by W. J. May
Rae tried to catch his eye as they headed up the familiar steps, but he kept his gaze locked firmly on the door. She knew that expression, though. There were a million things going on inside that beautiful head of his. And as Molly walked past him over the threshold, she could have sworn he leaned down to mutter in her ear.
“Did you leave your jacket in my car?”
Rae stifled another grin as she walked in behind the tiny redhead who was still shaking her head. Yeah, there might be hope for her fiancé after all…
It was a moment to savor, but all Rae’s good feelings stopped the second they stepped inside. Instead of heading automatically to the living room, like the gang did in most circumstances when they needed to work something out, they froze right there in the foyer.
Because I’m not one of the gang, she thought. Because I’m not welcome here.
It was a chilling thought, but she forced herself to straighten up as her mother’s voice echoed a greeting from down the hall.
Fortunately, it’s not up to them. Because Mom will know me. She wasn’t there with Samantha. And even when Cromfield freaking brainwashed her and sent her to France, she still knew who I—
“Who’s this?”
Rae’s heart froze in her chest as Beth walked out from the kitchen. There was a half-drunk mug of coffee in her hand, and judging by the flour stains clouding her pants she had been in the process of cooking breakfast.
“Mom?” she blurted before she could stop herself.
It was Beth’s turn to freeze. Her face paled dramatically as both women stared at each other for what seemed to be a small eternity.
Then she blinked in quick succession, and her lips turned up into a grin. “That’s a cruel trick to play on a woman who’s been brainwashed.” She lay a comic hand upon her heart before turning to Devon for explanation. “Seriously, who is this?”
He didn’t answer. He just stared at Rae.
Giant tears had started rolling down her cheeks. She hadn’t realized how much she had been banking on Beth until the woman looked dead at her and didn’t recognize her face. It was a deeper hurt than she had imagined. One that cut her to the very core.
“This is…uh…” Molly bit her lip, trying to come up with the best way to say it. “This is a girl we found this morning. She…”
“—she told us a bit of a story,” Luke finished helpfully.
“Mom,” Rae took a shaky step forward, feeling like at any moment she might faint dead away, “it’s me. Rae. Your daughter. You have…you have to know who I am.”
Beth’s eyebrows lifted into her hair as a hint of that same guarded defensiveness flickered across her face. “Is she being serious? This isn’t some kind of joke?” She seemed unable to talk to Rae directly.
Another fact that broke her daughter’s heart.
A half-choked sob rose in Rae’s chest, and for a moment it was all she could do to stand there. Aware that every eye in the room was fastened upon her. Seeing, but not knowing. Hearing, but not believing. Aware that she was officially a stranger in her own home. “You don’t know me,” she whispered. At this point, she was trying to convince herself. “I didn’t…I didn’t think her power would stretch this far.”
Beth’s ears perked up at the word power, and she turned again for answers. “Whose power? What is she talking about?”
“She claims to be our long-lost best friend,” Julian said softly. “Your daughter. Kraigan’s half-sister. Devon’s…” He trailed off, better to just leave that one alone. “She says that she’s been with us since Guilder. That this is her house, too. But that some super-villain named Samantha, with the power to persuade, made us all forget her.”
Rae hung her head in despair. There was something horrible about hearing it said out loud by another. In Julian’s gentle voice the story sounded ridiculous even to her.
“At which point, Dev decided to bring her home.” Gabriel smiled. “Like a stray.”
Like a stray.
Rae flinched and lifted her head angrily, but no matter what she did she couldn’t seem to stop crying. Noiselessly, continuously crying. Like her heart had finally broken for good.
“She knows things about us,” Devon said defensively. “Personal things. Stories. Details.”
“I know them because I was there with you,” Rae choked. When she couldn’t bear the look on his face, she turned to Julian instead. “Jules, that movie fest. The one where we—”
“That was with Molly,” he interrupted gently. “I don’t know how you possibly found out about it…but you weren’t there.”
