Shiloh shrugged, a tiny smirk on her otherwise unimpressed face. “I was helping.”
Cora scoffed. “Helping?”
At that Shiloh broke into a full-on smile, showing unexpected dimples and perfect teeth. “I put you in danger of breaking your ass, and still no air mattress. Next idea?”
Shaking her head in surrender, Cora laughed and trouped back up the stairs to the raised patio. “Okay, smartass, what do you think we should try?”
Shiloh turned to Goldie with a questioning look. “You got a fan?”
Goldie considered. “I think I saw one in the hallway closet.” She started toward the house, but Shiloh waved her off and headed in.
As soon as they were alone, Cora got curious. “So you and Flint, you’re not-?” She waggled her eyebrows suggestively and Goldie laughed. “Because I could have sworn when he brought you by the other night that you two had some serious chemistry going on.”
Goldie shook her head, not sure what to say. Cora wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t nearly the point. “This is all just so crazy, you know?”
Cora nodded along vigorously. “One hundred percent. I get you. It’s just that it’s also undeniable, so you might as well get ready. Fighting it won’t get you anywhere. And Flint’s a good guy. He’d take care of you if you needed him to.”
Shiloh came out with a box fan, saving Goldie from having to ask just what kind of “care” Cora was referring to. She didn’t like the way everyone kept assuming her involvement in this Cause was a done deal. But she had to admit she was curious to see what she could learn about the mysterious powers she had and how to control them.
Shiloh plugged the fan into an outlet just outside the back door and placed it on a small table. She waved Goldie over to stand in front of it and turned the knob to power it on. “Now you’ve got air to work with. See what you can do.”
Nervous, Goldie stood there for a moment without moving. But what did she have to lose by trying? She brought her hands up in front of her, feeling the air from the fan pressing against them, and closed her eyes. A picture formed in her head, of the man with the jet black hair with a single stripe of white, his fashionable clothes tailored to his lean shoulders. She felt the hatred stir up inside her, the desire to sink a weapon deep into his putrid flesh.
The air between her hands seemed to throb. She heard Shiloh’s voice to her side, urgent and encouraging. “You’re doing it, Goldie.”
But Goldie would not open her eyes, would not break her focus. She felt the sparking, pulsing energy and moved her hands apart to better accommodate it, to let it grow in power and size yet keep it contained. Once she felt it as big as a watermelon, Goldie started to wonder what she could do with it. Maybe she could tip the fan? She directed her energy to the bundle between her palms and sent it forward with a little push. A second later she was flying backwards and landing in the daylilies.
Shiloh and Cora rushed down the stairs to help her, one woman pulling her to her feet as the other brushed the dirt off her back. Cora was laughing nervously. “First thing we’re getting you is a helmet. Who knows how long it will be before we find another switch, I’m not killing the only other one we’ve got who can fight.”
Goldie blinked. No, Flint had definitely not told her about Darby. Maybe he wouldn’t? Then she realized what Cora had said. “Are there some who can’t?”
Cora shrugged, an almost sad expression on her face. “Just the one: Auntie. She’s super-old. We’re not even sure she knows she’s a switch.”
Not about to be deterred from their agenda, Shiloh grinned and socked Goldie on the arm. “That. Was. Awesome.”
Goldie brushed the dirt off her butt. “It didn’t feel awesome.” But maybe it had, a little.
Cora grinned at them both. “My turn. Show me how, sis.”
They worked on it for hours, the three of them, until the sky started to color with evening sun, until both Cora and Goldie could make a ball of what Cora called Breath magicks, not only with the fan, but with their breath, blowing into the space between their hands. Goldie had even progressed to throwing hers; the fairy statues scattered around the backyard were all on their backs. She caught Shiloh off-guard once and knocked her legs out from under her. The pale-haired woman came up glaring daggers. “What the fuck, blondie?”
Goldie shrugged her shoulders and smiled, surprised at her own boldness. Getting her back a little bit, plus she felt like the walking definition of empowered and it was making her a little drunk. “You were the only one who hadn’t landed on her backside yet. Just trying to even things up.”
