“Go, Jinx,” he urged and Jinx went to Rifter.
“Rifter, I’m—”
Rifter shook his head and reached out to trace the scars he’d left along the bottom of Jinx’s neck. “I’m sorry.”
“Ah, Rift.” The wolves embraced and it was like they were young wolves again, surviving the Extinction.
When they pulled apart, Rifter said, “Please come back to the mansion. You and Gillian. I realize you’ve mated and might want to spend time alone and that’s fine. But I’d like the mansion to always be open to you.”
“I’d like that,” Jinx said and Gillian was next to him, her hand in his. The other wolves looked relieved but troubled at what was about to happen to Jez. They’d all grown fond of the vampire.
“I can’t believe . . . he’s watched out for me and now . . .” He trailed off and Rifter said, “Let Jez have his honor.”
Jinx could only nod.
“It’s time, Jinx,” Jez told him. Jinx turned to see that the vampire’s fangs had elongated, his eyes black as polished marble and he walked backward, watching them all.
Jinx swore he noted a slight tremble in the vamp’s body, but then Jez straightened and whistled. The hellhounds shook the ground as Jez circled them.
“Dammit,” Rogue swore from behind him.
“I know. There’s no other way,” Jinx said, his voice breaking. He looked behind him and saw that the other Dires were there—for solidarity. He and Rogue and Jez were the keys here. Kate had sprinkled a heavy salt circle around them and they all stood inside of it and watched.
Gillian gripped his hand tightly and Jez walked into the middle of the cemetery and called for the hellhounds. They came at a rapid pace and the monsters followed as well.
“He’s got a job for you—listen to him,” Jinx forced himself to call out. The words nearly died in his throat but the look Jez gave him made him play his role.
Once he’d said it, Jez gave a smile, almost angelic and that was something to see on a vampire.
From the safety of the circle, Jinx and Rogue joined hands and began to chant the ancient prayer Jez had given them. They’d memorized it in case the wind picked up and ripped it out of their hands. At first, getting the words out was hard, because it seemed as though there was an outside force working against them. But they persevered and repeated it three times, and halfway through the fourth time, it began to happen.
Jez fell to the ground, as did the hellhounds. The smoke seemed to scream into the night and everyone covered their ears against the sound. The ground beneath their feet shook like a great earthquake had come, and then there was a blast of blinding red light. Jez screamed then, like he was burning alive and the smoke attacked him.
Jinx moved to leave the circle, to help his friend, but Rogue held him back. “No, Jinx. Don’t you dare.”
Jinx struggled as Jez continued to yell. In a matter of seconds, all of it—the smoke, the hellhounds, the vampire, were absorbed into the hot flashes of light and then there was nothing at all.
Chapter 39
Vice scented Liam before he saw him. Vice was in the living room, lying in a daze on the couch because the kid seemed to work on little to no sleep and still wouldn’t stay with anyone for long periods of time without fussing. Now, he was asleep on Vice’s bare chest as Vice flicked through the millions of channels and found nothing to watch.
“He’s asleep,” Vice offered when Liam edged in, hands stuffed in the pockets of his cargo pants. Liam nodded and slid into a seat that let him look at Vice but not get any closer. Vice pulled the blanket over the kid a little higher. “I know this is hard as hell for you.”
“Yeah.” Liam looked lost.
“You need my help with something? I can call Gwen.”
“I need your help, but you don’t need to call Gwen.” Liam clenched his jaw and said, “I know I can’t ask this, that I’ve asked too much already. But if I keep him . . . I don’t know if I can ever fully accept him into my pack. But if he’s yours, Vice . . . if he’s yours . . .”
“You will accept him.” Vice stared down at the innocent charge on his chest and maybe for once in his long life, he was speechless. It was the last thing he’d expected to hear from the young king, the Were he’d saved months earlier, the one he’d been training nearly nonstop.
The one who’d been through some of the worst personal pain, dealing with the loss of his father and his mate.
“Yes,” Liam managed. “I’ve been wrestling with this, Vice. I didn’t know the right thing to do, but after hearing about the baby having bonded with you . . . I knew the right thing, for both of you.”
Vice blinked and cradled the babe in his arms. Wanted to say, I can’t be trusted with a half-human, half-Were life, not with my general fuckedupitness. But Liam was looking at him like he could. And hell, he’d been put in change of making Liam a king.
The wolf before him was nearly there. Would be, once Vice agreed and so he did. “I’ll keep the Were and raise him as mine. When he comes of age, he can choose to pack with the Weres or the Dires. No matter what, he’ll always have a home with us.”
“Thank you, Vice. I can never repay you.”
“Good thing you don’t need to try.”
It was done. How hard could raising a babe be, after all? Couldn’t be any worse than a Were’s teenage shifting years, right? And he’d made it through Cyd and Cain’s general insanity.
The baby woke then; his eyes were shining bright and a laugh emerged from his throat as he stared at Vice. And just then, Vice knew exactly what his name should be.
Chapter 40
It had been forty-eight hours since Jez walked the hellhounds and dragged the monsters kicking and screaming into that hole in the earth. Gillian still couldn’t get the image out of her mind, and she knew Jinx and Rogue weren’t faring much better.
