by Rye Brewer
“Nobody would ever find this,” Gage marveled as he walked in, still holding Valerius across his arms.
“It’s perfect,” Philippa agreed.
I felt the same way. “And now you’ll know he’s safe.”
Gage lowered Valerius into one corner. “We can always try to make him comfortable, too. Maybe bring down some pillows, blankets. Whatever you think he’d need.”
I could see why Gage was coddling our sister like he was.
She had a sort of crazy glint in her eye, like she was obsessed with looking after him.
I could sort of understand why, even though I still didn’t get the whole Vance thing.
“When did the two of you…” I glanced and Gage, and he shrugged.
So he didn’t have a clue how to approach Philippa, either.
I continued, “When did you get back together?”
“We didn’t,” she whispered. “I don’t know that we ever would. But that doesn’t change how I feel.”
“I’m really sorry.” I folded my arms around her, from behind her, as she stood there, watching Valerius. Watching for what? I had no idea. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“It’ll be okay. Vance will come back for the body. I know he will. He has to.” It sounded like she was trying to convince herself, not me.
“I’m sure he will.” I wasn’t sure of any such thing, but I had to say something; she needed encouragement.
“Come on,” Gage said. “We don’t want to run the risk of anybody randomly showing up down here.”
“Nobody ever comes down here,” she whispered.
“Yeah, well, there’s a first time for everything.” I let go of her. “Come on. I can’t wait to take a shower.”
Everything else would have to wait a while, even the stuff with Gage.
“And when Scott shows up later, without Sara, after Anissa finds her, we’ll have to catch him up on some of this,” Gage reminded us.
We walked out together, and I turned to wait for Philippa to come out, too.
She didn’t.
“Philippa? Come on.”
Gage and I glanced at each other.
A sneaking suspicion started growing in my chest.
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
I nearly groaned in frustration.
She was clearly determined to keep me out of the shower. All I wanted was a shower. And maybe to lock myself in my room for a year.
“What are you saying? We can talk it out upstairs. This isn’t the place for you to hang out, you know? Come on. You’ll feel better once we’re home.”
She shook her head again and didn’t turn toward us. “No. I can’t leave him. Not for anything.” She went to him and sat on the floor with her back to the wall. “I won’t leave as long as he’s here.”
“Now what?” Gage asked.
I shrugged. “I wish I knew.”
25
Jonah
The club was on fire. Not literally, but almost. I didn’t think I had ever seen it so packed, so full of energy. And why not? We had Gage back, and everybody knew it, so everybody in the clan wanted to party like they were the ones who’d personally rescued him and brought him home. Far be it from me to stop them.
That didn’t mean I had to join them, though.
While the rest of the clan’s members danced and thrashed around under swirling, multicolored lights, my siblings and I sat on the deck. It was cooler out there, the air fresher. And we didn’t have to scream to be heard. The conversation we were having wasn’t exactly the kind we could scream in public, so taking it to a private corner was for the best.
Philippa’s eyes swept back and forth under lowered lashes. She thought we didn’t know how desperate she was to get away from us, but she was wrong.
“Philippa, relax,” I murmur, touching her bare arm. She flinched as though I’d burned her, so I pulled my hand away.
“That’s easy for you to say,” she muttered darkly.
“Come on. Jonah’s right.” Gage slid an arm around her shoulders, and this time she didn’t act like she was repulsed or in pain. “It’s bad enough we had to talk you into coming out, but you can’t act like this. Somebody’s going to notice and know something’s wrong.”
“Something is wrong,” she reminded him then turned to me. “If I asked you to leave your precious Anissa behind—”
I held up a hand to stop her. “Don’t go there,” I warned.
“Well? Isn’t that the truth? You would never leave her in some dark, cold vault where she couldn’t protect herself.”
“But Philippa, you know nobody can get in there but us. Nobody knows it exists but us, and nobody except for me and D— Fane know the access code. And now you know it, too. But that’s all. He’s as safe as he would be anyplace else. Safer, even.”
“You can’t sit in there with him forever,” Gage reminded her in a quiet voice. He always could get through to her better than I could. “You would waste away, and we won’t let that happen.”
“You don’t know how this feels,” she whispered.
“You’re right,” I said, and I tried hard to make my voice like Gage’s. “What’s happened lately… I can’t wrap my head around half of it. And just when I think I have things under control, something else happens and I question everything I thought I knew all over again. It’s insane. I’m exhausted,” I admitted.
“Me, too,” Gage said. “But we’re all together now, and we always work better as a team. We’ll look back on this one day, and we’ll laugh about it.”
I met his eyes, and he shrugged.
Sometimes, he could lay it on really thick. But it was the sort of thing Philippa needed to hear. She visibly relaxed, which helped me relax a little. But only a little.
“Shh,” she said, shaking Gage’s arm off. “He’s coming back.”
The three of us pretended to be talking about something else, anything else, as Scott returned to the round table the three of us sat at.