Shiloh shook her head with a smile, looking grudgingly impressed. “Yeah, ‘kay, just remember who watches your back when the guys with the pointy fangs show up.”
Cora bounced toward the house. “Thanks Goldie, but we gotta go. I want to show my man, I mean my wolf, what I can do.”
Shiloh followed. “When we get home I’ll throw you off the cliff. Jameson will be so impressed when you don’t go splat.”
Cora tossed back her head and laughed. “No way, kitty cat. I’m going to use it to knock his ass onto the bed when he gets bossy.”
Out the door they went, leaving Goldie to slump against the wall and try to figure out who she was now.
Chapter 20 - Bloodblades And Bodies
Flint stood by the water, fifty yards upstream from the BBOC store and the launch where their water tours started, and stared upriver at the sea of cops, photographers, and crime scene technicians that had been swarming his property since early that morning.
It had all started with a panicked call from Bryce that woke Flint up from a vivid dream about him and Goldie, tangled together as river water rushed over their naked bodies. He’d practically growled into the phone, “This better be important, B.”
Flint sat straight up in bed with his brother’s words. “You gotta come to the BBOC, bro. I found a body in the river.”
Instantly wide awake, Flint demanded more information. “You what? How? When?”
Bryce’s voice was shaken but sure. “I was taking some of the extra rafts up to the boathouse to clean them up for storage, like you said, and he was caught on one of the pilings. I think he’d been in the water a while, man. It was gnarly. I already called Dario, but you need to come, too.”
Not that there had been any question of that, but the way Bryce said it gave Flint pause. “Why?”
But Bryce had hedged, sounding more nervous than Flint had ever heard him. “Just get here, man. Fast as you can.”
Flint had come, thinking the whole way that he was bound to see Jameson there as well as Dario, maybe other members of The Cause, and that he still hadn’t told them what he knew about Goldie and the woman who it turned out was her sister. It had been almost forty-eight hours and for some damn reason he was still keeping mum about the possibility of Darby being another switch.
Now it was late afternoon. He’d sent Bryce home hours ago, after the police were done questioning him. Poor kid was wicked shook up. Unlike Flint, Bryce couldn’t remember ever seeing or touching a dead body before. Not that it got more pleasant with repetition.
The police and all that came with them were slowly being packed up, put away, and cleared out. The young man’s body had been taken away hours ago, filter nets set up downstream to capture debris that might wash off as he was moved, although from what Flint heard he’d been in the water so long that surely any evidence of value was gone. And anyway, the ones who mattered already knew what had killed the kid.
He saw Dario and Jameson walking down the hill towards him, Aven coming in from the side to meet them. It was time to stop fucking around and tell his brothers-in-arms in the most important war in history that they might have another weapon on their side.
Jameson looked up as Flint got closer, his eyes intense. “You see the wound that kid had?”
Flint nodded tightly. All vampires must fucking die. “Bloodblade.”
That had been what Bryce wanted so urgently for F
lint to see, and he had, his mind a chaotic hurricane of emotion as he’d stared at the waterlogged corpse. Aside from its location, the wound was identical to how the one on Flint’s neck had looked for years after the attack, before Hernando’s healer friend had done his work on it. Blackened around the edges as if the flesh had been burned, the skin puckered and ugly. Bloodblade wounds like that, ones that would have been dicey at best with a normal weapon, were absolutely fatal. Flint was the only shifter any of them knew who’d survived more than a knick with a vampire’s blood-weapon.
Now they were all there, all the males Flint considered part of the core group: Jameson, Dario, Aven, Bryce.
Bryce’s voice shook in anger as he spoke. “They’re in our fucking forest, bro. Those fucking bloodsuckers won’t get away with this shit.”
