by Sarah Piper
I closed my eyes and took a moment to send a prayer of thanks to the universe.
What bodies, these. What magic. What love.
Then I laughed even harder as the picture of Ronan sharpened in my mind. “Oh my God, he’s such a drama queen!”
“Well, he knows how to make an entrance, I’ll give him that.”
“But how did he get there? How did he know what was going on?” I had so many questions, all of them rushing out at once. “What was he even doing?”
“To put it bluntly, Elena was about to commit murder and suicide, and apparently this is one of Sebastian’s favorite combos. Not to mention the fact that I had the most guilty conscience of anyone alive. I guess he thought we were good candidates to go darkside, so Ronan was dispatched to negotiate a deal for our tarnished souls and carry us back to hell.”
“But you weren’t good candidates, obviously.”
“Oh, you should’ve seen Elena’s face! The mere idea of working for the Prince of hell got her all riled up again…” Emilio shook his head, almost like he still couldn’t believe the turn of events. “You might say Sebastian gave her back the will to live. Ranting and raving at Ronan the entire time about how presumptuous he and his boss were, she emptied out the bullets and chucked them out the window right then. And when she turned back to meet my eyes, there was so much rage and disgust and fire—fire I hadn’t seen in years. In that moment, I knew she’d survive. Not because she’d get over it or forgive me or forget what’d happened in Argentina, and not because she’d find a healthy way to deal with it. No. I knew that the anger in her now would fuel her for as long as it took.”
Emilio blew out a breath, the earlier levity slipping away again, just as I knew it would. Humor existed even in the darkest corners of a tragedy, but wounds like this didn’t just disappear after a good laugh. This was the first time Emilio had ever talked about all of this—I felt that, deep in my bones. He still had a long way to go to releasing his shame and all the pain that came along with it, and to putting the pieces of his relationship with Elena back together, if that was even a possibility. But he’d done the hardest part tonight—starting the process. Speaking the words. Freeing himself of having to carry it alone.
“After giving Ronan a piece of her mind, and telling him he owed her three bucks for the beer, she looked me dead in the eye and told me to pack my bags and leave the Cape. She said she never wanted to see me again.
“Just the fact that she’d survived the night, that I’d survived the night, that all felt like a gift, and I didn’t want to take that for granted. I knew I’d caused her so much pain already, I just… Honoring her wishes—leaving, for good—it felt like the only decent thing left to do.”
“So you ended up in the Bay,” I said, connecting the dots. “Ronan helped you.”
“You know he has a thing for strays.” Emilio laughed again—not quite as exuberant as the last one, but a laugh nevertheless. “He offered to help me get set up in the Bay, and the rest, as they say, is history. I got a job on the force, met Darius soon after that, did some consulting with him. He was still practicing law back then, before he traded all that in for Black Ruby. Ronan and I didn’t see each other all that much—he had his work, and I had mine, and our paths crossed only on occasion, but we always had that unspoken bond. And he knew, without my ever having to say as much, that when the time came when he needed me, I’d be there. No question.”
I let the magnitude of his words settle over me. “So before I came into the picture, you guys weren’t really all that close?”
“Well, yes and no. Like I said, we had that unspoken bond. But when you did come, it brought us closer once again. And then when Sophie passed away and you started coming into your powers and everything else happened, well…” Emilio sighed. “Now I can’t imagine Ronan not being a part of my life.”
I poked him in the ribs and smiled. “So you’re saying that my craziness is the glue that bonds you guys?”
“No, Gray,” he said seriously. “You coming into our lives and bringing us all together like this… It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And I’m pretty sure the rest of the guys feel the same way.”
“Me, too,” I said, holding his gaze, still marveling at all he’d been through, at everything he’d survived in order to end up here. In my arms. In the home of a sister he’d once thought he’d have to turn his back on forever.
During one of our infamous brownie sessions, back before anything romantic had happened between us, Emilio had told me, People do all sorts of misguided things when they’re trying to protect the ones they love, querida. Let’s just say I know something about that.
At the time, I’d sensed that he’d endured some terrible losses in his life, that he’d carried a truckload of regrets. But I’d had no idea the depths of his pain.
I’d seen real glimpses of it in his eyes tonight, felt his broken heart in the tears that’d soaked my shirt.
But when he looked at me now, his eyes were clear, flickering with something new and shiny. Something that brought a warmth to my chest I couldn’t even describe.
Hope.
“Tonight,” he said through new tears, “just before you came in here, was the first time since Elena had pointed that gun at me that she gave me any indication that we might have a relationship again.” He smiled faintly, lowering his eyes and focusing on a loose thread in the sheet. When he looked up at me again, he said softly, “Querida, I died that night, didn’t I?”
It took me a beat to realize he was no longer talking about what had happened between him and Elena, but the warehouse battle. The sudden shift nearly gave me whiplash; it felt as if I’d been yanked back in time, back to those ugly moments of seeing him lying in a pool of his own blood.
