Unwinnable

by May Dawson

  Maybe Skyla could fit through those bars, if I could get her to wake up. If I broke the glass.

  Then somehow she’d have to get to safety, and I had no idea where we were, or how far she’d have to go to get there.

  No matter how much I strained my eyes, I couldn’t see more out there. The basement was barren and empty. There were wooden stairs going up to a door, and I climbed them and pressed my ear to the door to listen. I couldn’t hear anything out there.

  Maybe we were alone. If we were alone, I could break down the door and no one would hear and come running.

  I mean, if I knew how to break down a door.

  My arms dangled uselessly at my sides, constant pain from my thumbs radiating up my forearms.

  I slammed my shoulder into the door testingly, but the door didn’t give.

  I finally braced myself in the doorway and kicked the door over and over near the doorknob. When it gave, I stumbled into the hall, landing hard on the door.

  I was in an abandoned-looking house. It was furnished, but the air smelled of dust and mildew.

  I left Skyla behind reluctantly, moving through the house, ready for a fight as I went around every corner. There was no phone, goddamn it. And no sign of the cell phone I’d had in my pocket when our house was invaded.

  My heart galloped in my throat. I wanted to run, but I had to find the keys if they had even been left in the house. I could rescue Skyla without hurting her if I could just find the keys.

  I finally found them, laying on the table in the kitchen. I let out a groan as my fingers curled around them, holding them in my palm.

  It was even worse when I got downstairs and kept dropping them, becoming more and more frantic as I tried to get Skyla loose. I begged her to wake up, and she finally started to stir.

  Finally, she opened her eyes. “Blake?”

  She sounded terrified as she took in the dark space around her.

  “I know, I know,” I said. “We’re going to get out of here. Come on, help me.”

  She looked at my hands as I accidentally dropped the keys again. My thumbs were both sickening bruises, blue-black and so swollen that the skin was shiny. I couldn’t look at them without a sudden swell of bile rising in my throat.

  She grabbed the keys from the ground and began to frantically try to get them into the cuffs. When she struggled with the lock, tears of frustration began to leak down her cheeks.

  “You should just leave me and go get help,” she whispered. “What if they come back?”

  “If they come back, I’ll make them regret it,” I said. “Calm down, Skyla. You can do this. Just focus.”

  “Maybe they’re not even the right keys.” She twisted the key back and forth in the lock, then looked up at me with wide eyes luminous with unshed tears.

  “Try one more time for me,” I said, and then I could’ve sworn I heard a creak of a foot on a board upstairs.

  She heard it too, and her face was livid with fear as she frantically tried to work the key in the lock. “Go, Blake, please go, one of us has to get out and get help--”

  “Shut up,” I told her, like I had a million times, as the shitty big brother I was. But that ended after this. I was going to be mean one last time, to snap her out of it, and then I was never going to act like a douchebag after this if we survived, I promise, please just let us get out of here. “Stop being stupid. Focus and turn the damn key, Skyla.”

  She gave me a dark look, anger crowding out some of her fear, and finally the damned lock popped open.

  “Come on,” I said.

  The two of us climbed the stairs, moving quietly, silently. We stepped carefully over the fallen door.

  I heard someone moving in the front room. I’d seen another door that led from the kitchen to the backyard when I found the keys. Part of me was tempted to go after whoever was here in the house, to try to kill them before they realized we were out of the basement while I had the element of surprise. But I couldn’t leave Skyla behind. So instead, I led her down the hall, and we entered the kitchen.

  Together, the two of us crept across the kitchen floor. I reached for the doorknob, then realized I couldn’t turn the knob.

  Skyla saw, and she tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t open.

  “Who’s there?” A voice called from the front of the house.

  “Grab one of those knives,” I told Skyla, my eyes finally falling on the knife block by the stove. “Then get that door open. If you get the chance, run. Don’t look back for me. Get help.”

  She eased over to the knife block and pulled out two knives, but I shook my head. I couldn’t hold one now, no matter how much I wanted to. Battering someone with my fists was the best chance I had at a weapon right now.

  She slid the knife carefully under her arm so she had both hands free as she began to undo the locks on the door from the kitchen. The chain on the deadbolt rattled in her shaking fingers, knocking against the wooden door.

  I turned to protect her, putting myself between her and the door, as I felt someone coming for us through the house.

  But I still wasn’t prepared for the man who stepped in, his face transforming, his nose growing into a snout, fangs appearing in his mouth and claws sprouting from his hands.

  Skyla threw the door open, and I barked, “Run!”

  I started toward the werewolf, intent on blocking him from getting to Skyla, as she raced out the door.

  The werewolf jumped at me.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Maddie

  As we moved back toward the capitol city and the Delphine, we worked together to destroy the portals, which Turic had hidden all over. Our passage through the Fae world was very different now, as we rode through the lands openly, heavily armed. Everywhere we went, children ran after Tyson, and people celebrated him.

  “I thought they might take it badly that their new king is half shifter,” he said dryly to me. “I don’t think I should get accustomed to the adulation.”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “Sooner or later, you’ll have to go home.”

  He smiled sadly.

  “You’re not going back with us, are you?” I asked quietly.

