Forever After (Post Apocalyptic Romance Boxed Set)

by Rose Francis

  “What’s going on, Conwynne?”

  “If she cuts into me, the wolf will get loose. It’s already screaming within me. I’ve never been especially good with pain, you see.” The old man grimaced as Foxtail knelt over him, prodding him with her thick fingers to find the silver needles lodged in his flesh.

  “I can hold you down. The pack can help. We’re plenty strong now.”

  “I don’t doubt that, girl, but a wolf in pain howls. He can’t help it. And if I howl now every one of those twisted alpha mockeries will come running straight here and our mission will be over before it’s begun.”

  “We could knock him out,” Farid offered from across the room.

  “I’d like to see you try,” Conwynne growled, his teeth lengthening and his eyes blazing with the shift.

  “I’ll do it, Conwynne. But you’ll have to help me. You’ll have to let me in.”

  The old man nodded. Laying on the floor, pain pulling at his features, the alpha knight looked older than ever. He’d always seemed experienced to Lucia, but this was the first time he’d ever seemed frail. She felt pity for him, for all things that had to die, and she rode that compassion all the way into Conwynne’s heart.

  She could sense him, the pain he was in, the moment she made contact with him. He wasn’t pack, not exactly, but he was near and in need, so it didn’t matter. Her gifts extended to him now, too.

  In his leg, terrible fire, like acid chewing away at his bones. The silver was poison to him. His body was turning itself inside out to cure him of the affliction, but the barbed tips of the slender flechettes were driven too deep into him.

  Lucia collapsed to the ground, conscious but in pain. Conwynne’s agony was hers now, but even so it was too much for the two of them to bear.

  Foxtail readied the knife.

  “It’s too much. I can’t do this,” Lucia said, her voice a pained whisper.

  “I’ll help,” Farid said. He came forward and knelt next to her, taking her hand in his. Lucia felt for him, for his soul, and joined it to hers and Conwynne’s. The pirate hissed as he took a share of the pain. Lucia’s load was lessened, but still it was excruciating.

  Quinn and Triptongue sat next to Farid, linking their hands with his. Lucia could feel the sensation of the burning silver move into each of them, but it still wasn’t enough.

  As if on cue, the prince and all of his soldiers joined hands, linking the pack together. The final person in the chain—Phaera the squirrel girl—took Conwynne’s other hand, completing their circle. The pain was nearly gone now, less a burning torment and more like a distant ache.

  It was time for Foxtail to begin cutting. It wasn’t torturous, but the pack still felt it. They felt her knife open flesh, felt her silver-coated instruments spread flesh apart, looking for the silver. She dug and spread the skin and muscles until the bone, bloodied and half-dissolved, stood revealed.

  With careful plucking motions, Foxtail worked the flechettes from Conwynne’s leg.

  “Gotta be careful,” she said. “If a bit breaks off inside him, it’ll kill him. Silver poisoning is no fun.”

  With her soul touching his, Lucia was shocked at the coldness she felt in the man. He had an anger in his heart, icy and dark like the wet sand that lurks beneath the lowest parts of the desert. There was a profound hatred lurking in the old knight. Why had he not spoken of it?

  As Foxtail cut his flesh, Lucia found herself peering deep into Conwynne’s mind. She saw skirmishes, armies of shifters armed with silver glaives howling their war cries as they plunged into thick forests, doing battle with some unseen terrible foe. There were mountaintop fortresses, swamps with green fire licking his heels, a decaying city under the water. The old man had seen so many things in his life that Lucia couldn’t even name. She’d never seen a forest, a swamp, or the sea—but as she perched in his memories, his words became hers.

  A shadow flickered behind Lucia, as if there was a memory in Conwynne’s mind that wanted to stay hidden. Curiosity didn’t exclusively belong to cats. Wolves had their moments, too.

