Sighing, she held it up, admiring the craftsmanship. “Only after we restore the ability to shift.” She didn’t bother to add her doubts about whether they would succeed.
Connell finished checking out the perimeter and joined her next to the circle she had drawn on the ground.
“You better not be cutting yourself up again,” he growled.
She frowned. “It was necessary.”
“Well, I don’t like seeing you bleed. Judging from your expression when you were slicing yourself up, neither do you. You’re squeamish about blood, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine when it’s someone else’s,” she snapped. “And it usually is.”
Connell humphed. She bit her lip to keep from arguing with him more because, judging from his expression, Douglas was trying not to laugh.
Gesturing to Sammy, she motioned for him to join her in the circle. Yogi was right behind him.
“There’s no danger to him, right?” Yogi asked.
Logan shrugged. “Probably not.”
Yogi glowered and stepped up to the circle’s edge. “Probably?”
“Hey, you’re the one who wanted me to do this,” she snapped. “In theory, it’s a simple transfer of energy, but I haven’t done this before. No one has. So you have to be aware of the risks. This isn’t one-hundred-perfect safe.”
“Which is why I still say I should go first,” Connell pointed out.
Logan was tired of arguing this point. “I know, but I have a better chance of success with Sammy since his attack was more recent. There’s a higher chance his shifter magic is still intact and floating around in the aether. But if I try and fail with you, I won’t know if it’s because the ritual is wrong or too much time has passed.”
There was also the issue of size. Connell’s magic would have been proportional to him—his body mass, age, and alpha status. So the energy she was trying to channel would have been more potent with him. Sammy was only a cub, so in theory, it should be easier for him.
Not that this was going to be easy. If she didn’t control the intensity of the energy and the rate of the transfer, Sammy could be blown sky-high. So could she. However, she chose not to mention those cold, hard facts. She’d stop the ritual if she felt the child was in imminent danger.
Of course, the decision wasn’t hers…
Logan knelt to Sammy’s level. “Kiddo, you don’t have to do this. You can grow up to be a perfectly normal man. You’ll be just as smart and special as you are right now.”
“No, I want my wolf back,” he said quickly before looking down at the ground. “The other boys act different around me now,” he added in a lower voice.
“Okay, then,” she said, putting her hand on the back of his head.
She had been half-hoping he would say he was fine the way he was. Like that had been realistic.
“In that case, let’s get started,” she said in a loud, clear voice. She straightened up and looked around, pointing the staff at his brother. “Yogi, back off and get outside the circle. And don’t smudge those runes.”
She positioned Sammy a few steps in front of her on the left side of the circle. Her blood pounded in her ears as she took her place on the right and held the bo up. Peeking out of the side of her eye, she took one last look at Connell and the others before breathing deeply and calling for the magic.
It was different from using her air talent. Calling the winds was second nature to her by now. Like breathing. She didn’t have to think about it. But this was something else.
The weight in her stomach increased as she searched for the specific signature of shifter energy in the aether. The words were similar to the spell she used to strip the Burgess witches, but she’d modified it extensively. There, she’d cast the magic out and away. Now, she was trying to coax it near—pleading for it to come to her.
The spirits on the wind heard and mocked her efforts. One of them, a nasty bogeyman-like male she had secretly nicknamed Gollum, whispered swear words in both English and Mandarin. Pointedly ignoring him, she focused on her chant, keeping her voice low so the words would be unclear.
It wasn’t that she was worried about the ritual being copied by the wolves here. This wasn’t their kind of magic, but Elementals were secretive by nature when it came to the spells they used. They were safer that way.
She was well into the second verse when Gollum shouted in her ear. “You’re going to fail, you stupid fucking cunt!”
Logan flinched. “Son of a bitch,” she swore, breaking off mid-chant.
In the distance, she could hear Gollum laughing, his delight in derailing her obvious.
“Everything okay?” Connell asked, his mouth turned down in concern.
Shifting her weight, she tightened her hold on the staff with a determined grip. “It’s fine,” she said from behind gritted teeth.
It had been some time since an air spirit had managed to unnerve her that way.
Connell shifted his weight impatiently, but she tore her eyes away from his tall, tense form. It was a good thing he could only hear the spirits if he was touching her. Ignoring the dead douchebag continuing to shout in the background, she refocused on her task, getting through the first, second, and third verses without cracking again. When nothing happened, she started over again. Thankfully, Gollum got bored and subsided into the background hum of the other spirits.
Her sweep was systematic. Logan would direct her calls out to the aether, turning periodically to face each cardinal direction before beginning the cycle again.
She had just become convinced that Gollum was right when the magic came hard and fast. It struck the staff like a lightning rod, running through it and her with a blast stronger than any bolt from the sky.
Oh, fuck.
Logan had miscalculated. There was too much energy to channel directly into Sammy’s little body. In a split-second decision, she did the only thing she could think of. She ran the energy through her body before passing it on to the little boy—efficiently frying her aura in the process.
Pain exploded in her head and her vision whitened out before clearing. When she could see again, it was through squinted eyes. Sammy was lying on the ground in front of her.
