He slammed the skillet onto the counter, his shoulders caving in as he dragged in a breath. “This is wrong,” he told the eggs.
“Is this about the mating thing?” I could be brave and bring this up, right? “Listen, Liam, I think our wolves somehow made the choice for us, and--”
“This is wrong!” He wheeled from the counter. The moment his eyes met mine, he dropped them. “You’re Alex’s mate. He chose you. He loved you.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, Alex is dead.” I don’t know who was more shocked and appalled by the callous way the words fell from my mouth, Liam or me. I do know the sword of pain stabbing my heart had two edges, one for each of us. And I know that when he walked out of the kitchen and away from me, I had to let him.
***
I don’t deal well with straight-forward rejection. The whole rejection en masse thing? Eh. No big. People, in general, suck. I don’t really give a crap what they think about me. But I did care what Liam thought. A lot. A whole, whole lot. The more I thought about it, the more I cared, and the more it hurt.
For three days we avoided one another as much as possible. In the rare instances when we found ourselves forced to be in the same room together, like when his Aunt Rachel came to check on us, we adopted façades of apathy. My wandering eyes and carefully blank express didn’t betray my wounded ego any more than Liam’s bored scowl showed his true anger.
I don’t know how or why he ended up in the living room where I was immersed in a Downton Abbey marathon. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention, or maybe it was intentional. Whatever the case, one minute I was watching Professor McGonagall snip at some poor lady, and the next I couldn’t tell you if there was a naked Jensen Ackles on the screen or not because Liam was standing in the doorway.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I said without turning around, certain he would disappear like a ghost. “Me either.” I remembered sleep. I wanted sleep. It just wasn’t happening.
Without saying anything, he left. I knew he would. What I didn’t expect was for him to come back.
“Liam?” I turned to find a wolf peering over the arm of the chair. “Oh. Hey you.” I rubbed my hand over his head, and then dipped down to press a kiss there. “You know this is cheating, right?”
The wolf barked and backed up a couple of steps. Fully understanding his intent, because I was like Dr. Doolittle or something, I got up and followed him. We ended up back in my room. That night, for the first time since our little discussion in the kitchen, I got a full night of deep sleep. He was gone the next morning, but his scent still clung to my pillows.
***
“If you put your weight on your right foot in the second turn, you would get more force behind the kick.”
I used the bottom of my shirt to wipe the sweat off my forehead. Well, mostly to get the sweat off my forehead. It also did a great job of hiding my face long enough for me to school my expression.
“I don’t have time,” I said, turning towards him with a perfectly bland face. “I’m coming off the roundhouse. I’ll lose my balance.”
Liam rubbed the back of his head, the first slip in his own carefully constructed mask.
“Make it a part of the same move. The momentum will keep you going. Here…” He walked up behind me and placed his hands on my hips. “Start the roundhouse…” I brought my leg up with exaggerated slowness. “…And as you bring this foot down…” Liam shifted my hips with his hands, which I wasn’t expecting at all. As a result, I toppled right into him, catching myself by grabbing onto his shoulders.
He looked down. I looked up. Our faces were only inches apart. I could feel his breath sliding against my lips--
A knock pounded on the front door.
I didn’t know if I wanted to kill or kiss whoever it was for interrupting. I saw the merit in both as I trailed behind Liam down the hallway. We were only a few feet away when I caught their scent.
“We come in peace,” said a voice I knew as well as my own.
Liam had enough good sense to move out of the way as I flung myself through the door. Jase caught me around the waist, our momentum driving us straight into Toby.
“Whoa, calm down. Someone might think you’re happy to see me,” he said as I sobbed against his shoulder, unable to catch my breath the tears were coming so hard. “Scout, those are happy tears, right?”
“I missed you,” was my garbled reply.
“Hey, I missed you, too.” He squeezed me harder, and then I felt another arm slung across my back as the smell of Talley’s shampoo tickled my nose. Someone rubbed a hand over my hair, and another squeezed my shoulder. And then there was another pair of arms joining into our group hug and I finally found a reason to pull back from my brother.