“You… you’d been badly wounded in the fight,” I began, my throat thick with emotion. “Cut with a silver blade. Bleeding…”
“Badly wounded enough to die, then.” He shook his head, as if trying to clear away new cobwebs. “I remember trying to shift out of my wolf, and I couldn’t. Not all the way. I remember having all the heightened senses and instincts of the wolf, but the pain felt like a man’s pain. The fear was… indescribable.”
“There was a while there where you got kind of… stuck,” I explained. “You couldn’t quite shift one way or the other. Ronan and Elena didn’t know how to heal you.”
“So how did they heal me?”
I pressed my fingertips to his lips and shook my head. I wanted to shush him, to tell him there was no point in revisiting that awful night. That the important thing was that he did survive, never mind the hows of it all.
But secrets and lies were the twin snakes that kept looping back to bite us, time and time again. Whether it was Emilio lying to his sister about how her family died, or Liam lying to me about our relationship, or Ronan keeping my deal a secret, or me lying to him initially about what I’d done to Bean… Secrets like ours were heavy burdens, and eventually, they came crashing down on us, and the truth slithered out, all the more venomous for the time it’d had to fester.
I made a vow right then and there that I’d never lie to the men I loved. Not even to protect them.
“The warehouse was burning,” I said, “and I was on one side with Ash and Darius and Jael, along with the witches we’d just liberated. We were running for the exit, and I just… I saw you go down. I got to you as quickly as I could, but you were… you were in bad shape.”
I told him the details, as best as I could remember.
“Ronan promised he’d save you, and so I left. We had to get the witches to safety. So I came back here with Ash and Darius and everyone else, and we just waited for word from Ronan and Elena. When they finally showed up, you weren’t with them. Ronan said that Liam arrived in the form of the great raven to claim your soul. He saw it leave your body. You were… mutilated.” I shivered as the images flooded my mind again, unbidden. Emilio lying in all that blood, his chest cleaved open, his bod
y shifting between man and wolf, stuck in limbo. “Liam took you, but Ronan and Elena didn’t know where. You were just… gone.”
Snuggling in close, I told him the rest of the story—how I knew he wasn’t totally gone from us. How Haley and I did the blood spell, and I’d tracked them to my realm. How I’d fought Jonathan, how when I finally found Emilio and Liam, it looked as if they’d been waiting for me. I explained the ritual Liam had guided me through, trying to remember all the details—the moonglass, the magic, the feel of his soul as I gently guided it back home.
“And together,” I finished up, “Liam and I brought you back. I’m not sure what happened in the realm after that—there was a strange earthquake sort of event, but then it stopped. And you called for me. That’s when we knew you were okay. I took your hands in mine, and then… Well, the next thing I knew, I was waking up in this bed next to you, and Haley was shouting for Ronan and Elena, and someone told Lansky to call the medics back to the house. I was fine the next day—just needed a little rest after the energy expenditure from calling up and using so much magic. You needed a little more time.” I kissed his shoulder again, dropping my voice to a whisper. “And here you are. Back with me where you belong.”
Emilio was silent for a long time, and though I was dying for his thoughts, I let him be. It was a lot to process, coming back from the brink of death.
“I heard your voice,” he finally said, a little awestricken. “Felt your presence all around me. I felt this… this energy pulling me toward the gates. I guess some part of me knew I had died—that I was supposed to go through them. But suddenly you were there, your spirit. It was pulling me, too. And no matter how strong the call coming from the other side of that gate, I knew I didn’t want to go through it. Not as long as you were standing on the outside, calling me home.”
“As if I’d let you leave without me.” I tried to laugh, but Emilio seemed to be stuck in that moment, uncertain of how to feel about the whole thing.
“Gray, that kind of magic… There’s always a cost.”
I offered a faint smile. I’d said something similar to Liam when he’d made the moonglass. “Doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.”
He nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t convinced. He brought my hands to his mouth, pressed a kiss against each palm. When he looked at me again, he said, “What was the price, querida?”
“I don’t know. Honestly. I connected with Liam briefly last night—He’s still in my realm, still hunting Jonathan. He told me he’s been called to appear before… well, I think he called it a cosmic tribunal? We don’t know exactly what that means for us yet.”
“Maybe nothing,” he said.
“Maybe nothing,” I echoed, but the words felt as thin as the frost on the edges of the window.
“Gray, you shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t even think it.”
“But—”
“I have the power to raise the dead, Emilio. To manipulate souls. I don’t know why that power was entrusted to me. Or how it even works, exactly. Or what my bigger purpose is in all of this. I don’t even know if the Silversbane prophecy is legit, or just some wishful thinking by generations of witches desperate for answers and hunters even more desperate to get their hands on that kind of mojo. But I do know that I can’t lose you. That in that moment, I was facing that very real possibility of having to say goodbye to you forever. So yes, maybe there is a bigger consequence, an astronomical price tag we can’t even imagine, and it’ll drop on us all like an atomic bomb when we least expect it. But I would do it again in a god damn heartbeat. You know why?”
He didn’t say anything. Just turned his head away, his eyes focusing on the ceiling.