She held on long enough to make sure his chest was still moving up and down before letting go. The ground rushed up to meet her.
31
Ow. Pain raced through her body as she regained consciousness. Logan cracked an eyelid, but even that hurt.
There was nothing but white above her. Crapulence. Had she died? Had the Mother called her home?
“Logan, thank God!”
Connell’s anxious face appeared above her, and her body rolled into his as he sat next to her. They were on a bed in an unfamiliar room. His weight was enough to displace her, the staff she held tightly in her hand knocking into his knee.
“Maybe you’ll let that go now,” he said gruffly. “I couldn’t get it out of your hand when you were unconscious. Neither could my dad. It was the damnedest thing, but your grip was supernaturally tight.”
No wonder her hand ached. With a wince, Logan lifted the bo staff straight above her. For a second, she thought her hand was fused to the bo. It took far too much effort to force her fingers to relax, but she finally did. Connell took the staff from her and propped it next to the bed, the dragon head winking down at her.
“Did it work?” she croaked, her voice raspy and tight.
“I don’t know. Maybe. My father says Sammy’s energy is different now, but he hasn’t shifted yet. He was out for a few minutes, too, but he woke up as soon as we got him inside. Dad said he should wait a little longer before trying to change.”
“Is that all it’s been? A few minutes?”
“No. You’ve been out for hours.”
“What?”
Logan sat up with a grimace, despite Connell’s effort to hold her down. She ached from head to toe, but she wasn’t about to stay in bed a minute longer.
“Hours?” she asked in disbeli
ef.
“Yeah.” His face grew dark. “The longest damn hours of my life. Don’t ever fucking scare me like that again,” he growled, pulling her into his arms in a hard, inflexible embrace.
“Okay,” Logan said, patting him awkwardly on the back. “Did you forget the part where we have to try again to restore your wolf?”
Connell leaned back to meet her eyes. “Fuck it. I don’t want it back if it’s going to kill you.”
“In case you failed to notice, I’m not dead.”
“You could have been.” He scowled. “And if it was that hard to get Sammy’s wolf back, then I don’t want you to try for mine.”
“Well, I didn’t say I wanted to do it right this minute, did I? And really, I’m fine now.” She started to get up, but Connell rolled on top of her. “Hey.”
“Did you notice you’re in my room?” he asked silkily.
Logan took a look around again. She hadn’t recognized it at first, although the size of the bed should have tipped her off. “So?”
“And did you forget what I told you I would do to you if I got you back here?”
Oh. All of sudden, she had no desire to get up and back to work. Relaxing, she let her body melt against his. “I don’t suppose everyone has gone to bed?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact, they have. You slept till dawn.”
“Hmm. Well, in that case…”
She wrapped her arms around his neck, deciding she wasn’t that sore after all.
32
Logan was studiously avoiding looking at Connell’s family at breakfast the next morning. She was kicking herself for falling into bed with him again, and she couldn’t believe she had done so under his father’s roof. Her only excuse for her weakness was her recent brush with death…
Not to mention those ten-pack abs.
Sex with Connell had been even better this time, and she had lost herself in his arms. However, she was aware of how sensitive a Were’s hearing was, so she’d made an effort to do so quietly.
Unfortunately, Connell hadn’t bothered with discretion. Or he hadn’t cared that he was waking everyone on their floor of the house. She’d wanted to kill him at the time, but she hadn’t been feeling up to it.
Even now, she was feeling a little shaky in the aftermath of that blast to her aura. Her nerves were normally rock solid, but she felt jittery and uncertain, although she would have chewed her own leg off before admitting it.
Connell had slept in, but he’d been up most of the night keeping watch over her when she’d gotten zapped. He needed the rest. So she went downstairs alone and ate quickly, hoping to get out of there before the rest of the pack descended on the house.
Her plan was to return to the safe house for more research. Hopefully, with a little modification, she could repeat the ritual to get Connell’s wolf back without getting knocked on her butt again. But first, she needed to refuel. She helped herself to more pancakes.
Mara sat across the table from her. From time to time, she gave Logan a speculative look, but she kept pretty quiet.
She’s thinking of Malcolm.
Sammy provided a brief distraction. The little boy blew into the dining room to wolf down breakfast. He could barely sit still long enough to gulp a glass of milk before running outside, bouncing up and down the entire way. When the chief went outside to check on him, Logan relaxed.
“Do you want kids?” Mara asked.
Logan choked on a large bit of breakfast sausage. The pack enjoyed a lot of meat with every meal. “Err. I guess. Someday.”
“Connell wants them. A whole litter,” Mara continued in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Okay.”
“You’re too young to be thinking of having kids, aren’t you?”
Logan nodded, widening her eyes for emphasis.
“I guess that’s okay. Connell is still young for a Were. Not as young as you, but he has time.”
God, this was uncomfortable. “Look, I know a lot has happened. To you. To your pack. Even between Connell and me. But that doesn’t mean we’re…”
She trailed off, unsure what to say. She knew what Connell would want her to say, but Logan didn’t want to make any claims either way. Wolves put a lot of stock in verbal declarations.
