Alpha: An Urban Fantasy Novel (War of the Alphas Book 3)

by SM Reine

Stark was assuming this was a trend, not a coincidence. And this was the first full moon since she’d come back to life.

  It was brave to lock himself in with the woman who had just accidentally incinerated a man with her questionable new shapeshifting powers.

  She licked her dry lips. “How long should it take before I start to transform? I’ve never shifted before, so it should be like any other first-time shift, right?” He prowled around the room, checking the cabinets. He found maps rolled up in one and spread them out on a table. “Stark?”

  He weighed the edges of the maps down with pocketknives and the sidhe rune stone.

  Deirdre went to the opposite side of the table.

  The maps that Stark had pulled out didn’t display state boundaries, cities, or even topography. She recognized the vague outlines of forest and mountains as being local geography. But the other colorful splotches on it didn’t make sense, nor did the seemingly random radiating lines that reminded her of cobwebs.

  “Is this a map to the Middle Worlds?” she asked, starting to turn the maps in her direction. She poked at it gently with her forefinger to make sure that she didn’t set anything on fire. “Ley lines, I mean?”

  He planted his hands on the paper to hold it down. “Niamh said that you were planted in my pack by Rylie Gresham,” Stark said.

  There it was.

  He knew. He knew what she had done, where she had come from, and why she had been sticking around with him.

  Stark knew she was a traitor.

  It was amazing he hadn’t already killed her a third time.

  “It’s the full moon,” Deirdre said. “I could change at any moment. Don’t you want to talk about what’s going to happen?”

  “Niamh says you’re a traitor. That’s what I want to talk about.”

  A hard lump formed in Deirdre’s throat.

  If Niamh knew that Deirdre was a traitor, why hadn’t the swanmay told her that she knew? Deirdre had suffered in the wake of Gage’s death alone, concealing the truth from everyone—including her friends—when she could have had Niamh’s help the entire time.

  Because Niamh was a traitor, too.

  A traitor for a different faction, but a traitor nevertheless.

  Deirdre wasn’t sure if it hurt worse that Niamh had killed her, or that Niamh had been lying to her the whole time. Either way, she had wasted so much time watching Jacek that she’d missed the real threat.

  And now Stark knew.

  “Niamh stabbed me,” Deirdre said. “I don’t know that she’s the most trustworthy source of information on all things Deirdre.” Stark rounded the table. Deirdre fought the urge to back away, shoulders tensing as he grew nearer by the inch. “Plus, Niamh is kind of a bird-brain. She’s not much brighter than the swan she’s supposed to turn into.” It wasn’t the nicest observation to make, but she wasn’t going to bandy words when the woman had stabbed her.

  Stark grabbed Deirdre by the elbow and turned her to face him. He might not have been afraid Deirdre would burn him, but she was—she tried to step out of his grip. He didn’t allow it. “Tell me you aren’t allies with Rylie Gresham.”

  She set her jaw. Swallowed hard. “Yes, I was allied with Rylie Gresham. She asked me to join your pack and report back on what you did…with Gage’s help.”

  Stark’s hands tightened. “Give me a reason not to kill you right now.”

  “The fact you’re asking for a reason means you’re not going to do it,” Deirdre said. “If you wanted me dead, you’d have already killed me.”

  “Traitor,” Stark said. His tone was soft. Dangerous. “You called the OPA tonight, didn’t you? You told them that we would be at the safe house. You’ve been informing them about my movements.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Deirdre said. “And I don’t plan to tell them another damn thing about you. I regret everything I did for them in the past.”

  “Then what are you still doing here? You’ll get nothing else from me.”

  Deirdre was surprised by the question.

  What was she still doing with Stark?

  When she didn’t respond, he continued. “I made you Beta, and you had the OPA sent to the asylum. They would have arrested many of my closest allies if the unseelie sidhe hadn’t killed them first.”

  “Yeah, but I also tried to give you the Ethereal Blade. I’ve killed people for you, and I’m with you now. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  Stark’s fingers dug into her arms.

