Whispered Visions (Shifters & Seers Book 3)

by Tammy Blackwell

  “Let me guess,” Layne said once the door had shut firmly behind Lord Asswipe. “You went to Spain.”

  “The Louvre,” Lizzie said, slumping onto the other end of the couch. Her eyes were red-rimmed and slightly out of focus. “I got to see the Venus de Milo. It was beautiful.”

  Caroline scrambled off the couch the moment Alistair was out of sight and was now brandishing an extension off the vacuum like a sword. She made slashing motions at Layne, but at a slight shake of his head, she refocused her energies, letting the Queen Anne chair become her target.

  Layne sat up and moved as close to Lizzie as he dared. “What’s wrong? What did he do?”

  One pale hand fluttered to her throat.

  “I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing.” He knew her, maybe even better than he knew himself. At the moment she looked as if the weight of the world was bearing down on her shoulders, attempting to drive her to her knees. Weariness was etched into the lines of her forehead while the air around her buzzed with nerves. “Tell me what he did to you.”

  “It’s nothing,” she said again, her voice cracking over the last syllable as she blinked back tears. “He didn’t… It’s nothing.”

  Sure. Nothing at all. She was probably shaking like that because it was oh-so-cold in their air-conditionless apartment.

  Pari walked in front of him, casting him a quelling look just as he was opening his mouth to ask yet again what that bastard had done to her. The other woman perched on the edge of the coffee table, placing herself directly in front of Lizzie. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. The position lined up their faces, forcing Lizzie to look Pari in the eye.

  “Whatever it was,” she said in her thick Scottish accent, “whatever he made you do, it’s not your sin. It’s his.”

  Lizzie’s head dropped forward as tears spilled down her cheeks. She gasped out a sob and the sound went straight to Layne’s heart, squeezing it in a vice.

  “No, look at me,” Pari commanded. “It’s not your fault.”

  “You d-d-don’t understand. I—“

  Pari held up a hand. “No. Don’t say it. Don’t give it life. No matter what it was, you did it to survive. You did it for your friend, and for me, and for my wee one. There is no shame in doing what you must to save us all.”

  Like anyone, Lizzie had seen her ups and downs in life, but Layne had never seen her this broken before. He wanted to chase down whatever demons were bending her back and weighing down her shoulders, and tear them to shreds.

  Instead, he simply sat by and watched as Pari forced Lizzie to drink some hot tea that smelled like a field of weeds before ushering her off to bed. Pari and Caroline soon followed Lizzie’s example, leaving Layne in the dangerous position of being alone with his thoughts.

  When he was a kid, he liked to make up grand stories about why he didn’t have a mother. Sometimes she was a spy working undercover for the CIA. Other times, she died protecting him from a masked gunman who was still on the loose. He wasn’t sure if his friends ever believed him, but he tried very hard to believe himself. Having a mom with a dangerous career or one that was dead was much better than having a mom who simply left because she didn’t love him.

  Lying to himself about his mom was a child’s game, a coping device. The problem was, he never outgrew it. How many lies had he told about Lizzie over the years? How many times had he called her cold or stuck up? How many times had he referred to her as a pampered princess? He hadn’t meant any of them. He knew better. Lizzie wasn’t cold, stuck up, or pampered. She felt with all her heart, cared about everyone, including people she probably shouldn’t, and worked her ass off trying to prove herself to the Alphas. But he said those things over and over, hoping one day he would believe them.

  His mother left before he could even start forming memories. He didn’t even know if it was summer or winter when she took off. But he could remember every tiny detail about the day Lizzie decided he was no longer worth the effort.

  She’d been working on controlling her Sight. Like most Seers, she’d developed her powers sometime around middle school, and as she grew, so did they. Talley was working with her, but Lizzie was growing impatient at all the restrictions the older girl put on their sessions together.

