Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “That’s what happened.”

  “No, Lucy. I want to hear what you actually remember. Do you remember being in school that day?”

  “Don’t you get it, Kaleb,” she snapped, shoving him off of her so that she could sit up on the bed and have some space. As she shifted aside, the bedsheet that had been balled in a pooling tangle sprang up from the floor and covered her in a glow of astral light at her command. “That isn’t a day I try to remember. I’ve worked hard to forget it. I’ve kept myself doped up on Xanax for over ten years just to ensure I’d never have to think about it.”

  “Were you really at school, Lucy?”

  “I was twelve! Of course, I was at school!”

  “What do you remember about being at school?” he pushed.

  “I remember walking in the door! I remember my classes! I remember what I ate for fucking lunch! Alright? It was a turkey sandwich and I ate it on the playground before I went for a walk!”

  She gasped and her eyes suddenly widened with some wash of recognition that Kaleb wished he could see for himself.

  The next thing he knew, she’d flown from the room in a ball of light and when he chased after her, he found Lucy tearing through her purse.

  When she had the little orange bottle of pills in her trembling hands, he advanced on her and wrestled for the pills.

  Effortlessly, enraged, with tears streaming down her cheeks, she shot light out of her palms and sent Kaleb flying across the room. He slammed against the wall, paintings and framed photos crashing over him.

  He cut his eyes to her. She had gotten the bottle open and was shaking pills into her hands so he lunged at her, transforming into his wolf form and clobbering her to the ground.

  The pills spilled out of her palm and she was sobbing, but he snarled his wolf snout right in her face before shifting back into a man.

  When he did, he pulled her up into his arms and they sat on the living room floor as Lucy balled her eyes out.

  “I didn’t go back into the school house when the bell rang, Kaleb,” she cried with abject horror. “I walked out into the woods.”

  “God,” he breathed, holding her.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” she told him. “I don’t know why I did it. I had no free will or ability to think or stop myself.”

  “You were being controlled,” he told her as his jaw clenched.

  Dante.

  “I held them. First Mom,” she said as if reliving the trauma in her mind. “I paralyzed her with my light,” she sobbed out. “And he killed her.”

  “Then you were used in the same way to immobilize your dad,” he supplied.

  “How could I have done that? How!” she cried.

  She was trembling now, from head to toe, every emotion she’d refused to feel over the last twelve years erupting out of her. All Kaleb could do was hold her tighter. He began rocking her as she eventually ran out of tears to cry. Even her desperate sobs of regret quieted, and soon he was holding her limp, exhausted body in his strong arms.

  “I killed them, Kaleb,” she confessed. “Then I walked back to school as though nothing had happened.”

  “You didn’t kill them,” he insisted firmly. “Dante used you.”

  “Why didn’t he kill me, too, then?” she asked.

  But Kaleb didn’t know. All he knew was that he had every intention to rip Dante limb from limb without mercy the second he hunted him down.

  Chapter Sixteen

  LUCY

  There was a full moon overhead. The wispy, tendril clouds that had been fighting to claim the sky had blown out west, revealing one of the brightest moons Lucy had ever seen in her life. Even the dark crater blemishes that scarred it seemed to glow against the black, dome sky. The surrounding constellation of twinkling scars paled in comparison. It was magnificent and eerie, and if Lucy had been sitting on a porch and not standing in the salvage yard at Damned Repair, she might have been able to marvel it. But she was filled with trepidation. The brilliant full moon felt more like a bad omen, the precursor of tragedy to come.

  Kaleb had been tender with her during their quiet drive out. He’d held her hand as he’d steered his pickup truck. He’d glanced lovingly at her here and there, but he hadn’t offered any warnings or explanations of what she might expect. These were uncharted waters. No one had ever been so bold as to bring a non-werewolf to a pack meeting. It seemed that even Kaleb wasn’t sure what would come of it. All she knew—or could sense—was that he had to bring her. It was a risk he was willing to take, but what he was actually putting at risk, Lucy didn’t know.

