by Sarah Piper
When she’d squeezed the last drop of blood from her fist, she pressed the wounded palm against the symbol. The snow around it glowed briefly, then melted.
Before I could even ask what that was all about, she got to her feet, turned her palms face up, and began to chant, slowly pacing out a circle around us.
Spirits and guides, ancestors all
I call on you now, each one and all
I offer my blood in exchange for protection
Delay this attack from every direction
Let all who dare breach this circle I cast
Fall back to the moment of three minutes past.
She repeated the mantra several times, not stopping until she’d completed a full circle around us, magically cutting us off from the shifters.
“It’s a confusion spell,” she explained when she rejoined the group. “It’s not much, but it’s all the blood I can spare on short notice.”
“What’s with the three minutes thing?” Ronan asked.
“Each time they hit the boundary, their minds will revert by three minutes, so they’ll feel like they haven’t initiated their attack yet. It’s essentially a time loop—it should make them retreat and start over. But seriously, guys. This is like, blood magic 101 stuff—totally makeshift. We’ve probably got about ten, fifteen minutes tops before it wears off.”
Lansky took another look at his van. “We need to get that thing on the road. It’s our best shot.”
“On it,” Ronan said, and Lansky and I followed him down into the ditch. Physically, we were the strongest and best able to push it out. But that meant leaving Haley and Jael unprotected—a prospect I didn’t like one bit.
“Hold the circle, you two,” I said. “The moment you sense the magic weakening, give us the signal.”
“You think those things can understand us?” Lansky asked, jerking his head toward the beasts across the road.
“I want to say no,” I said, “but I’m inclined to err on the side of caution these days.”
“Alright. On three,” Ronan said.
We crouched down and grabbed the bumper.
“One, two—”
All three of us jumped the gun, but after a few more attempts, we finally got the job done, shoving the two-ton van out of the ditch and back onto the icy road. It skidded to a stop, looking as tired as the rest of us undoubtedly felt.
Jael helped us out of the ditch, and we headed over to inspect the vehicle that would hopefully get us home.
“Can’t believe the airbags didn’t blow on this one,” Ronan said, knocking on the hood. “You guys slid in face first.”
“Yeah, remind me to bust Hobb’s balls about that later,” Lansky said. “He was supposed to take it in for a re-install after the dealer sent out a recall notice, but he blew it off.” He crouched down to take a look underneath, inspecting the damage. “Okay. Aside from the obvious cosmetic shit, the front axle’s bent, and the bumper looks like it’s folded in against the front right tire. But if we go real slow and don’t take any sharp turns, she’ll get us home.”
“Assuming she starts,” Ronan said, wiping the icy slush from his eyes. All of us were wearing caps of snow three inches high. Poor Haley’s teeth were chattering, but bloody hell, the woman was still smiling.
I left Ronan and Lansky to deal with the van while I checked on Haley and Jael.
“Five minutes,” Haley told me. “Spell’s fading.”
“It’s some spell, though.” I put my hand on her shoulder and leaned forward, peering into the snowy woods. None of the shifters had moved from their posts, not even to attempt a breach. “They’re completely immobilized.”
“They’re not the most predictable creatures, that’s for sure.” Haley shook her head. “I’m not sure if it’s my spellwork, or something else keeping them at bay.”
“Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we?” I winked at Haley, then turned to Jael. “Anything you can do?”
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Though not for lack of trying. Their minds have been secured against manipulation—likely they’re only susceptible to Darkwinter influence.”
“Darkwinter?” I asked. “So these aren’t Jonathan’s hybrids?”
“No way,” Haley said. “Jonathan was too much of a loose cannon to make something this dangerous and, I don’t know. Coordinated? They haven’t attacked yet, but look how they’re standing in formation like that. It isn’t accidental. They’re watching our every move. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more of them further down the road.”
She was right. They’d positioned themselves at even intervals, and when I looked closely, I saw the slightest movements of their eyes, following Lansky’s footsteps as he approached.
Jael and Haley were right. These weren’t Jonathan’s rotting, broken creatures. They were powerful, genetically altered, fae-made beasts bred for a purpose we could only begin to guess at.
We needed to get out of there.
“Bad news,” Lansky said. “Engine won’t turn over.”
“Two minutes,” Haley warned, and immediately I felt the shift in the energy around us, like an electrical current surging, then fading. At the edge of the road, one of the big cats took a step.
“Fuck,” Ronan said. “This is about to get ugly. Anyone got weapons?”
“Nothing that would help against these creatures,” I said.
“Can’t you shoot them?” Ronan asked Lansky.
“Doubt it.” Lansky drew his weapon again anyway. “These aren’t silver bullets. They won’t work on shifters.”
“Might not kill them,” Ronan said, “but maybe you can make them bleed.”
Haley took a step backward toward the van. “Now or never, boys. Thirty seconds and we’re totally exposed.”
“Stay alert.” Lansky took aim, firing off three shots into the chest of the closest beast.
The creature didn’t even flinch, and if it’d bled at all, it’d been such a minuscule amount that not one drop had stained the snow.