  “I can’t do anything in fifteen second bursts,” she complained, stomping around the music room at their old den in Romania. He wasn’t sure why they had a music room, and neither he nor Lizzie was particularly musical, but for some reason they always gravitated towards that room when it was just the two of them. Sometimes they would mess around with the instruments, but mostly they just sat and talked under the watchful eyes of unused harps and cellos. “It’s not enough time to really latch onto anything. It’s just noise. Loud. Messy. What am I supposed to do with loud and messy?”

  “It’s not always loud and messy,” he reminded her. “Sometimes you figure it out later. You take all that mess and rearrange it until you’ve constructed the core of who a person is. That’s even cooler than what Talley does.”

  Lizzie strummed a violin like a guitar. “It might be if I could get the whole thing, but I can only manage little snippets. It’s like getting random sentences of dialogue without having context. I think I could do it if they would let me, but no. We wouldn’t want to actually let little Lizzie fully test her powers. That would be horrible!”

  He hadn’t been thinking. If he had, he never would have suggested it. If he would have given it a moment’s thought, he would have realized what she would See. But he was young, stupid, and in love, so he said, “You can practice on me if you want.”

  Her hands had been cool on his cheeks. Instead of closing her eyes in concentration, she kept them locked on his. That was the first time he noticed the swirls of amber in her brown eyes. It was like staring into a bottle of his grandfather’s Woodford Reserve.

  And then she was kissing him.

  He’d never kissed anyone before, so it was awkward and wet, but he didn’t care. Lizzie was kissing him. For a single moment, his life was perfect.

  And then she collapsed in his arms.

  It took over thirty minutes for Charlie to revive her. Layne reached for her the moment she was fully awake, and for the first time, she recoiled from his touch. The next day, she was wearing gloves and shying away from all human contact. Her behavior was so odd and unLizzie-like, it was several days before he realized she was avoiding him.

  It shouldn’t have been shocking, but he felt sucker punched all the same. He thought Lizzie was different, but in the end, she realized the same thing his mother had when he was still in diapers: There was nothing good or worthwhile inside him. His father had tried. Toby Hagan was a man of integrity. He worked hard at being a good father despite having a child who didn’t deserve the effort, but in the end, he walked into the middle of a fight he knew he might never return from and left Layne just as surely as his mother had.

  The ironic part was, Lizzie was the one to help him through the debilitating grief he found himself drowning in after his father’s death. He spent the first few months with his grandparents, but then they grew tired of him and handed him off to Charlie and the Alpha Pack. At the time, Lizzie was staying at the Den in Romania. He didn’t meet her until Scout drug the entire Hagan Pack halfway across the world for a Hustings nearly a year after his father died.

  He noticed Lizzie immediately. It was hard to miss that hair and all those freckles. But she’d been quiet and he’d been angry at having to be there, so as far as first impressions went, they weren’t spectacular, which is why he was more than a little surprised to find her crawling in his bed that night.

  She hadn’t said a word. She just snuggled up behind him and threw an arm over his waist. He didn’t say anything either. He was too freaked out. There was a girl in his bed and she was spooning with him. He would have thought it was a dream except he could definitely feel his heart hammering in his chest.

  “Don’t freak out,” she’d
finally said. “I’m here to help.”

  “Help with what?” he squeaked out in a voice that tended to change its mind mid-sentence about whether it belonged to a small child or an adult.

  “That gaping hole in your heart,” she said. “Now, hush. I’m trying to sleep here.”

  And she did. She slept in his bed every single night up until the day she Saw what was beyond his tattered heart. Sometimes they would talk, but mostly she just held him. He thought he should be embarrassed to let a girl hold him like he was some sort of baby, but he never was. It felt too good. He hadn’t realized how starved he was for affection until he got a taste of it. And then one day she took it all away. Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to look back on those weeks with anything other than gratitude. He’d been slipping away, bit by bit, every day, until she’d rescued him from the abyss.

  Now it was Lizzie who needed rescuing.