I tried to say his name, but only some sort of embarrassing bleating noise came out. It didn’t matter. Charlie always knew what I meant anyway and had seen me a complete sobbing mess many times over the past eighteen years.
“Hey, shhhhh….” He pressed a soft kiss against my forehead. “It’s okay. We’re here. It’s okay.”
It took me longer than I care to admit to pull it together. I almost had it at one point, but then I made the mistake of noticing how Toby’s eyes weren’t one hundred percent dry, and lost it again. By the time I could form real words, everyone had shed at least a tear or two.
“I can’t believe you’re all here.” Toby, Jase, Charlie, Talley, and a handful of other Hagans, including a guy my age I’d never seen before, stood on the front porch of the Safe House.
“We heard some crazy kid was Challenging the Alphas and wanted to get in on it,” Toby said, pulling himself up onto the railing of the porch. Sitting up there he was above everyone else, just like a Pack Leader is supposed to be.
I hopped up to sit beside him.
“Sensei.”
“Scout.”
“It’s been a while.” I hadn’t seen Charlie’s older brother since he basically offered his life in exchange for mine at the trial back in July.
“It has,” he agreed. His eyes trailed critically over me. “You look like crap, kid. And that hair… not the best look for you.”
Because it was Toby who always made me feel like a five year old, I stuck out my tongue while pulling up my nose so it would resemble a pig’s snout.
“That’s very mature and classy, Scout. I hope you use it during your Challenge to the Alpha Female.”
“Yeah, about that,” I said. “How did you know we were here getting ready for that?”
Toby raised his eyebrows and looked at Liam, who was leaning against the door frame. So much for mine and Toby’s play for Dominance. Liam was the uncontested winner even when he was slouching.
“I thought it was time to start gathering the troops,” Liam said.
God, I loved him at that moment.
Not that I loved loved him.
Or maybe I did.
Crap. This was so not the time to be doing the angsty teenage boy problems thing.
“I thought we were going to wait until we were ready?”
“You are ready,” Liam said.
Did I say “love”? I think I meant “hate”.
“Ummm… No. I’m not.”
“Ummm… Yeah. You are.” For someone who hadn’t been able to look at me since Friday, he sure wasn’t having trouble maintaining eye contact now. “You’re lifting 200 pounds twice a day, running five miles, and can do more push-ups in under a minute than most Americans can in an hour. You’re fine.”
Jase laughed, although I’m not sure what he found so funny. “Good to see you two worked out all your differences over the past few months.”
“She’s who we want to be our new Alpha?” That shining endorsement came from Makya, Jase’s cousin who was ranked somewhere below foot fungus in Things Scout Finds Awesome. Not only had the annoying brat from childhood grown into an even brattier teenager, but he was also turning into a total skeeze ball. I always felt the need to shower after all of our run-ins over the past
year. “Someone remind me why.”
“It probably has something to do with that whole Scout being Jesus’s sister thing,” Liam said ever-so-helpfully.
“I’m Jesus?”
“Jase!” Talley smacked his arm, eyes wide. “Don’t be sacrilegious.”
“Hey, he started it!”
“I didn’t know Jesus had a sister.” Charlie was propped up against the banister. I pretended I didn’t see the cane he was trying to hide behind the post.
“He doesn’t,” I said. “Liam and his family just happen to be suffering from a case of inherited delusion.”
“What, pray tell, does this delusion include?” Charlie asked.
“Oh, the usual. I’m the actual child of God, who used to be the moon but got turned into the first Shifter, and have now been reincarnated to lead my people out of bondage and set up heaven on earth, or some such nonsense.”
“Heaven on earth. Would that be anything like an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet?”
“I was thinking more like Disney Land without the lines.”
“I would’ve gone with Universal,” the new-to-me guy said. “They have that cool Spider-Man ride and Butterbeer.”
