Nothing happens.
“Sebastien!” Mom cries.
“Do it again! Girls, chant with us.”
We do.
“Mother Earth, our children protect, these sisters who into your comforting womb have crept.”
The largest of the boulders we used as a step dislodges from the ground. It rolls upward and softly sucks into the opening of the shelter.
“Mommy!” Skylar screeches. “Mommy!” She pounds on the stone.
“Mommy!”
“Daddy!”
My own screaming wakes me, my hands pushing at the headboard.
Panting, I bring my hands to my chest, sliding my fingers along the gold chain around my neck. I take a deep breath and then another. After the third deep inhale, my hands stop shaking. The tears, though, flow freely.
Family. A mother. A father. And two sisters.
For a moment, I bask in the euphoria that I remember them. I close my eyes, clearly seeing their faces in brief, flitting scenes — a birthday party for Skylar, in the sunshine wading with Sophia through a gentle flowing river, worshipping in the circle surrounded by aspen that we ran across in my dream.
The burn on my chest heats — not scorching hot, but warm and comforting, as though the partial spiral seared into my skin is confirming my recollections.
Sage was my mother’s name. Sebastien was my father.
Was.
I’ve no doubt they’re dead, killed by hunters that night.
But my sisters are alive. I feel it and know it in my core. The triskele — my portion of it — is key. I need that pendant to find my sisters.
Wiping my eyes, I toss the duvet aside and reach for Enrique’s robe. His spicy scent lingers in the terry — so soothing and calming as I slip it on. I wish he were here. The need to tell him my discovery is overwhelming.
The indicator light on my phone glows green, signaling that it’s completely charged. I tap the screen to wake it.
Holy hell. I have a ton of messages. I deal with the texts first.
The most recent is a text from Enrique. He and Antonio are driving to Aspen, of all places, to meet Francisco.
I tap the callback button. Enrique picks up on the first ring. “Shavone? Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m fine. But I” —
Sirens blare on his end of the call.
“What’s that?”
“Son of a bitch,” Antonio’s voice growls low.
“Probably the State patrol. Antonio’s speeding.” The sound muffles. “I told you to slow down.”
“Shut the fuck up and hand me the registration from the glovebox.”
The sound on the phone thumps like it’s been dropped.
“Mi dulce, can I call you back?”
I feel a bang of guilt demanding his undivided attention when he’s on a mission I sent him on.
“It’s okay. We’ll talk when you get home.”
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Absolutely.” I put a note of brightness in my voice to convince him and allay his doubt.
I remembered my family!
“Hurry home.” I’ll share my news with him then.
“As fast as I can, my beautiful witch.”
Over the phone, I hear a male voice ask for Antonio’s license, registration and proof of insurance.
“Bye.” I sigh as we hang up.
Scrolling through the rest of my texts, I find several from Garrett. All of them ask me to call him — each gets more frantic. I respond to the first one that simply says, ‘Got an address. CALL ME!’
What?
‘An address? What does that mean?’ I text back.
Immediately, my phone rings. It’s Garrett. I put him on speaker.
“Hey.”
“Don’t hey me! Where the fuck have you been?”
“Um,” I stamper. I’ve never heard Garrett cuss before. “My phone has been dead.” It’s the truth, albeit not the entire truth.
“Geez, babe.” His deep exhale is audible. “I was so worried. I called the cops, you know.”
“You did?”
“Hell, yes!”
Wow. Two swear words in one conversation.
“DPD said they were aware of your situation. When they wouldn’t tell me anything more, I called that detective friend of yours.”
Great. I’m sure Nash was a total ass to Garrett.
“I’m fine, really. Thanks for worrying about me. So, what did you mean about an address?”
“Hello? Your cyberstalker.”
Oh! Of course!
“Wow. That was fast work.”
The whole computer hacking situation has a different context now. Could Garrett’s work lead me to the kidnapper and, most importantly, my pendant?
“The feed from your old computer pings one machine which sends it to another.”
Two?
“It’s a sophisticated setup. I have a street address for the first machine. Still working on the other one.”
I open my note app ready to tap in what he says. “What’s the address you have?”
“5063 Cherry Circle.”
The phone drops from my hand.
“I also got some return feeds from the first computer camera.” Garrett continues on.
The shock of betrayal squeezes my heart again and again.
“Shavone? Are you there? Shavone!”
I sit on the chair and pick up the phone.
“I’m here,” I whisper, sliding onto the chair facing the bed.
Garrett’s voice softens. “You recognize the address, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Is it who you thought it was?”
No.
“Were you able to install the spyware I gave you on their computer?” He asks.
“Yes.” I force my voice to stay calm. “Did you tell my detective friend what you found?”
“No, he hasn’t called me back yet.”
That’s not surprising.
“Well, don’t tell him.”
“Why?” Garrett practically yells.
“Because it’s his address.”
The line is silent for long seconds.
“Your stalker is a cop?” Garrett murmurs.
“Appears so.”
I didn’t think Nash could hurt me any deeper than he already had. I was wrong.
After Garrett promises to send me the video he recorded and I promise to call him back once I watch it, we disconnect.
