by S. M. Reine
The beast was sleek and gold, almost more feline than canine.
Rylie.
The liquid flame of Deirdre’s blood poured over her muzzle, but the Alpha didn’t release even though it must have burned terribly. She swiped a paw toward Deirdre’s underbelly. Her claws opened another gash, and the pain was unlike anything she had experienced before.
An Alpha could injure other shifters in such a way that their bodies couldn’t heal at super-speed.
Apparently that applied to phoenixes, too.
Deirdre panicked. She tried to throw up more flames, tried to incinerate Rylie the way that she had incinerated Chadwick Hawfinch, destroying the Alpha in an instant. It was the only thing that could save her.
But the harder she tried to channel her anger, her fear, the dimmer her flames grew.
She felt her body changing.
No, no, no!
They dropped to the field like a rock skipped into the lake.
Deirdre struck. The world flipped and spun around her. The surrounding grass ignited.
She tried to sit up. Deirdre ran her hands over her arms. Everything hurt, like she was one giant bruise. Where were her feathers? Her wings? Her clawed feet? She had two human legs, two human arms, a vulnerable human body.
No longer a phoenix.
And without Melchior, never again a phoenix.
She shook her head, denying the change back. “No,” she said. “Damn!”
Fear rocked through her, immeasurably powerful, choking her. She rolled onto her hands and knees. She scrambled toward the nearest cottage.
As a werewolf, Rylie Gresham was a thousand times faster than Deirdre.
She didn’t even hear the Alpha coming.
Massive paws shoved Deirdre to her back on the ground. Rocks dug into her spine. She stared up at the starry sky filled with smoke and golden werewolf eyes that loomed only inches away. The Alpha, who was such a matronly woman in her human form, was a monster rippling with cruel muscle. Her claws sliced into Deirdre’s body as though her skin gave no more resistance than putty.
Rylie snarled, ropes of saliva dripping from her teeth. Their fight had gotten her worked up, and she was slathering, panting. Every breath growled through her chest. Deirdre’s molten phoenix blood scalded her fur, making it curl the way Stark’s beard had curled when she incinerated him.
She wasn’t going to die crying. She would die facing down the woman who had ruined her life, knowing that at least she had followed her principles until the very end.
“Do it,” Deirdre said. “Finish me!”
Rylie hovered there, just inches away.
Her breath smelled like Deirdre’s blood.
She didn’t kill.
Rylie stepped back, lifting her weight from Deirdre’s chest, and shifted into her human form. Bones popped as she shed all that beautiful golden fur, exposing pale white human skin, fine blonde hair, and a slender body that showed little indication of the many babies it had grown.
She stooped to pick up the Ethereal Blade. Rylie held it with obvious respect. She had seen how it killed. She knew what it could do. And she knew that even she, an Alpha werewolf, wouldn’t be invulnerable to its blade.
Rylie stood over Deirdre, the blessed sword hanging at her side.
Yet she didn’t bring it down for a kill.
“God, Deirdre,” Rylie said. The horrible pity on her face made Deirdre’s eyes burn—not with fire, but with tears.
“I told you to finish me!”
“No, honey. No.” She dropped to her knees beside Deirdre, touching the deep gashes on her chest, stomach, and legs where the Alpha’s claws had effortlessly cut into her. For the first time, Deirdre dared to glance down. The bone was exposed in a few places. It hurt so much that she almost couldn’t feel anymore. “What were you trying to do?”
Hot tears slid down her cheeks. “I have to kill Marion. I can’t let her finish the oath and inaugurate Rhiannon.” Her chest hitched. She started crying, and she wasn’t sure if it was pain or disappointment or fear or something else she didn’t even have a word for. “I burned your sanctuary. Kill me!”
Rylie bowed her back, pressing her forehead to Deirdre’s. “No,” she said softly, stroking her hair. “I won’t kill you. I wouldn’t even hurt you if I didn’t have to stop you.”
Deirdre had tried to burn down the sanctuary and kill a teenager in Rylie’s care, yet the Alpha still had nothing but compassion for her.