I actually took the time to look at him and realized he wasn’t a part of the Hagan Pack. Hagan men are on the short side of average height, solid without the word heavy ever crossing your mind, and green eyed. This guy was like a six foot tall bean pole with big brown eyes bugging out of his narrow face. I decided he had to be from another Pack, although part of me rejected the idea of him being a Shifter at all. There was something off about him that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Who are you?” It wasn’t the most polite introduction ever. My grandmothers, all four of them, would have been appalled.
“Joshua,” he said, holding out a huge bony hand. “I’m Jase’s roommate.”
Surely I heard that wrong...
“Jase’s roommate? From college?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Jase somehow magically got paired with a Shifter roommate?”
“Me? A Shifter?” Joshua snorted.
I wheeled on my brother. “I know I said you needed to be more honest about all this Shifter stuff, but I was talking about with me, the sister you’ve known your whole life. Not some guy you met in August. And I certainly didn’t mean to bring him to my cage match with Sarvarna.”
Jase leaned back against the glider he and Talley were sitting in front of and pulled his mate against his chest. “Liam said we needed people.”
“Shifter people. Not human people.”
“Oh, well, if it helps, I’m not human.” Crazy not-a-Shifter say what? “Maybe I should retry that introduction.” He stuck out his hand again. “Hi, I’m Joshua, an Immortal.”
I waited, but no one laughed.
“There are no such things as Immortals.”
Joshua reached up and tugged on his ear. “Am I supposed to pinch you, or are you supposed to pinch me to prove my existence?”
“Either of those will only prove you’re corporeal.” I pulled out the pocket knife I had found in the kangaroo pouch of the Harley hoodie. Using a move Liam drilled into my head over the winter, I pinned Joshua to one of the porch posts and aimed the knife at his jugular. “That isn’t what I need to know. Now, do I stab you, or do you stab yourself?” I pushed the tip a little further into his neck, but not enough to even nick him. I may be prepared to take on the entire Alpha Pack if I have to, but there was no way I could really stab a guy who looked like a Muppet. But I could scare him a little, especially if it would end whatever stupid joke he and Jase were having at my expense.
His hand grabbed my wrist, wrenching it around until I dropped the knife.
“No stabbing.”
“But I thought Immortals were, you know, immortal.”
“I am. If you stab me, I’ll live, but it’s still going to feel like someone shoved a knife into my neck.”
I eyed the knife. It had been days since I had a proper sparring session, and anyone strong enough to disarm me was worth playing with. I trusted the Hagans not to bring someone who couldn’t handle a little hand-to-hand for the fun of it. “You know, they say that which does not kill you makes you stronger.” I lunged for the knife, but it was kicked away before my fingers could close on the hilt. And then a kick caught me in my ribs, not hard enough to break anything, but enough to knock the breath out of me. I flew back, not stopping until the house caught me.
“Thanks, but I’m strong enough already.”
I would have agreed with him, but first I had to remember how to breathe.
“By the way,” Jase said, “I brought my friend Joshua along. He’s an Immortal. Don’t pick a fight with him. Apparently those guys are like crazy strong.”
“Thanks.” I stood up and stretched. My ribs were tender, but not broken. I could feel a bruise forming on my left shoulder where it got up close and intimate with the brick wall. “Your timing is, as always, impeccable.”
“Oh, and I already did the Touch-and-See thing to confirm it,” Talley added with an impish smile.
“Great. You’ve turned Talley evil.” I rotated my wrist, which seemed to be in perfect working order. “And don’t think I can’t see you trying not to laugh, Charlie Hagan. You’re on my list now, too.”
Charlie tried to swallow his smile and failed. “We thought about telling you right off the bat, but decided this would be way more fun.”
Joshua seemed to be just as amused as the others. “I suppose you were in on the ambush plot?”
“I’ve always wanted to see how I’d fare against a Shifter.” He shrugged those thin shoulders which should not have been able to hold so much freakish strength. “This seemed like a good practice round.”
