by May Dawson
Then Clearborn came back in through the doors. I jumped to my feet, ready to fight him if he posed some danger to Skyla and to Aunt Jennifer, who was sprawled out on the floor.
He held his hand out to me to shake. “Hi, Blake. I’m the dean of your brother’s school. And I bet you have some questions.”
I stared at him. “Chase isn’t really on a school trip, is he?”
“No,” he admitted. He moved to Aunt Jennifer and squatted beside her. He looked at her face, then straightened. “She’s just been knocked unconscious. I can wake her up, maybe send her back home with a hole in her memory so she’s safe and out of the way, but I’d like to talk to you first.”
“How do you know our names?” Skyla demanded of him.
“I work with your brother. I promised before he left that I’d look out for you.”
“Where the hell is my brother?” I demanded.
“That’s a long story,” he said.
“Then let’s go with what the hell is he,” I said, and Skyla looked at me sharply.
“I’ll explain all of that,” Clearborn said. “But I think you’re in danger, and I want to get you somewhere safe.”
“Where’s that?”
“The academy,” he said. “It’s warded so witches can’t cross onto our territory. You’ll be safe there.”
“Witches?” I repeated hollowly.
“It’s a big magical world,” Clearborn told me, his voice deadpan.
I looked around at the damage in our living room, at Aunt Jennifer still slack-jawed on the carpet.
Maybe witches and werewolves existed. Maybe magic was real.
Maybe that was the opposite of a magical world.
I licked my lips. “We don’t have a choice, do we?”
“You do,” he said. “But I don’t like your odds of surviving until Chase comes back.”
I nodded slowly. I didn’t trust him either, but I had the feeling he was right—that we needed to get out of here. And I could believe the mysterious college that Chase and the others attended was Werewolf U.
“Skyla, let’s go pack some bags.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Penn
“It’s all right,” Maddie murmured, her cheek against my shoulder. I stroked my fingers through her shiny blond hair, smoothing out the faint tangles. “It was magic, Penn. And it was just a dance.”
I closed my eyes, still sick with the sense of having been lured into danger. I was supposed to be watching my friends’ backs, and they’d had to come to my rescue. I was some alpha.
“You’re too good to me, Maddie,” I whispered without looking at her.
I felt her rise onto her elbow, studying my face. The ends of her hair tickled my bare shoulder. “Do you remember when we first met?” Her lips touched my bare skin, and my hips almost jerked at that tender touch, before the tip of her tongue traced my tattoos—a familiar game of hers.
“When you came to the academy, already a hero, quietly kicking ass while everyone was a shithead to you? I do recall, yeah.”
She paused, exhaling a breath against the faint, damp track she’d left across my chest. “You weren’t. You were my friend. From the very beginning. You never asked me to prove anything.”
I scoffed. “Don’t make me out to be too gallant. I had a crush on you from day one.”
“Well, that’s fair enough.” Her body slid against mine, her thighs to either side of my leg. She kissed the corner of my mouth. “I had a crush on you from day one too.”
I opened my eyes just to kiss her full-on.
“Are you going to go pull Chase out of his misery?” I asked.
She walked her fingertips over my chest, and my abs tensed at her touch. “If you promise you’re done wallowing.”
“I am.” I cocked one arm under my head, studying her face. She was so beautiful that even right now, soaked with shame, my cock hardened just looking at her. “You know me. I don’t overthink things.”
Her lips twitched in a small, secret smile, as if she knew damned well that wasn’t true, but she said, “All right. As long as you promise.”
It hurt to watch her leave, when I ached to have her body against mine, but I knew Chase needed her. He was struggling with being in this world when Blake and Skyla needed him back home. My fingertips idly traced the places where her lips had wandered as I tried to push away the memories from that awful dance.
It felt as if I’d barely fallen into a restless sleep before Tyson came into my room. “Hey.”
He kneeled next to my bed, like dozens of times when we were kids, about to get into some kind of trouble.