  In the halls of Conwynne’s mind, Lucia turned and gave chase. From memory to memory the shadowy thing—was it a person?—fled before her. Across a battlefield strewn with hacked limbs, the shadow flickered, leaping from one patch of darkened ground to the next like an insect seeking shelter under rocks. Through a memory of Conwynne’s first love—a bear shifter woman—with kinky hair and dusky skin, stretched out on a bed that seemed larger than a mountain, her knees reaching to the sky and the sound of her moans thundering against Lucia’s skin—the shadow tried to hide between her legs, as if propriety or shame would keep Lucia from looking there. Once discovered, the shadow flitted to a new memory, and Lucia followed the trail.

  She saw Conwynne in a throne room, receiving his glaive from a glowering old shifter with an oozing scar where his left ear should be. Conwynne was young, sneering, and angry. The one-eared shifter looked displeased with the young alpha knight. In that room, the shadow hid itself on the underside of the glaive, as if the dangerous blade would scare Lucia away.

  From memory to memory, arcing backwards through time, the shadow fled, until there was no more time left.

  In the final memory, a young boy of two stood atop a house in a tree. His parents slept in the room next door, their breaths rising and falling with a hushed roar like wind across the sands. The boy couldn’t sleep, so he wandered the house at night. His parents didn’t know. He was very quiet. One of the windows opened, sliding silently upwards in its frame. Something beckoned from beyond, glowing eyes in the darkness of the forest like fireflies at play before the moon. The eyes called to Conwynne, and before he knew it he was crawling out the window. Something hungered in the dark of the woods, but he couldn’t stop himself from moving toward it. It was the first time he was afraid. Just as he was crossing the threshold, moving into the warm, gnashing night, his mother’s hand closed on his foot, yanking him back into the house. In the dark of the woods, something evil shrieked its rage at being denied dinner.

  Where was the shadow in this memory? Lucia looked all over, under beds, inside boxes, moving through the treehouse like time had stopped, all of the textures fuzzed and indistinct. What would a trip through her own memories look like? What was her first primal fear? Before she feared her uncle, what terrified her most? She couldn’t recall. He’d been such a powerful force in her life since he killed her aunt that any fears from before that time felt inconsequential.

  Fear, that was it. The shadow hid in fears.

  Lucia braced herself then opened the window and crawled outside into the hungry darkness.

  The exterior of the house didn’t exist. Conwynne didn’t remember it at all. The memory was a blank white canvas in all directions once she cleared the window. She peered back into the room, saw Conwynne’s mother hugging him, singing to him as the boy sobbed. She stood and looked out across the white plains and saw the shadow, helplessly trapped. Here in the white of no-memory, it was clearly a person’s silhouette. A woman, roughly the same size as Lucia though perhaps thicker in the hips and slightly shorter.

  A bad feeling slithered through Lucia’s bones. Did she really want this? Conwynne’s mind was going to great lengths to keep this from her. Did she have the right to pry so deep into him? Didn’t she trust him?

  Well, no. She didn’t. Maybe once she did, but now she realized how little she really knew of him.

  At the edges of Conwynne’s mind, Lucia Brightwolf shifted into her alpha form and leapt upon the shadow, catching it in her teeth.

  A memory then. A storm upon the sands. Beating rains, lightning flashing too often. Thunder booming so close that it shook his heart. Before him stood his old friend, his pupil. Something had changed about her. “We need to go inside,” he roared, the wind taking his voice. The woman, Dasha Brightwolf, handed him a bundle. A squealing bundle wrapped in bloodied rags.

  “You need to take her. Keep her safe.”

  “She’s not
my burden,” Conwynne growled.

  “Where I’m going, what I’m going to do, it’s all for her. But she can’t be there.”

  The rain ripped at the desert around them, heavy sheets of water tearing at the sand like swords through flesh. Lightning struck, the flash burning Conwynne’s eyes, and for a moment the ground was the ripped flesh of his friends, his lover, and the lightning was the claws of the Suzerain.

  “You can’t defeat him,” Conwynne said to Lucia’s mother. “No one can.”

  “I have to try. Keep her safe.”

  “No,” the alpha knight sneered. “Take her to your sister, to your brother. To anyone else. I can’t bear to look upon a child, not after all I’ve done, after all that’s happened.”

  Dasha Brightwolf shifted in anger, a mottled red fur showing from under her robes. Her eyes flashed brighter than lightning as she roared, “Take her, damn you. I need to know something good still exists in this world.”

