by Hettie Ivers
I remembered now that I’d also read stories of people entering this forest and experiencing visions and memories of the deceased, or of recalling detailed memories of past lives, only to forget all but vague recollections once they’d exited the forest.
“I can feel her emotions—her initial sense of panic when she couldn’t control the teleport; the confusion she felt—how inconceivable it all seemed to her at first. Her absolute denial that any of it could possibly be happening to her—she never made mistakes.”
Kai broke down in a fit of sobs again, and Alcaeus put a consoling arm around his friend’s shoulders.
I felt a strong vibration of magic shift the air around me. I knew Alcaeus felt it, too, when his head jerked up from where it had been bent over Kai’s form. Chaos’s heart rate spiked, yet he turned and gave me a casual smile and a “thumbs up” and said, “Don’t worry, he’s totally fine. This is a great breakthrough moment he’s having. Everything’s good.”
“There was no way in Maribel’s mind that Nuriel and Gabe could ever best her,” Kai continued to relay. “The final destruction of the Salvatella pack had been prophesied to come by her hand—she was smarter, more powerful than the Salvatella brothers could ever hope to be, and she knew it.” He shook his head. “She knew it in her last moments that this was all wrong, and she simply couldn’t accept defeat.” He cried out and yanked on his hair, unraveling. “Oh, God, Al, I can feel her desperate scramble to figure out a way to stop it as she felt her body begin its inevitable separation from her spirit—because she’d been caught in the teleport for too long. And me … her thoughts of me when …”
His voice broke as he resumed sobbing, his body curling into a ball on the ground.
I felt my eyes blink with tears as Alcaeus spoke softly to Kai, consoling him. I’d like to say that mine were tears of empathy for Kai and for how he’d obviously suffered over the loss of this Maribel, but it felt more personal than that somehow.
“Kai, man, keep in mind, this place—the spirits here … they do weird things to people’s minds,” Alcaeus told him. Then he turned and whispered to me with a reassuring smile, “He just needs a minute.”
When Kai began growling and clawing at the ground and at himself like a distraught, wounded animal, Alcaeus winced and said, “But, hey, this is all good. You just … go there, man. It’s important to finally work this stuff out … after one hundred and eight years …”
Alcaeus turned to me and said, “Maribel was Kai’s mate.”
My mouth formed an “o,” even as I felt my brows draw together.
Alcaeus must have sensed my confusion, because he explained, “Yes, they were true mates—like you and I are. They even marked one another. But when Maribel died, she couldn’t accept the idea of Kai dying because of her—because of their mate connection. So she found a way to remain in limbo between worlds for ninety-eight years—unbeknownst to Kai and the rest of us—in order to keep Kai alive.”
My mouth fell open. Jesus. Talk about dedication. And for Killjoy Kai?
“No one knew how Kai had managed to survive his true mate’s death. For nearly a century, his survival was an unexplainable anomaly of the werewolf world.”
The ground shook beneath me.
Alcaeus felt it, too, because he muttered, “Fuck,” before quickly continuing to explain for my benefit, “Maribel stole life force from the living and consumed souls of the dead who were on their path to crossing over in order to remain in limbo and absorb more power.”
When another, stronger vibration of magic pulsed over us like a current, Chaos frowned and looked down at Kai, who remained inconsolable. He was behaving more animal than human now.
To me, Alcaeus said, “What Maribel did was an unprecedented phenomenon that breaks every rule of the cosmos and our species, basically. Eventually, she amassed enough power over time and figured out how to communicate with and forge alliances and agreements with members of the living—those who could be bribed or coerced into helping her—in order to hijack a power source strong enough to sever her mate connection to Kai.” The ground shook again. “So that he could live on freely without her. And be miserable.”
He’d spoken the very last part under his breath, but I still caught it. Wow. Again, that seemed like a Herculean effort just to save one guy who was a total pill to be around. Then again, it was just possible Maribel had actually done it for herself—so she wouldn’t have to spend eternity with Killjoy.
