by May Dawson
She shrugged. “Let me guess. She chose Dad?”
I didn’t have to answer. She waited a beat anyway, then smiled humorlessly. “You’re never going to get them to love you, you know.”
It was true, but it was still harsh. Some truths don’t need to be spoken aloud.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
She admitted, “I could never get them to love me either.”
The words made me want to hug her. Maybe our parents had failed us, and over the years, they’d failed us in ways that had splintered us apart. We were no longer the two kids that used to read out loud to each other because no one else was going to. I remembered tenting the book over our heads as she held the flashlight, whispering the words to her so we wouldn’t attract our parents’ attention.
Then I’d left the pack, and she’d chosen them. There was nothing left of those two kids and the easy relationship we used to have.
But we could develop a new relationship.
She broke into my thoughts as she sat back. “Where am I going to live now?”
Penn sighed under his breath and raised his head, giving up on the pretense of sleep. He folded one arm over the backseat as he leveraged himself up, pressing his arm against the wound in his side. The past few hours of Rosemary complaining—about things that mattered and things that didn’t—had clearly worn on him, maybe more than his injuries.
She had just left the only home she knew behind; it was understandable she wanted to know what her living situation would be. I kept reminding myself that I had no idea what the kind of trauma she’d been through was like.
I promised, “We’ll figure something out, Rosemary. But for now, we have to go to the academy.”
“Why?” she demanded. “I was trying to get away from danger. You know that the academy is the most dangerous place there is right now, right?”
Penn leaned forward in his seat to look at her. “Our friends will be coming home to the academy. And when they get there, we’re going to make sure they’re safe. And you are going to help defend the academy until that happens.”
She stared at him. Penn’s voice had been quiet, without the growl of many alphas, but he sounded absolutely certain.
“Fine,” she said, before crossing her arms. She huffed out a breath like a pouty teenager.
I glanced at Penn, who shrugged. I couldn’t tell if that shrug was embarrassed because he was alpha-ing. But maybe Rosemary didn’t know how to live without a bit of bossing around, not yet. Maybe after living under our parents’ and pack’s brutal rule, it would take time for her to learn how to stand up for herself… in a way that wasn’t obnoxious.
The Kierney pack was no longer going to show up at the academy, but I wasn’t sure how many shifters were still converging to attack our friends and try to keep Maddie from coming back from the shield.
“How many packs do you think allied with the witches?” I asked Penn.
“I don’t know,” he said bitterly.
I pressed the accelerator harder, taking a corner tightly. I hated that we’d left the academy, but I knew I’d made the right call in protecting my sister.
“Come on, Lex,” Rosemary chided me. “There’s no point in saving me if I’m just going to die in a rollover.”
“Would you knock it off?” Penn told her.
“It’s all right,” I said. I felt guilty about leaving her behind, even though I’d been desperate to save myself.
“No, it’s not,” Penn said.
Rosemary sat back in her seat, pouting. Penn rolled his eyes and rubbed his hand across his face.
“The next generation of academy students isn’t going to be any less of a pain-in-the-ass than the current ones, I can tell,” he muttered.
I had to grin. “Well, the pains-in-the-ass that I’ve known have all been worth it.” I didn’t look away from the road, given the speeds we were moving at, but I added, “Thanks for the save back there.”
Penn was amazingly skilled. I hadn’t truly recognized that before, and while I’d hated feeling helpless yet again—just as I always had at the alpha’s house—I could always trust him to watch my back.
“It was nothing,” he said. “I was lucky to have some good teachers.”
“And a bit of magic.”
His lips turned up at the corners. “And a bit of magic.”
Losing our wolves had changed us forever, and I wondered what would happen when—if—we ever gained our wolves back again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Maddie
Jensen and I were playing cards in the kitchen when we heard movement outside. We both tossed the cards face-up on the table and stood, swords in hand.
When they came back, as soon as he made it in the door, Rafe said, “They moved the shield.”
Silas sauntered in behind Rafe, his hands in his pockets. Echo’s face was tranquil under the mass of dark hair.
“So much for twenty-four hours,” Jensen said.
I resisted the impulse to kick him on Silas’s behalf, which I thought was pretty mature of me. Silas had the dreamy look I’d come to associate with plotting, even though on Echo’s face it looked more suspicious than when Silas was his boyish, blond-haired self.
“Now what?” Jensen asked.
“The shield’s in the castle at Eastbrick. Establishment headquarters.” Silas closed the front door and leaned against it. “So we’ll go in and get it.”
“How are we going to do that?” Jensen asked.
Silas suddenly straightened from the door. “I could really do with some tea. Preferably with whiskey in it. Anyone else want tea?”
He sounded worrisomely animated as he began to search through the cupboards, looking for the tea. Jensen and I exchanged a glance.
“Let me fill you in on my adventures with Maddie,” Jensen said, clapping Rafe on the shoulder. He jerked his head toward the door.
“Leave out the dirty bits,” I told Jensen.
“That’s no fun,” he said. He winked at me just before he stepped out of the room; Rafe raised his eyebrows at me in a way I couldn’t quite interpret even after a year of Rafe’s eyebrows dominating my life, but he followed Jensen out.