I sat up, rubbing the sleep out of my aching eyes with the back of my fist. “Yeah?” My voice was soft as his.
“I need to talk,” he said.
“I’m up,” I said.
He told me about what he’d seen in his dream. The dead Fae king of the spring court claimed that Tyson was his heir. He’d tried to convince Tyson to repeat some spell, and to go to the Delphine and declare himself the heir so he could be recognized and take the throne.
None of that fit in with our mission, that was for sure.
“Do you think it’s some Fae trick?” I asked, staring at the ring on his hand.
“I don’t know,” he said, then admitted, “It doesn’t feel like a trick. It feels…true.”
“But maybe it’s some kind of spell that plays on what you want. It’s just… wishful thinking.”
He scoffed. “I’d rather be a regular guy in our world with Maddie and the team than a fucking king here. How would that work?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because I hated that idea too. “Maybe you can opt out.”
“Yeah,” he said, but his gaze was troubled. “It’s just that the way things are going here… with Turic trying to take the throne… it feels wrong to leave them.”
I almost told him that he couldn’t break Maddie’s heart again, but I stopped myself. He had a lot to figure out and he didn’t need more emotion in the mix.
I couldn’t stand the thought of losing him, either.
“What’s being a king going to cost, Ty?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He ran his fingers through his hair in a distracted, frustrated gesture. “I have to tell them. But I wanted to talk to someone first…”
“I’m—”
Someone rapped sharply on the door. “Get up. Team meeting.” Footsteps moved down the hall, sure we’d jump in response to that order. Rafe, definitely.
The two of us exchanged long looks.
“You tell them when you’re ready,” I said, wanting him to know I’d keep his secret until he was ready to share it.
He nodded, tension written across every line in his face. Jesus. Couldn’t he catch a break? He and Maddie had gone through enough the past several months.
We headed out to find everyone crowded in the hall. Lex nodded to Silas. “Tell them what’s going on.”
Silas gave Rafe and Lex a look I couldn’t read, his eyes darting to Chase.
“We’re in a time crunch here,” Rafe said impatiently. “We’re all professionals.”
“All right,” Silas said, in a tone that suggested it wasn’t, in fact, all right. “I headed back to see Clearborn. It took me a while to find him. He got into a fight outside Chase’s house.”
There it was. Chase came off the wall, every muscle tense.
“Blake and Skyla are fine,” Lex said hastily. “Clearborn had someone watching the house.”
Silas nodded. “So when Alice showed up, they were ready.”
“Alice went after Blake and Skyla?” Chase demanded. “Did Clearborn expect that? Did you guys know?”
Chase was about to blow. I stepped up next to him, ready to grab him if he went after Rafe or Lex.
“No, we didn’t,” Lex promised. “We would’ve left you and backup if we’d known they were in danger.”
The look on Chase’s face was tortured. But he paused, listening.
“What does Alice want?” Maddie asked.
“We don’t know what she’s working on. But I assume she’s trying to get leverage over Chase, and therefore over the rest of us,” Silas said calmly. “I think we need to get away from Turic ASAP, and then Chase and I can head back to our world.”
“Fuck Turic,” Chase said. “I’m going home now.”
“No, you’re not,” Rafe growled.
Maddie tensed at the same time I did. There was an edge of hard command in Rafe’s voice, that alpha edge, and I winced. Now was not the time for it. Then Rafe said, more gently, “We’ll get you back ASAP. We just can’t blow the mission. It’s going to be all right, Chase.”
“Would you say that if it was your family?” Chase demanded, and Rafe’s face went tight.
“Clearborn will protect Blake and Skyla,” Lex promised. “Nothing is going to happen to them. We’re talking about waiting a day, at most.”
Chase ran his hand through his hair, exhaling a breath.
“Get some air,” Lex said. “We’ll talk about it, all right? No final decisions this minute.”