“Kai, man, I know this is probably a cathartic, super-important emotional breakthrough moment you’re having here, and as much as I’d love to camp out in a haunted forest with you tonight discussing this shit, I think your Gabe theory is spot on. This was no accident. It was a set-up—because we’re about to be ambushed.”
Alcaeus
There were at least thirteen werelocks approaching, and twice as many werewolves.
Don’t look panicked. Don’t act freaked out.
“About to be ambushed” probably hadn’t been the best choice of phrasing to use in front of Avery, but I needed to get through to Kai somehow. I’d done a semi-decent job of keeping Avery calm thus far by distracting her with tales of Maribel, the greatest psycho werelock genius of the last century.
I turned back to Avery with what I hoped was a reassuring smile as I frantically tried to tap Lessa’s mind yet again. Blocked. Damn. If anyone could teleport us out of this, it was Lessa. I knew that it was no small feat trying to teleport out of the Romanian Bermuda Triangle. And Kai had only been teleporting regularly for the past decade—once undead Maribel had finally passed on and the disturbing visions of her that had kept him from teleporting previously, ceased.
I could’ve reached out to Alex for help, of course, but I’d just as soon eat my own liver than give my baby brother something to hold over my head for the next century. And as rude as Kai had been to Avery, that was nothing compared to how Alex was likely to behave toward her given his track record. I wasn’t ready to introduce Avery to Alex yet.
“So, sweetheart, when I said ‘ambushed,’ I didn’t mean that in … an overly bad sense of the word or anything,” I told Avery. She gave me that adorable “what the fuck” face of hers in response. God, she was perfect. I needed to get inside of her and put my mark on her neck, stat. “Just trying to keep the night exciting,” I joked. “This is like our second date—time to ratchet things up, right?”
I turned back to Kai and asked, “Any chance you can teleport us out of here?”
He looked as if he was doing better and pulling his shit together. He wasn’t sobbing and clawing at himself anymore, at least. Whenever Kai allowed himself to get emotional—which was rare—he reverted to his primal nature in a big way.
Which possibly wasn’t such a bad thing right now … come to think of it.
Kai shook his head and sat up. His eyes were still his wolf’s blue hue, but his claws and fangs had retracted already. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to teleport out of a magnetized paranormal vortex like this, Al?”
Yep, he was mostly back to normal. Crap, that was fast. I’d have to rile him up again.
“Is this all part of the excitement?” Avery asked with a nervous laugh, unsteadily arising to her feet on the forest ground that was now shaking continuously beneath us. “If you tell me right now that you staged all of this, I promise I won’t even be mad.”
Fuck. She was starting to smell terrified. And yet she was still cracking jokes and being cute with me. We were totally going to live happily ever after.
“Don’t worry, honey, we got this.”
I pivoted and slapped my palms down onto Kai’s shoulders, facing him at eye level. “You want to avenge Maribel? You want to rip Gabriel into tiny pieces for killing your mate? Then we need to get out of this trap alive. I estimate there are about forty werelocks and werewolves coming our way.”
“Holy motherfucker, did you say forty?” Avery asked, rushing over to us.
“Yeah … ah … give or take. Tru
st me, it sounds way worse than it’ll be in reality when—when they get here,” I faltered. “Kai and I do this sort of thing all the time.” I turned my focus back to my best friend. “Listen to me. I don’t want your head in this, Kai. I don’t want you to strategize or overthink your battle approach. I need primal Kai right now, okay?”
He shook his head.
The sound of paws thumping and crunching through the forest could be heard coming from all directions now.
“Yes,” I told him. “I need circa 1618 feral-arctic-beast Kai—the Kai who attacked my father in the wilds of Greenland and tried to take his whole head off in one bite. I need circa 1638 red-haze Kai who gnawed a Portuguese Inquisitor General’s body in half in two bites for torturing and raping young girls.”
His eyes glowed brighter and he growled at the mention of the inquisitor. I was reaching him. “I need you to kill whatever comes at you as fast as possible. Got it? Just focus on Maribel’s final memories, and channel all of that rage and sexual frustration you’ve built up over the last one hundred and eight years into tearing things apart.”