“Do we have to contact his brothers?” she asked now. Jinx had told her and Rogue and the others about the other eleven vampires.
“I tried his computer but it was wiped clean. He said if we needed them, they would come,” Jinx said. “Maybe they just sense us?”
“According to Jez, they all knew what he needed to do on his end,” Rifter reminded him. “I’m sure it’s a blow to them as well.”
Rogue had his head on the table, was staring into space. “We have to get him out of there.”
“I know.” Jinx put a hand on his twin’s arm and Gillian’s stomach twisted as she thought of her own twin out there, confused and alone.
“As much as I hate to say it, we still have a pressing problem,” Stray reminded them. The TV was on mute behind them and Gillian knew if she turned around, she’d find news of her parents upping the ante on the reward. They’d gone into overdrive since her escape but from what she’d seen, they hadn’t mentioned having her in their grasp. The thoughts Kill tried to plant hadn’t worked exactly as they’d hoped, since her parents were now saying things like, “She’s been seen in the vicinity of this house. We think she may be trying to hurt us.”
She would make them believe she was innocent. Had to. She put her fingers on her temples and massaged them now, thinking about everything that had happened. The memory Jez had triggered was still there, and she could access it over and over, although it was still like watching a TV show. It was still as if it hadn’t happened to her.
Huddled against the wall, refusing to get up. Whatever the wolf had planned, he wouldn’t just stop, right? The Greenland pack had to have been following her—or that wolf had, at least.
Was he out in the woods looking for her? Surely the Dires wouldn’t have given a thought to scenting another Dire in the woods. But how else would he get to her?
“My parents,” she breathed.
• • •
It was so obvious, she didn’t know how she hadn’t seen it sooner. Gillian knew she had to go back to
the Blackwell mansion, had to go to her parents to try to warn them. Jinx and Vice were with her in the woods; the others were in the area, waiting for the signal.
She wasn’t sure what she would say to the Blackwells, but Killian and Stray promised they could change her parents’ memories if things got bad and they discovered she was a wolf. Since that would be a new memory, it could be easily discarded.
Now, in the woods, she could still smell the blood. The hellhounds must’ve completely obliterated the bodies, because as far as Stray could see, there had been no reports of any of that.
There was no real plan of how she was going to tell them. Gwen had suggested using the phrase, serial killer stalking and Gillian rolled that on her tongue, trying to make it all sound plausible.
She would not bring up wolves.
“Killian and Stray took care of the press for now,” Jinx told her. They’d been camped outside the gates ever since the reward got upped—she was now worth ten million dollars.
“Suppose they don’t believe me?” she asked.
“We’ll make them,” Jinx promised.
“I like believing you.”
“You always should, mate.”
“I like that too.” She flung her arms around him, nuzzled against his neck. Neither one knew if the mating would be accepted officially by the Elders, but in her heart, it had been official from almost the first time she’d laid eyes on her warrior.
“You just keep yourself safe, Gilly. No matter what—you keep yourself safe.”
• • •
Hours into the stakeout outside the Blackwells’ mansion, Sister Wolf smelled the danger and Gillian took off at a dead run toward the house. The other Dires were behind her and she jumped onto the front staircase between the columns, lunged over the dead security guards. The smell of blood lay thickly metallic in her mouth and she broke through the locked front door like it was butter.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” the man said. Not man—Dire. Like her. Just like her.
His eyes were the same unmistakable aqua blue. He had a gun to her mother’s head. Both parents were side by side, tied to chairs. Neither was gagged but her mother appeared frozen with fear.
Did they remember what they thought Gillian had done? Even with Killian’s help, she couldn’t imagine that this wouldn’t trigger some memories. But her parents weren’t looking at her with hatred in their eyes. Come to think of it, they never had.
And this time, the fear they had wasn’t directed at her.
She glared at the wolf holding them hostage and fought the urge to run at him. It went against everything she wanted to do by simply standing there, but she did. She would take her opportunity when it arose, and it would.
“Gillian, have a seat.”
“Who are you?”
He jammed the gun hard against the side of her mother’s head. “Sit. Down.”
She complied, tucking her hands underneath her. Hopefully, the others wouldn’t slam in here the way she had.
“I’m your uncle. Call me Uncle Sam.” He pointed to her parents. “You knew you were adopted.”
“I did.”
“You don’t look happy to meet your biological family,” he said, almost mournfully. “Didn’t you want to search us out?”
“No,” she said honestly. “I’m happy with the family I have.”
Her father gave a tenuous smile in her direction and her uncle growled.
“Ungrateful. Just like your mother.”
“Where is she?”
“I killed her maybe a month after she gave you and your twin away. Abominations, both of you,” he spat. “She was told to put you down when she discovered there were two of you in there. And if she didn’t, we were to put her down. She didn’t listen. She ran—hid. And now, look where we are.”
Her heart ached for the woman who’d carried her, who’d cared enough about her to give up her babies so they’d be born in freedom. “We’re here because of you,” she told him. “If you hadn’t gotten involved, everything would still be fine.”