  Conwynne cowered before Brightwolf’s power. She was too strong, too full of rage. “Okay,” he lied. “I’ll take her. Keep her safe.”

  “Train her, Connie. Raise her in our traditions. Teach her well so she doesn’t make our mistakes.”

  “I will,” he lied again.

  Dasha Brightwolf sprinted across the sands, stepping between the raindrops. Her shattered glaive rested at Conwynne’s feet, ready for Lucia when she was of age. In the distance, lightning cracked the sky open revealing the shadows of a hundred flying warships. Dasha was going to fight them all.

  Conwynne gripped the baby tightly, turned his back on Dasha and shuffled off toward Los Robles.

  A knock on a door.

  A stately house, peaceful and kind.

  A woman opened the door, a man stands behind her bleary-eyed.

  It was Lucia’s aunt and her uncle, before he was Baron Lawson. The man looks so small, so timid.

  “There’s been a disaster,” Conwynne said. “She asked me to bring the little one to you.” He handed over the baby—Lucia Brightwolf, last of the alphas—to her poor doomed aunt and to her monster-in-waiting uncle.

  This wasn’t what he agreed to. This wasn’t the plan.

  Conwynne broke his word.

  Chapter 13

  Shifter Wars

  Lucia pulled herself out of his memories, dropped his hand and scrambled away from the man. Her fingers and toes already shifting, dark claws digging into the stone floor like it was loose sand.

  Foxtail was asleep on the floor. The operation was long since completed. Conwynne slept, the floor below him sticky with congealed blood.

  The prince came to her then, taking Lucia into his arms.

  “My lady, I feared to wake you. You were deep in a trance.”

  “Did you see it? Were you there too?” Her voice was hushed, shocked.

  “No, wherever you went, we could not follow.”

  “How can I forgive him? My life, all I have suffered, it was never meant to be.”

  “I do not understand, Lucia.” The prince’s body was hot against hers. Under her skin, Lucia’s wolf writhed. It wanted this man harder than it wanted anything. Could he sense it, too? The urge to mate?

  Lucia tilted her head up, to look at him. The pack bond was growing stronger, more distinct. She could almost pick the prince’s voice out of their shared song.

  He gazed back at her, his eyes reflecting her own mounting lust. If they’d been alone, she wouldn’t have hesitated. The wolf craved him—needed him. But trapped in a storeroom, her mind still reeling from Conwynne’s secrets, it was all wrong.

  “Where’s Farid?” she found herself asking, just to steer her thoughts away from the handsome shifter.

  “Gone, lady knight. Farid, Triptongue, the mutt and a handful of my most injured made their way to his ship. Phaera lead them. She has a gift for stealth. They will arrive safely. When our attack is noticed, and the soldiers come for us as they surely will, the pirates will flee with the wounded.”

  Lucia sighed. “It’s a good plan. So why do I feel so sad about it?”

  The prince grinned widely, showing off a mouth of white sharp teeth. “Because we will likely die?”

  “There is that.” She hugged him tighter. “So why don’t I feel more worried?”

  “Some react to certain death by embracing it,” the prince murmured. “Certainty brings calm. Others choose madness or denial.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “My lady, I am excited for the prospect of justice, the taste of vengeance, and the knowledge that I cannot die today.”

  “You cannot die? Why is that?”

  “Because I have only just met you and already I know we are meant for each other.” His eyes sparked in the darkness.

  “Don’t say such things, please.” Lucia’s breath came rapidly. Her wolf strained inside her for a taste of the man.

  “I know you sense it as well. I can smell it on your skin. I can see it in your eyes.”

  A gruff voice sounded from behind them. “Well don’t stop on my account,” Conwynne said. “It’s not like we have any important plans to see to.”

  Foxtail knew the way. She didn’t speak unless she absolutely had to, so it was easy to underestimate the wily fox shifter, but the woman had a mind for directions like no one else. Lucia tried to hide her amazement.

  “You know your path through this maze because you saw a map, across a room, once?”

  “Gifted,” Foxtail shrugged.

