by Bella Jacobs
I step back with a soft, “Woah,” that makes Kite laugh beside me.
“Didn’t expect a griffin to be that big, huh?” He takes my hand as my eyes dart from Dust’s giant wings—a span as wide as a school bus, covered with gorgeous silver and gold feathers than glitter in the moonlight—to his powerful lion’s body, curved beak, and bright yellow eyes.
“No.” I smile. “But I like it. I like it when the big, scary things are on our side.”
Dust’s large head swivels my way in response, and my heart pounds faster. His face is unlike anything I’ve seen before—a mixture of feline and avian that’s as striking as it is beautiful—but it’s the look in those glowing eyes that makes my blood rush. He’s not nearly as civilized as a griffin. There is no veneer of stuffy English manners in that look. There is only hunger and an eagerness to be gone so he can come back to me as soon as possible.
I lift a hand, blowing a kiss first to Dust and then to the cat with the tufted ears who leaps onto the griffin’s back, settling between his wings for the ride. “See you soon,” I whisper, and then they’re gone, launching into the cloud-smeared sky with a powerful flex of Dust’s lion haunches.
Kite and I watch them go, keeping them in our sights until they snuff out in a shower of sparks like shredded moonlight, hidden away by Dust’s gift for concealing things he would rather not be seen.
It feels like there’s a clue there, tucked in the pocket of that thought.
I make a mental note to mull it over later—when I’m lying awake in bed tonight, wrestling with the insomnia that’s plagued me for the past week—and turn to Kite. “Ready to head back?”
“Let’s go for a walk first. Give Luke some time to himself.” Kite kisses my cheek before adding in a softer voice, “Dust’s not the only one who gives a great piggyback ride, you know.”
I turn my head, kissing his lips long and slow, because a piggyback ride sounds delightful. A few minutes later, my big teddy bear of a mate is literally a giant grizzly, his clothes are folded and tucked under my arm, and I’m on his furry back, soaking the hearth-and-family smell of him into my soul as he starts off through the forest.
Instinctively, I know he’s going to take me to the top of the rise, to look down on the moonlit treetops and imagine what it will be like when the world is as peaceful as it seems right now.
And I know that I will let myself believe in happy endings.
At least for a little while.
Chapter 6
Dr. Martin Highborn
The study is warm. Too warm.
But that’s the way Bea likes it just before bed, so that’s the way it will stay.
And my team leader on this mission could stand to sweat a little.
“So, you’ve lost them?” I ask softly, refusing to lose my temper. Beatrice has been through enough. Sparring her further anxiety is the least I can do for my wife.
“They ditched the Hummer outside of Wilbur, sir,” Gareth says, rolling his shoulders back and lifting his chin. “But we’ve got a lead on the location of the safe house. The team is working in shifts around the clock, sorting through the intel we gathered from the resistance compound. We’re ninety percent sure we know where they’re going.”
“Ninety percent.” Bea lifts expectant eyes to mine. “That sounds good.”
“It is,” I assure her with a smile.
“Wonderful,” she says, hugging her knitting closer to her chest.
She’s making a sweater for our granddaughter. Our only living grandchild. It will be too small. They always are, as if Bea can’t bring herself to admit that Wendy has aged a day since the morning her mother and three older brothers were killed.
My daughter was the sweetest soul ever brought into this world, but she only got thirty-two years on the planet. Further proof that Fate is cruel and there is no such thing as karmic justice. If there were, Natalie would be here with her mother and I, sharing a port before bed, with all four of her little ones asleep upstairs.
Instead, there is only Wendy in her twin bed, sedated into a shallow rest because not even years of therapy have been able to ease her night terrors.
Seeing your mother’s head ripped from her body by a pack of wolves isn’t something that’s easy to come back from. My granddaughter may always be damaged. She may never sleep easily, even on the day when I’m finally able to look into her frightened eyes and promise her that all the monsters are dead and gone.
Some wounds never heal. They stay open and raw, stinging every time something reminds you of the way they were made.
Gareth wasn’t in his current position the day my daughter was attacked, but his arrogance reminds me of his predecessor, the man who assumed the threats against my family were just idle talk.
That man is now locked in a facility somewhere off the coast of Thailand, a prisoner of the U.S. government, charged with criminal conspiracy.
He isn’t guilty. It doesn’t matter. Natalie, Benji, Rick, and Heath’s blood is still on his hands, and my contact within the Department of Homeland Preservation has assured me he will never see daylight.
I want to remind Gareth of what happens to men who overestimate their abilities and underestimate the enemy. But I settle for meeting his eyes across the study and letting the silence stretch on too long.
The way his throat works assures me the message has been received.
“We’ll have everything ready in time, sir,” he says. “The surveillance team is in place in a house nearby, and we’re moving Subject Seven tonight.”
I steeple my hands over the book open on my lap. “Good. I’ll expect an update when the pieces are in place. And remember, Subject Seven gets nothing but water. No food. She’s stronger than she looks. We want her weak. Fragile.”