Numb, I just sit there, staring out the window, through the trees, at the visible portion of the mansion across the street.
How could Nash do this to me? Lie about Val? Bug my computer? I swallow hard.
What else is he capable of?
Oh, please don’t let him be involved in the kidnapping.
My heart wants so badly to reject the idea. Given recent history, though, it can’t. Tears well in my eyes. Sliding to the floor, I curl into a ball and let the grief flow.
How I trusted him.
Leaned on him.
I heave a painful, lung-emptying sob.
Idolized him.
I wipe my cheeks with Enrique’s sleeves.
Was Nash really a horrible being all along? Is my judgment of people that flawed?
No.
The tears slow to a trickle.
He wasn’t like this when we were kids. When he came home from college, he was a little more standoffish. I chalked it up to the age difference between us. He was an adult. I was still a teenager.
It was the fire that changed him dramatically. Planning the funeral for our parents, he was bossy and gruff. And a hardened Nash seemed to be a permanent change.
It was the fire that changed Nash. Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t touch me for so long. Maybe deep down on a subconscious level he does blame me for his father’s death.
That would be a normal reaction, but not evil.
I sniffle. Sitting up to reach for the tissue box on the nightstand, I blow my nose.
> I hang on to the thought that Nash isn’t evil.
When Garrett first discovered the spyware on my old computer, he said it was professionally done. He said much the same just now.
That is not Nash. There isn’t an ounce of tech DNA in his bones.
All at once, the answer crystalizes in my mind.
The Alliance.
More precisely Jack.
The way he and Jack ganged up today against Enrique, against me. Nash calls her ma’am. It’s so obvious that he takes orders from her. If she ordered me kidnapped, would he do it?
Maybe. But he wouldn’t leave me naked and bound in a sex club. That I know for sure.
I scratch him off the list of possibilities and get moving.
Step one, find the actual kidnapper.
Step two, find my pendant.
Step three, find my sisters!
I grab my Mac.
The morning Val came home, I couldn’t get out of the LaFontaine house fast enough. I had just shoved the computer in my bag. That’s why Ben’s audio feed was still up when Enrique handed me my Mac this evening. While Enrique’s attention was on the power cord, I quickly closed out of the spyware. He doesn’t need to know that I eavesdrop on people.
I shove the guilt of deceiving my mate aside and stare at the photos on the screen, the photos of the woman in the van. She’s the kidnapper. I’d bet my life on it. I zoom into the ring on her index finger. It’s an exact copy of Jack’s. That they wear them on the left indicates that the rings are for protection. I wonder from what. Marquis in shape, the stones are onyx, but darker in color than Enrique’s.
My email app dings. I click on it.
Garrett’s message is at the top of my inbox. With a deep breathe, I click on it.
The video isn’t of the LaFontaine den as I expected it to be. I sort of recognize the space, yet can’t place it. I play it again and again. It’s no use. The picture is too dark and the video too short.
Another email from Garrett pings my inbox. I click on the attachment. It’s another video clip. This one almost three minutes long.
The computer must be a laptop. The view tips and turns like someone is moving it.
Settling on a lower table, the view gets super bright as though facing a window. Once the camera adjusts the lens to accommodate the extra light, I make out a row of French doors and water beyond them.
Nash’s pool house.
The footage darkens as a body blocks the light. Again, the lens adjusts. There’s knees, torso and chest as someone sits on a sofa. The face I recognize instantly.
Jack.
chapter 20
Slowing Antonio’s Porsche Spyder, I make the turn from Highway 24 onto Independence Pass.
We listen to Adele sing about setting fire to the rain — only a witch could do that.
The moon — somewhere between new and waxing crescent — hangs to the side of Mount Elbert. The slim reflection shimmers on the water of Twin Lakes. The lack of city lights and tiny sliver of moonlight allow the stars to glimmer like diamonds. To most, it’s a picture-perfect Colorado vista. For me, this particular view is the stuff of nightmares.
Since the night of our mother’s murder, I’ve always taken the long way around to Aspen simply to avoid this area and the debilitating emotions associated with it. The unbridled rage that seized me that night isn’t something I want to relive or repeat.
Tonight, for Shavone, I made an exception. Tonight, time is of the essence.
Get to Aspen, speak with Francisco — without harming him, and return to my little witch as quickly as possible.
“Are you okay?” Antonio asks.
“Of course,” I lie, rolling down my window. Perhaps the cool mountain air will ease my beast’s simmering memories.
“Where exactly did you find her?” Pain tinges Antonio’s normally chipper voice.
The question brings to mind images and scents that I’ve attempted, unsuccessfully, to forget. The bloody and scorched body of my Mother is something I wish I could unsee.
Anger and grief paralyze my vocal cords. I simply shake my head at my brother.
He nods in understanding, returning his eyes to the lake.
The closer we get to the site, the faster my wolf vibrates.
A wind ripples across the water. The breeze flows from the lake to the shore, rustling aspen leaves and tufts of grass. Into the car the wind comes, filling it to capacity with energy.