“Why not?” Deirdre whispered.
“You’ve already hurt yourself enough,” Rylie said.
It was too much for her.
Stark leaving. Melchior dying. Failing to stop Marion.
Deirdre sobbed right there on the street in the center of the burning sanctuary, and Rylie held her.
The healer who worked on Deirdre was an older witch with gray-touched black hair, a broad nose, and full lips. Her thick accent made it sound like she must have come from somewhere in India, though Deirdre didn’t know the region well enough to guess where. “Does this hurt?” the healer asked, probing Deirdre’s leg wounds with her fingertips.
Deirdre sucked in a breath. “Yes.”
“You’re lucky. Your nerves are intact. Many people who are bitten by an Alpha can’t say the same. Please continue to take deep breaths because this is going to hurt.” She scooped a thick paste out of a Tupperware and smeared it over the open wounds on Deirdre’s legs.
She hadn’t been lying. It hurt like a bitch. She tried to jerk her legs out of the healer’s reach.
“What’s in that? Acid?” Deirdre asked. She was in bed at a guest cottage, which was guarded by multiple werewolves outside the walls. They were patrolling the perimeter so she could occasionally glimpse their shadows sliding over the curtains. She wasn’t sure if they had been posted there to keep Deirdre inside or to keep people who wanted to retaliate against her out.
The healer held Deirdre still with strong hands. “It’s magic. The herbal compound is a base for the energy I have summoned from the universe to repair you.”
“It flipping hurts.”
“As I said—you’re lucky. It would be far more worrying if it didn’t hurt.” Once the healer finished smearing paste on the various wounds, she wrapped clean bandages around Deirdre, pinning them in place. Then she set a large bottle of water on the bedside table. “Please stay in bed for the next hour, and drink every drop of that water to rehydrate yourself before moving. Magical healing is not as fast as standard shifter healing.”
An hour. Deirdre had once healed a broken bone in five minutes.
She wouldn’t have to heal anything at all if she hadn’t tried to burn the sanctuary…or if Rylie had killed her.
Deirdre watched the healer leave with a strange panicky feeling snaking around her heart.
The sanctuary was still burning. She could sense the fire outside, since the flames had come from her body and were a part of her in many ways.
Another phoenix talent unlocked now that she had died and shapeshifted.
It seemed like her phoenix had a lot of potential powers that might be truly amazing. But she wasn’t going to get to discover them. Melchior was gone, so he’d never be able to make her shift again.
The door sighed open. Rylie entered, closely followed by her mate, Abel. He was a towering man with scars down one side of his face and neck, which vanished underneath his shirt. His skin was blacker than Deirdre’s, but his features were whiter. A man of mixed parentage. A man who looked at her like he was trying to figure out the best way to kill a phoenix.
She knew the expression well. She’d seen it on Stark’s face when he realized she was immune to his compulsion.
Between seeing Rylie and the thought of Stark, Deirdre’s face heated again, tears springing to her eyes.
She didn’t let herself cry.
Deirdre wasn’t going to cry over Stark again, not ever.
“How do you feel?” Rylie asked, sitting on the chair the healer had vacated. Abel hove
red behind her, glowering silently.
“Wonderful,” Deirdre said. “Like I could go skipping through a field of pansies.”
Rylie smiled. “You must not feel too bad if you’re joking.”
“I want to die.”
“Oh, Deirdre. Honey. What happened in the Winter Court?”
Deirdre shook her head. She wasn’t ready to talk about it. She never wanted to talk about anything she had seen in there—the king’s grief, the people he had killed, what she had done with Stark.
She’d had a lot of bad days, but her day in the Middle Worlds had been among the worst.
That said a lot.
“You found Stark, I take it,” Rylie said.
Deirdre managed to nod.
Rylie twisted to smile up at her mate. “Can you give us a few minutes?”
“Are you nuts?” Abel asked.
She tipped her head so that she could rest her cheek on his protective hand, which gripped her shoulder. “You can wait right outside the door.”
“Yeah, or I can wait right here,” he said.
“Please.”