  She visualized the Alpha consumed by flame, the same way that she had imagined consuming Chadwick Hawfinch. She had been afraid when he had done that. Afraid that the criminal kingpin would hurt Stark. Now she was afraid that Stark would hurt her.

  Yet the flames didn’t rise. She didn’t glow, much less catch fire.

  He released his grip on her.

  “Get out of here,” he said harshly.

  Deirdre would have loved him to banish her days earlier. But now it felt like a punch to the gut.

  Why hadn’t she already left Stark?

  Because she believed in him. Because she believed the world needed him and his vision for the future.

  Because they weren’t done yet.

  This time, when Stark walked around the table, it was Deirdre who pursued him. “Hear me out. Rylie Gresham had the Ethereal Blade, right? Who wields the Twin Blades?”

  He straightened out the map, uncapped a marker, started tracing some of the ley lines.

  Deirdre took a deep breath. “I think Rylie Gresham is the Godslayer.”

  She expected that announcement to have some impact on Stark, but he didn’t even blink.

  He’d spent ten years seeking revenge for Genesis. Deirdre had just told him that the woman responsible was his rival Alpha, and he didn’t seem to care. Not at all.

  “If Rylie is the Godslayer, then that means she’s responsible for even more than I realized. She’s not redeemable. I was wrong to have ever helped her. But by announcing this election, she’s given us a tool to remove her without causing innocent deaths among the gaean and mundane populations. We need to focus on making you win the popular vote.”

  Stark exploded with motion, flipping the table over with a roar.

  The weapons on its surface crashed to the floor, taking the maps with them.

  He swung a fist at Deirdre, so fast that she couldn’t react in time. His knuckles connected with her cheek. She smashed into the table. Her head rang, and flames leaped over her skin, echoing the healing fever.

  When Stark approached her to strike again, she swept out a leg, hooking it behind his ankle.

  She jerked him to the floor.

  He shifted his weight to throw himself over her. Stark’s hand clamped down on her throat.

  Deirdre grabbed a fistful of his shirt.

  And her fist leaped with flame.

  “Stop it!” she squeezed out, struggling to breathe through his grip. “I’ll incinerate you!”

  “You don’t have enough control,” he growled.

  His weight pressed down harder. Tighter. Cutting off her oxygen supply. There was so much hate in his eyes.

  Deirdre could barely speak. “Want to bet your life?”

  She pressed her flaming fist to his chest. She heard sizzling, smelled the meat cooking, saw his face flush with the healing fever as his body rushed to repair the damage she inflicted. But Stark didn’t draw back.

  Black spots flashed in her vision. Her head swam.

  And then he lifted his weight.

  Her throat opened and oxygen filled her lungs. Deirdre coughed. The fire in her hands went out.

  Stark loomed over her, fury and the healing fever making his face ruddy under the beard, eyes like shards of gold filed down to a knife point. “You’re no better than Rhiannon. You lied to me this entire time, and—”

  “And you beat me, and forced me to beat my friends, and ordered me to kill my boyfriend. Bitch all you want, but stones, glass houses, etcetera. Even if I’m a monster, you’re still a
better monster than I am.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You’re a better monster every day, Tombs.”

  Stark made that sound like a compliment.

  Deirdre was suddenly uncomfortable having him crouched over her. Not in pain. Just…uncomfortable. “Speaking of Rhiannon…”

  “Don’t.”

  “She bleeds red,” Deirdre said.

  Stark seemed to lose interest in fighting. He climbed off of her. “I saw that.” He shook his fist at nothingness, as though clenched around her throat again. “I almost ripped her heart out. I saw the blood.”

  “That means she’s not unseelie and can’t be the unseelie queen.”

  “She performs unseelie magic,” Stark said. “She used compulsion on me. She opened a portal to the Winter Court in my asylum and brought the sidhe to kill my people.” His voice grew harsher. “On top of all that, she’s mated to a shifter. She may be some rare breed of red-blooded sidhe.”

  “Or she might be an ordinary human witch who’s using the unseelie to springboard herself to power. Witches are the weakest gaean faction. Do you think Rhiannon would ever be satisfied being one of the weakest gaeans in the world?”