Antonio and I gasp.
I brake to pull into a small parking area.
The zephyr is Mother.
Her warmth takes my breath, soothing the images of her violent death with memories of my childhood with her, Father, Antonio and my sister. Flowing down my arms, her touch lingers on my hands. The ring on my left index finger tingles and heats slightly. She’s pleased with my mate.
One more quick spin within the tight confines of the car, she exits the window.
“Look,” Antonio whispers, pointing through the windshield.
Clearly visible at the lake’s edge, wispy tendrils of mist coalesce into an undulating human shape.
I get out of the car as does my brother.
Like a little girl with a frilly dress, Mother’s spirit twirls happily over the water.
“Mom?” Antonio, near tears, murmurs.
The mist’s upper torso bends in a type of nod as, once more, her energy embraces us — dancing around us for long moments before swirling quickly away and across the water.
Forming into a spiral reminiscent of Shavone’s pendant, the mist coils upward to blend into a smattering of thin clouds streaking the dark sky.
She’s gone.
My little brother drops to his knees. He was only twelve when we lost her. Not that it was any easier for me at seventeen.
I had pleaded with my mother to take me along to an Alliance meeting focused on the Soft sisters. She knew why I wanted to go. Antonio and my sister, Isabella — who was eleven, stayed in Denver with a nanny, while Mother and I traveled to Buena Vista.
To my siblings, Mother left and simply never came back.
I’m ashamed of my selfishness. Of course Antonio would be curious.
With a hand on his shoulder, I kneel in the dirt at the water’s edge alongside him.
“There.” I point to the southwestern edge of the larger of the two lakes. “I found her body there.”
Antonio squints in the direction of my index finger.
“Mother was invited to Interlaken by a small coven of elderly witches who were quite dear to her.”
I curse myself for allowing her to go alone. I should have accompanied her.
“Midway through an update on the oldest sister, I heard Mother’s first howl for aid. The room cleared, all wolves responding to her call. I followed her consistent baying — each one becoming more insistent.”
I’ll never forget the feeling in my stomach when her cries stopped echoing through the valley, or the stench of burnt flesh when I arrived first on the scene. The gift of speed was a curse that night.
I close my eyes, begging my beast to stay calm.
“The witches were staked and burned,” I murmur.
I don’t share that Mother, in wolf form with her claws and snout badly scorched and guts hanging out, lay near the witches she valiantly tried to defend. That much I can spare him.
“They heard her,” Antonio snarls.
I nod in agreement.
We heard her indoors miles away in Buena Vista and a lone wolf near Boswell Gulch heard her. The Granite alpha claimed no one in his pack heard her howls at their village a mere ten miles away until it was too late. By the time he arrived on scene, everyone — including Mother were dead.
“As the other wolves prepared Mother and the crones for burial, I followed the alpha back to his pack.”
The pack was a small group — only five adult males. None of them seemed concerned over hunter presence within their jurisdiction, or the murder of five witches and one of their own, a Nat
ive wolf. From my vantage point, I saw the alpha reach into his pocket. His members smiled as he placed money into their outstretched hands. My beast concluded they’d been paid to ignore Mother’s cries — and he jumped my control.”
“I’m glad you killed them,” Antonio growls.
Kill them, I did.
I disabled the two Granite sentinels — one with a swipe of my claws across his abdomen and the other by ripping out his heart. The next minute, I stood in the center of their mountain village to challenge the alpha.
He was three times the size of my seventeen-year-old frame, and wouldn’t fight me. Instead, he motioned to his beta to take me on while he walked away. I was inconsequential to the alpha, my mother’s death not worthy of his time or energy.
Already beside myself with heartbreak and fury, my wolf became unhinged.
The rest happened in a blur. I remember twisting the beta’s neck. I can still hear the crisp snap. In my memory are fleeting images of the gaping throat of the apprentice and, then, of the alpha — shifted and huge, turning around to charge me. His size, though, was no match for my deranged beast. Easily dodging him, I caught both sides of his lower back with my claws.
He gaped at his bloody kidneys in my hands as he collapsed, dead.
The moment the alpha hit the ground, my Lycan ears picked up sound in the nearest cabin. Throwing the organs aside, I burst through the door eager to kill more Granites. There, wide-eyed and terrified stood a girl — around the same age and build as Isabella — and a witch holding her hand over the mouth of a baby. In that second, the wolf ceded control and sanity back to man.
“We need to get going.” I stand, brushing the dirt from my pants.
Back at the car, I walk to the passenger side. “You drive.”
Antonio gets into the driver’s seat.
“Easy on the gas this time, hmmm?” I attempt a small grin as I close the door.
He nods, also, with a tiny lift to his lips.
Neither of us speak, lost in our own thoughts as we climb up, wind across and begin to descend the Continental Divide.
“The Norse are bringing in Gunnar Bodolf.”
I raise my eyebrows. That explains his sudden retirement from soccer.
“Sophia must be emerging.”
Antonio nods. “Only the youngest sister has a relatively intact cloak over her.”
Soft Fate (Wolven Moon Book 2) Page 17