by Gloria Craw
“Hit him again,” I whispered to Phoebe.
She gave a quick nod, and her energy swung out at him. He puffed a breath as it barreled into his stomach, but he recovered quickly and sent a substantial wave at her chest. She gasped and fell to her knees.
“I’m okay,” she whispered to me. “I’m okay.”
Sebastian’s energy slingshot back my way, but it was noticeably weaker. I was able to equalize the pressure he’d sent at my stomach and maintained my footing without a problem.
“We need to go,” Asher said, shaking her head to clear it. “They’ll be coming for us.”
“Shut up, you useless troll,” he growled at her.
Turning his vile eyes on me, he said, “I’m sorry about your brother, Laurel, but it had to be done. An eye for an eye, as they say.”
“When I tell you, aim for his head,” I whispered to Phoebe. To Sebastian, I said, “Don’t be sorry. Alex is with my parents in Vegas. The Thanes are looking after them.”
His scarred face registered confusion. “David told me the chiefs accepted my conditions. He said…”
I couldn’t help smiling as he figured it out.
“You sent the text,” he surmised.
“We have to go,” Asher repeated. “If these two found us, the others will, too.”
“Silence, you idiot!” Sebastian yelled. “Is it possible that a stupider dewing was every born?”
I saw something flicker in Asher’s eyes and realized she wasn’t as loyal to Sebastian as he thought. She hated him. She’d probably been on the receiving end of his verbal abuse often since they likenessed. Whether their lives were irrevocably connected or not, there was only so much a powerful woman would take.
“Why wouldn’t the chiefs have accepted the deal?” Sebastian asked himself. “They can’t have gotten a better one. Maxwell took everything but that video to his grave. The journal is the only key to creating hybrids.”
“They don’t need a key anymore,” I replied. “You called me a conduit the last time we met. I just returned from a trip to the afterlife, where I got the keepers to turn fate. The chiefs have a sample of pure blood now. They’ll analyze it and fix what’s wrong with us.”
His brows drew together. I could almost see the wheels turning in his mind as he accepted I was telling the truth and grappled with the idea of his own failure.
“Watch out!” Phoebe yelled.
I shifted to the side just as Asher reached for me. Grabbing her outstretched arm, I pulled her into my knee. The air whooshed out of her, and she fell to her knees. I would have hit her in the jaw, like I did the first time, but Sebastian doubled down on me with his energy, forcing me to concentrate on defending myself.
“You idiot, Asher,” he growled. “You disgusting, foul-smelling frog. You’re worthless.”
Struggling for breath, the poor woman closed her eyes. When she opened them again, I knew something inside her had broken. “I won’t kill you,” she managed to say, “but I won’t help you anymore, either.”
Sebastian picked up a poker by the fireplace and twirled the sharp end in the flames. “When I finish with our guests, you’ll pay for your betrayal,” he warned icily.
“Are you ready to hit him again?” I asked Phoebe in a whisper.
She nodded.
“I’ll tell you when,” I said.
“We’ve played enough,” Sebastian remarked with a sneer. “I’m going to make you feel the kind of pain I feel, Laurel.” He leveled the red-hot poker at me. “How much do you think you can take before you scream?”
“Now,” I yelled to Phoebe.
She sent every bit of energy she had at him, and he rocked backward from the force of it. Realizing he was in real danger, he withdrew his energy from me and used it to protect himself. Free at last, I ran at him with the dagger clenched in my hand and plunged the blade into his throat. His essence retracted, but Phoebe kept pounding him with hers, even after his vibration ground to a halt.
I pulled the dagger from Sebastian’s throat, and his body folded to the floor.
“It’s over, Phoebe,” I said. “You can stop now.”
“I had to do it,” she sobbed. “For my clan’s sake, I had to do it.”
“You had to,” I agreed, feeling the onset of shock. “We both did. We had to do it for the greater good.”
I was blindly staring at the bloody gore covering my hand when Theron came rushing into the room.
“What have the two of you done?” he asked, looking at the carnage. “And why are you wearing my hat, Alison?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Theron took charge, which was lucky for Phoebe and me because we were both numb with shock.
He must have noticed the abandoned state of the house because he asked Asher if there was a bathroom somewhere with towels. Without moving from where she sat on the floor, she told him there was one upstairs.
After suggesting I go clean up, he turned his attention to Phoebe, who was standing in the middle of the room, sobbing uncontrollably. He pulled her into a hug and let her cry into his shirt.
Finding the stairs, I made my shaky way to the upper floor. My body ached with fatigue. My essence had taken an awful beating. Unlike a physical injury, it wouldn’t get better at superhuman speed. I’d be weak and sore for a few days at least.
Sebastian must have been living on the second floor of the mansion because every room I passed was lavishly furnished. I noted he favored dark wood and red velvet, which is pretty much what you’d expect for someone almost as evil as the devil himself.
I found the bathroom and went in to clean up, but I froze in front of the sink. I knew the next step was to put the dagger down and turn the water on, but I couldn’t seem to release my grip on the hilt. Catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I felt a wave of nausea. My face and shirt were splattered with Sebastian’s blood. The realization that I’d killed someone hit me like a freight train. I hurried to the toilet so I could throw up.