  The door leading to her set of rooms was less than two yards away, unlocked. He could simply walk through it and into her bedroom and return the favor. He owed it to her. The question was, would she accept what he had to offer?

  Chapter 20

  Lizzie’s bedroom looked a lot like his, but with lots of flowers and lace. She looked perfectly natural laying in the middle of the tall bed, surrounded by all things dainty and feminine.

  Layne doubted he looked quite as cute and delicate in his bed.

  She kept the curtains pulled back, letting the light from the waxing moon spill through the windows. In the distance he could see the outline of dark trees against a backdrop of a million stars. His desire to be out among them was a physical ache. The coyote inside him strained towards the lure of the outdoors. It was nearly impossible for a coyote Shifter to Change outside of a full moon, but he knew if his feet could touch earth he would be on all fours tonight. His coyote needed to run free.

  He found himself standing in front of the window without giving any thought to walking over to it. It felt as if his skin was soaking up the moon’s light the way it normally guzzled in her brother’s fiery rays.

  Ninety-seven days. Ninety-seven days since he walked with the earth solid beneath his feet. Ninety-seven days since he’d seen the world beyond this rundown mansion. At times it felt as if the rest of the world was nothing more than a figment of his imagination. Entire days went by now without him thinking of ways to escape.

  He had given up.

  He hadn’t realized it until this moment, but the truth of it sucked the breath from his lungs.

  He had given up, resigned himself to dying in captivity. And that death wasn’t in the distant future. His coyote was too wounded to keep going. How much longer did he have? One full moon? Maybe two?

  How had that happened? If his life was the only one at stake, he could understand it. Quitting was always easier than fighting, but it wasn’t an option when you were fighting for someone other than yourself. His father taught him that.

  They needed out of this hell hole. They needed to be in a place where Caroline could run and play whenever she wanted, where Lizzie wouldn’t be forced to use her Sight, and where Pari could begin to atone for whatever sins the SHP had forced her to commit.

  “Layne?” Lizzie’s voice, made low and raspy by sleep, pulled him out of his thoughts.

  “Yeah. It’s me.”

  He walked across the room slowly so he wouldn’t scare her.

  “What are you doing?”

  If it were a normal bed, he would have simply sat on the edge of it, but the beds in Brownlow Manor weren’t normal. They were all at least four feet high and required step ladders to get into. He debated with himself for at least half a minute before climbing up and easing himself onto the mattress.

  “I thought you might need a friend,” he said once he was sitting far enough over he didn’t feel like he was going to plummet to his death, but not so far over he was in any danger of touching her. “I know Pari thought she was doing what is best, but I know you better than she does. You need to talk about things and get them out of your brain. You have to declutter.”

  She didn’t say anything or move for a long time. Layne wasn’t completely sure she was breathing. When she finally started talking her voice was so soft he wouldn’t have heard her without his Shifter hearing.

  “I killed a man,” she said.

  He tried not to react. He focused on his breathing and the beating of his heart while willing his body to be still.

  “Not with my own hands,” she clarified, “but it was my fault all the same.”

  “You sound pretty sure of yourself,” he said, knowing if he denied her culpability outright it would make her stop talking. “What did you do?”

  “I told Alistair he was going to sell him out, but he wasn’t. I knew what would happen to him even if I wasn’t thinking about it at the time. I knew I was setting him up to die, and I did it anyway.”

  “So another SHP member is gone from this world. Good riddance.”

  The words were casual, but the thumping of his heart wasn’t. This was war, and there were always casualties in war. His head knew that fact, but his soul was having a little trouble with the reality of it. Someone was dead, and like Lizzie said, even though they hadn’t delivered the killing blow, they both held some of the blame. It had been Lizzie who told the lie, but it was Layne who hadn’t done his duty as a Shifter and protected his Seer.

  Lizzie rolled onto her back, tilting her face so she could see his.

  “It was Rashid. The Shifter I told you about. The one who was stealing art for Alistair.”

