by Elise Faber
“Thank you,” Alex said, tears in her eyes.
Daughtry’s own eyes weren’t dry either. “I’m glad you’re here,” she murmured and promised to check in later, knowing that her sister could probably use some time to process everything that had happened.
Because for the first time in a long, long time, Alex had a family.
A nosy, impatient, loyal and overwhelming family.
That took some getting used to.
Forty-Two
“We’ve been able to find little evidence to corroborate Alex’s story,” Dante said.
Daughtry was unable to stop her mouth from dropping open. Because, really, did he think the Dalshie were just going to tell them what they were up to?
She sat in Dante’s cluttered office, stacks of paper dotting his desk like oversized confetti and tried to figure out what he expected her to do from there.
“I would have thought that talking with Tiffany”—who’d been captured and held prisoner by the Dalshie for nearly a decade—“and Steph would be enough. I would have thought the Forgotten confirming the kidnappings and experiments would be enough.” Dee took a breath and said quietly, “I would have thought my memories would have been enough.”
Dante raised a brow, probably at the sheer amount of insolence in her tone. She respected him, had faith in his abilities, but Dante was also five centuries old. The meaning of moving quickly was sometimes lost on him.
“With all due respect, Daughtry, your memories are not the most reliable.” He put up a hand, stopping her when she would have spoken. “That being said, I’m inclined to believe your sister,” he said. “Especially after talking with Tiffany, Steph, and Dom. But that doesn’t mean we can just turn her loose in the Colony.”
“She’s not a Dalshie,” she said.
“We don’t know what she can do, Dee.”
Defeated, Daughtry sat back in the armchair and glanced over the surface of his desk, or the little of it that was visible beneath the piles and piles of papers. The man needed a maid.
Or to go digital.
“I understand.” She stood and walked toward the door.
“Dee.” She stopped, turned to face Dante, and saw that his grey eyes were kind. “We will find a solution that works. I promise.”
With a nod, she pushed through the door and stepped out into the hall. Alex would be waiting for her, and she’d already made her sister wait on her too much over the last week.
Cody was standing outside, ankles and arms crossed as he reclined against the wall.
“We need to know everything that the Master and Elisabeth were working on,” she said. “I know there’s more she’s not telling me.”
He nodded. “She’s trying to protect you.”
Dee nodded. “I think so too. But I remember everything Elisabeth did to me, so now we need to understand what the Master wants and how to stop him. We need to come up with a plan, and we need to do it soon.”
“Dante—”
“Look,” she said. “I get it. Dante is a great leader, but he’s also five hundred years old. His sense of urgency is different from mine.” She brushed the hair back from Cody’s head. “I understand that he wants to move cautiously, but I can’t stop these feelings inside of me—maybe it’s foresight, maybe it’s fear for Alex, maybe it’s nothing but gas. I understand his need to be careful, but we’ve still got to act. I worry if we don’t that—”
Her teeth found her lip and bit hard.
“That it might be the end of the Rengalla,” she said.
Cody was quiet for a moment, but only a moment. Then he took her hand and started tugging her down the hall.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To get Alex.” He turned the corner. “Then we’re going to the inner sanctum.”
Monitors and a conference table. It could have been the security suite in any Fortune 500 company, albeit the images projected on the screen weren’t of workers. Instead, they were filled with families, children in classes in the gardens, couples sitting on the front lawn of the Colony.
Which made what they were discussing seem even more important.
The door opened, and Alex walked in, trailed very closely by John. Her sister was giving off definite prickly porcupine, intense do-not-touch me vibes. John wasn’t a ray of sunshine himself, a ferocious frown pulling down his blond brows.
Dee waited until Alex had plunked into the seat next to hers before whispering, “Did you murder his cat or something?”
She felt Cody’s burst of amusement in his mind, saw the slight shaking of his shoulders as he spoke with John and Dante.
“He’s an arrogant jerk.”
Uh. Yeah. “He’s a LexTal.”
“Watch it, cowgirl,” Cody grumbled across the bond.
She smiled. “You know what I mean. Pushy. Like to have your own way. Alpha.”
“Not making me feel any better.”
“Your ego can survive it,” she thought, “because more than all of those things, you’re also the strongest, most noble man I know.”
“That’s better.”
Alex cleared her throat, and Daughtry glanced up, her cheeks hot. “Sorry,” she said. “Cody took umbrage with my statement.”
“About LexTals being the most infuriating creatures on this planet?”
Daughtry snorted. “Basically.” She tilted her head to the side. “Want to tell me what’s going on with John?”
“Not really.” Alex dropped her head into her hands, so her next words were muffled. “God. I don’t know. He’s just so . . .”
“Stubborn? Frustrating?” A pause as she lifted both brows. “Sexy?”
“Yes!” Alex’s head popped up. “Wait. Not sexy. That’s not where things are going. I don’t—We can’t— Oh for fuck’s sake!” There was a thunk as she dropped her forehead to the table.
“You know you can do what you want. You’re free here.”
Daughtry recognized the ridiculousness of her statement even before the words had fully crossed the space between them. She gave her sister a rueful smile when Alex turned her face, still resting her cheek on the table, and glared at her.