“I want to be an aunt,” Mara declared firmly.
“Um…”
Mara was staring at her expectantly when a great shout went up outside. It was Douglas, and he was yelling Logan’s name.
She was out the door in a flash. She didn’t even bother to run, just dematerialized and threw herself out the nearest window so fast she made herself dizzy.
Regaining her legs, she ran up to Douglas, who was standing a little away with a group of male Weres and cubs. Yogi was there, his eyes trained on something behind the wall of men.
Mara ran out of the house behind her, catching up as Logan pushed past the Weres blocking her view.
There in the middle of a shredded pile of children’s clothing was a small, blue-and-gold dragon.
Yogi spun Logan backward with a large hand. “How do we turn him back?” he cried.
“How do we turn who back?” she asked, the answer coming to her before she had finished her sentence.
The kid’s clothes. She had seen that shirt this morning. This was Sammy, and he was a shifter again. Just not a wolf.
“Holy crap on a cracker,” she muttered before looking up at the men.
A ring of shocked gazes stared back at her.
She coughed and cleared her throat before turning back to the little dragon, who was preening and swishing his new spiked tail. “Well…this is awkward.”
33
By the Mother, they were going to kill her.
“What the fuck do you mean by it is more nurture than nature?” Yogi yelled.
“Calm down, son,” Douglas said for the third time.
“It’s not her fault,” Connell pointed out. He’d shot out of bed when the yelling started. “We asked her to do this.”
Yogi had been ranting at her for a solid ten minutes—ever since they’d persuaded Sammy to stop flexing his wings and swishing his spined tail in favor of having some ice cream.
That last had been Mara’s idea. She knew the kid pretty well. Only the offer of three scoops of rocky road had gotten Sammy’s attention. Otherwise, it was doubtful he would have given up playing in his dragon form. He seemed thrilled with the new status quo and kept trying to set the shrubbery on fire.
It hadn’t helped that Logan had yelped, and then laughed when the little dragon had succeeded in breathing a weak flame. Once the bush he’d set on fire was charcoal, he’d shifted back to his seven-year-old self.
“It has to be that damn dragon staff of yours,” Yogi continued. “It turned him into one of them!”
Logan shook her head. “It’s not a magical dragon creation device,” she said sarcastically. “The headpiece at the top is purely ornamental. Even if Sammy focused and somehow imprinted on it during the ritual, it shouldn’t have been enough to override your natural wolf programming.”
“What the hell does that mean? We’re not programmed,” Connell protested, his head drawing back.
She raised her shoulders and made little circles with her hands. “Well… actually…you kind of are.”
“What?”
“Well, you know that whole shifting-into-wolves thing is more a cultural practice than anything else, right?”
Even the chief stared at her blankly.
Logan shuffled on her feet. “Okay, so it’s like this. There aren’t that many types of Supes out there. You have your Fae, your vamps, and your witches.”
Douglas passed a hand over his face. “Go on,” he said impatiently. “Faster, if you please.”
“I’m simply trying to be clear here,” Logan said, exasperated. “There are those species of Supes. And then there are shifters. There are a lot of different kinds of shifters…in practice. But the reality is, you’re all…just shifters.”
�
�Well, I can’t turn into a fucking dragon,” Yogi spat. “Or a goat. Or a fucking bunny rabbit. We’re werewolves.”
Logan nodded. “I know you’re wolves. Don’t expect to suddenly be able to shift into something else if you try. The wolf meme is strong. They all are.”
Even Connell was starting to give her a frustrated glare. “Fuck, Logan, being a werewolf is not some fucking fad.”
“I didn’t say it was. It is, however, more along the lines of a very strongly held conviction.”
More disbelieving looks. She turned to the chief. “You know how some ideas are so strong that we hold onto them as an inviolable truth, and then we meet another culture or society and find out they don’t believe in that truth the way we do, and it seems almost incomprehensible to us?”
“It’s how most wars get started,” he said flatly, looking down at her with get-on-with-it expression.
“Well, werewolves are very much like those truths. The concept of a man—or woman,” she said, breaking off to glance at Mara, “changing into a wolf is an idea so strong, and so compelling, that it’s been passed down in your blood.”
“So we are wolves by nature,” Connell said.
“In a way…but there’s this thing human scientists have described recently that sort of explains what I mean. Has anyone heard of epigenetics?”
“What the fuck are you talking about now?” Yogi asked, his volume raising.
Logan wiggled her hands, searching for the right words. “Epigenetic traits are changes in your cells caused by the environment that aren’t necessarily hard coded into your DNA. They happen at a level above that. Sometimes, they’re inherited by the next generation, but sometimes they aren’t.”
“So what?” Yogi spat.
It was her turn to start losing her patience. “So being a wolf is something that is usually inherited. It’s a powerful trope. One that is so strong it’s become the foundation of an entire society. But it’s not hard coded into your DNA.”
That was met with complete silence.
“All right,” Douglas said after a long while. “What you’re saying is that Sammy’s signals have been scrambled, and now he’s settled on another…trope.”
Air: The Elementals Book Two Page 20