  “Even better. The Alphas will probably give you some sort of special recognition at the next Hustings.”

  “Layne, don’t. Don’t try to make it sound like it was nothing, or even worse, that it was a good thing.”

  He wasn’t above saying whatever he thought would ease some of her guilt, but this time he was actually telling the truth.

  “What do you think would have happened if we had escaped and told the Alphas what he was doing?”

  Lizzie’s eyes slid to the window.

  “Exactly,” Layne said. “Even if you had put a gun against his head and pulled the trigger, you would have been doing your duty as a member of the Alpha Pack. All you’ve done is saved Scout and Liam the trouble of having a trial.”

  Her teeth bit down into her bottom lip, and she still wouldn’t look at him.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked, trying a different tactic. “What did Rashid do?”

  “Nothing,” she said so quickly he knew it wasn’t the complete truth. She must have sensed his disbelief because she went on to clarify, “He tried to provoke me. He truly hated all of us just because of what we are. In that way, he was probably the most loyal member of the SHP Alistair has. He would have done anything to bring us down. But at the museum he was just… Rashid. A hurt little boy hiding in a grown man’s body lashing out at the world around him while trying to appear completely apathetic.”

  Layne winced, the description hitting a little too close to home.

  “I guess that description applies to most of us, huh?” Lizzie’s words mirrored his own thoughts, and not for the first time he wondered exactly how much her Sight had grown since their days as childhood friends.

  Ignoring her question and his own unease, he asked, “So if it wasn’t something Rashid did, what made you tell the Duke of Dumbasses he was a turncoat? I seriously doubt you did it just to see what would happen.”

  “I almost got caught trying to send a message to the Alphas.”

  There was a good chance this conversation was going to be the death of him. How many times could one person’s heart stop beating and then start pounding uncontrollably before they keeled over?

  “You sent a message to the Alphas?”

  Hope ballooned big and bright in his chest. The slight shake of Lizzie’s head was like a sharp needle plunged into the middle, leaving nothing but a hollow space.

  “I didn’t get a chance to finish it. I tr
ied to send it anyway, but…” Her sigh was a cocktail of disappointment and hopelessness.

  “You’ll get another chance,” he assured her. “We’re going to get out of here. I promise.” He wasn’t giving up. He couldn’t.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” Her eyes were bleak when they met his. “You’re right. This place is changing us. One day I’m going to look in the mirror and not know the person looking back at me. I can feel it happening already. It’s like I’ve become untethered.”

  “Liz—”

  “Will you hold me? Please. I need to feel grounded, even if it’s only for a little while.”

  A sharp intake of breath echoed in the silent room, and Layne realized belatedly the sound came from him. His fingers were numb and clumsy as they searched his pockets for the pair of gloves he’d grabbed before coming to her room.

  She rolled back onto her side, and he slid in behind her. They fit together differently than they had three years ago. It wasn’t just that he was finally getting a chance to be the big spoon. He was bigger. Not just taller, but the hours and hours of training had turned his twig-like arms into muscled weapons, capable of disabling an enemy or forming a cage of protection around his Seer. Layne wasn’t a big guy, his coyote kept his body lean and compact, but against Lizzie’s soft curves he felt like a titan.

  “I’ve missed this,” she said, burrowing deeper into his embrace.

  Layne had to swallow down a lump in his throat to reply. “Me too,” he finally said, wondering if she heard the primal edge to his voice.

  Her hand whispered down the long-sleeved shirt he’d thrown on and stilled at the edge of the pink knitted gloves she’d made him as a joke. “I’m sorry,” she said, her finger dipping below the band and slowly tracing down his hand, the glove sliding away in its wake. Her touch was so light as to be nearly nonexistent, but Layne had never felt anything so strongly in his life. The sensation traveled from knuckle to finger and then exploded throughout his body. He couldn’t have said anything if his life depended on it.