A howl rang out through the trees. Another responded. Then another.
Kai’s eyes had taken on that bright, vacant glow they always got when he was about to go full-blown crazed animal.
“Hellfire, we’re surrounded,” Avery exclaimed. “They’re really close. Shouldn’t we throw a—a flashbang or … something? Anything? Can’t you guys conjure weapons?”
We already had a weapon. It was just a matter of drawing the White King out. He was nearly foaming at the mouth with rage now, and I hadn’t even yanked his biggest trigger yet.
“These werewolves coming for us, Kai, they’re the same ones who hunted the arctic werewolf into extinction. They massacred your family—your entire pack. And now they’re coming for you. What are you going to do? Shift!”
By the time I gave the order, he’d already done it, morphing into the biggest, angriest, only pure white arctic werewolf left in existence.
I heard Avery’s sharp intake of breath, followed by, “Nice coat!” Drawing my attention to the fact that she was still in human form.
What the hell?
“Was that true?” she asked. “That’s not true, right? That was just your pump-up speech I’m guessing.”
My Alpha command should have caused her to shift as well. I was seconds away from shifting myself. I turned feral eyes to her and ordered, “Shift, Avery.”
Her eyes had shifted and her fangs and claws were already out, but she hadn’t let her wolf out any further than that. And she didn’t so much as twitch at my command.
My eyes flew wide. “Why aren’t you shifting?” I was hoping to keep her out of the fighting as much as possible, but she had to be in wolf form, regardless. She was already more fragile, being that she was a common werewolf.
“Oh, don’t wait for me; I’m good like this.” She gave me a nervous smile and dismissive hand gesture. “I’ll shift when I need to.”
My jaw fell open. The wolves were nearly upon us. I needed to shift and back up Kai. “You’ll shift now, Avery. Now. It’s not safe otherwise.”
“No, really, I’m fine.” Her fingers gripped and fidgeted with the hem of her T-shirt. “I do my whole ‘wolf thing’ a little differently than most, but it works for me. You’ll see.”
What the ever-loving fuck was she talking about? There was only one way to do your “wolf thing”—as a goddamned wolf. You were either in wolf form or you weren’t.
“This is not up for debate!” I yelled at her, and felt awful for doing it. I promised myself I’d never yell at her again unless her life was in jeopardy—which it was right now!
“I said I’m fine as I am, Chaos,” she sassed me back, planting her hands on her hips. “I always start out fighting in human form. I shift if I need to. I’m an excellent fighter in human form.”
This was utter insanity. What was wrong with her? She was a common werewolf, not a werelock.
I swallowed the shouted retort on the tip of my tongue and tried to get a grip on my mounting anger over her cavalier attitude and carelessness. She was putting her life in danger. And in doing so, she was putting my life and Kai’s life in jeopardy.
I had to take a calming breath and remind myself that my mate hadn’t grown up as a werewolf, and she had never been accepted for long by any pack. She obviously had a severely limited, faulty frame of reference for how things worked in our world. She seemed to have no respect for wolf pack hierarchy—no basic understanding of what it meant to take orders or to fight as a pack.
Dozens of pairs of wolf eyes could be seen coming through the trees now, rapidly approaching our small clearing. White King Kai didn’t wait for them to break the tree line though; he charged right into the trees to meet the first three werewolves closest to him, taking their heads off in seconds flat, and blasting their bodies into the path of other wolves charging forward as a welcome message.
This was going to be epic. Kai was at his most fun whenever he let his wolf go full-blown off-the-chain savage.
“Dang,” Avery murmured. “Wasn’t expecting that from the doc.”
Most didn’t. But most didn’t know that Kai was a werewolf who’d been reared in reverse. All werewolves were born human and shifted for the first time at puberty. Except for Kai.
