by Sadie Moss
My lungs seemed too small for all the air I needed right now. If it’d been just my own life at stake, I honestly would’ve considered risking it. But I couldn’t take a chance with theirs like that.
Was that the bond talking? Or did I actually have a decent moral compass after all?
Grasping at another straw, I leaned closer to Asprix, speaking low in an attempt to keep this conversation private. Not that there was much hope of that. Sounds from the main room outside filtered through the thin curtain, but not enough to drown out my words.
“So, what? My magic is bonded to theirs, but what does that mean? Can we never be apart at all? Can I—”
“Leave their sides?” Asprix nodded kindly. “Of course you can. But I think you’ll find you don’t want to. And if you go too far for too long, you’ll likely experience negative effects.”
So I couldn’t even take the coward’s way out and run. My shoulders slumped, and I rested my forehead on the hands still clutching the old man’s knees. His gnarled fingers patted my hair.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of distressing news, my dear. But look on the bright side! Your magic is truly remarkable. Once you learn how to control and use it, you will be a force to be reckoned with. And who better to teach you how to use it than the men who share that magic with you?”
“Hell yeah! I’ll help you learn to shift,” Fenris volunteered.
Akio started muttering under his breath again. I could practically feel the anger radiating off him. Now that it had been given a name, I was uncomfortably aware of the bond I shared with each of them. The onslaught of their feelings jumbled up with mine, creating a riot of emotions inside my chest—not all of which I was certain were mine. Surely the thrill of happiness belonged to Fenris, not me.
Forcing my face into a neutral mask, I pushed to my feet. “Thank you, Asprix. At least now we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Anytime, my dove. Please come and see me again sometime. I’d love to find out how you all get on.”
I didn’t think I could respond to that in a polite way, so I held my tongue, stepping back to let one of the others take over. Corin shook his head, blinking slowly. “Yeah, thanks, Asprix. I’ll bring you more of that tincture soon, okay?”
“You’re too good to me.” Asprix grasped his hand, his wise blue eyes studying Corin’s strained face. “Ah, I see. An old wound. Old and deep.” He clicked his tongue. “Nurture the seed of forgiveness, not resentment. Don’t poison your bond, my boy.”
Corin’s head jerked back, and he shot me a glance seemingly against his will. Retrieving his hand from Asprix, he stood abruptly. “Let’s go.”
Without waiting to see if we followed, he pushed aside the curtain and strode out. Akio followed so close on his heels I was surprised he didn’t trip over them. Corin’s pace hardly slowed as we retraced our steps through the compound, into the guardroom, and through the dark maze of tunnels to the portal. In the abandoned house on the other side, dust plumed into the air as we all walked quickly through.
Even with our group spread out, I somehow ended up in the middle like always, with Corin and Akio ahead, and Jae and Fenris behind me. Not a word had been spoken among us since we left Asprix’s small abode, which was fine by me.
By the time I reached Jae’s flashy silver car, Corin was standing impatiently by the door, his hand hovering by the handle. Jae dispelled the wards, then pressed a button on the key fob as he came up beside me, and the car beeped, the locks springing open.
We piled inside, and a hush fell over the car.
“So… what do we do now?” Fenris asked. I’d felt his gaze on me the whole way back, and I could still feel it warming my skin.
“This doesn’t change anything,” Jae said. “Our directive from Christine is to train Lana and bring her up to speed. That’s what we’ll do. Akio, can we use your house?”
“Why not? Or what’s left of it, anyway,” the incubus muttered. He’d ended up in the front seat this time, forcing Corin to sit next to me.
Jae revved the engine and pulled away from the curb. This fancy, rumbly car was the loudest thing about him; it seemed an odd choice for the quiet, contemplative mage. Then again, we all had our guilty pleasures. Maybe one of his was flashy cars.
By the time we returned to Akio’s place, my nerve endings were lit up with tension. The drive had been mostly silent, despite Fenris’s best attempts to draw me into conversation. The sight of the destruction in Akio’s living room and kitchen only seemed to ratchet the tension up another notch.