When I returned downstairs, Phoebe and Asher had moved to one of the unfurnished rooms. Phoebe was sitting in a corner. Her eyes were closed, and her face was red from crying. Asher was standing by one of the windows. She’d opened the curtains and was staring out the glass. “I didn’t call the police or anything…and I won’t,” she said without emotion.
Since I’d helped kill her likeness, I didn’t know how to respond. I managed a lame “okay.”
“I wanted him dead almost since the moment we likenessed,” she remarked. With a cynical laugh, she added, “I waited a hundred years to likeness, and when it happened, my future was tied to that monster.”
“You didn’t deserve that,” I muttered. “No one deserved Sebastian.”
“At least I’m free now,” she said. “The countdown to my own death has started, but I don’t have to endure another moment of him.”
With a tired sigh, she headed out of the room.
I watched her go, thinking Katherine had been right all those months ago. Destiny had started down a new course so perhaps it hadn’t happened exactly as she’d seen in her vision, but a fading likeness, someone who would soon be a clan chief, and the daughter of the White Laurel, had been there when Sebastian breathed his last breath.
Theron came for us, and I noticed he had William Truss’s journal in his hand. “We’re leaving now,” he said, striding toward Phoebe. He picked her up in his arms and added, “We’re taking her car.”
Sometimes silence is the best gift you can give someone…and Theron was a giver. He didn’t ask a single question or make any comments as he drove us away from D.C. As though Phoebe and I were incapable of speech, which was pretty close to the truth, he got adjoining rooms at a hotel, ordered food, called the rental car company telling them where to pick up the car I’d abandoned, and even bought a shirt to replace the bloody one I was wearing.
After eating a BLT from room service, I started to perk up and went to change my shirt in the bathroom.
When I came b
ack out, Phoebe was sitting on the edge of the bed in a semi-tranced state. She hadn’t eaten anything, her face was white as a sheet, and her eyes were glassy. Seeing how she was suffering made me angry, and anger burned off the last of my lingering shock.
Sebastian had been a murderer. If Phoebe and I hadn’t killed him, he would have killed us.
Sitting next to her, I turned her shoulders so she’d have to look at me. “We only did what was necessary, Phoebe,” I said. “If we hadn’t, Sebastian would have hurt my family and likely destroyed your clan. It was awful, and we’ll live with the memories for the rest of our lives, but in the end, it was him or us. We had no choice.”
She breathed a ragged breath, and her eyes took on more focus.
“You need to pull yourself together,” I urged her. “You’re the Truss clan chief now, and they need you. Can you be strong for them?”
She drew another breath and nodded. Then in an even voice, she said, “I want to go home.”
It turned out she lived in Northern Virginia, only half an hour away. Theron said he’d drive her there and then catch a cab back.
After they’d gone, I turned the TV on but was too exhausted to understand the plots of any of the shows I flipped, though. Leaving it on for company, I crawled into bed and fell into a restless sleep.
Sweaty and scared, I woke from a nightmare in which I was fighting Sebastian again but loosing. The light under the door to Theron’s adjoining room was on. Not wanting to be alone, I got up and knocked.
“It’s open,” he said from the other side.
I pushed the door open and found him sitting at the desk in the room. He had his computers up and running. I sat on the bed behind him and crisscrossed my legs.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Accessing all security recordings of Sebastian’s neighborhood this afternoon,” he replied. “My program is systematically scrubbing our images out anytime we appear. I’m pretty sure Asher won’t report a murder, but if she does, there won’t be a visual record of us in the area.”
“What would I do without you?” I asked with a smile.
“Go to jail for murder probably,” he replied drily.
I chuckled, but he remained stone-faced. He was silently fuming.
“I expected you’d track me down,” I said after a moment. “I thought I had more of a time buffer, though. How did you find me so quickly?”
“Lillian woke me to say you’d called a cab and left without an explanation,” he replied. “I could think of only one reason you’d do that: you’d gone off to deal with Sebastian. So, I put tracers on all your IDs and found out that Ali McCaine had just boarded a flight to D.C. I immediately booked a flight for myself. I’d just landed at Dulles when I got a frantic call from Ian.”
“I didn’t keep any secrets from him,” I insisted. “I called him when I left the airport. I explained exactly where I was going and what I planned to do.”
“And then you hung up on him,” Theron added. “At least he was able to tell me the address you were headed to.”
Theron hadn’t looked at me once while he explained things.
“On a scale of one to ten, how mad are you?” I asked.
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “An eleven,” he replied. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going after Sebastian? I could have helped you.”
There were several reasons. The first was that I didn’t have a dewing signature, and he did. I’d stood a better chance of getting close to Sebastian on my own. The second was he’d just exhausted his energy holding a portal open and needed time to recover. The third was that I’d wanted to keep him safe.
“The last time I faced Sebastian, I had to watch Brandy die,” I explained. “I couldn’t watch the same thing happen to you.”
“I’m not Brandy,” he grouched.
“No,” I agreed, “but you’re the only family I’ve got, and I won’t lose you.”