“Sorry. I know this last week has been frustrating, but I’m hoping that if we can get everything out in the open, Dante will trust you.” She sighed. “You need to be doing something, and it can’t be sitting in your room. Especially with the Dalshie regrouping.”
Alex sat up. “It’s not your fault.”
“I don’t know how to make him see reason.” The memories Alex had sparked confirmed what she already knew. Her sister was good.
Alex touched her arm. “It’s okay, Dee. I understand. I’m frustrated, sure. But I get it. Trust takes time.”
“How are you only twenty?”
“Should I pull out some college coed drama? Go get drunk and hook up with a random stranger?”
Daughtry’s jaw dropped open. “Uhhh, no. Please don’t do that.”
“Sarcasm.” Alex rolled her eyes. “You don’t usually miss it.”
Dee shook her head vigorously. “Don’t put images like that in my mind. It makes my sisterly instincts go all squirrely.”
“You will not touch anyone else.”
John’s voice made Daughtry jump. The sneaky LexTal hadn’t made a noise.
Alex narrowed her eyes. “I’ve already told you to not order me around.”
“You will not.” John said, bending to glare down at her sister. “Or so help me God, I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Alex snapped and shoved her chair back, popping to her feet in a fairly impressive impersonation of a jack-in-the-box.
“Ding, ding, ding,” Cody thought across the bond. “And round one has begun.”
Forty-Three
Alex jabbed her finger hard enough into John’s chest that Daughtry winced.
“You’ll what?” she asked again. “Do nothing but stand on the outside of my life and judge? Or worse, maybe you’ll pull an Elisabeth and hurt me?” A
nother jab. “Or restrict me? Lock me up? Chain me in my quarters? Been there, done that, got the freaking souvenir tank top, okay?”
All was quiet for a long moment.
Then John spoke, his voice carefully calm. That, more than anything, illustrated to Daughtry how near the edge he was. “You deserve better than how you were treated.”
“Look you Rengalla may not be into torture and the like”—Alex huffed out a breath and sank back down into her chair “—but nobody believes that. Least of all me.”
“I believe it,” Daughtry told her. “Cody believes too.”
“Sure. Great. Whatever,” Alex said, her tone almost caustic. “Let’s just get everything out in the open so we can hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya,’ okay?”
John’s hand settled onto Alex’s shoulder. “You need to—”
The move happened in the blink of Daughtry’s eye.
One second John was towering over Alex. The next he was sprawled on the floor, Alex straddling him and jabbing a ballpoint pen against his throat.
“I could kill you this easily,” Alex snapped, digging in the pen. “This. Easily.”
John grabbed her wrist and slowly pulled it away from his throat. “You could.” A pause. “But you won’t.”
The muscles of her sister’s arm stood out sharply beneath the sleeve of her T-shirt.
Strong. Capable. Dangerous.
Daughtry had only seen the bruised exterior, the little girl without family or home.
Oh, she’d known Alex was ridiculously tough and had more grit than pretty much anyone else. But, for the first time, Dee realized how much she’d underestimated her sister.
“I could do it,” Alex said, clenching the pen. “I damn well could.”
“I know,” John murmured.
His tone had taken on a husky edge, one that Daughtry understood very clearly.
She glanced at Cody, who was a cross between amused and concerned.
“They need to figure it out themselves,” he thought.
“In the middle of the conference room floor?”
“I’m not one to judge locations.”
Her cheeks heated as the memories of how many places they’d discussed their various issues flooded her mind. “You’re no help.”
“Pink looks good on you.”
“Shut up.” “If you do decide to kill John please don’t do it in front of me,” she said to Alex. “Because then I’d be obliged to try to save him and, really, my day has been exhausting enough.”
Alex and John both looked at her incredulously. She gave a little finger wave and glanced pointedly around the room.
The LexTals were all there. Morgan, Mason, and Monroe. Cody and Tyler. Dante . . . and of course, John.
And they were all—with the exception of John still sprawled on the floor with Alex straddling him—watching the scene avidly, horrible gossips that they were.
“Blood stains are hell to get out of carpets,” Morgan quipped.
Daughtry rolled her eyes and tossed him a glare. “Really?”
He winked. “You love me.”
“No. Really. I don’t.”
Cody snorted and walked over to Alex. He put out his hand. “I think you’ve demonstrated your abilities quite thoroughly. Maybe we can continue this discussion in a slightly more comfortable location?”
“I love it when you go all formal with your speech,” Daughtry thought to him. “It makes me go all tingly inside, like you’re a hero from one of those historical romances Suz always reads.”
“We will continue that discussion later,” he thought, his mental smirk sliding down the bond.
Alex sighed and, though she took the pen from John’s throat, Daughtry noticed her sister didn’t drop it. She played it over her fingers in an almost absentminded gesture that bespoke of some serious hand-eye coordination.
Hot damn. Her sister was a total badass.
“Sit,” Dante told the room at large. His grey eyes focused on Alex when they’d all obliged. “Spill.”
Alex took a breath and said, “Elisabeth wanted to put our magic back together.”