Rafe’s jaw was tense, and Lex shot him a warning look. Chase finally nodded and headed for the door at the other end of the hall, that led to the stairs to the ramparts.
“Can you?” Rafe asked Lex, who nodded. Lex headed after Chase.
Rafe’s cheeks were faintly flushed, as if he knew he’d just blown that, even if his face was the same steely mask as usual.
“This is all a fucking mess,” Tyson exploded, and I knew he was thinking about his own situation too. “We need to know what Alice wants. Why the hell is she targeting us?”
“Maybe she knows we’re here, and she wants the Shield too,” Maddie said. “She knows we’d give up the shield to protect Blake and Skyla, if we had to.”
Rafe glanced down the hall at the door that Chase, then Lex, had disappeared through. I had a sudden feeling that wasn’t as simple for him as it was for Maddie. We had a mission, and that mission was supposed to come above any of our lives.
I glanced at Tyson, wondering if he was going to tell them about the damned ring and his mysterious dreams of his father, but his jaw was tense.
“We’ll stay with Turic tomorrow and get as far as we can,” Rafe said. “The Regent giving us safe passage will get us closer. Let’s take this one step at a time.”
“We can find our way without the Lord Regent,” Tyson said. “We need to get away from him. Without bringing any more of the Fae into it—Raura, Arlen, Lake, they risked enough today. They could be executed for helping us.”
They were probably going to be executed for staging a coup and trying to make the world a better place, but Ty wasn’t a big history buff. He didn’t realize how badly life usually went for people who tried to do the right thing.
When Rafe didn’t answer, Tyson went on. “We’ve got to look out for them. They helped us.”
“Yeah, of course,” Rafe said. “We’ll try to keep them out of it.”
“We don’t have time to be drawn into a Fae war,” Rafe warned, as if he realized what was turning in Ty’s head, and probably Maddie’s too. “We’ve got our own war.”
“That doesn’t mean we’re going to use these people,” I said calmly. “We’ve got to figure out how to complete our mission and get out of here without making things worse.”
“Yeah, that’s ideal,” Rafe said. He glanced around, his eyes narrowing in irritation, as if he realized our feelings were mutinous. “Mission first. Heads in the game. Understood?”
I muttered yes sir out of habit, since he was using that same cadre voice.
But it felt like even when we weren’t all drunk on Fae wine, the team was spinning out of control.
Chapter Forty
Maddie
The next morning, guards banged on our door before they opened it into our hall.
“Turic wants you,” the guard said. His gaze found me, and I didn’t like how the guard studied me, from my uncombed morning hair falling around my shoulders to my jeans to my bare feet. He stared at me, even though he spoke to Tyson: “And your mate.”
Ty and I exchanged the briefest glance—we had to hope Raura did not betray our secrets—but there was nothing to do but humor the Lord Regent.
Turic left his guards behind when he took us on a tour through the city. The three of us wandered through fragrant markets and stone buildings older than the Coliseum. Fae of all types looked at us curiously. I would’ve loved to have stopped and lingered, if we hadn’t been on a mission. I was so curious about this world.
Tyson reached out and caught my hand, tucking it over his arm, and I swayed close to him. When I looked up into his bright eyes, I could tell he felt the same way.
I caught Turic watching us, as if he’d had his doubts about our relationship.
Just because Tyson and I hated each other sometimes didn’t mean our love wasn’t real, too.
Turic seemed to delight, strangely enough, in showing us the city. He was smiling and friendly as we walked through the market, where vegetables were proudly displayed alongside fine art and glazed pottery.
I couldn’t get a read on him. But if Raura, his own daughter, didn’t trust him, I imagined there was a good reason for that.
One of his guards approached us and leaned in to whisper to him.
Turic turned to us. “The High Delphine will finally deign to see us. You’ll come with me.”
The High Delphine wasn’t staying in the keep, but in a towering family home built into the wall of the city. The Fae lady who let him in curtseyed low to Turic.
