Twisted Together
Page 1
The Chronicles of Kerrigan
Twisted Together
Book VIII
By
Copyright 2016 by W.J. May
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Copyright 2016 by W.J. May
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The Chronicles of Kerrigan
Book I - Rae of Hope is FREE!
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1NNFR0
Book Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gILAwXxx8MU
Book II - Dark Nebula
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B46UWNO
Book Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca24STi_bFM
Book III - House of Cards
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LPIAFL0
Book IV - Royal Tea
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SGIN35W
Book V - Under Fire
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00YVNJECW
Book VI - End in Sight
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B015HGNL0C
Book VII – Hidden Darkness
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B018SSJEZC
Book VIII – Twisted Together
Amazon:
Book IX – Mark of Fate
Coming March, 2016
Book X – Strength & Power
Coming April 2016
Book XI – Last One Standing
Coming May 2016
Book XII – Rae of Light
Coming June 2016
PREQUEL – Christmas Before the Magic
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0195ZSB3I
Chronicles of Kerrigan Prequel
A Novella of the Chronicles of Kerrigan.
A prequel on how Simon Kerrigan met Beth!!
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Description:
Twisted Together is the 8th Book of W.J. May's bestselling series, The Chronicles of Kerrigan.
Rae Kerrigan has been branded a traitor.
Arrested with no idea why, Rae suddenly finds herself on the wrong side of the Privy Council and possibly for good. She’s branded a traitor, just like her father.
Forced to trust in someone she doesn’t know, she finds herself more confused than ever. Gabriel is cocky, brash, distractingly handsome and apparently working for the Privy Council under Carter.
Forced to prove her innocence, Rae will stop at nothing and risk everything.
Twisted Together is the 8th book in the Chronicles of Kerrigan series.
Book 1, Rae of Hope is currently FREE.
Follow Rae Kerrigan as she learns about the tattoo on her back that gives her supernatural powers, as she learns of her father's evil intentions and as she tries to figure out how coming of age, falling love and high-packed action fighting isn't as easy as the comic books make it look.
Series Order:
Rae of Hope
Dark Nebula
House of Cards
Royal Tea
Under Fire
End in Sight
Hidden Darkness
Twisted Together
Mark of Fate
Strength & Power
Last One Standing
Rae of Light
Prequel: Christmas Before the Magic
Contents
The Chronicles of Kerrigan
Chronicles of Kerrigan Prequel
Find W.J. May
Description:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Sneak Peek
Note from Author
The Chronicles of Kerrigan
CoK Prequel!
More books by W.J. May
Free Books:
TUDOR COMPARISON:
Put a big bird in a small cage, it will sing you a song.
- Patrick Watson
Chapter 1
Not this bird.
I cannot BELIEVE this is freakin’ happening.
You know that dream you have when you finally come home after saving a bunch of people from a psychopath…only to be arrested in front of your mom, your boyfriend, and all your friends?
Yeah…I was pretty much living that.
“You have to let me out of here. Eventually!”
Rae shook back her long raven hair. It was straight today, falling in silky waves down her back. A purposefully formal look, paired with a lavender dress, intended to impress and appease the host of adults waiting for her back at the Privy Council.
Under the present circumstances, it was unbelievably annoying.
She spat out an accidental mouthful of abusive words, at the same time pounding her hands on the door. “I know you can hear me! What the heck?! I don’t even get a phone call?!”
A harsh silence followed her words. She listened as they echoed into the darkness of the tunnels beyond her cell, growing quieter and quieter every time until there was just…nothing.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she mumbled to herself, cursing as she tottered back and forth on the uneven stone floor in her high heels. As she took them off and conjured herself something more feasible for imprisonment, she took in her surroundings for the first time.
When the guards had first escorted her down here, she had been too shaken to notice much of anything going on around her.
This couldn’t really be happening, could it? They weren’t actually, really, having her arrested, were they?
She had put up absolutely no resistance, and trailed behind her guards like she was attached by a string, moving as if she was floating rather than walking
. She didn’t see the dank stone walls, didn’t notice the occasional drips of water as they led her deeper and deeper beneath the foundations of the school and Privy Council buildings. She had no idea what was above her, what direction they had gone, or even how long they had walked. She was even too preoccupied to notice she was in handcuffs.