Flint was glad Bryce was finally getting angry. He’d need to be, to get through the war that was on its way. But at the same time Flint’s idea of going off on his own, leaving Goldie, Bryce, and everyone else involved in The Cause to the mercy of whatever the bloodfuckers had planned, suddenly seemed like his worst possible move.
Dario gave them more information, details only the police had. “Brittany’s dad’s been ignoring his kids since his wife disappeared. It’s no wonder he didn’t know where Brittany and her boyfriend were.” He trailed off before squinting at the shifters standing with him, as if they had the answers.
Jameson nodded. “Let’s find her. Aven?”
Looking out at the treetops as if he were already soaring over them, the eagle shifter nodded.
Jameson turned back to Flint. “Tell me about Goldie. What’s going on with her?”
(protect her.) Yep. She’d asked him not to tell about Darby, and although The Cause was everything… Goldie still meant more to him. He swallowed hard at the hot emotion flooding his chest at the thought. Crap. He was in so much trouble if she rejected them all and took off. A new thought hit him. What if she accepted The Cause and rejected him? The yawning of a potentially fatal crack to his emotional dam loomed over him. He turned away from it. Nothing to be gained by running away from pain. Besides, she liked him, right? “Nothing. Same old. Still trying to convince her.”
Dario tilted his head, one eyebrow raised. “What about her roommate? I think she’s hiding something. Maybe I should do a background check.”
Shit. Was this a sign or something? No. Just Dario being Dario. You can’t take the cop out of the shifter. Goldie was more important than anything so he would protect anything she held dear, including her sister. “She’s clean. Did her background check for the diner myself.” Whoa, now he was all in. Not just a lie of omission but a deliberate lie, an in-your-face lie. He’d never done such a thing before, was not used to lying to his fellow shifters.
Aven’s head swiveled sharply, catching Flint’s eye. Shit. He’d forgotten the raptor was there. Fucking feathered freaks could tell when someone was lying. He was busted now, for sure.
Dario nodded, watching him closely. “Okay. If no red flags popped up for you we can afford to leave it for now. I’ll dig deeper on her after I clear my desk.” He rubbed the back of his neck as he scanned the crews packing up forensic gear, and tossed another easy smile at their group. “Which oughta be in about five years.”
He and Jameson walked back into the thick of the law enforcement sea, leaving Aven and Flint behind. Flint cleared his throat and got ready to explain, but Aven cut him off with a sideways look from his sharp eyes. “Funny thing about raptors, we care a hell of a lot more about why someone did something than we do about what they did. People do some fucked-up shit for good reasons.”
Flint stayed silent, jamming his hands in his pockets. Was Aven trying to tell him that he understood why Flint had lied?
Aven stared out over the treetops again, and Flint wondered what it must be like to be up there, to be able to see the world from such a wide perspective. The raptor tapped his teeth in a staccato rhythm as his eyes skated over the mountainside. “There’s a way to convince her. One that she can’t deny. Just gotta find the thing that lights her up.”
With that statement Aven stalked off, and Flint watched the raptor give Jameson a two-finger salute before grabbing his plastic pod of belongings and heading towards the forest. Dollars to donuts he was going to strip, shift, and get to work looking for that waitress before the light was gone.
Meanwhile, Flint was left trying to work out just what Aven meant. The thing that lights her up? What the hell-?
If he’d had a lightbulb over his head it would have lit up at that moment. Of course. Goldie didn’t have a Resonant, the special weapon that fit perfectly with a switch’s elemental material, which in Breath Coven’s case was metal. If he could find or make the one weapon in the world that sang to her heart the way Cora had said hers did, the weapon she wanted to have next to her every night as she slept, then maybe he could convince Goldie to join The Cause.
And if he could just convince himself that was all this was about, he’d be a fuckton better off. Because Flint’s bear was growling. There were no words, but to Flint, the intent was clear.
Fuck all your plans. Find Goldie’s Resonant. That’s how you can best help her and The Cause right now.