When he finally looked at me, some of the warmth had returned to his brown eyes. He smiled and said, “I’d like to see you try.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Five weeks later, I woke to the warmth of sunlight on my face. Reaching for my phone on the nightstand, I checked the time and stretched. The sun rose early that time of year in Sweden. It was barely six thirty.
Rolling out of bed, I padded across the floor to look out the window. Lillian and I had wheat fields for neighbors. In golden splendor, they stretched out to the beach and the bright azure ocean.
I smiled as I watched a pair of seagulls circle and then dodge each other before landing in the driveway. Even the birds were happy here.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but I knew it wouldn’t be particularly warm that day. It never seemed to top more than seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Since, I was coming off Las Vegas summers, I had invested in lots of sweaters to keep from freezing to death.
I sensed Lillian was awake and moving around downstairs. She’d fully recovered since my naming ceremony and in a lot of ways was better than ever. She continued to be plainspoken and concise to the point of brusque, but she smiled occasionally and had tried her hand at a joke or two. She’d made her peace with the past and was happier for it.
Though she was technically retired, she kept to a regular daily schedule. She was up by seven, had breakfast by eight, took a walk along the ocean’s edge by nine, and then returned to her office to scour the internet for rare books until noon.
Wanting to check in with her before she disappeared for the morning, I pulled my jeans on, threw a sweater over my head, and combed through my hair with my fingers.
“There’s orange juice in the refrigerator if you want some,” she said when I entered the kitchen.
Chuckling to myself, I got a glass out of the cabinet. She didn’t like orange juice. She kept buying it, pretending like she did, so there would be some around for me. “Thanks,” I said, pouring myself a glass.
“Is Phoebe the Truss clan chief again?” she asked.
I’d returned late the night before from an impromptu roundtable with the other chiefs.
“Yes,” I replied, sitting at the table. “The chiefs asked Theron to testify that Sebastian was dead. He must have anticipated they would because he presented a slide show of some gruesome pictures he took before we left the mansion in D.C. I thought a couple of the chiefs might be sick watching it.”
“Which is exactly what he intended,” Lillian remarked.
“Right,” I agreed. “It’s interesting to see how different the chiefs looked at him. He’s gone from as unimportant as paint on the wall to someone they’re in awe of.”
“Hopefully it won’t make his big head bigger,” she said. “What about the blood tests? Any luck finding out how to cure our population problem?”
I nodded. “The Dawnings’ lab identified a genetic mutation in our blood compared with the keepers’ blood,” I said. “They’re working on gene therapy that should be ready within a year.”
I didn’t tell her that they were also testing the blood of some Truss dewing who’d passed away unexpectedly. Nothing had been found that would suggest a virus or bacteria caused their illness. Whether coincidental or not, there hadn’t been another reported instance since Sebastian departed our world.
“I’m going to die soon,” Lillian said, “so I want to go to the opera.”
I choked and orange juice shot up my nose. “Would you stop saying you’re going to die soon?” I grumbled, reaching for a napkin. “You’re going to be around for at least another ten years, probably fifteen.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t seem that long to me,” she said.
“It’s long enough to see most of the operas ever written,” I replied. “Why not say, I’m alive, so I’ll take dance lessons or I’m in good health, so I’m going to learn to fly an airplane.”
She looked thoughtful and then responded, “I’m alive, so I’m going to get tickets to the opera tonight. Do you want to com
e?”
I breathed out a long breath. She was hopeless. “Yeah,” I said. “I might as well.”
“We’ll leave at six,” she remarked. “It’s fancy, so you should wear one of the dresses Katherine got for you.”
It wasn’t like I’d planned to wear jeans, but I replied, “Okay. Thanks for the reminder.”
A few hours later, Lillian had locked herself up like a hermit in her office, so I grabbed the book I’d been reading off my dresser, put my jacket on, and headed out the door.
The ocean was calling me again. Not literally, but ever since the bonding ritual, I seemed to crave the feel of seawater against my skin.
The wind was brisk as I walked the narrow road through the wheat fields. I was sure my nose was red from the cold when I reached the rocky beach, but I hardly felt the chill. I was wearing tall rain boots, so I walked into the water until the waves covered my ankles. Then I let the surf roll over my hands and relished the sense of belonging to the sea.
A twinge of sadness always followed that feeling of connection. The life I’d left in Vegas hadn’t been mourned properly.
I hadn’t seen Ian since leaving the Arx. We were in contact a lot on social media and FaceTime, though. My parents were doing okay, and Alex hadn’t suffered any weird side effects after Luke erased his memories. He’d opened up to Ian on a few occasions. Mostly he was just angry about my death. Ian assured me it was a positive sign, and my brother was on the road to acceptance and healing.
We only talked about the McKyes in general terms. Ian didn’t tell me the specifics of their days, and I didn’t ask. Outside of brief discussions, I still tried not to think about them. It only made me sad when I did.
Climbing up and over the remains of an old water break, I sat on the sand and watched the gulls glide over the water for a moment. Then I opened my book to read, but I discovered I’d brought the wrong one. Instead of a spy novel, I’d picked up my dog-eared copy of Dragonsong, the one thing I’d asked Ian to send me from home.