  The other Quinns had arrived. Kaleb sheltered Lucy behind the wall of them—Troy, Shane, Conor, and Dean standing in a line to buffer their mother, Nikita, their grandmother, Sasha, and also Reece from the entire pack that was waiting as a crowd in their human forms.

  Lucy had snuck peeks through the brothers, glancing out at the wealth of them, from the very back of the Quinns. There were so many more than she could’ve ever anticipated. It was dark, too dark to see every face out there, but the moon glow offered slim patches of dim light in certain spots, and she was shocked to recognize certain residents.

  Walter MacIntosh, who always swung into the diner at nine o’clock every Thursday evening to eat his fill of cherry pie for the week, his diet cheat day. Joan Morton and her husband, Davie, who both dressed the same and sold lumber on the outskirts of town. Young, flirty Melissa Robinson, who blended well with girls who shopped exclusively at Acorn Fashion, was among the front row of the impatient pack. But it wasn’t so much all the folks she recognized that filled her with a dark sense of unease. It was the sheer volume of them. Were there eighty people present? Over one hundred? It looked like a dark sea of worried faces, and the quantity had to represent at least half of the town’s overall population.

  Devil’s Fist wasn’t the quaint, storybook town she’d always taken it for. It was the home of werewolves. And mortals just happened to live here.

  Learning this would’ve terrified her if she hadn’t studied the dour worry and wide-eyed fear on every dimly lit face she could see. It gave her the firm impression that, like most fierce animals, they were more afraid of humans than humans were of them.

  Lucy was scared, as well, but for different reasons.

  It was impossible to grasp the magnitude of what she’d done twelve years ago. Impossible to reconcile the horrifying role she’d played in her parents’ murders. No wonder she’d kept herself bogged in a haze of Xanax her entire life. Functioning in a fog was infinitely easier than facing the truth—that without her powers, Dante Alighieri would have never succeeded at killing the Astral family whose very presence in the Fist threatened his dark existence.

  He’d returned to take Lucy’s life as well, twelve years later and to the day. But he’d killed the wrong girl. Lucy had never been filled with rage like this before. The realization of how she’d been used set her bone marrow on fire. That’s what it felt like, like she was burning up with fury from the inside out. She didn’t want to help the Quinns find Dante. She wanted to murder the rogue werewolf herself.

  What was stopping her?

  Revenge might be the only way to cool the raging inferno that was building in her bones.

  Lucy was, after all, stronger than any of them.

  She trusted Sasha’s words now, her wisdom, and expertise.

  But how would she find the werewolf responsible for wielding her own light powers to fulfill his darkest plan? Remorse was scrambling her thoughts. There was no clear thinking. And she wasn’t aware of any emerging power she had that would guide her through the success of her newly vowed mission.

  “Troy is going to start the meeting,” Kaleb informed her. “Then I’ll introduce you.”

  “Okay,” she said absently, as darker and darker determinations took root in her heart.

  “Lucy,” he said, as Troy stepped forward and began addressing the entire pack at a shouting volume. “You love me?” When she nodded, despit
e how thrown his sudden need to confirm her love for him was making her feel, he told her, “I’ve been dreaming about you.”

  “You have?”

  “For years now,” he added as he searched her eyes. For what? She didn’t know until he asked, “Have you ever dreamed of me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t dream. The prescription prevents it.”

  He was working up to something. He wanted to ask her something. She could feel it, but didn’t have the faintest clue as to what.

  “I think we’re meant to be,” he finally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you’re the light to my darkness,” he said as though that might clarify his point. It barely did. “Werewolves don’t use the term soulmates. We call our other halves our one true mate, and Lucy, I think you’re mine.”

  “Is that why I’m here?” she asked just as Troy turned and gestured for Kaleb to step forward.

  As Kaleb did, he cradled Lucy to the head of the Quinns with him so that the crowd of werewolves could see her.