Chapter 21 - Stranger Danger
After Cora and Shiloh left, Goldie poured a glass of sweet tea and tucked herself into the Adirondack chair on the front porch to watch the sunset light the clouds and autumn trees with golden light. It was so different here than her native New Orleans, but in spite of her worries Goldie was truly coming to love it. The forest, especially, called to her.
While she watched the showy sky Goldie thought, when was the last time that she had felt as vital and excited as she had this afternoon with Cora, working on their magic together?
When she’d been kissing Flint.
Okay, yes, but that didn’t count. Did it?
She worked it all over in her mind, trying to get closer to making a choice about this switch mess. A once and for all, final choice, that would include being honest about who she was and who her sister was, and might move her into that big mansion. Where Flint lived. And where Cora lived.
As much as Goldie loved her sister, it wasn’t like she and Darby had that much in common. Or anything, really. Goldie frowned when she realized that, when Cora had called her “sis”, it had seemed as true as when Darby did the same.
Thudding drums and screeching guitars got louder, their source obvious when Flint’s black SUV pulled into the driveway next door. Goldie’s heart started to pound and she had to resist the urge to jump up and show Flint what she’d learned with Cora that day. He would take it the wrong way.
But Flint jumped out of his ride and jogged up the steps to the duplex’s other door, never once even looking in her direction. Not one look? She knew she had overreacted the other night, had come across harsher than she meant to in her defensiveness, and really she should be glad that he’d apparently given up, but… she wasn’t. She felt completely miserable.
It sounded like Flint wasn’t doing any better in the mood department. She could hear him now, stomping around, yelling to his brother to help him find something, maybe even shouting at him. Seconds later Bryce slammed out the front door and stomped to the mailbox, muttering to himself along the way. Goldie looked away. She knew what it was like to be at odds with your sibling.
She hoped Flint not telling her secret didn’t have anything to do with it. She sank into daydreams about thanking him.
A blue envelope waved in front of her face just as Goldie tuned into the voice by her side. “Hey, you awake? Jeez, you’re as deaf as my brother. I’ve been calling and calling you. Here, this letter was addressed to our side by mistake.”
Goldie reached for it absent-mindedly, her thoughts still half on Flint and how kind he’d truly been, but as soon as her hand touched the cool paper everything changed. The hairs on Goldie’s neck stood straight up, her stomach heaving with nausea. She stared at the carefully-printed
block letters on the front of the envelope and a cold sweat broke out over her brow. Oh, no.
She broke the seal on the envelope and pulled out a sheet of expensive cream-colored paper, her hands shaking only slightly. Some part of her was aware that Bryce was watching, but she couldn’t stop. She had to know.
Just like every time before, the letter wasn’t handwritten, but made up of letters and words cut from magazines and newspapers and pasted onto the fine stationery in neat rows. As always, the sender declared his adoration: I am yours to command. You are mine to adore. Soon there will be nothing left to hide.
Goldie pushed out of her seat, forgetting about her glass of tea until it crashed to the cement and shattered. She gasped as she lunged for the door, catching a glimpse of Bryce’s confused face. “I’ll clean it up later. I’ve got to go get Darby.”
She ran to her bedroom knowing every word was a lie. There was no later. They were leaving. He’d found them. Goldie snatched her bag from the closet, cursing herself for having unpacked it in the first place, for having gotten cozy in this little home. Three days. Three freaking days had been all it took for him to find them.
Her mind spun as she shoved clothes, wallet, jewelry case, her tiny book of her most precious photos all into the go-bag, then started for Darby’s room. Her sister was going to have a fit at all they’d have to leave behind, but there was no time. Maybe if she left a note Flint would hold onto it for them, ship it to them when they settled somewhere. Oh, who was she kidding? She’d never do it because she could never be sure that he wasn’t watching. Her sister’s stalker. The man Goldie wasn’t going to let take what was left of her family.
The front door slamming made Goldie’s heart seize, but when she looked into the hallway it was just Flint, eyebrows jammed together as he scoured the house for her. “What’s going on? What’s wrong? Bryce said you got a letter and freaked out.”
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