Kai had existed solely in his wolf form out in the wild among common wolves, not werewolves, for the first sixteen years of his life. He’d had to learn fairly late into his development how to shift into and remain in human form—not to mention how to behave like a human. To this day, Kai often came across as overly controlled and stiff in human form, because his first and true form would always be that of a wolf.
I was reluctant to leave Avery unguarded, but the sooner I started killing, the safer she would be. “Steer clear of the werelocks,” I ordered her before shifting and running to join Kai.
We were down to five werelocks and seven werewolves. Much to my irritation and ongoing disquiet, Avery still hadn’t shifted.
While she hadn’t attempted to fight any werelocks yet, thank God, I had endured witnessing Avery kill and kick the shit out of several werewolves while in her human form. And her methods were downright dangerous, to say the least. They were clumsy. Unorthodox. Dirty. And surprisingly effective.
She would feign injuries. She’d act afraid, cower, and pretend to surrender, and then when the wolves pounced at her—mistaking her for an easy kill—she’d spring up and punch them in the nuts or claw their eyes. She’d latch onto tails and throw wolves into trees and other werewolves. I’d watched in fascination and horror as she’d jumped and wrestled a werewolf to the ground, put him in a chokehold, and snapped his neck.
I couldn’t believe that this was how she’d been fighting werewolves for all this time. And that she was still alive!
Because there were so many of them, eventually the werewolves caught on to her ruse and she was forced to rely on her fighting skills alone. Multiple times, I stopped fighting, shifted to my human form, and ordered Avery to shift. But my commands continued to have zero effect on her.
Once Kai’s initial primal killing haze had calmed enough for him to take notice of what Avery was doing, he’d been horrified as well. He had shifted to human form to try and order Avery to shift, too, to no avail.
A few times it had looked as if she intended to shift at last, because she’d stop and remove an article of clothing—before continuing to fight. I was quick to reassure her that I would conjure new clothing for her. Kai did the same.
I lost an arm—albeit temporarily—while battling two werelocks at one point because my focus got thrown off as I was worrying about Avery when it appeared as if she was trying to sneak off and find cover behind some trees in order to shift in private of all absurd things.
Kai really lost his shit then, shouting, “Bloody Christ, woman, do you need a fucking phone booth like Superman? Shift, goddamnit! Shift!”
Kai took to teleporting Ave
ry out of harm’s way in order to keep her safe and to help keep me focused on fighting. He would only teleport her ten-to twenty-yard distances at a time, gaining a better and better sense of how to navigate the magnetic pull of the forest each time he did. And while it was an annoyance and distraction for him to be doing it—as evidenced by his constant screaming at her to shift—I was thankful as hell that he was looking out for Avery. She’d become the enemy’s prize target with her odd behavior and bizarre fighting style.
We were down to only three werelocks left to kill, and I’d just pulled one werelock’s heart out and blasted it across the forest out of his reach, when White King Kai’s fuse finally blew beyond control in his annoyance with my mate.
“If you don’t shift this goddamn second, I swear I’ll kill you myself!” he roared before shifting into his wolf form and charging straight at her.
Avery screamed obscenities at him, but her body finally gave way to her inner animal at long last in what was the most stilted, awkward, spastic, unnecessarily prolonged, and painful-looking shift that I’d ever witnessed in my four centuries.
I was so staggered by it that I lost an arm once more to one of the two remaining werelocks standing. I probably would’ve lost my head next if Kai hadn’t teleported me—and my arm—out of harm’s reach and over to Avery’s side in that moment.
Eager to unleash his fury over Avery’s outrageous behavior, Kai raced off in wolf form to shred every vital organ he could from the final two werelocks.
I probably should have helped him, but I simply stood there next to Avery, staring in a state of disbelief as I feasted my eyes on my mate’s gorgeous red-golden coat of fur.
By God, the fates had mated me to a ginger!
Avery
“You want to tell us what the hell that was about back there?” Kai snarled. He slammed his palm against the stone accent wall of the entry foyer we’d teleported to, before proceeding to angrily punch a code into an outdated-looking security system keypad in the wall next to where he’d struck. It looked like he was deactivating a motion detection sensor.