Akio, Jae, and Fenris gathered in the living room to discuss their plans for my training, and Corin suddenly seemed to take an intense interest in the art on Akio’s walls. At a loss for what to do, I wandered into the kitchen. Broken dishes littered the floor and counters, mixed with spatters of blood. I picked up the biggest pieces and threw them away, then hunted down a broom in a little closet in the corner of the kitchen to sweep up the smaller shards. Once the debris was mostly cleared away, I went to work on the bloodstains. It was slow going; blood had slipped into the spaces between tiles, and it took some serious scrubbing to get the stains out. I was so absorbed in my task I didn’t notice at first that the house had gone quiet. Finally, I looked up, realizing I had an audience. The four men stood at the edge of the kitchen tile, staring down at me as I kneeled on the floor with a rag in my hands.
“What?” I blew a strand of hair out of my eyes.
“What are you doing?” Akio’s voice sounded strange.
I sat back on my heels, regarding them all carefully. “Look, I know this is all my fault. If I hadn’t attacked Akio, none of you would have been around when my magic flared. You wouldn’t have absorbed a piece of it, and we wouldn’t be stuck together now. But we are. And I—somehow—have magic I need to learn how to control. I want your help. Magical bond or no, I need your help. And I promise to do what I can for the Resistance.”
“But what are you doing?” Akio repeated, perfectly shaped eyebrows raised.
I looked down at the bucket of water and small pile of ceramic dust near me. “I’m trying to fix what I broke. I’ll do the upstairs next. It’ll take me a little longer to get to the hole in the wall. I don’t really know what do to with plaster. But I’ll clean up what I can.” The incubus’s eyes widened, and I raised a hand quickly. “All right, don’t get too excited. You’re not getting a live-in maid or anything. I only clean up messes I make.”
“Too bad,” Fenris murmured, his gaze hot. “You in a maid outfit….”
He trailed off, and I scrubbed a hand across my face to hide the flush creeping up my cheeks. As awkward as it was, I knew how to handle the other men’s hesitancy and standoffishness. That was familiar territory for me, something I understood. Fenris’s enthusiastic attention put me totally off-balance.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, not gonna happen. Sorry.”
He sighed wistfully, but I pretended not to hear it.
“We’ve discussed it and decided we’ll each spend time with you, coaching you in how to use the magic you got from us. I’ve never taught spell casting to anyone but children, nor to anyone as powerful as you, so I’m not sure if the same techniques will work. We’ll have to find the right access point for you to connect with the gift inside you. I’m going to pick up a few texts from my house that I think will help us. Your training will start tomorrow.” Now that he was discussing magical theory, Jae’s face lit up with excitement.
I nodded slowly. A lot of what he said didn’t make much sense to me, but I assumed he knew what he was doing.
“We’ll make this our home base for the time being,” Jae continued, with a glance at Akio. The incubus’s face darkened. “It’ll draw less attention if we’re all in one place and have fewer people coming and going. I need to go back to the Capital for a few days to put in an appearance with my family, but I’ll put a concealment spell up before I go. Until we know for sure who wanted Akio dead, we need to play it safe.”
The decision didn’t shock me, though I thought longingly of my quiet, shitty little apartment in the Outskirts. Sure, the TV was always on, and a ghost hogged the couch. But it was mine.
“Yeah, okay.” I squeezed the rag out over the bucket of water. It now had a vaguely pink tinge.
The men started to drift away, Fenris’s eyes lingering on me as I resumed scrubbing. Probably imagining a damn French maid outfit.
“Hey, Akio!” I called before he disappeared up the stairs. He slowed reluctantly, then turned to face me.
“Yes?”
I cleared my throat. Apologies had never been my strong suit. “Look, I didn’t want to kill you, okay? I know it doesn’t make it better that I was doing it for money, but there was no ill will on my side. It was just a job.”
“Right.” His voice skated over my skin like a piece of ice.