Gareth nods. “Will do, sir. She’s in bad shape already, and the scans this morning came back looking just the way you wanted. Significant deterioration in the frontal lobe. Her long-term memory is going to be Swiss cheese by the time she’s found. She won’t remember enough to make any trouble.”
“If she’s found,” I say, voice hard. “If she isn’t….”
The threat doesn’t need to be spoken. Gareth knows what happens if he’s lost our subjects. If he’s lost them, we’ll have to turn to Atlas for help finding them, and Atlas’s help always comes at too high a price.
The pack of wolves who murdered my daughter and her children was slaughtered by his hands. In payment, he took his pound of flesh.
Several pounds, in fact, in the form of my wife’s legs from the knees down.
We didn’t know that’s what the monster would ask for when we begged him to help us take vengeance, but Bea doesn’t regret it. She would have given her life to punish Natalie’s killers.
In her mind, her legs are a small sacrifice.
In mine, they loom so large that sometimes I can’t bear to look at her, can’t stomach the sight of her amputated limbs beneath the covers. The guilt is crushing, a half ton weight on my chest, squeezing the life out of me.
I wish he’d taken his fee from me. But that’s why he carved away pieces of my wife, making me watch from behind the glass as he slashed a fiery arm through each leg, severing and cauterizing in one fell swoop, while Bea screamed until she passed out from the pain.
Atlas didn’t want the limbs. He wanted the pain, the emotional agony, the absolutely helpless terror.
Sometimes I think he feeds on it. Sometimes I think he’s just bored and taking his entertainment where he finds it.
“I’ve already got three search teams in the area.” Gareth clears his throat. “But I can add more. If you really think…”
Bea makes a panicked sound low in her throat, but I reassure her with another smile. “It’s fine. It’s going to be fine. I promise you.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Gareth says. “I wouldn’t have bothered you at home, but you told me to come to you the moment I had news.”
I reach a hand out to Bea, threading my fingers through
hers and squeezing. “It’s fine, Gareth. You did well. You can go now. We’ll talk more in the morning.”
“Yes, sir.” Gareth leaves the room, shutting the door softly behind him, leaving Bea and I alone in our too-warm cocoon.
Alone, but not alone.
The dead are always here with us, hovering overhead, reminding us of how much we’ve lost.
“He’ll find them. I know it.” Bea’s voice trembles but her eyes are steady and full of faith. Faith in me. Still, after all the ways I’ve failed her, she believes I can move mountains.
“He will,” I promise, refusing to let her down again. I will get eyes and ears inside the girl’s innermost circle. I will report back to the creature who pulls my strings, and someday soon this will all be over.
The threat will pass, and the work will once again take center stage. And when all the shifters are dead but one, and he, safely tucked away on his throne, certain he will always be king of his castle, my family will be safe. Wendy will be able to grow up in a world where there are no monsters hiding among us, no claws and teeth bared and waiting in the dark.
“I’m ready to sleep now,” Bea whispers. “Help me into my chair?”
“Of course, love.” I lift my wife into her chair and wheel her toward the elevator by the fireplace, hoping sleep will come easy for both of us tonight, though I already know it won’t.
Nothing is easy, and nothing will be easy until Atlas has the girl’s head mounted on his wall.
Chapter 7
Carrie Ann
Once upon a time, there was a girl with blond curls, blue eyes, and a laugh so loud her parents were embarrassed to take her out in public. The aw-shucks-I-know-but-she’s-cute-right? kind of embarrassed—her mother all giggles and apologies for her obnoxiously happy kid and her father beaming at the both of them.
His girls.
That’s what he called us.
His girls, with such pride I knew it was something special to be a girl, especially one who belonged to my tall, handsome, guitar-playing daddy, a man who fronted a band and smoked classy cigarettes he rolled by hand and had a singing voice so deep and lonely it made strangers cry.
I thought it was beautiful back then—all those tears pouring out of people who, until my father stepped up to the mic, had been laughing, guzzling beer, and about as in touch with their emotions as the average earthworm.
Daddy worked hard at bringing the emotional gut-punch, laboring over every note, every key change, and turn of phrase. He was never happier than when he had a room full of barflies mopping up tears with their shirtsleeves and sniffling into their bandanas.
He was happy. And we were happy—his girls, the most loyal fan club any minor rock star could have asked for.
Even when gigs got fewer and farther between, and Jerry, the drummer, quit because “the Reminders were a bunch of doped-up has-beens,” we were happy. We had each other and the music, the tears in the audience and the laughter in our beat-up RV, and magic waiting around every turn in the road.
And then, in the blink of an eye, we had nothing at all.
Every member of the band and most of their families were on the chartered plane bound for Singapore, embarking on the first leg of an Asian tour that was going to turn it all around for the Reminders, when the engine exploded two minutes after leaving the runway.
I don’t remember anything about the crash, nothing between the excitement of takeoff and waking up in a hospital room days later, hurting all over and somehow knowing that my mother was dead.
I thought Daddy was gone, too.
I assumed I was headed to an orphanage—even though I was twelve and had been cooking meals and doing RV-cleanup for my bohemian parents for years—unless I could run away from the hospital first.