I hated lying to him, even lying by omission, but he didn’t know yet about Fane.
We couldn’t even use his help in keeping Philippa out of the vault, where Valerius’s body still rested, because it would’ve meant going into the whole story about where we got him and what happened before and after that—eventually, all roads led to Fane.
I still had to work at it to stop thinking about him as our father.
I exchanged a glance with Philippa and Gage as Scott sat down. They agreed it was best for Fane to announce his presence personally. It just wouldn’t be the same coming from one of us, or all three of us. I hoped Fane didn’t take his time about it, was all.
The more time went by, the more lying we had to do.
And the worse I felt.
He looked miserable as he sank into his chair with an ungraceful thud, tossing his phone onto the table in disgust.
I glanced around, and guessed it was my turn to ask, “What’s up?”
His mouth was drawn into a thin line, and worry lines creased his forehead. “She’s not answering her phone.”
“Sara?”
He stared at me like it was stupid to ask. “Yeah. It’s not turned off, but it keeps going to voicemail.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Gage offered.
“You don’t know her,” Scott reminded him.
Philippa made a sort of strangled noise like she was trying to hold something back, but couldn’t quite manage it.
I rolled my eyes at her, but she didn’t react. It was obvious she’d never liked Sara, but she’d been more negative toward her than usual over the last few days.
I couldn’t figure out why, and she wasn’t telling. I wondered if she would ever get over her hatred of Anissa and her sister, then doubted it. I had known my sister long enough to know she didn’t get over things easily. If ever.
I turned back to Scott. “You know, Anissa was looking for her. I bet they’re together someplace and she just can’t get to her phone. I wouldn�
�t worry too much about Sara—Anissa would never let anything happen to her.”
Again, I couldn’t be completely honest with him, and it killed me. I was no good at keeping secrets from my siblings. I could keep information to myself if it was for the good of the clan, I had been doing it for decades, but lying to my brother was something else.
It would be as simple as telling him Anissa wanted to take Sara to see their mother for the first time since the Great Fire. But I couldn’t because too many other random bits of information were tied up with that. He had missed so much.
He didn’t look convinced. “Where did Anissa go, anyway?”
“Oh, you know. People to see, things to do. Sometimes, I forget she had a life of her own before we met.” The words rattled off exactly as if I had practiced them in front of a mirror. I hadn’t, of course. It surprised me how easy it was to come up with a half-truth.
He was too worked up over Sara to notice how lame my explanation was, anyway. Good thing, since I didn’t want to talk about it.
I didn’t know until she told me she needed her space how much I needed her. It was one thing to know the sun would burn your skin, but it was another thing to feel that burn. It was the same thing with her, only worse.
I didn’t know there was such a hole in my life until she came along and gave me what I’d been missing all along. Somebody to love and protect, someone to fight for. Without her, I felt rudderless. I had no desire to go farther along the path we were on, with all the secrets and revelations and danger to us and the clan. What did it matter, really?
My mood fell even lower than it already was. We must have been the most somber table at the club. One good thing about everybody else having such a good time was that none of them noticed. And if they did, they didn’t care.
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned in time to see Scott go stiff. “What’s up?” I asked.
“Excuse me.” He hurried away in the direction of the bathroom.
Philippa frowned. “He’s worrying himself sick over that—”
“Watch it,” I warned.
“What? I’m not allowed to have an opinion now?”
“Keep it to yourself. Please. There are bigger issues at hand right now. You know that.” I gave her a meaningful look, and she turned away.
It was ridiculous of her to be so consumed by jealousy, or whatever it was she held against Sara, when Valerius’s body was in our vault.
“Yeah, bigger issues like this.” Gage tapped the inside of his forearm, and I knew what he meant.
“Does it still burn?” I rolled my sleeve up to my elbow, keeping my arm under the table so no one but us could see.
“No. Yours?”
“No.” I turned my arm, studying it. “But they look the same. They haven’t faded a bit.”
“At least the pain’s gone. I thought I was gonna go out of my mind.”
“Tell me about it,” I said with a grimace. “And there I was, thinking I had a high tolerance for pain. This was blinding.”
“I wish it would go away.” He chuckled, and I understood why he did. If we didn’t laugh, we would lose our minds. It was just one more thing to be concerned over.
“Quick. He’s coming back.” Philippa waved her hands under the table, so Gage and I unrolled our sleeves and buttoned them before Scott saw us.
“You feeling all right?” Philippa asked him.
“Oh, yeah. It’s one thing after another, you know?” He shook his head.
The three of us exchanged looks that said, ‘If he thinks things are bad now, he’s in for a rude awakening.’
I hoped again his awakening didn’t take much longer. I wasn’t sure he would forgive us for withholding the truth so long.
26
Gage
Does anybody want a drink?” Philippa asked as she got up from the table.
I was worried about her; she put a little effort into her appearance for the sake of looking good in front of the rest of the clan—we had to put on a united front and all that—but I could tell she was suffering.