Daughtry exchanged a look with Cody. “Put it back together how?”
“She wanted to mix the two magics together again. Like how it used to be in the past.”
Dee’s brows pulled down. “Do you mean Bond Magic?”
Alex frowned. “What’s Bond Magic?”
“What Cody and I have.” She held up a hand, called on her magic. A sphere of purple and violet flames hovered over her palm. “When we bonded, our powers mixed on a soul-deep level. You know we’re linked in our minds, but our magic is also intertwined. It’s stronger than normal Rengallan magic and is what we used to create the shield around the Colony.”
“Oh,” her sister murmured. “I’d wondered why it was so powerful when I came through.” She shook her head. “But no. Elisabeth wanted what she called the twin sides of magic—the light, the dark—back together. United the magic is supposed to be infinitely more powerful than when both pieces are separated.”
Dee nodded. “The sum of the whole is greater than that of the individual pieces.” Eight gazes locked on her at once, and she shrugged. “What can I say? Occasionally I have my moments.”
“Yes,” Alex said. “The power is supposed to be limitless, and Elisabeth devoted herself to finding it.”
Dante was giving her cautious eyes, but Dee already understood. She’d used her magic to end her mother’s life. She’d felt that near-limitless power. Never would she forget the sensation of her hands covered with flames so hot and yet completely harmless—at least to her.
When they’d touched Elisabeth, her mother had just disintegrated.
But no phoenix had risen from the remaining ashes, only Daughtry’s guilt.
“It was a magical artifact,” she said, stomach clenching, that ugly nauseous feeling rising again. Swallowing hard, she finished her thought. “I found it in the archives. No one knew what it was supposed to do, and I destroyed it before Elisabeth could get it.”
“Good.”
There was no doubt denying the genuineness of her sister’s tone. Or at least Daughtry didn’t.
Dante, for his part, was unreadable, his face blank, his tone completely neutral when he said, “Tell me more about the experiments, Alex.”
That was when Dee realized that no matter how much she wanted to, this wasn’t a battle she could fight alone.
Forty-Four
Alex talked for several hours as Daughtry and the LexTals listened intently.
The men were quiet except for Dante asking the occasional question, directing Alex’s recollections in a clear and ordered way.
Her sister laid it out carefully, in a neutral tone that did nothing to reveal the pain in those blue eyes. Alex’s outward mask may have been calm, but it was exactly that. A mask. A front.
And Daughtry would be a fool to assume she was the only one who saw through it.
But they paid strict attention as Alex detailed everything she’d seen in the time after Elisabeth had been killed, and the Master had risen to power. They listened as she talked about growing up in the Dalshie stronghold, about the smaller compound she’d been confined in after Elisabeth had no longer brought Daughtry.
They listened as she talked about the experiments and how the Master had taken it upon himself to succeed where Elisabeth had failed.
That was when things got challenging for Daughtry.
Memories of her mother treating her and Alex like lab rats crept to the surface of her mind.
She couldn’t help but remember the pain of the black magic entering her body, the terror, the hideous joy as the darkness flowed through her. Cody touched her knee, and the images were shoved away, replaced by his love across the bond and hers in return. She blinked, smiled up at him, and forced herself to focus.
“Elisabeth first had the idea to experiment on the Forgotten. Because they each can only do one type of elemental magic, she thought if she cou
ld somehow remove the magic that was implanted in them and put it all together in one Dalshie body, she might be able to merge the light and dark powers.”
“What happened?”
Alex shook her head. “It killed the Forgotten when their power was removed. Elisabeth was never able to harness it. But she was convinced it failed because they weren’t able to get Forgotten with all four elements.”
“That’s why she wanted Steph,” Dee said. When Alex raised her brows, she added, “The Dalshie tried to grab her a few months back. She has a rare form of Earth magic. But she and the rest of the Forgotten are safe at the Colony now.”
“Dominic needs to know this,” she thought to Cody.
“I agree.”
“That must have been why the Master changed tactics,” Alex said. “He’s stopped experimenting on the Forgotten and fully moved toward resurrecting Elisabeth’s failed breeding program.”
Morgan made a retching sound.
“But Dalshie can’t reproduce,” Dante said. “That part of their bodies is broken when the darkness takes over.”
“Not for lack of trying,” Alex said. “Or at least the Master forcing them to try. He’s got every Dalshie in the place effing each other’s brains out. I think he’s convinced it will only take one time or the right combination of Dalshie. But when they tried—” Her voice broke, but she pressed on. “When they tried to make me join that party, I decided I’d stayed long enough.”
Dee sat in stunned silence staring at her sister. She’d always wondered why Elisabeth had sent Dalshie to try to rape her, had chalked it up to the Dalshie wanting to hurt her as thoroughly as possible.
But had Elisabeth truly wanted to impregnate Daughtry with a Dalshie baby?
She shivered and pushed that horrifying thought as far back in her brain as possible. A child with dark magic? Growing inside her?
No. She wouldn’t even picture it.
Her stomach clenched again, another wave of nausea filling her.
“Cowgirl?” Cody asked, concerned.