Rae turned to Molly to deny it, but the girl was slowly nodding her head. A vacant yet confused look passed over her face before it cleared with a sudden fictitious memory. “Yeah…back in the dorms.”
“You only think it was the dorms because I said it when telling the story!” Rae interjected desperately. “Try to remember anything else about it, Molly! You can’t, because you weren’t there!”
Molly’s blue eyes fastened on her face, but she never stopped nodding. “I was there,” she said steadily. “I remember being there. You weren’t.”
“This is getting ridiculous,” Angel interjected, suddenly bored by the whole thing. “My arm feels like it’s about to fall off, and I don’t want this crazy chick in my house. Get her out.”
Get her out?
Rae jerked like someone had poured cold water down her back as she suddenly understood the next steps that were about to happen.
She’d lost her friends. She’d lost her family. Now she was about to lose her home, too.
“You guys…” she began desperately, raising her hands peaceably as someone behind her opened the front door, “you can’t just throw me out. Please, I…we need to fix this!”
Devon’s face tightened at the note of panic in her voice, and he glanced around imploringly. “Yeah, you’re right. Beth doesn’t know her. But we still don’t know how she found out that Simon was staying here as well. It might be worth it to—”
“Devon,” Gabriel said his name patiently, like he was trying to explain something to an easily distractible child, “everyone in our world knows that Simon was remanded into our custody. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that he’d be here with us.”
Devon gazed around the room with a troubled frown. “You’re right, but—”
“Dev.” Gabriel waited in silence, until Devon finally lifted his head. “Did you honestly think that Beth was going to know her?”
Time stopped as the two men locked eyes.
Then, with an almost imperceptible sigh, Devon shook his head.
Please, no!
Rae watched in horror as that door swung shut forever, trapping her in isolation on the other side. As if to add a note of irony to her situation the actual door behind her swung even farther open, beckoning her out into the cold.
“She’s harmless, and she’s hurt,” Julian said quietly. Glancing between her and Devon, it was hard to say which person worried him more. “We might as well let her stay the night—”
But Gabriel wasn’t having it. He already had one threat confined to the basement. He wasn’t inviting another to stay in his house.
“My sister is hurt, Julian.” His eyes flashed a dangerous warning. “Why don’t you worry about her instead?”
Julian glanced over, and at once Rae was forgotten. He walked across the entryway without another word and scooped Angel off her feet, ignoring his own wounds altogether. On the way up the stairs, he pulled out his phone and began texting. Presumably to request Alicia’s healing touch.
Likewise, Beth took one look at the weeping girl and decided to wash her hands of the whole thing. Too many times had she been taken in by a lone woman posing as a friend. It would not happen again.
“Hurry up and deal with it,” she instructed as she headed back to the kitchen. “The pancakes are getting cold, and I’d rather like to know why it looks like the lot of you lost a fight to a pack of heavily-armed wolves. I ca
n’t wait to hear what excuse you come up with this time…”
“Molly—” Rae reached out as her best friend walked past into the kitchen. Hoping without hope that something would change. That the heavens would open with her own personal miracle.
But Molly simply gave her a long look before glancing out the door at the cold November morning. It had started to rain. “Keep the jacket,” she said quietly. “It looks to be your size, anyway.”
Rae’s heart fell as, one by one, they all disappeared. Kraigan made sure to throw a sarcastic, “Good luck, sis!” her way before vanishing into the kitchen.
In the end, it was only she, Devon, and Gabriel still standing in the entryway. The tension was palpable.
“Well, it was a pleasure.” Gabriel cocked his head outside before bringing up a hand to rub the scratch marks on his face. “Let’s be sure to do it again real soon.”
“Gabriel, shut up.” Devon was in no mood to joke. In fact, he alone looked like he was having qualms about turning a delusional, wounded girl out into the cold. He tentatively lifted his eyes to meet his fiancée’s. “Do you…do you have a place you can go?”