Instead, her mind was filled with a stilted montage of faces; a dozen different faces, each of the best people she knew. Each staring at her in muted horror as she was carted off in unbreakable chains.
Devon’s face, in particular, stood out to her. Handsome as ever, but pale—literally frozen with surprise; his blue eyes wide with wonder and then anger.
As usual, he and she seemed to be on exactly the same page. When the guards had sprung up from nowhere and grabbed her arms, he looked like he thought it had to be some kind of joke. After all, they were technically standing in the middle of the safest place in the world. In the very heart of the Privy Council, surrounded by family, teachers, and friends.
Who the hell in that room would mean any of them harm?
He had made an impulsive movement when they led her to the door, taking an automatic step as if he meant to either stop them or follow, but Julian’s hand had flashed out quicker than lightning and held him firmly in place. Whatever was going to be done to stop this, it wasn’t going to be done right there in that room. There were larger forces at play.
As for the rest of them, Molly and Julian, her two best friends, wore identical expressions of bewilderment. When Carter did nothing to stop the guards, Molly had actually started to smile, unable to believe it could be real, while Julian’s face had turned uncharacteristically grim. Her instructors and the rest of the PC faculty averted their gaze, literally looking anywhere else to avoid seeing what was happening. Carter’s face had been unreadable, but she was sure she had seen shock in it before he covered his emotions. Even Devon’s father, a man who had up until recently historically hated her, seemed to be having trouble meeting her gaze.
That just left one face left. And in many ways, it was the hardest one to bear.
Her mother’s.
Beth alone didn’t have a split-second’s doubt about what was happening. She must have known what was coming from the start. Her face was lined with worry, and tight with pain from the moment Rae had walked through the door. In fact, it was her troubled eyes that had cued Rae in to the fact that anything was wrong to begin with.
Then she had turned her shocked attention onto Carter, the man in charge of everything.
Once things had begun to click into place, she automatically turned to him, along with the rest of her friends. Carter would make things right. As the President of the Privy Council, not to mention a personal friend of the family and one of the few people in the world who knew what Rae and her friends had really been up to this last month, there were few doors he couldn’t open, few messes he couldn’t get them out of. Surely he wouldn’t let Rae be arrested the second she walked through the door.
Except… he stood by just like the rest of them.
His face was stern and unreadable as two strong men she had never seen before led her away into the dark.
AND FOR WHAT?!
The unfairness of the situation hit her all over again and she stormed back to the door, using the tatù of her old mentor, Jennifer Jones, to maximize the noise.
Rae was out there for them! For the damn Privy Council!
One could even argue she was out there because of them!
If they weren’t so stymied by their own narrow-mindedness, then none of the hybrids she had been racing all over the world to save would have been in hiding in the first place. At the first sign of danger, they could have come straight to Guilder for help and protection. Instead, they were living on the run, in a perpetual state of hiding from the one organization that had sworn to protect them. But no, the Privy Council had literally decided to ban them from existence; leaving them easy prey for the likes of Cromfield. Not that they Privy Council was in charge of the entire world, but still…
Rae huffed in frustration.
And then there was Cromfield himself.
For the last four weeks, Rae and her friends had been working tirelessly against him, risking their lives every day, sticking their heads in the crosshairs to save the lives of the innocent. They’d walked away from everything they knew, everything that was waiting for them after graduation.
Their cushy government jobs, their new penthouse apartments, their friends and family—all to fight a villain that the Privy Council had yet to even acknowledge existed. And now Rae was being arrested for it, like she was the threat.
Her fists actually left little craters in the hard stone as she beat against the door of her cell. “I know you’re out there, I can hear you—you freaking mouth-breathers! Are you even going to let me know what I’m being charged with?!”
The answering silence did nothing but fuel her rage. She beat the door still harder, shivering slightly in her thin dress as she rattled the bars of her temporary cage.
“All this funding and you guys still don’t believe in centralized heating?” More pounding. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m a teenage girl. I can keep this sort of thing up all day. So you should just let me out already—”
There was a deep groan from the iron lock, and the next second, the door pushed open.