  He surveyed Deirdre with mistrust. “You talk like you know her.”

  “I don’t need to know her because I know you,” Deirdre said. “I can guess what kind of woman you’d marry.”

  Stark reached down, offering Deirdre a hand.

  She hesitated before taking it.

  He pulled her onto her feet. “Rhiannon’s ruthless,” he said with no small amount of pride. “But if she’s not the unseelie queen, then who is? Where is she? And how does Rhiannon control the Winter Court?”

  “Great questions,” Deirdre said. “I’d love to know the answers.”

  “Then stay with me,” Stark said. “Remain my Beta. Help me find the Winter Court and burn it to the ground with Rhiannon, Melchior, and Niamh inside of it.”

  “Are you actually giving me a choice?”

  “You are the powerful shifter I always believed you to be. Of course I want you to come with me. I told you from the beginning that I prefer my followers to be enthusiastically consenting, and that hasn’t changed.”

  But was that really the only reason he wanted her to come along? Because she could be powerful, assuming she figured out how to control her flaming powers?

  Stark was standing close to her, forcing Deirdre almost to the lockers. The look he gave her wasn’t one of an Alpha with his ally.

  Her fist had burned a crater into his chest.

  “It’s not long until the election,” Deirdre said. “Rylie is the Godslayer. We need to get her out of power, Stark. We can’t go marching through the Middle Worlds with an army until that happens.”

  “The election doesn’t matter.”

  “If you really think that, then why did we meet January Lazar at the safe house tonight? Wasn’t that your idea of an election ad? Because I bet you anything it’s going to improve your position in the polls.”

  “Forget the polls. I’ll need more followers to defeat the unseelie,” Stark said. “As soon as I find the juncture in the ley lines that will let me reach the Winter Court, I’ll take everyone I’ve gathered to kill Rhiannon.”

  “Look at the facts: the sidhe have been underground since Genesis, so they don’t have a following like you do. Melchior won’t win the election. If you defeat Rylie, you’ll defeat all the candidates in the election, including Rhiannon.”

  “Stop. Talking. About. The election.” Stark stepped forward on each word until Deirdre’s back hit the lockers. He braced an arm beside her head, leaning over her. They were almost the same height. He shouldn’t have been able to look so intimidating. But Stark was so much more frightening than that.

  Deirdre squared her shoulders, trying not to shrink away. “You’re a household name. You have political clout. We’ve got momentum and we’ve got to hit Rylie hard before you lose it.”

  He gave a harsh laugh. “Is that what you think?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think. You’re the best chance we have at making real change, and I’m not going to watch you let that slip away from us.”

  “How can I ever trust you again, knowing how you came to me? Knowing that you’ve betrayed me?”

  He sounded so bitterly angry, in an inhuman place beyond rational thought.

  This wasn’t about Deirdre lying to him. This was about his wife being alive, knowing that he was searching for her, and mating with a dragon shifter anyway.

  She wasn’t going to be able to talk with him rationally when his emotions weren’t rational.

  Deirdre pushed against his chest, hard enough to make him step backwards. “You’re pissed. I get it. Now get over it. Hit me, make me toe the line, show me who’s boss, and shake it off.”

  Stark stepped so close again that their noses were only an inch apart. “Do you want me to hit you?”

  She pushed him again. “If that’s what it takes, yeah. Do it. You were ready to kill me two minutes ago. Follow through. Let’s get this crap out of your system so that we can move on to more important things, because if you let your wife mess with your head, you’re going to lose everything.”

  The way he glared at her made Deirdre think that he was going to take her up on it. There was so much hate in him.

  But Deirdre pushed again.

  “Don’t tempt me, Beta,” Stark said. “I won’t let you deprive me of my revenge.”

  “You shouldn’t. But keep your eye on the target.” Deirdre fisted his shirt in both hands. “Rylie Gresham. The Godslayer. She made Genesis happen. She killed my father. She created the orphanages that abused me throughout my entire life. She’s keeping our people down. We can get revenge, but it needs to be the big target. The election. The OPA. Rylie Gresham.”