  There were gasps and murmurs then an outpouring of collective anger as Kaleb announced, “Lucy Cooper is meant to be one of us.”

  Someone in the back shouted, “Troy, what does your foresight say?”

  Troy barked over the disturbed voices, “We cannot rely on the amethysts! Lucy has powers that I believe we can trust!”

  “Powers?” one of the woman exclaimed with an edge of shrill terror in her tone.

  “She isn’t even human?” asked another.

  “Quiet!” Troy yelled, but it didn’t calm the pack.

  “Kaleb revealed our secret?!” another shouted, furious.

  And that’s when the pack turned into a mob.

  “He broke the cardinal rule!”

  “He exposed us!”

  “Kaleb has put us all at risk!”

  There was no calming or quieting them and soon the crowd collectively began chanting, “String him up! String him up! String him up!”

  As they began closing in, Lucy felt two strong hands grab her from behind, jerking her back through the line of Quinn brothers, and when she turned she found Nikita holding her.

  “We have to get you out of here!” Nikita warned.

  Confused and worried, Lucy cut her eyes to Kaleb as he was swallowed by the crowd, members of the pack transforming into wolves in the blink of an eye to leap at him.

  Troy had shifted as well and his brothers jumped in.

  It looked like a tangled brawl of flesh and fur.

  Without thinking, without warning, Lucy felt her skin light up with the brightness of a thousand suns.

  But she soon realized that drawing massive attention to herself had not been wise.

  Chapter Seventeen

  KALEB

  It was pure chaos.

  Of all the ways this could’ve gone, Kaleb had not anticipated it would’ve gone south this goddamn fast. The pack hadn’t even given him a breath of space to explain himself. They’d shifted and attacked. They were deaf to their werewolf king’s orders, blatantly ignoring Troy when he’d shouted firm demands that they all stand down. Insanity was too flimsy a word to describe the shitstorm that was now swallowing him. Every last member of the pack had turned on him and had no regard for their king.

  Kaleb did not see a way to make it out of this alive.

  Fangs had sunk into his shoulder, his hide. He was bleeding. Chunks of his flesh were being torn away. He was being mobbed so mercilessly, he couldn’t even see. His world had turned to fur and fangs and utter darkness, and no amount of lashing back, twisting and turning, snarling and howling was going to free him.

  And then the salvage yard had lit up with the blazing light of what felt like a thousand suns—the darkness of the wolves moving so fast in their attack that it seemed like a strobe light was flashing in Kaleb’s squinting wolf eyes, that’s how stark the chaotic contrast was.

  But some of the wolves were now turning, having shifted their bloodthirsty focus from Kaleb to the bright being of light that had so greatly threatened them.

  “No!” Kaleb yelled, shifting back into his human form, as part of the pack broke away to charge at Lucy. “Get her out of here!”

  Nikita and Sasha were anxiously doing just that, but Lucy refused to be dragged off to safety.

  She held her ground, beams of light shooting from her palms and slamming into one wolf then the next, sending them flying sideways.

  “You can’t help him!” Nikita insisted as she jerked Lucy’s arm. “This is his fight!”

  Lucy shoved Nikita off of her and sent another burst of light across the mob just as a wall of wolves lunged at her.

  Then Sasha yelled, “You will not win them over with this display, girl!”

  “Win them over?!” Lucy yelled right back, astonished that she should be expected to win a single werewolf over when they were tearing Kaleb apart before her horrified eyes.

  “Come! Now!” Sasha commanded, and when Lucy glanced back at Kaleb, wide-eyed and terror-stricken, he felt his heart shatter for her.

  “Go!” he screamed at her as a murder of wolves pulled him under.

  The last thing he saw before the darkness closed in all around him was Lucy’s light fading away through the salvage yard.

  He fought.

  Tussling and tumbling.

  He shifted into his massive wolf form and tore flesh from bone, any wolf that dared lunge at him. Troy and all of his brothers joined in and soon they’d formed a circle, facing out to defend their clan from the hell-raging mob that had once been their pack.