“How helpful you are to the Delphine,” Turic said to her, his tone dry. “I’m sure neither of us will forget your hospitality.
“Lord Regent,” she said, keeping her head down. “The High Delphine’s personal servant will show you the way.”
When we had passed her on our way upstairs, I glanced back to find her eyes full of hate, no matter how composed her face.
The young woman who attended the High Delphin wore the same bracelet that my men and I, and Nat, all wore. Tyson and I exchanged a quick glance, which Turic noticed.
“The Delphine can never resist taking in strays of all types,” Turic said, catching her hand and jerking it up to eye level. “Of course, sometimes they turn murderous. They can’t be trusted—so we keep them cuffed.”
The girl gave him a long look, her face tight with tension. “I am completely loyal to the High Delphin—”
He let out a bark of a laugh and dropped her hand. “Oh, I’m sure you are.”
I gave her an apologetic look—I was embarrassed to be seen with Turic—but she kept her gaze lowered as she stepped to one side of the door, and Turic walked ahead of us into the bedroom.
“High Delphin,” Turic said. “I hope you’ve recovered from the stress of your vision.”
“You brought me visitors.” She looked wan and tired, her head falling back on the pillow, but her eyes were bright and keen. “Who are they?”
“Okay, first of all, she already met me. Second of all, shouldn’t she know?” Tyson mouthed to me, and I punched him in the arm.
“Well?” Her gaze studied Tyson, and a faint smile crossed her lips.
“Forgive him, he’s an eternal skeptic, even after everything we’ve seen,” I said, shooting him a look. He hadn’t believed in the Fae world to begin with, until we’d plunged into it.
“Come here, you handsome prince,” she said, her voice a purr. Turic started—for a second, a thunderous expression was written across his face—and then she held out a slender, wrinkled arm to me as well. “Come here, wolf princess.”
Those two words stung more than she could realize. I wasn’t a wolf, and I’d grown up being treated like a princess by my sister’s men, while I wondered if I’d ever grow into a queen like Piper. Now, just like Raura, I thought I didn’t want
to be a princess at all.
She hugged me, and I hugged her back tentatively, afraid as one sometimes is when hugging someone who looks frail and elderly that I’d hurt her by accident.
But she squeezed me tight enough to make my ribs ache, and I exhaled into her silver hair. She was smiling as I straightened.
“We need to speak about the heir,” Turic pressed. “The kingdom is lost without a true, crowned king.”
“Then find the heir, Turic,” she said. “Jorden seemed quite sure that he had one.”
“Maybe something happened to him or her,” Turic said impatiently. “Or maybe it was simple wishful thinking. The kingdom is suffering, Delphin. It’s time.”
“Say what you’re going to say, Turic.”
“Oh, not this again,” he muttered, his voice agitated. “You know what I want. Declare the heir dead. Allow me to take the throne. Allow magic to reach its full abundance and to sweep through this land again. Without someone of royal blood on the throne, the spring court is weak, and so is our magic.”
“The kingdom needs the true heir.”
“There isn’t one,” Turic said, his eyes bulging. “Delphin, how do I get you to see sense?”
“I hold out hope,” she said.
He held her gaze before he dropped his head into his hand.
“You hold out hope,” he muttered. “Well, I hope your darling Fenig can make you see reason. Because as long as you take something from me, I’m going to take something from her.”
“Here we are,” she said.
Turic seemed as if he were struggling to hold himself back.
“Finish your threat,” she told him, her voice chiding.
“Fine,” he said. “When I return from the southern edge, I’m going to kill one of those orphans of hers. I’m going to kill one every day until you free this land from your thrall and declare the heir dead.”
I bit my lip hard, holding back a gasp.
“This will never work out as you hope,” she warned him.
“I’ve been patient enough. They aren’t even full-blooded Fae… they have no rights here.” Turic turned to the two of us and barked, “Go back to the keep. We ride out in an hour.”