“Finally,” Rae took a step back in relief, “what took you so…?” She stopped short at the look on Carter’s face. It was not the look she had been expecting: The dependable, infallible protector she’d come to know; the constant peripheral security blanket she’d come to rely on without even realizing it before this very moment.
The moment it was taken away. Forever.
“You’re not here to let me out…are you?” Her voice grew small and frightened without her permission, and she dropped her eyes quickly so Carter wouldn’t see them fill with angry tears.
Instead of answering, he shut the door firmly behind him, listening for a moment to make sure they couldn’t be overheard before turning back to face her. “No, I’m not here to let you out.” He looked as distressed as she had ever seen him. A whirlwind of conflicting emotions was held in check by only a very thin layer of control.
Unfortunately, that did nothing to ease her panic. “I don’t understand why this is happening.” Her voice shook as it rose in volume. “I found Cromfield, for Pete’s sake! I found his secret hideout; I saved a list of people from his crazy little designs. I have freaking proof! Why the hell am I the one being arrested?!” She wanted to add, ‘what about the others’ but bit her tongue. She wasn’t going to drag her friends into this mess… Unless they were already being questioned and arrested as well. So help me, if they are…
Carter’s eyes flashed. “Miss Kerrigan, if you expect me to come in here and have a conversation with you, you will at least do me the curtesy of lowering your voice.”
“Miss Kerrigan?” Rae repeated softly. “What happened to ‘Rae’?”
Carter’s face tightened, then hardened all at once. “I’m not here to let you out,” he repeated flatly. “I’m afraid, in that matter, my hands are tied.”
Rae’s eyebrows shot up in disbelief. “Your hands are tied? Mr. President?” It was hard to ignore the irony. “I still don’t even know what I did. Is this all because we took off for a month and didn’t tell—”
“This isn’t about last month; it’s about what you did at graduation,” Carter interrupted harshly. His eyes flicked almost nervously to the door, and he dropped his voice down half an octave. “Your little demonstration in the Oratory.”
Rae’s mind blanked in confusion. “Little demonstration…? I was told to do that. It wasn’t like it was an optional thing. Everyone in my whole class had to go in there and—”
“Except no one in your class did even half of what you were able to do. While a few of the alumni were simply impressed, you absolutely terrified the members of the Council. They looked out at you and
saw nothing but your father. That day was Simon Kerrigan all over again. It was exactly what everyone who was nervous about letting you into the school was afraid of.”
It felt like a cold hand was squeezing around Rae’s heart. Without thinking about it, she fell back a step, struggling to find herself in the aftermath of those terrible words. “But I work for the Privy Council…” she murmured, staring at him with wide, disbelieving eyes. “After everything I’ve been through these last years—working to help—how can they still doubt my intentions? How can they still see my father, when I’ve proven I’m nothing like him?”
For the first time, Carter’s eyes infinitesimally softened. “Simon Kerrigan had one of the most powerful abilities the Privy Council had ever seen. To this day, he remains, in their eyes, the biggest threat to our way of life to date.” He paused uncomfortably. “Until you.”
Rae’s temper flared up. “But I haven’t done anything—”
“But you could. That’s their whole point. Your tatù puts Simon Kerrigan’s to shame, and you’re only beginning to fully develop your powers. There’s no telling what could happen in the future, what way your alliances could turn.”
“And they don’t think that imprisoning me here might be exactly the way to make that happen?” she demanded, bringing herself up to her full height. “I freaking work for them.”
“And that’s why you’re here,” Carter growled. “If you had just been a private citizen, it might have been different. But when you disappeared for a month, certain members of the Privy Council were able to paint it as an agent ‘going rogue.’ They said they couldn’t have such a potentially dangerous person within the government heading off on their own. It gave them exactly the excuse they needed to put you in here and throw away the key.”
And throw away the key…
Rae shivered and took another step back, folding her arms protectively across her chest. She remembered what Devon had said about people getting put into holding just because of the potential hazards of keeping them free. Mrs. Lachaise had called it ‘getting disappeared.’