I was plotting my escape from whatever evil Miss-Hannigan type the state was sending to fetch me, when Daddy swaggered into my room sporting two black eyes and a sling. He ran teasing fingers over the toes poking out of my cast and announced we were going home.
It was the last time he ever touched me, skin to skin.
In the years that followed, as his grief over losing Mom and the band and an audience eager to give away their pain ate at him, Dad touched me in other ways. He’d whip a belt against my thighs, slam a door on my fingers, press the tip of his classy cigarette into my skin, burning constellations into my flesh between the freckles. But there was never a hug or a hand on my shoulder when I was crying in my room, missing Mom so much it felt like my heart was gobbling a hole in my chest.
I took off twice; Dad sold my dead grandparents’ farm so I’d have nowhere to run. I asked a counselor at school for help; Dad convinced her I was a liar and then he fucked her in the bathroom of the teacher’s lounge while I waited in the car.
I gave up and came to heel. I learned to read his moods and keep my mouth shut. But no matter how hard I tried, I was never small enough or quiet enough to avoid the belt, the door, the cigarette.
By the time I was fourteen, I couldn’t remember what it was like to be part of a family. By sixteen, I was out on the streets most nights, preferring the violence of strangers to that of a blood relative.
Easier not to take it so personally that way.
That’s when I met Dr. Highborn, the man with the silver-streaked black hair, steady brown eyes, and hands that touched his patients with such gentleness and respect. We were homeless and filthy, every one of us who shuffled into the free clinic, but Dr. Highborn—call me Martin, he told his favorites—treated our wounds and listened to our problems. He gave us sack lunches to take with our medicine, just in case we didn’t feel well enough to stand in line at the soup kitchen across the street.
He even had free pads and tampons in big jars by the clinic’s front door, winning him the affection of every homeless chick between the ages of thirteen and fifty. A dude who realized it sucked even harder to be a girl on the street and took steps to make our lives easier?
Be still our beating hearts…
Looking back, I know Martin took advantage of us. Of me. I might as well have had “Daddy Issues” tattooed on my forehead, and he was way too smart not to leverage that to his advantage.
But at the time, I needed so badly for someone to listen, to care—even a little bit. It was a matter of life or death, and Martin was the one who reached out, took my hand, and pulled me back into the land of the living.
And then he made me a shifter.
He gave me superpowers. And a job. And money when I needed it and special attention that made me feel superior to all the other lab rats who worked as his spies. I thought I was special. I believed it so fiercely that I betrayed my best friend, maybe the only person in the world who truly loved me with no strings attached.
I hate myself for it, even though I can’t remember exactly what I did…
The past few years get hazier with every passing minute. Whatever Martin gave me in that IV drip along with the Devour Virus, it isn’t just eating away at my flesh and bones. It’s wolfing down my memories, nibbling holes in my history, turning my brain into a cartoon landscape filled with so many black holes it would be easy to tumble into one and get lost. Forever.
But as I lay curled in the corner of this dusty bedroom, alone in the dark, waiting for something I can’t recall, yet dread all the same, he’s still there.
Daddy and his belt.
And his cigarettes.
And his voice assuring me I’m never going to amount to jack shit.
“You were right, Dad,” I croak as tears stream down my hollow cheeks. “Look. You were right.”
Deep in my mind, neurons fire, electricity dances, and my imagination wastes valuable energy showing me Daddy on the stage, mic cupped in his hands, eyes closed as he sings his favorite song. The one about the girl who spends her entire life mourning the boy who got away, only to die the day before his love letter arrives in the mail.
I bite down on my bottom lip until I taste blood. The sharp, iron-and-sugar taste
comforts me, making me stronger, though I can’t remember why it feels so good to bite.
To bite and claw…
I lift one trembling hand, but no matter how I ache for the escape of my animal form, my fingers remain pale and slender. Weak and frail. Human.
Martin took that away, too. I can’t shift without a trigger from his goons.
From…those men…
I used to know their names. Now they’re just silhouettes retreating into impenetrable darkness.
The world narrows, fades, evaporates.
I lose so many names and faces that I’m not surprised when the two men who wake me in the middle of the night seem to know who I am but I can’t recall a thing about either of them.
Nothing at all, though they seem kind. Good guys, not bad ones.
One of them—the slimmer one with the shaggy brown hair and the smell of wood smoke lingering on his skin—has tears in his eyes as he asks who did this to me.
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. I can’t remember anything. I am a cracked vase, all the water I once held spilled out onto the floor. But I do know one thing, and I confess it to the man in a whisper as I beg, “Please don’t cry. I can’t stand to see people cry.”
It makes me feel sick, but I don’t know why.
I don’t know much of anything.
Not even my own name, a fact I confess, as well.
“Carrie Ann,” the golden-haired man says, his eyes nearly as sad as his friend’s. “Your name is Carrie Ann. You’re Wren’s friend, which means you’re our friend. We’re going to take care of you, okay? No one’s going to hurt you again. I promise.”
It’s a lovely promise, one I want to believe so much it hurts.
But I don’t. Something deep inside knows instinctively that promises are made to be broken and that I’ll never be safe, no matter how far I run or how well I hide.