I gritted my teeth, forcing down my own irritation. “I’m trying to say I’m sorry. No matter how we got here, we’re stuck together now, so I don’t want there to be bad blood between us.” I tossed the rag into the bucket. Holding a piece of cloth covered in his blood while we talked probably wasn’t helping this conversation go any more smoothly.
Akio’s dark eyes glittered, scrutinizing me long enough to make me shift uncomfortably. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then snapped it shut and vanished up the stairs.
I stared after him, a knot inexplicably twisting my stomach.
Well, I guess hate can bind two people as well as love.
Chapter 12
“You’re still fighting it. Just let the change happen.”
“I’m… trying,” I ground out, baring my teeth as a trickle of sweat dripped down the side of my face. Maybe if I made my face as wolf-like as possible, it would somehow jumpstart my magic and force the shift.
“I know, killer. You’re doing great,” Fenris said encouragingly.
“How is she doing great?” Akio glanced up from where he was reading on the couch. The incubus had an amazing book collection. When—if—he decided to stop hating me, I’d ask him if I could borrow one. Or several. Unfortunately, that day wasn’t likely to come anytime soon. His chiseled features were painted with disdain as he watched me crouch on the floor, attempting to shift into a wolf. “All she’s done is sweat and complain. She hasn’t shifted once.”
Fenris shot him a quelling look. “She’s trying. And that’s great.”
Ugh. I did not need Fenris’s fucking pity. Akio was right. I was failing miserably at this.
The guys had decided I’d learn to shift first; supposedly that was the easiest of my new skills to master, since it didn’t involve controlling or directing magic, just letting magic flow through me to transform me. All I had to do was get out of the magic’s way.
Apparently, my innate pigheadedness made that difficult.
I wiped the back of my arm across my forehead, puffing my cheeks and blowing out a breath.
“Good idea. Try less oxygen,” Akio commented unhelpfully.
Dick. We’d see if he was still so smug when I turned into a wolf and bit him on the butt.
I shook my head, trying to dispel images of Akio’s well-shaped ass clamped between my teeth. I’d never seen him dressed in anything that didn’t perfectly showcase his body, from his broad shoulders to his trim hips and firm ass. Being physically attracted to someone I couldn’t stand was extremely irritating. All my violent thoughts toward him invariably morphed into other kinds of fantasies, leaving me to hope no one noticed the blush spreading across my cheeks. I knew it was because he was a damned incubus—he was probably using his charm on me to torture me.
“Do you want me to get the other guys again?”
Fenris’s voice wrenched my attention back to the lesson.
“No,” I gasped. “I can do this.”
I’d been working with Fenris on shifting for three days. The first day, we’d tried closing the loop like we had in Christine’s office, each of the men touching some part of me. It had unlocked my magic but hadn’t helped with the shift. And I’d been terrified the whole time that I’d lose control and destroy Akio’s house or something. Besides, I needed to learn how to access my powers on my own. Only being able to do magic when four men had their hands on me would be both awkward and horribly inconvenient.
“Fuck it!” Fenris exclaimed, making me jump. “I know what’s missing! We need to get you out of this fucking sterile house.”
“I’m assuming by ‘sterile’ you mean well-decorated and clean.” Akio didn’t even look up from his book. “In which case, thank you.”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.” Fenris rolled his eyes at me, and I stifled a chuckle. He sprang to his feet, hauling me up with him. “Hey, tell Jae I borrowed his car, okay?”
Akio muttered something that might’ve been an agreement as Fenris snatched Jae’s keys off the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. Since the house was now protected by a concealment charm and a protective spell, Jae hadn’t bothered to put the wards up on his car.
The guys had insisted on bringing my Honda into the garage—not because it was worth protecting, but because it was too much of an eyesore. Leaving it on the street would draw attention. The incubus had seemed deeply traumatized by the sight of my shitty car in his spotless garage, which squashed any inclination I had to argue.
“Where are we going?” I asked as Fenris gunned the engine, roaring down the street faster than Jae probably ever drove.