  “When all the monsters are gone, when Turic is dead… I still don’t think I’ll be able to, Maddie.”

  “We could find out. You could walk through with us and then come right back, if there’s still work to be done, and we’d know.” Even I could hear the desperate edge in my voice.

  His eyes on mine were intense. “What if I wanted to stay with you so much that I wasn’t strong enough to go back? What if our love damned a whole kingdom?”

  “It wouldn’t be much of a love if we did,” I said.

  “It feels like I could sometimes,” he whispered. “Like I could let the world burn while I looked into your eyes.”

  I couldn’t take the thought of being separated from him forever. I rode close to him, leaning awkwardly across the expanse between our two horses until his hand met my lower back. His lips found mine, and the two of us traded an intense kiss as we passed under the shade of the spreading white-and-pink flowering trees above.

  I broke away to remind him, “You never would. You’re one of the good guys, Tyson Atlas. And sometimes that hurts.”

  He cupped my face with his hand as he leaned in again, kissing me back as if he wanted to kiss me so hard, I would never forget him.

  As if I ever could.

  “When you go back,” he said, “Promise me that you’ll find my mom’s place in the graveyard and exhume her. Find out if she’s really dead or just…”

  I didn’t think his mother was under any kind of spell, but wasn’t that always the fantasy. We all dreamt that there was some way we could have back what we lost.

  I wanted to tell him to find a way back to me and to check himself, but those words would have been too cold, so I swallowed them.

  I knew there was a chance Tyson would never come back to me.

  Rafe, Jensen, Raura and the oth
ers had been riding ahead of us while we fell behind. I heard one of them shout from ahead. Then I heard the crash of Ravagers in the woods nearby. Ty and I urged our horses ahead.

  We found Rafe and Jensen off their horses in front of a cave.

  “Jensen, Maddie, get inside and destroy that portal,” Rafe barked. “The rest of us will hold them off.”

  “Got it,” I said, even though I had a feeling Rafe would have asked me something sarcastic, like if Tyson doesn’t mind, if we weren’t in a time crunch with growly monsters prowling around.

  Instead, I raised my hand, sparking a globe of glowing magic in my palm, and Jensen and I headed steadily into the cave. Magic seemed to come so much more easily here. It was going to be hard to go back into our world where magic seemed to fight us, where it felt as if we were drawing it out of our own very bones.

  “He is super pissed at me,” I muttered as we left Raura, Ty and the others behind us and headed into the darkness.

  Magic sparked across Jensen’s fingers of his free hand, and he formed his own orb. His other hand gripped his drawn sword. I was curious if he was pissed at me.

  Not that Jensen being angry at me had ever made him less attractive to me. Actually, something about it made me want to shove him against the wall and press my lips against his and remind him that he and I always had a bond that transcended any little issue like fighting or even, when we first met, passionately despising each other.

  “Of course he is,” he said. “You challenged his leadership. More than that, you made it clear you don’t trust him.”

  I stopped dead and turned to him, dumbfounded. “You have got to be kidding me. I don’t trust him? Because I trust my own judgment?”

  Jensen shrugged. “I’m not saying you and Ty were wrong. But there’s supposed to be one leader of the team. You guys staged a fucking coup. How do you think Rafe’s going to take that?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m not giving up my own sense of self just because he’s the leader of the team,” I said. “We couldn’t leave the Fae behind to die.”

  “It’s not all ego,” he said. “He’s supposed to be in charge.”

  I scoffed at that. “Come on, you hate the hierarchy.”

  “Just because I hate it doesn’t mean I don’t see the reason for it,” he said. “The team was divided. We’ve been fighting since we got close to the Fae. Someone had to make a final call.”

  He shot me a knowing look. “It was supposed to be Rafe who made that call. But you decided to take it out of his hands.”

  “Because that was the right thing to do!”

  “I mean, I get it. It was an impossible situation. We have a pretty simple, direct mission, and I don’t know if Clearborn’s going to even let us continue the mission into the Greyworld when he discovers we went on a joyride through the spring court.”

  “Nothing about this is a joyride,” I said.

  “Maybe. I’ve got my own bets on how Clearborn is going to take it.”

  I chewed my lower lip. God, I hated letting Rafe down, but I would’ve hated letting Ty down too. I hated the thought of betraying Raura and the other Fae who had helped us all along.

  “Do you feel like I let you down?” I asked abruptly. “By not making the portal?”

  “You don’t need to go through life worrying about what I think.”

  “Maybe I care what you think,” I said sharply.

  “I don’t know why you would. My judgment’s usually just as twisted as yours.”

  I flashed him a dark look, but he answered me with an unapologetic grin. Then he said, more gently, “I’m not mad at you. I don’t expect you to ever follow my orders, or anyone else’s. You’re a born leader. I’m not sure you can do anything else.”

  My lips parted in surprise at those sweet words.

  “But that means you can’t be in the team if you have to be leading the team,” he said. “And I don’t know what that means for all of us.”

  I’d wanted to bring the shield back to protect my people—to protect Piper and the babies and the pack I’d grown up in—but it had also been our chance to convince Clearborn and the alphas to keep us together. The fact that no one else wanted us was a blessing if it kept us together—I didn’t care how anyone else saw us.