  Stark breathed heavily, shoulders heaving with the force of it, as though he’d been running laps around the bomb shelter.

  Deirdre shook him gently.

  “We’ve got to beat Rylie Gresham,” she said again, softer than before. He put his hands over hers. His skin was cool in comparison. “Prove to me that you’re the man I think you are. You’re the guy who can fix every screwed-up thing that was done to me as a kid. You can defeat Rylie Gresham and make our world the place it needs to be.”

  “She’ll die too,” Stark said. “But Rhiannon and Melchior need to die first.”

  She wasn’t getting through to him.

  Deirdre released Stark, pacing away from him, rubbing her hands over her face.

  What time was it? She felt hot and antsy, like she’d heard that she should on the night of a full moon, but she wasn’t transforming yet.

  She couldn’t organize her thoughts.

  “When do I change?” Deirdre asked, scratching the inside of her left arm. She hadn’t worn an intake bracelet since coming back to life, but she still felt itchy where the needles had been embedded in her skin. “I want to get this night over with.”

  “Fine,” Stark said. He caught her face in his hands, staring deep into her eyes. “Change into your animal.”

  There was compulsion in his voice.

  He was ordering her to shift shapes using the talent that Rhiannon had attributed to sidhe magic.

  Deirdre still didn’t feel anything.

  But she caught herself gazing into Stark’s eyes, caught in the deep gold color of his irises. It reminded her of what she had seen after she died a second time—those rolling, grassy fields, with an oppressive sun smashing down on her as its heat consumed her.

  She couldn’t remember more than that. Just the fire of the overbearing sun and grassy fields.

  Deirdre wasn’t even certain that she hadn’t hallucinated it.

  Stark’s compulsion still did nothing to her, and she still didn’t transform.

  “Damn,” he said.

  Why wasn’t Deirdre changing? She wasn’t an Omega anymore, was she? She’d been reborn with new powers, and she had assumed that meant that she wou
ld have finally unlocked her animal. “Maybe I’m not really a shifter,” Deirdre said, slumping against the wall. “Maybe I’m a sidhe too.”

  Stark didn’t like that she was including him among the sidhe. His scowl deepened. “I’m a shifter.”

  “Who cares? There’s not that much difference between sidhe and shifters anyway.”

  “There’s a difference,” he said sharply.

  “Okay. You’re a shifter. But maybe I’m not! Maybe I don’t have an animal form.” She flung her hands into the air in frustration. “I’m not waiting this out down here. I can barely breathe. I’m going upstairs to get air.”

  “If you leave now, don’t come back,” Stark said. “I’m leaving for the Middle Worlds as soon as I find a path there. If you won’t help me, then I don’t need.”

  The rejection stung more than she expected. “Fine. I’ll stop inconveniencing you with the ideals I thought that we shared.” She stalked toward the stairwell.

  “Rylie Gresham will be at the United Nations the day after tomorrow,” Stark said.

  Deirdre stopped in the open doors. “How do you know that? I haven’t seen anything on the news about Rylie making any appearances.”

  “She’ll be there.” Stark picked the table up, put the maps back on its surface. He spoke again when she tried to leave. “Don’t you want to know what you are?”

  “Of course I do,” Deirdre said. “I’ve never wanted anything so bad in my entire life. But I don’t think I’m a dragon, and I have no idea what else I could be. What kind of shifter randomly catches fire? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “I have,” Stark said. “There used to be ancient firebirds tied to the cycle of life and death. They would die repeatedly, only to be reborn from their own ashes. They’ve been extinct for millennia. But I learned of them when researching my own unusual animal, as they roamed the Earth at similar times.”

  Deirdre clenched her hand on the doorway. Her fingernails dug into the metal. “Don’t tease me. Give me a word. A name. Anything.”

  His gaze bored through her, intent and cold. “Phoenix, Tombs. You’re a phoenix.”

  IV

  The high-rise was far from the tallest building in New York City, or even the neighborhood. But being up on the roof still gave Deirdre an excellent vantage point.