  When Kaleb lifted his eyes in the direction Lucy had disappeared in, he felt the hard fist of panic punch his chest. Nikita and Sasha were racing around, bewildered.

  Something was wrong.

  Lucy wasn’t there. Wasn’t with them.

  She’d taken off.

  But where? And why?

  At first, he feared a cluster of wolves had seized her, but when he received a sudden flash—a vision opening up in his mind—he knew that wasn’t the case.

  Call it intuition or a dark knowing, Kaleb suddenly had every reason to believe that Lucy had broken free of this fight, fleeing from his mother and grandmother’s care, to attack the root cause of all this chaos.

  Dante Alighieri.

  Kaleb was not about to let her fight him alone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  LUCY

  Not her fight?

  Let the love of her life get mobbed?

  Flee away into the safety of darkness with two old women whose logic made absolutely no sense?

  That was the expectation?

  Not on her life.

  She’d seen it clearly in her mind.

  A sudden burst of light that had illuminated the truth.

  The werewolf pack hadn’t turned on Kaleb and their king of their own volition.

  Not by a longshot.

  And no one but Lucy could see it.

  The entirety of the pack was being controlled.

  Mind controlled.

  And the man who had stolen Lucy’s life, her childhood, her parents, her happiness was the one dark monster who was now pulling the strings.

  Why Dante hadn’t seeped into Kaleb’s mind, or any of the Quinns’ back there was no accident. Lucy knew it. She knew that rogue werewolf had intended to turn the pack against the Royal brothers. He wanted them to feel the depth of that profound betrayal. He wanted them to suffer as their own kind tore them apart. Dante, wherever he was, was enjoying this.

  And Lucy was hellbent on finding him.

  She could feel the texture of his darkness in her soul. It was a sense entirely new to Lucy. It was distinct, unmistakable, and traceable. If werewolves had heightened senses, could hear the faintest rustling from miles off, could distinguish the unique scent of one person versus another, and could see clearly through the darkest corners of the wilderness with hawkish vision, Lucy was now discovering her own specialized height
ened senses. And one of them was the textured energy of Dante Alighieri’s dark, soulless pulse.

  She would never forget it.

  When he’d seeped into her mind out on Eagle’s Pass, he’d left a stain of himself behind. It was more exact than a fingerprint, more accurate that DNA, and as Lucy flew through the eerie night, the glow of the full moon brightening an otherwise black sky, she could feel exactly where the murderous monster was located.

  She landed breezily, her sneakers touching down on the yellow lines that cut along the very center of Main Street in the heart of Devil’s Fist. There wasn’t a soul around and as she slowed from a jog to walking, catching her breath as her momentum tapered off, she felt the profound magnitude of peace and tranquility that was her precious town.

  Libations bar, which was up ahead, cast a soft, amber glow into the street.

  It was a devilish thing for Dante to do—show up at Libations while all of the Fist sat vulnerable. Dante knew that Jack Quagmire and Angel Mercer had reported to the werewolf meeting at Damned Repair. All of the werewolves had. There was no better time for the rogue wolf to roam free in the heart of town, unencumbered. Everyone who knew of him and knew the danger he posed, including Reece, was tucked away, under his dark control, on the far side of town. Fighting. Attacking. But hopefully not killing the Quinn clan.

  But not Lucy.

  She heaved the heavy wooden door of the bar open and cautiously entered.

  The bar was being tended by the same surfer kid who’d been tasked to hold down the fort night after night.

  Other than a few of the usual suspects hunched over pints here and there, the place was quiet, but to Lucy it was far from peaceful.

  The dark texture of Dante Alighieri’s soulless energy had filled the place. The air was tainted with it. And Lucy felt like she might choke.

  “Oh, God,” she breathed the second she locked her gaze on them. “No.”

  Wearing a crisp, designer suit, his dark hair slicked back, wing-tipped patent leather loafers polished and shiny as sin, Dante was seated at one of the tables in the back, but he wasn’t alone.