  But maybe I’d blown that.

  “What do you think Clearborn’s going to do to us?”

  Jensen snorted. “You worried about catching another beating? I’ll be honest, I kind of feel like that’d be the easy route out. I’d rather just be punished for what happened and go back to normal. Keep being a team.”

  The portal shimmered in front of us. There was always a shimmer whenever there was a rip connecting worlds, but these portals especially stood out because they were framed out by magic and runes.

  Turic had lovingly constructed each of these portals himself, enchanting them with control sigils so he could use the monsters to terrorize the countryside and force the people to see him as their savior. He didn’t even have to enforce his curfews or order people to stay in their homes during Ravager attacks, because the monsters did that work for him. He could control when people were able to leave their homes, which made it easy for him to fight the rebellion.

  “No, that’s not what I’m worried about. I don’t know what I’ll do if we aren’t a team anymore,” I said softly. “If we lose Rafe and Lex…”

  But maybe I’d already lost Rafe. He’d been cold and angry, even by his standards, ever since the temple.

  A Ravager suddenly jumped through the portal between us.

  “Yeah, me either,” Jensen said, twirling his sword in his hand as the Ravager bared its teeth at us. It was a small one, only six feet tall, full of snapping teeth and whirling claws and tail. Jensen’s golden eyes glowed in the dark of the cave as he said, “I don’t know if you recall this, but I was kind of an irredeemable asshole before you. Before us… you and me, and the team as a whole.”

  Jensen distracted the Ravager, and I drove my sword low at his leg, the weakest points of these monsters. My saber cleaved his leg in two and he fell toward Jensen, who leapt to one side, thrusting his sword up through the monster’s throat.

  “I wouldn’t say irredeemable,” I said.

  The monster fell to the floor between us.

  “Anyway, you’re not that man anymore,” I said.

  “That’s a sweet thought, Maddie,” he said. “But bad habits come back easily. And my ingrained habits are to be angry, worthless—”

  “Oh no,” I said, pushing him against the wall. “Don’t you talk about the man I love that way.”

  He grinned at me. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Don’t make me hurt you,” I warned.

  “What if I like it when you do?”

  My lips grazed his, and I felt the hilt of his sword still in his hand press against my ass as he wrapped his arms around me. I kissed him hard, as if I could kiss sense into him, as if I could ever make him see himself the same way I did.

  Then another Ravager came in, and the two of us moved together to kill it swiftly. Jensen was closest, so he struck the legs.

  “I screwed up, didn’t I?” I said as I ducked the Ravager’s falling body. I drove my sword through its thick throat, adding a little magical oomph to my strike, and the head rolled away from the body.

  “Nice,” Jensen said, admiring the kill, as he moved to destroy the portal. “Sometimes, there’s no way out without making a mistake, Maddie. You’d have regrets whichever choice you made. At least you always make a decision.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “I didn’t say that.” The ground heaved beneath our feet as the magic crumpled. He caught the back of my neck with his hand, and my face tilted up to his as he drew me close. “I made a choice to follow Rafe’s leadership. That’s a choice too. He has the final responsibility for whatever the team does or doesn’t do—with Clearborn, yeah, but in his own head too. But we’re all responsible for what we do
if we obey.”

  A smile touched his lips. “Or not. It turns out your default might be not.”

  “You’re not necessarily making me feel better,” I chided.

  “Not my goal,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not on your side. And I’ll always love you, even if you do screw up. Even if we’re on opposite sides.”

  I stared at him, wondering if Rafe would feel the same.

  “And I bet I’m not the only one,” Jensen said. He held his hand out to me.

  Dirt was beginning to fall from the ceiling of the cave, as if when we broke the portal, the magic snapping had destroyed the solidity of the cave itself. I wrapped my fingers around his, gripping him tight, as the two of us began to run.

  The two of us fled the cave as it began to collapse in.

  Chapter Sixty

  Skyla

  The monster fell on Blake, who tried to fight it off.

  I ran across the back porch and jumped down into the grass. I had to get help, even though as my heart beat frantically, I had a feeling there was no one who could ever really help us. Who could fight a monster like that? Except for another monster?

  I ran frantically down a long driveway to a quiet rural road. I couldn’t even see any houses—just trees and fields stretching away to either side of the long gray road. I picked a direction and ran down it, listening for a monster chasing me. I could barely hear over the desperate pounding of my heart.

  I saw a house up ahead, and I ran desperately down the road, hoping someone would be home and that they would be willing to help me. If they just called 9-1-1….

  Deep in my heart, I didn’t think anyone could protect us. I thought it must be too late for Blake when I remembered the sight of the monster’s wide-open jaw, its long, wicked teeth. Hot tears slid down my cheeks. I was gasping, trying to breathe, when I saw a car approaching.

  The car squealed to a stop when the driver saw me in the road.

  The car door flew open, the engine still running, and a young woman with pink hair burst out of the car.

  “Are you all right?” she asked me. She already had a cell phone clutched in her hand. “Do you need me to call 9-1-1? What happened?”