“Dev,” Gabriel interjected, “there’s a bus stop two miles up the road. She’ll be fine.”
“I said shut up, Gabriel.” Devon flashed him a dark look before striding forward and taking Rae deliberately by the hand. “You wanted her gone—she’s gone. I’ll walk her out.”
There was a beat of awkward silence. Gabriel opened his mouth to argue, but after a second of consideration he closed it again and walked away with a shrug.
The second he was gone, Devon released Rae’s hand.
The two of them walked in silence out onto the front porch, and then gazed out into the rain.
For a moment, neither knew what to say.
Apparently, Devon didn’t understand why he was concerned and not dismissive.
Rae wondered if that would be the last time he ever held her hand.
Then, when the silence could go on no longer, Devon turned to her with another sigh. “Do you need a ride somewhere? I could drive you—”
“No,” Rae said quickly. She was falling apart by the second, and for the first time since the two of them had met she didn’t want Devon to be around to see it. “I can…I’ll…I’ll figure something out.”
He looked at her appraisingly for a second, then nodded. “Gabriel’s right. There’s a bus stop about two miles down the road.” He pointed towards the end of the driveway. “If you just make a left—”
“Yeah, I know where it is.” Rae stuffed her hands into her pockets, staring stiffly out into the rain. “I drive past it almost every day.”
Again, Devon looked at her quizzically. He glanced inside for a moment, checking to make sure no one was listening, before he took a step closer. Then another step after that. “Do you really believe that?” he asked quietly. “Truly, I mean. No games.”
Rae’s heart broke as she gazed up at him. So close. So impossibly far away. “Truly. No games.”
He pulled in a sharp breath, like someone had punched him in the ribs, then dropped his gaze to the ground. They stood there for a long moment, and when he finally looked back up his shoulders wilted with an almost nostalgic sort of sigh. “Well, good luck…Rae.”
If Rae thought just seeing him was bad enough, hearing him say her name was a torture of the most excruciating degree. Her face tightened painfully, and a wave of fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. “Yeah,” she gasped, trying to keep it together, “thanks.”
Without another word, she headed out into the rain. Crying so hard she could no longer tell between rain and tears. Shaking so hard she no longer knew whether it was from the cold. It wasn’t until she felt a hand on her shoulder that she realized Devon had been calling her the entire time.
She spun around in surprise, trying to wipe a tear from her cheek. “Sorry. I didn’t hear you.” She squinted up at him, unable to reconcile the fact that she didn’t know the next time she’d see his face. “What…what’s wrong?”
Even though he was the one who’d stopped her Devon froze, looking as if he was wondering the exact same thing. He stared at her for a second more before making up his mind. “Can I ask you another question? Truth?”
Something about his tone tripled her heartbeat. “Of course. Anything you want.” She nervously tucked her hair behind her ears.
His gaze followed the gesture. “How did you really know my name?”
Rae stared up at him, prepared to repeat everything she’d been saying for the last hour. But it was in that moment that she realized something very important.
He wasn’t going to be convinced, because he honestly didn’t remember her. He couldn’t. It was no good fighting it—the man was under a spell. But that didn’t mean that she couldn’t convince him in other ways. It didn’t mean that their story had to come to an end.
After all, why were spells made…if not to be broken?
For a moment, she gazed up into those sparkling eyes. Eyes that were gazing just as intently down into hers. Then she smiled, and she answered him. In her own way.
“I told you…”
She leaned up on her toes, and kissed him softly on the lips.
“…I know you.”
With that, she bravely strode out into the rain. Armed with a confidence she thought she’d lost the second he didn’t know her name. Armed with a hope that refused to be extinguished.
Armed with a fierce kind of faith.
A faith on which she was staking her entire world.
No, their story wasn’t finished just yet…
Chapter 3
“Excuse me…Miss? Miss?”