Abel shot a look at Deirdre. He didn’t have to verbalize a threat. His eyes clearly said he’d grab the Ethereal Blade and finish Deirdre off if she dared to attack his mate.
It must have been nice to be mated to a man who cared so much about his partner.
He stepped out. The door shut behind him, but Deirdre knew he would be just outside, listening with his acute Alpha senses.
“Where are my people?” Deirdre asked. “Niamh and Vidya?”
“They’re being held,” Rylie said. “We haven’t hurt either of them. I’m going to wait for news before deciding what to do with them—and you.”
“News?”
“About the sanctuary.”
“If we killed people, are you going to kill us?”
“That wouldn’t be justice,” Rylie said. “I’ll hand you all over to the OPA, and there will be a trial. It’s the best I could offer you at this point.”
“You’re crazy for letting me live at all,” Deirdre said. “You’re crazy and you’re stupid and—and you won the election. Did you know that? You won. You’re the kind of person who sends a healer to take care of the person who tried to burn down your home and you still got reelected.”
“You succeeded,” Rylie said.
“What?”
“You didn’t try to burn down my home. You succeeded. I’m waiting for the numbers to come back, but I’m estimating damage in the six figures. As I said, I don’t yet know if anyone has died.” Rylie looked exhausted. “You keep pushing, Deirdre. You keep pushing, and pushing, and you want me to push back.” She massaged her temples. “I have an adopted daughter named Sun. She’s eighteen now, and beginning to resemble a normal human being, but when she was fourteen, fifteen years old…we stopped getting along. She ran away from the academy. She pushed me, too. She wanted a reaction.”
“What did she do?” Deirdre asked.
“Sun bit a mundane,” Rylie said. “She was trying to pass on the curse. She couldn’t because she’s not a cursed werewolf like I am—she was made a shapeshifter by Genesis. But she wasn’t sure of that, and she tried, and she’s lucky she failed.”
Deirdre’s head throbbed. She hurt so much. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know how to get through to you,” Rylie said. She dropped her head into her hands with a sigh.
“So stop trying. Kill me.”
“What do you think that would accomplish?”
“I’d stop ruining your life,” Deirdre said. A tear streaked down her cheek.
Rylie’s eyebrows knitted with sympathetic concern. “Tell me what happened in the Winter Court.”
Deirdre didn’t want to tell her. But the Alpha was looking at her with those steady, calm eyes, and there was a little bit of blood staining the front of her human teeth, and Deirdre knew that was her blood. Rylie could have killed her, but she hadn’t.
You keep pushing, and pushing…
“Stark wouldn’t come back from the Winter Court unless we found his daughters. While we were looking for them, I found the election results—I found evidence that Rhiannon cheated and that you won. Not that it matters.”
Rylie beckoned for her to continue.
“Anyway, when we found Stark’s daughters, we also found Rhiannon. Melchior is dying. No, he’s—he’s dead. And Rhiannon needs someone to be her Alpha if she wants to take control, so she told Stark she would take him back if he’d take over as Alpha of the unseelie.”
“And he went with her,” Rylie said.
Deirdre swallowed hard. “He went with her.”
Rylie sat back. She actually managed a faint smile, though there was no humor in the expression. “Oh, Deirdre. This isn’t about the inauguration at all, is it?”
Those two sentences were enough to make her start crying.
So much sympathy from someone who should have been an enemy.
Deirdre had spent all this time trying to hurt Rylie, pushing and waiting for her to push back, but Rylie still only had sympathy for her.
“Look at me,” Rylie said.
Deirdre lifted her tearful eyes to the werewolf Alpha’s.
“Love is a stupid, stupid thing, and it makes smart people stupid,” Rylie said gently. “We don’t choose who we fall in love with. We don’t choose our destinies. The only thing we can choose to do is forgive ourselves.”
A wet, laughing hiccup escaped Deirdre. “How am I supposed to forgive myself when I hooked up with the guy who made me kill Gage?”