As I hobbled over to the glider next to where Liam was holding up a wall, I gave Joshua another perusal, this time doing nothing to hide my assessment. Yes, those arms were long and thin, but not lacking in muscle. His posture was supposed to appear relaxed, but once I took the time to actually look, I could see the warrior’s stance. From the way he responded to my aggression, I would say he was trained. Extremely trained. Like Jason Bourne trained.
“Immortals are real?”
“As real as Shifters and Seers,” he said.
“And Thaumaturgics?”
“I’ve met a few.”
“How does that work? And how did you end up sharing a room with my brother?”
“How it works isn’t for you to know, and Jase just happened to get the luck of the draw.”
Right. Sure. That didn’t sound way too convenient at all.
I folded myself onto the glider. “Tell me, Joshua the Immortal, why is it you’re here?”
“Same as everyone else here. The Alphas took someone I loved. Since I can’t get them back, I’ll have to settle for a little vengeance.”
“Funny, I thought we were all here to get ourselves killed so Scout can feel oh-so-special.” Makya was sprawled across the glider facing me, making it impossible for me to miss the disdain oozing in my direction. “I mean, is she really so good in bed you’re willing to die just to tap that again?” His question was aimed at Liam and Charlie. “If so, I need to be getting me some of that before we throw down with the Alphas.”
Shifters are all fast, but Liam made the rest of us look like slugs when he crossed the porch and jerked Makya up by his throat.
You know those moments when the right thing is crazy obvious, and you know you’re supposed to do the right thing, but you just can’t seem to bring yourself to do it? This was one of those moments for me. I knew I was supposed to make Liam stop. Makya was turning blue, for the love of Pete. Of course he should stop. And I knew I should be the one to say, “Liam, put the idiot down,” but I didn’t. I watched Makya struggle, his feet a good two inches off the ground. I watched Liam, who could have been a statue for as much as he moved. I heard Jase say, “Dude, he can’t breathe,” and Charlie mention something about it not being w
orth it, but I did nothing. I suppose if Toby hadn’t stepped in, I might have just sat there and watch Liam kill him, although I doubt Liam would have let it go that far.
“He’s a coward and a traitor.” Liam dropped him back onto the glider. In the first intelligent move of his entire life, Makya stayed down and didn’t say a word. Although, I guess it’s kind of hard to talk when you’re gasping for breath. “I want him gone before morning,” Liam said as he walked back into the house without sparing the rest of us a glance.
“He’s crazy,” Makya wheezed once he had enough air to accomplish it.
Finally propelled to do something, I went to stand over the sorry sack of loser. There were lots of people to blame for what went down last summer, and most likely it would have happened without anyone’s help, but at that moment all I could think of was how Makya set off a chain of events which ended with me standing in front of a guillotine.
“Because of you, three men died, one is in a coma, and your cousin can’t walk without a freaking cane. You’ve earned whatever bad crap happens to you, Makya. It’s called karma, and it really is a bitch to those who deserve it.” I leaned in and showed him my teeth. “Ironically, so am I.”
“What did I do? None of that was my fault! That was your doing, you psycho!”
“We all know who made the call to The Matthews Pack which led the Alphas to us, so just shut up.” I leaned in even further so he could feel my breath on his face. “Liam wasn’t kidding. You better be gone by morning, but feel free to use my phone before you go to make your call. Be sure and send Sarvarna my loathing.”
It was a stab in the dark, but his face proved I was right. “You’ll get them all killed,” he said. “My family. My father. They’re all going to die just because you think you’re so freaking special. Scout Donovan, the high and the mighty. I’ve been putting up with you and your holier-than-thou crap since we were kids.” Pure hatred seared through his gaze. “I can’t wait until they put you in your place.”
“New deadline.” I leaned back on my heels. “Either you’re off this property in fifteen minutes, or I finish what Liam started.”
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