Rae was slumped over on a cheap vinyl seat. Rain-soaked hair, disheveled clothes, every earthly possession she had in a bag clutched against her chest. Her face was plastered up against the window, the glass fogged up with every sleeping breath. And no matter how hard she’d tried to clean the soot and blood off her face while waiting at the bus stop, she still looked like an escaped extra from some particularly grisly movie set.
The bus driver tried again, tentatively poking her in the side. The rest of the passengers had been too afraid to try, lest some of her ‘trouble’ rub off on them. “Miss, we’ve arrived at your stop—”
Rae jerked fully awake, clutching the bag tighter against her chest while her head swiveled around in alarm. When her eyes came to rest on the driver she straightened up in a hurry, hoping very much that she hadn’t drooled. “I’m sorry, what was that?”
The man looked at her with great pity, gesturing outside the window. “Your stop, Miss.”
By now the rest of the bus was clearly staring—while pretending not to stare—at the beautiful young renegade, the one who had what looked like tiny pieces of breakfast cereal stuck to her hair.
Rae pawed them out nervously, thinking back to her showdown in the supermarket, while pushing shakily to her feet. As she made her way down the long aisle, she flashed an elderly couple sitting by the door a sweet smile. “Food fight,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Sometimes you’ve gotta play for keeps.”
The couple stared in shock for a second before nodding hastily as she departed the bus. Of course, their astonishment doubled when they peered out the window and saw where she was going.
“Yep,” Rae muttered under her breath, “it’s a nice house.”
Without another word she swung her purse over her shoulder, hitched up her collar, and started making her way across the street, her eyes fixed on the lovely little cottage.
Little might have been understating it. For that matter, cottage might have been the doing the same thing. The house was enormous. A three-story mini-mansion nestled right in the heart of ritzy, residential London. Bordered by a park on one side and a picturesque little stream on the other, the place looked like it was something out of a fairytale. The place where all the heroes came back at the end of the day to hang up their capes and call home.
Iro
nically, that wasn’t too far off the mark.
Devon and Julian had bought the house together at the very height of their Privy Council crime-fighting days. In fact, they’d bought it just a day after Molly had let slip that she and Rae were moving into a penthouse apartment just on the other side of the park. Realistically, there was no way that anyone so young would be able to afford such a coveted piece of real estate, but working as agents for a top-secret, supernatural organization came with one or two perks along the way. The paycheck was one of them.
Rae trudged up the front steps with a sigh, and started rummaging around underneath the flower pots. She and Molly had roared with laughter when the boys had decided to hide a spare key, especially in such a mundane place. Odds were, if anyone was foolish enough to break into their house either Julian would see them coming, or they wouldn’t be the type to use the door.
Today, however, Rae was grateful for the assist. She was equally grateful that, as beautiful as the place was, it was temporarily deserted. She needed a place to lay low and think.
She found the key under the third pot and made her way inside, making a mental note to water the poor things sometime later that night. All the lights were off, and it was freezing from the prolonged lack of heat, but other than that it was exactly as she remembered it.
Decadent, yet homey. Clean, but messy enough that one could easily deduce two young men lived there together. That being said, the boys had left in a hurry.
There was still a mug of coffee sitting on the kitchen table. A pile of laundry lay by the stairs to the basement. A forgotten phone charger was still plugged into the wall.
As far as Rae could remember, the last time that house had seen people was the day that she and the rest of the gang had raced off to Guilder to find evidence against Victor Mallins. It was supposed to be an easy mission—in and out.
Of course, things hadn’t exactly gone as planned.
The gang had been ambushed. Gabriel had been shot. Rae had been stabbed. Devon had almost killed the guy who did it. They woke up a day later in the medical bay over at the Abbey, and from there they had proceeded straight to Scotland to begin training for the battle against Cromfield. The beautiful house was forgotten. The penthouse apartment was sold.