“Where wolves like to play the most.” He shot me a killer grin, waggling his eyebrows. “The mountains.”
I had never wanted to come to Denver, but the one thing I’d liked about the city right away was the stunning backdrop of mountains that rose up to the west. Having grown up on the plains of Wyoming, I’d been used to flat landscapes, so the mountains had always held a certain mysterious appeal to me.
But I had never actually been in them before.
The twitter of birds chirping in the distance and the crunch of dirt and rocks under our feet were the only sounds as we hiked up into the foothills. Tall, skinny pines rose up around us, interspersed with bushes and shrubs. Fenris had parked in a small turnoff at the base of the mountain, and now he led the way up into the wilderness.
“Is this where your pack used to live?” I asked, my voice shattering the peaceful silence.
He glanced back at me, looking pleased at my question. But a shadow crossed his face as he answered. “Near here. Our territory was a little farther south. I think a few lone wolves live there now. Most of them are in the city though.”
“I can’t see why anyone would want to live in the city when they could live here.”
His rich laugh floated back to me. “Me neither. A lot of us don’t have a choice though. It’s hard for a wolf without a pack, especially in the wild. In the city, there are more ways to get by.”
“You said a lot of shifters work as enforcement for the Gifted. Did you ever do that?”
A clearing opened up next to us, and Fenris diverted our course toward it. When we reached the small grassy area, he nodded. “Yeah, for a year. Worst fucking year of my life.”
“I hear that.” I grimaced, thinking of Edgar and the time I’d been forced into his service.
“It’s amazing how the Gifted get us to work against each other, isn’t it? Instead of attacking them?” His tone was serious, and I hesitated, surprised by both the insight of his statement and the depth of pain in his eyes.
“Yeah, it is. They took so much away from us, then gave us just enough back to make us feel like we’re beholden to them.”
“Yes!” The darkness in his eyes faded as he beamed at me. “That’s exactly what I always say! See, we have so much in common.”
I rolled my eyes. Fenris refused to give up on the insane idea that the bond between us was meant to be a mate bond. He’d mostly taken to joking about it or playfully pointing out our compatibility whenever the opportunity arose, but the expression on his face wh
en I caught him gazing at me made it clear he still felt the pull as strongly as I did. But whereas the rest of the guys and I were perfectly content to ignore the bond, pretending it didn’t exist, the wolf shifter seemed determined to embrace it with open arms.
“Yeah, yeah.” I tried to brush him off. “Okay, so now that we’re in the mountains, it’ll be easier for me to shift?”
He grinned. “Actually, I have no idea. I just wanted to have you to myself for a bit. Plus, Akio was being a dick. That couldn’t have been helping your focus.”
I belted out a laugh. “Yeah, surprisingly, being heckled by an incubus doesn’t make doing magic easier.”
“Well, there are no incubi for miles up here. And who knows? Maybe being closer to nature will help.”
“Okay. I’m ready.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me to the center of the small clearing. Sharp shadows danced on the ground as the afternoon sun cut through the trees around us. The air smelled of pine—just like Fenris always did. I inhaled deeply, loving the scent. After a moment, I kneeled and closed my eyes, finding the spark of magic burning in my center. Movement nearby ruffled my hair, and I felt Fenris crouch down beside me.
“Don’t try to force it,” he whispered, his husky voice raising goosebumps across the back of my neck. “Let it come. Imagine your natural form is a wolf. This form, the human one, that’s the disguise.”
The mountain air was cool on my skin, but I could feel sunlight on my face, warming every place the bright rays touched. I tried to imagine being a wolf in these mountains. Large paws thudding in an even beat against the ground as I raced through the wooded foothills. Tongue lolling and breath puffing in the air as I panted. The sound of other wolves calling to me before I answered them, head thrown back to howl at the sky. Heart racing as I hunted—
I gasped.
The dim light of magic inside me bloomed, expanding and filling my body like a river crashing through a ravine.