“Really? It’s fine to let abominations walk the earth? The Elders may deem it so, but our pack follows the old traditions,” he sneered. “By doing my job, I’ll be paying my debt to the warriors of old.”
“Why didn’t you take me when you killed my friends?” she demanded.
“We don’t want you near us. We tried that once, with Steele. We don’t want twins, abilities or not. My pack figured they’d lock you up and throw away the key. Drug you. Keep the shift at bay. And if you had abilities, the other Dires would find you. That was fine with the rest of my pack but I couldn’t let it end there.”
Her father’s eyes widened at the admission and a tear ran down her mother’s face—they only understood part of what the older wolf was saying, but it was enough.
“Why not just give me to the other Dires to begin with?” she asked.
“We don’t help them. They’re the reason our kind is nearly extinct.”
“I’m not locked up anymore.”
“You will be when they find you here, your parents dead in the same way your friends were killed and you, guilt ridden, mentally ill and shot by your own hand. I wanted you to be here to watch them die. Abominations deserve pain—you reap what you sow.”
He thinks you can die. And she really didn’t know for sure that she couldn’t, or how fast she’d recover. She could only hope that Jinx rescued the Blackwells in time.
Let him go to report back to the pack that she was dead. He was obsessed with the twin curse, knew nothing of the ability.
I could trail him to find my twin.
She freed her hands from under her thighs and Uncle Sam told her not to move.
She stood anyway, moved threateningly toward him, aware that Sister Wolf was ready to take the reins. Her canines were already elongated and she was never more sure of anything than this.
The bullets ripped through her chest and she crumpled after taking a few more steps. Her breath grew harsh, her eyes hazy and the last thing she saw were the Blackwells’ faces before she closed her eyes.
Her final thought was of Jinx and then everything went black.
• • •
Gwen had to fight Rifter to be allowed to come on this stakeout. Now that the Dires surrounding her began to drop, she was so grateful she’d followed her instincts.
“Gillian,” Jinx cried out. “She’s been shot.”
Gillian’s death didn’t fell the other Dires immediately, but they all stopped moving within moments, their bodies pained. It had happened before, many times over the years and it always hurt like hell, but this time, Jinx wasn’t upset.
It meant he’d been right—Gillian was immortal. Of course, he’d kill her later when he talked to her about what a chance she’d taken.
“What now? If she’s dead, there’s no one to protect her parents,” Kate said as they stared into the window at the scene in front of them.
“She wouldn’t know that when she’s killed, the others die too and they recover together,” Gwen said. “Kate, stay here with them—Liam, come with me.”
Gwen’s wolf was eager to come out but she didn’t want the Blackwells to see a wolf coming at them. Instead, she slammed through the bulletproof glass with her foot, then leaped through the rest, not stopping for a second, moving over furniture to pin the man down seconds before he shot the Blackwells.
Liam was shouting, grabbing the gun, and Gwen raked her claws across the wolf’s left cheek so he’d be easy to find—and then she let him run.
“Tell Cyd to stay close to him. If he gets and keeps his scent, maybe he can lead us to Gillian’s twin,” she instructed and Liam called Cyd and did just that.
She moved to where the Blackwells were passed out, but alive. She smelled the chloroform he’d used and wondered why he hadn’t ki
lled them on the spot.
“I hope Kill comes to soon, because he’s got to plant some new memories,” Liam mumbled.
“Or maybe not,” Gwen said. “Maybe they have a right to know.”
“And maybe you’ve gone crazy.” But he was smiling as he said it.
• • •
Cain tore through the woods behind Cyd. Keeping up with the Dire wasn’t easy, but the strong scent of his fear certainly helped. And suddenly, Cyd stopped on a dime, Cain skidding to a stop behind his twin.
Cyd shifted fast, as did Cain and they watched the Dire pull out a long sword from behind one of the trees. He’d done this purposely, known someone would try to track him.
“I failed,” he said to no one in particular.
“We’ve got to stop him,” Cyd said, leaped over the brush to get to the Dire before he ran the sword through his heart. Cain watched as his twin got there just in time, surprising the Dire just enough so the sword flew. But Cyd was no match for the Dire—hell, both Cyd and Cain combined weren’t. And holding the sword to him wasn’t much incentive, because the Dire wanted to die.
“Where’s Gillian’s twin?” Cain demanded. The Dire smiled.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” were his last words before he ran straight to Cain. The force of his body hitting the sword slammed Cain into the tree behind him. He watched helplessly as the wolf died in front of him.
• • •
Gillian woke slowly, painfully. Gwen was standing over her, putting cool water on her face and Gillian sat up. Too fast, because the room spun.
“Gillian, it’s okay. Your parents are safe. Cyd’s tracking the Dire. Everything’s okay,” Gwen assured her and Gillian gripped the doctor wolf’s hand.
“Thank you.”
“You started it.”
“And you finished it,” Gillian said. “Where are the others?”
“Here,” Jinx said, limping in.
“What happened?” Gillian asked, confused as all the Dires walked in behind him like the centurions they were.
“When you die, they all . . . die,” Gwen explained.
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