  With Conwynne and the prince bristling at each other, it was up to Lucia to pull everyone together, to take that first step from the safety of their storage room into the wolf’s den. In pairs they slipped from shadow to shadow, a force two dozen strong. Would it be enough? Lucia didn’t know. She didn’t fancy suicide, but maybe if she saved the world from the Suzerain and his witch’s dark arts it’d be worth it.

  She tried not to think about death, about the great blackness at the end of all things. Because thinking about death beckoned the dark shift closer and also made her consider all the things in her life she hadn’t yet done, like Farid. Why hadn’t she taken him up on his offer for some bed play? It was too late now. She’d never see the handsome pirate again, never watch his hips wiggle tantalizingly as he piloted his ship across the sands. They’d been locked together for weeks. Why hadn’t she tumbled with him?

  She knew why. If she had, she never would have gone through with this mission. The witch and the Suzerain would use their device to kill any who opposed them. If Lucia gave in to her attraction to the pirate, the world would burn.

  If she was an alpha knight, she couldn’t let that happen.

  Lost in regret, Lucia didn’t notice that the air smelled wrong. Conwynne did.

  “The ship is too quiet,” he murmured. “The air smells foul.”

  “Shut down ventilation,” Foxtail grunted.

  “Why would they do that?” Lucia asked. “They need to breathe as much as we do.”

  “They’re not going to suffocate us, my lady. Rather they want the air still and heavy with our scent, so they can track us.” The prince said, gripping his weapon tighter.

  Every look the prince shot her was thick with desire. Surely the pack must smell it? Lucia couldn’t decide if she was embarrassed to be so openly pursued by the de facto ruler of the western wastes, or honored.

  “Conwynne’s tricks won’t hide our scent,” Lucia said. “We need to move faster.”

  The pack ascended up ladders and stairs, moving through passages of smooth sandy stone that transitioned abruptly to brushed steel. From the outside, the pyramid was monolithic and formidable. But from the inside it resembled an entire village smashed together without regard for use, wrapped into a ball and hurled into the sky. The steel halls lead through a wooden catacomb, a hive of houses stacked on top of each other.

  “I don’t understand this place,” a soldier, Shine Shine, said. “Why make a battleship that no one can navigate?”

  “Because it’s not a ship,”
Conwynne answered. “The halls are a rune, sketched in three dimensions.”

  “It’s the ritual, made real,” Lucia realized. “This is the twisted pack ritual the Suzerain perfected, isn’t it? We’re walking through the twists and curves of his glyphs. This whole floating death machine has been designed to dissolve loyalties, to leech away life and transfer it to the dark lord.”

  “Or,” a harsh female voice echoed from above, “to his witch.”

  “Run!” Conwynne yelled, holding his glaive aloft.

  From the wooden catacombs above them, a squad of alpha-spawn appeared. They peered through windows with spider eyes. They emerged from the walls like phantoms. They held glittering silver weapons with teeth like saw blades in their mangled hands. Somewhere amongst them was the Witch of the Wastes. This was her pack. They were her spawn. With her present, Lucia and her men had no chance at all.

  As the alpha-spawn jeered and shouted taunts from the rafters above, Lucia ran. She could feel her pack’s fear through her bond, electrifying her. It reminded her of when she was a girl and on a dare from one of her uncle’s crueler stooges, she’d touched the security fence at the edge of the property. It thrilled her and numbed her at once, driving away most her thoughts.

  But as the pack’s fear flowed to her, so did her strength and resolve flow to them. They ran faster than they ever had before, their bodies shifting—some for the first time ever—as they raced down the twisting corridors, the alpha-spawn at their heels. Lucia needed to take their fear, or they’d cower before the alphas and die in seconds. Or worse, get twisted into spawn themselves. What began as a scared mob, pursued by monsters, evolved quickly into a pack of battle-ready shifters, their hands now claws, their legs shifted for speed, their eyes attuned to the dim lighting of the pyramid.

  Conwynne raced beside Lucia, shifted to a great white dire wolf as tall at the shoulder as she was. On her other side, the prince ran. His handsome, noble face even more so now, with the shift taking his body. The man radiated joy and fire. He wasn’t afraid of the spawn at all.