“Because I love you,” I said softly. Taking his face between my palms, I turned his head toward me again, stroking my thumbs over his cheeks. “You snuck up on me, Emilio Alvarez. From the very first, you showed me so much kindness and compassion during Sophie’s murder investigation. You supported me even when I violated police procedure. You bought me shower poofs and baked me brownies and watched the moonrise with me. You protected me. You let me into your heart. And somewhere in all of that, through all the insane stuff that’s happened between the first time you showed up at my house with your messy bed-hair and San Francisco T-shirt, and right this very moment, I fell in love with you. That’s why.”
Another tear escaped down his cheek, but still he hadn’t spoken. His brown eyes seemed to darken.
Emilio was healing remarkably well, especially considering the extent of the original damage. Elena was right—his color was looking good, and the wounds crisscrossing his body were no more than battle scars now, his skin red and raised, but completely healed.
Still, the experience had clearly changed him. He’d died that night, and I’d brought him back. Despite the fact that he’d just unburdened himself of one of his greatest secret shames by telling me about his past, there were new shadows swimming in the depths of his eyes.
It seemed to me that he’d aged, somehow. Not physically, but… cosmically.
“I don’t know how to ask this,” I began. “So I’m just going to blurt it out. Are you pissed that we brought you back? Or freaked out or… I don’t know. Confused? I need you to be totally honest with me.”
At this, he immediately shook his head, surprising me.
“You brought me back to my sister. To a chance to set things right between us—a chance that she is finally willing to consider after twenty years of stone-cold silence. You brought me back to my brothers. To my life’s work. To the new friends and partners we’re making here in Raven’s Cape. And most importantly, you brought me back to you, mi brujita. To the woman I fell madly in love with. So sure, I could sit here on this bed and tell you that what you did was wrong, unnatural, that it never should’ve happened, that I was supposed to die that night and you should’ve let me go.” He closed his eyes and let out a deep breath, and when he looked up at me again, his gaze was full of fire. “But that would make me a damn liar, because there is nowhere else I’d rather be than right here in your arms.”
He slid his hands into my hair and pulled me against his mouth, stealing my breath with a wild, feverish kiss that had me wishing we had the house all to ourselves. I wanted him to claim me in every room, in every way, both of us running around naked and howling up at the moon and celebrating the fact that we’d survived another crazy night.
But for now, that kind of celebration would have to wait. I was grateful for the kissing anyway.
I finally pulled back to catch my breath, my lips stinging with the intensity of his welcomed attack.
“You’re blushing, querida,” he teased. “Something on your mind?”
“Maybe.” More heat rushed to my cheeks. I felt like a kid with a crush, and I loved every minute of it. “It’s just… You… you fell in love with me, too?”
“You think I buy shower poofs and twelve bottles of fruity conditioners for every woman I meet?” He grabbed me by the arms and flipped us so that he was on top of me, the sheet between us barely hiding his desire. “What kind of—”
He cut off abruptly, taking a deep whiff of the air, his face twisting with concern. I felt the change in his body immediately—his muscles stiffened, then bunched, and I recognized the movements for what they were.
He was about to shift.
“Emilio, don’t!” I gripped his arms, his muscles hot beneath my touch. “You’re not totally healed yet.”
Without a word, he jumped up from the bed and headed for the door, naked and stumbling as he went.
“Wait!” I shouted, chasing him down the hall, nearly tripping over Sunshine and Sparkle on the way. “You’re still healing! You can’t just—”
“The guys are in trouble!” he shouted, barely avoiding a collision with Elena, who seemed to be on the same trajectory toward the front of the house. Someone managed to haul open the front door just in time, and the pair launched themselves out, transforming into wolves befo
re their feet even touched the snow-covered ground.
Twenty-One
GRAY
The question about whether Emilio could fully shift in his current condition was swiftly answered.
They were magnificent together, two sleek, black wolves streaking across the bright white snow like arcs of dark lightning. I was so mesmerized by their power, their grace, that it took my mind a minute to process the sight unfolding before me.
The team that had gone out for supplies in two relatively newish vans was now stumbling out of a single, completely jacked-up van that had somehow gotten wedged into a snowbank at the end of the driveway.
Haley, Jael, Ronan, Darius, and Lansky—I counted them twice just to be sure. They were all there. All standing on their own two feet.
But three of them were covered in blood.
“Ronan!” I ran outside, following the path of the wolves to the end of the driveway, where Emilio and Elena were frantically sniffing around the van and the perimeter of the yard. Sparkle and Sunshine joined them, tracking some unknown threat.
“It’s not our blood,” Ronan said, and I stopped just before him, reaching out to touch his jacket for a quick second. He lowered his head to catch my eyes. “Hey. I’m okay, Gray. We all are. I promise. Which is more than I can say for half the shit we bought and one of the vans, but hey. Priorities, right?”
I nodded, the adrenaline spike slowly fading. “What happened?”
“We—” Ronan began, but his attention suddenly shifted to the super-hyper wolf circling us, wagging his tail and yelping like a puppy.
“What? Look at you!” Ronan let out a full-on laugh, dropping to his knees to grab Emilio’s huge wolf head. He scratched him behind the ears and brought his face close, inhaling Emilio’s scent, his eyes full of emotion. The whole thing was so adorable and touching, it basically turned my insides into a puddle of goo.