“Great. Apparently, they heal faster than regular shifters, too,” Lansky said, holstering the useless gun. “Guess we’re doing this the old-fashioned way.”
“Haley,” I said, catching his meaning. “Now might be a good time for you to get in the van. You too, prince. See if you two can get it started.”
The moment we heard the van door slam shut, we struck.
From the corner of my eye, I caught the dark gray blur of Lansky’s wolf form, Ronan right on his heels. The shifters were just coming out of the spell-haze when we took down the first two—Ronan and Lansky on one, me on the other. I barged into him, biting, slashing, disemboweling. His blood tasted ashy and bitter, laced with some kind of chemical, but I drank deeply anyway, needing the fuel and—yes—needing to put on a show of dominance.
The wolf and the raging, black-eyed demon made quick work of their foe, Lansky mauling him with his massive claws while Ronan tore off hunks of white fur and flesh with his bare hands. The bullets hadn’t made a dent, but the damned things were finally bleeding now. The three of us had no intention of letting them heal.
I scanned ahead for my next shifter meal, but was shocked to see the rest of the pack backing off.
Were they… retreating?
“Why aren’t they attacking?” I growled, wiping the blood from my mouth.
Lansky pawed at the beast he and Ronan had shredded, drawing my attention to a black metallic object that appeared to be fused to its collarbone. It was circular and flat, about the size and shape of a watch face.
I tore the bone clean out of its carcass so Ronan and I could take a closer look.
“I’m guessing it’s some kind of behavioral control device,” he said. “Or tracker. I bet they all have them.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re holding back,” I said.
“If that’s the case, then someone is watching. Someone’s controlling them.”
“Let’s take them out,” I said, already anticipa
ting the bitter tang of blood on my lips.
But the big cats were already disappearing, loping away into the snow-packed forest on silent paws.
“I don’t believe they weren’t trying to kill us,” Lansky said later, stepping into what was left of his clothing. While Haley and Jael had finished loading up the salvageable supplies into Lansky’s van, Ronan, Lansky, and I had done a full sweep of the area, tracking the shifter prints a good mile out in all directions before the trees became too dense to continue. “Not for a second. Six cats that size against three of us? They could’ve done a hell of a lot more damage.”
“We hit the first two pretty quickly, though,” I said. “My sense was they weren’t expecting our initial attack.”
“No way. They knew exactly what we were up to. Exactly how we’d react. I’m telling you, guys. These aren’t normal shifters, operating on instinct. They’re following orders in real time.”
“Detective Lansky is right,” Jael said, securing one last box of food in the back of the van. “My belief is that Darkwinter is trying to unhinge us a bit. Consider it—Orendiel suffered a massive defeat that night at the warehouse, and he knows we’re gathering strength here. What better way to keep us off guard and second-guessing our strategies?”
“Psychological warfare,” I said. “Dark fae expertise.”
“It is,” Jael agreed, “and this is just a taste of what he might unleash. What he's already begun unleashing in the Bay. By his actions tonight, he’s virtually guaranteed that whatever his actual capabilities, we’re going to imagine much, much worse. Hybrid shifters? No. Try electronically-controlled hybrid super-shifters. A violent attack on our home? Yes, but let’s add in a minor attack that cuts off the food supply during a storm. The point is, we don’t know what he’s fully capable of or what he’s planning, and it could be virtually anything. That’s how dark fae operate. He's counting on our fear of the unknown. Humans especially are conditioned to operate on worst-case-scenario fears, and that fear makes it much easier for the fae to manipulate their targets.”
“Well, obviously that glitter-dicked asshole has never dealt with me.” Haley leaned out the driver’s side window of the van, now idling in the center of the road, ready to go. “I’m all about the best-case scenario, which at the moment is the prospect of ushering dozens of beautiful empanadas into their final resting place in my belly. Now, if you all don’t mind… Can we please get the fuck out of here?”
Nineteen
EMILIO
The ghosts that had laid siege to my heart had lingered there long enough. If Elena and I had any hope of reconciling, if I had any hope of being a brother and friend to the guys, if I had any hope of being the man Gray truly saw when she looked at me with those pretty blue eyes, I needed to evict them.
And I needed to do it now, before they slipped out of the light and into the dark corners once again.
“My sister and I were very close growing up,” I began. “But at some point, she got involved with a new crowd, and she started spending all her time with them. Camping trips, road trips, last-minute parties I was never invited to. I hardly ever saw her that summer, and when I did, she was merely coming and going, picking up a change of clothes, bribing me not to tell my parents that her new friends weren’t… our kind.”
“They only wanted you guys to hang out with other wolf shifters?” she asked.
“They weren’t like that with me, but my sister was the alpha of our generation, poised to take over leading the pack for our father. By the time she was thirteen, she’d already been promised to the alpha of a neighboring pack—a guy named Franco, who also happened to be my best friend—and it was just accepted that they’d eventually marry and mate as adults. But that promise was made years earlier—nothing she’d ever taken seriously. And these new friends of hers… They were human. They had no idea what she was. But I figured out pretty quickly that one of them was becoming more than a friend.”