There was no light in her eyes, no energy in her voice. She might as well have been dead. I told myself to stop being so morbid, but it was hard not to be after what I had been through.
I was about to ask her to grab a chalice of blood for me when something hit me. Not a thing, though it might as well have been since the sensation was something like hitting a brick wall would be.
My head spun. I was almost dizzy. I scanned the area for the source of it.
Her.
I had to find her. I knew it was a her—the girl from the cave who rescued me. How, I couldn’t say. Instinct.
Something about the girl I had caught scent of told me I had to find her.
“Excuse me.” I got up without looking at the rest of my family and ran down the metal staircase leading straight to the street from the second-floor deck I had been sitting on.
My head swiveled back and forth, my nose searching for her scent. She was out there. She had reached me from two stories away.
I hurried to the corner, almost pushing humans out of the way to get there in time. The conflicting odors of their colognes and perfumes and deodorants and hair products screwed with my head, but there was one scent stronger than any of them.
Blood.
I had smelled blood.
Blood I had to have.
There.
To my left.
Halfway down the block, in the middle of a group of girls dressed up like they were out on the town and living it up.
I followed her, single-minded, homing in on her scent as I drew closer and closer. I caught a flash of dark-blonde hair, long and wavy the way the girls liked to do it—funny how trends seemed to double back on themselves, a creature alive as long as I had been knew how often that happened over the decades.
I heard a voice as familiar to me as my own.
“I don’t wanna go!” She was laughing when she said it, but I could tell she meant it. She was only pretending to joke around for the sake of her friends. I could tell the insincerity from the scent of her.
“Come on, Carissa. Don’t be a pain in the ass tonight. We’ve been talking about this all week!” This came from a brunette in her group.
Carissa.
The girl who saved me in the forest is named Carissa.
I decided I didn’t like that mouthy, tall, dark-haired girl with the poker-straight hair and the big ass, teetering like a horse on stilts in a pair of ridiculous shoes. She was pushy.
“Yeah, I know, and I’ve been telling you all week I don’t want to do this. Why don’t you ever listen to me?”
“Because she wants to get laid by a buff, hot, steamy piece of man meat tonight!” Another girl, this one with hair even redder than my sister’s, shrieked with laughter as the dark-haired girl took a swipe at her.
A third girl, the short, plain one, who seemed to be along for the ride—every group of friends had one—piped up. “I’m practically drooling over the descriptions on the website. Have you seen some of the pictures of the guys who go there? Oh, God!” She fanned herself.
Carissa gave her a wink and linked an arm through hers. “I hope you can handle all that hotness in one place,” she said, and I liked that.
She was a nice girl, encouraging the friend who would most likely go home alone.
I kept my distance, following along as they and a few others made their way another three blocks to the club. They talked and shrieked and giggled the entire way there.
When they arrived and I saw—and smelled—what the big deal was about, I froze.
They were going into a shifter club. And not just any shifters, either.
Not the werewolves I was used to. That was clear. I wondered about this different breed of shifters, but not for long. My mind was preoccupied with Carissa.
Who the hell were these girls, and what were they thinking? A human girl had to be crazy to go into a club with a bunch of shifters. Didn’t
they know what they were getting into? How they could be ripped apart? It wasn’t a good idea to even let a werewolf get too familiar in a social setting, since they could claim a human as their own and basically stalk her until she either gave in—or else.
I shuddered to think of Carissa going into a place like that.
What was worse, I couldn’t follow her.
They would kill me the second I walked through the door. I wanted to go to her, order her not to step foot inside, tell her she would regret it for the rest of her short, vulnerable life.
Except…
Either she had incredibly sharp instincts, or she was smarter than the rest of them. She hung back, closer to the curb than the velvet rope designating the line to get into the club.
I realized none of them knew what kind of club it really was. They just thought it was a meat market.
But she must have sensed differently.
“What’s the matter with you, Cari?” The tall girl took her arm and tried to pull her—playfully, or at least pretending to be playful.
“You know I don’t do this sort of thing,” Carissa said, pulling away.
“What sort of thing?”
“You know.” She looked around like she was embarrassed. “I don’t go to clubs and pick up guys just to sleep with them.”
Tall Girl’s hands found her hips, and she cocked one of them out to the side.
I knew that pose. My sister gave it to me at least once a week.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing! Nothing!” Carissa sputtered, waving her hands. “That’s great for you, if that’s what you’re into. I’m not trying to comment on anything else but that. It’s just not for me, is all. I would feel too… awkward.”
“Believe me, you’ll get over that real fast.” The other girl laughed.
“I don’t know.” I noticed then, too, Carissa was dressed differently from the other girls. They wore tight, short, low-cut dresses—even the bigger girl—while she wore a sleeveless dress cut across her clavicle that almost reached her knees. And what most women would never understand was she was much sexier than the ones with half their body hanging out.