Rylie stroked her fingers through Deirdre’s hair, pushing it back from her face. “I’m not going to tell you it’s easy, but you can do it. Forgiveness is a choice we make. We have to keep making that choice again and again.” Her fingers grew still in Deirdre’s hair. “You know that Gage committed suicide, don’t you? It wasn’t your fault. That was his choice.”
That, more than anything else, made Deirdre lose control.
Once the tears spilled out of her, she couldn’t stop. She felt like her body contained an ocean of tears and there was nothing that could halt the flow once she had breached the walls holding everything in.
Gage had committed suicide. He had taken away Deirdre’s ability to choose any other option but shooting him.
It hadn’t been Deirdre’s fault he died, nor had it been Rylie’s.
It hadn’t even been Stark’s fault.
“And we’ll have to forgive Gage for that someday too,” Rylie said. She was crying silently, tears streaking down her cheeks to dangle on her jaw. “He was in so much pain, and he took the easy way out. It’s not rational. It’s not fair. I’m angry at him for it, and it’s okay if you are, too.”
“Shut up,” Deirdre said.
But Rylie wouldn’t shut up. She just kept talking in that low, soothing tone, stroking her fingers through Deirdre’s hair. “You can’t punish yourself for what Gage did. And you can’t blame your heart for following what it wants, no matter how insane those wants might be. It’s okay, Deirdre. It’s okay.”
Deirdre cried. She cried and she kept crying, clutching Rylie’s arms, riding out the waves of emotion.
Gods, it was stupid, crying over Gage.
Crying over Stark.
It made no sense. It wasn’t like it was news that he was evil. She’d known that from the beginning. His idea of a pickup line had been to tell her to kill innocent people.
But she thought that his evil had been for a noble purpose. She’d believed that they shared something important—not love, but something better than that.
Deirdre hurt, not just because he’d left her, but because she’d been so stupid. She should have been better than that. Smarter. Yet twice now—twice just this year—she’d allowed herself to fall in with men whose darkest, most selfish urges were more important to them than the greater good. More important to them than Deirdre.
Rylie seemed to understand. Her sympathy was a terrible, agonizing t
hing, even more horrible than if she’d judged Deirdre for it.
“Did you read my autobiography?” Rylie asked. It had been assigned reading at school. Deirdre couldn’t speak coherently, though. She nodded. “You read the part about the moon sickness. How I killed all those people when I was a teenager, before I knew how to control my wolf and became Alpha.”
Another nod.
“That was how I met Abel,” Rylie said. “He was a werewolf hunter. He tracked the deaths back to me, intending to stop my killing streak. You can’t believe how much we hated each other in the beginning. He wanted me dead, Deirdre.”
The memory of Abel’s protective presence behind his mate flashed through her mind. It was hard to imagine him as anything less than Rylie’s protective shadow.
“What happened?” Deirdre asked.
Rylie stroked her fingers along the back of Deirdre’s wrist, so gentle that it was hard to imagine she could easily sprout claws. “I changed his mind.” Her smile was wistful. “We don’t choose who we love, Deirdre.”
“I don’t think I love him,” Deirdre said. “He’s just…” She searched for words to describe the strange chemistry between them. There was no word for it in the English language. She would have been surprised if there was a word for it in any language. “Are you saying I’d be able to change Stark’s mind like you changed Abel’s?”
“No,” Rylie said. “The problem with Stark is who he is as a person. He’s a bad person. Abel—he’s always been a good person, deep down. Only his goals needed to be shifted. He had to learn sympathy. Stark is flawed in a deeper way that can’t be fixed, and you can’t punish yourself for it.” She squeezed Deirdre’s hand. “But I know what it means to fall in love with the wrong person.”
Fall in love.
Was that what Deirdre had done?
She wasn’t comfortable putting those words to it, but it was hard to think of it in any other way now that Rylie had said it.
Love shouldn’t have been tangled up with fear and pain like that. Love was those fleeting moments that Deirdre had shared with Gage in the privacy of their room at the asylum, when she had been vulnerable, and he had been understanding. Love was Niamh flat-ironing Deirdre’s hair when the moisture made it too frizzy. Love was the silent trust she shared with Vidya.