“As in…?”
“As in, she fell in love with him, Gray. A man named Jonah Shiley. He was the only one she’d told about her true nature.”
Gray sucked in a breath. “She married Jonah. He was the forbidden love she told me about.”
“Eloped, actually. None of us knew about it for a whole year. We’d thought she was living with a roommate, but it turned out that was just a girlfriend covering for her and Jonah whenever we planned to visit. She was nineteen years old, and he was twenty, and there was no telling them about the ways of the world or pack hierarchy or anything that even remotely implied their love was wrong.”
“Because it wasn’t,” she said defensively, and I realized the subtext of my words.
Gray was a human witch. I was a wolf shifter. And nothing about us—about her touch, the way she looked at me, the way my heart seemed to grow big whenever she walked into the room—felt wrong.
“No, that’s not what I meant, querida. You’re right. Their love wasn’t wrong. It was just… against the rules. My parents loved us, but they were also extremely practical, and extremely loyal to the pack. When they found out about the marriage, they basically disowned her. I saw her even less than before, as if that were possible. I missed her, you know? Missed getting into trouble together, missed her teasing me, missed just… Just hanging out and being goofy with my big sister.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and I felt her own sadness wash through her. I wondered if she were thinking about Haley, or the other sisters she’d been separated from as a baby. Unlike me, Gray hadn’t really known or remembered them. She didn’t have anyone to miss.
I wrapped my arms more tightly around her, holding her close. When I finally felt her sadness retreat a bit, I continued.
“Anyway, the family she was promised to—Franco’s kin—they didn’t take the news too kindly. My buddy dropped me, and our family became pariahs. People started disrespecting my father, then outright challenging his authority. Kids at school were fucking with me. It sucked. So there I was, basically still a kid, no sister, no friends, total outcast.
“Then the inevitable happened—I got jumped after school one day, five wolves, tore my ass to shreds—Franco and his brothers. They would’ve killed me, too, if this other pack hadn’t shown up and saved me. They fought off Franco’s crew and helped me patch myself back up.”
I remembered them now, new in town, mysterious, all muscle and swagger. Chasing off Franco and his guys as if they were little field mice. I’d worried they’d beat me up themselves for being so weak, but they didn’t say a word. Just took me home to one of the guys’ apartments, patched me up, fed me. And from then on, they were always around.
“They saved me that day,” I continued. “And they protected me every day after. Pushed me to get stronger, smarter, to develop my instincts. Basically, all the things my father should’ve been doing, but he was too busy defending our territory to worry about me.
“My sister got pregnant later that year, and once again, we didn’t know a thing about it until Maya—” I stopped suddenly, my throat closing up over her name. My niece’s name. I hadn’t said it out loud since we’d left Argentina—Elena had forbidden it, even before she and I split. Hearing it now, feeling it, it brought everything rushing back in crystal clear, high-definition images. The good, as well as the bad.
Maya’s first tooth. The sound of her sweet little laugh. How she couldn’t say my name, so called me “Em-ee-o” instead.
My eyes blurred with tears, my throat stinging with the scream that wanted to claw its way out.
But Gray nestled in closer, her breath soft against my bare chest, and from her I took just enough strength to continue.
This, too, was part of the deal. No one said exorcizing these ghosts would be easy or painless.
With a cracked voice, I said, “Maya, my niece. My sister showed up on our front porch three days after the baby was born, this little pink bundle in her arms. My parents melted. And just like that, she was part of our lives again. Maya and Jonah, t
oo.”
I stilled again, taking a moment to gather the rest of my thoughts. This was the inevitable turn in the road, the part of the story where the darkness began to seep in, and I felt it mirrored inside me now like a wisp of black smoke curling up from my gut, thickening around my heart.
“People heard about the happy little family,” I said. “That’s when the threats started.”
“Against Elena?”
“Well, at first they were more generic. There were rumors of a rival pack moving in to the area from the north, looking for a challenge, and Franco’s family were more than happy to fan the flames. They started spreading lies about my father, about his ability to manage and provide for the pack. Someone threw bricks through my parents’ windows painted with curses and crude, violent images. They cut the brake lines of my father’s car—fortunately, he’d only made it down the driveway before he figured it out. They slaughtered the chickens and cows on my parents’ land. My father started getting anonymous calls and emails demanding that my sister be tossed out of the pack, stripped of our protection. When he refused, the threats escalated. This went on for a couple years, but my parents always managed to stay on top of things, to not lose hope.
“Then one day, someone physically assaulted my sister in the grocery store parking lot, trying to get at the baby. She fought the guy off and Maya was unharmed, but that was the last straw. My father decided my sister and her family needed to go into protective custody.”
“Holy shit,” she whispered. “How did he even set that up?”
“Well, he was a cop—no surprise there, right?” I laughed, grateful for the chance to relieve some tension. “In our family, you were two things: a wolf first, an officer of the law second. He’d always known it was only a matter of time before Elena and I followed in his footsteps.”
I swallowed through another painful lump of emotion. My father hadn’t lived long enough to see either of his children follow in his footsteps.