in the fact that no one actually died.”

  “That’s part of it, yes,” Keene replied calmly, glancing sympathetically at the connection between father and son. “No one died, and under the circumstances that fact alone seems incredibly unlikely. But my reasoning was a bit more personal than all that.”

  Fodder shook his head. “What are you—”

  “The voice in my head,” Keene interrupted. “It told me to stand perfectly still. To put my hands in my pockets and do absolutely nothing at all.” His eyes flickered around the looks of confusion in the room before saying simply, “My tatù only kills. She didn’t want me using it.”