“Tea makes everything better,” Silas said. The tap screamed as he turned it on, before water finally rushed out with a groan of the pipes. I winced—it was painfully loud—then realized it only hurt because my senses were returning. He stuck the tea kettle under the tap. “Sometimes when life is dour, I remember I haven’t always had the opportunity to make a cup of tea whenever I wanted. I should appreciate the little things.”
“Like oh, last month, at the academy?” I asked. We definitely weren’t allowed hot plates in our rooms—not that my roommates hadn’t kept their share of contraband.
“Yeah, that was miserable. You didn’t even have tea in the cafeteria; it was bizarre. Your American werewolves seem to think there’s something feminine about tea.” He shook his head as he slapped the kettle down on the stove and snapped on the burner. “They seem to think there’s something wrong with being feminine, for that matter.”
He was rattling along as if he were trying to distract me from something—or as if he were trying to distract himself.
“Silas,” I said softly. “What’s wrong?”
His broad shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. The vest he was wearing fit him very well, hugging the taper of his lean chest and narrow waist.
He turned and leaned against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest. He hesitated, then said, “I don’t experience a lot of uncertainty in my life.”
“You don’t know what to do,” I guessed.
“No, that’s not quite right,” he disagreed, running his hand through his hair absently. “I know what I should do—what I would normally do. It just doesn’t feel…right…anymore.”
“What would you normally do?”
He gave me a long look, as if he were debating what to tell me. Then he admitted, “My friends in Elegiah are being moved
soon. To a penal colony that is hell itself, where even I probably can’t reach them.”
My chest squeezed, even before the memories I’d seen in Silas’s mind rose again: Isabelle trying not to laugh as she scolded him, because she always saw through his mischief; Sebastian’s goofy pranks and steadfast friendship; Frederick’s endless kindness that had made hell itself bearable. I saw again the four of them, exchanging little Christmas gifts wrapped in newspaper in a long, cold room.
“How long?” I asked.
“Two days.”
It would be a very tight squeeze to get the shield, bring it back to our world, and come back with enough time to rescue his friends.
“They’ll expect me to attack during the convoy to the colony,” he said. “So normally, I would go in now. Before that. Of course, it might all be a trap.”
He hesitated, then admitted, “If I were Rafe, I wouldn’t risk a rescue.”
No wonder he felt so torn, and I felt my own heart ache for him. They weren’t my friends exactly, but I knew them from his memories. I couldn’t imagine just abandoning them.
“I’d do whatever it took to get to mission complete. I don’t fail, because I don’t hesitate. But now…” He shrugged.
“I’m surprised you told me.”
His lips quirked to one side. “I’m trying to be a new man. No, that’s not even true. I’m considering being a new man, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.”
“This new man might be even more incredible than the old Silas Zip,” I suggested.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Rabbit, I couldn’t be any more incredible.”
I grinned. “You couldn’t be any more cocky.”
He reached out and caught one of my belt loops, pulling me toward him. “Maybe that too.”
“Have you told Rafe yet?” I asked, already knowing the answer. If he’d debated whether or not to tell me, he certainly hadn’t told Rafe.
He shook his head. “He knows I talked to Frederick, that my friends are in Elegiah, and that Frederick claims to be working against the Establishment. But I didn’t go into the….details… yet.”
I raised an eyebrow, prompting him to go on.
He pulled a face in response. “We’ve got to get the shield, and my friends are all amazing criminals. We could use them.”
“Why does this not surprise me?” I teased. Of course Silas would have out with the best… of the worst. “But that’s not why you want to rescue them first. You don’t really think you need them.”
He chewed his lower lip absently. “The old Silas wouldn’t ask.”
“I like this version better,” I promised him. He was always so confident, it was strange to see Silas hesitate, and it made me want to wrap him up in a hug. Instead, I reminded him, “I’ve been on the receiving end of all your manipulation before. You stole some of my memories. It’s not good for a relationship, Sy.”
“I gave them back.” The kettle began to whistle, and he took it off the stove and poured hot water into two mugs before adding tea bags and stirring in rock sugar. As he handed me a mug, he added, “After all, I didn’t want to keep the memory of our spectacular first kiss to myself forever.”
I smiled over the top of my mug, then took a sip. Silas promptly took my cup back from me and said, “It hasn’t even finished steeping yet. You are a savage.”
“Did you just take my tea away?”
“I can’t speak to the rest of your world, but so far… Americans as a whole do not seem to deserve tea.”
I took my cup back, my fingers briefly overlapping his long, narrow ones. He smiled down at me, and I smiled back; something about bantering with Silas was warm and comfortable as a blanket.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Silas Zip.”
He raised his brows. “I can think of six things you can do without me.”
I shook my head, suddenly certain that we had a discussion we needed to have about just how important he was to the family and the team. But now was probably not the time.
“Just talk to them, Silas,” I urged him. “We won’t let you down.”
He wrapped his hands around his cup. “That’s too big a promise, Maddie. Even when we love people, even when we have the best of intentions, we let them down. That’s just part of being human.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do,” he said. “You want me to be unnecessarily honest, and gamble on Rafe being reasonable…which would be fine except that I’d be gambling my friends’ lives. Or I could play it safe, and just tell Rafe that we need them to succeed. Why wouldn’t I twist the roll of the dice?”
“Because it’s wrong?” I prompted him. I could imagine how Rafe would react to being lied to; our little team was already fractured enough.
Silas’s face was stubborn. “It’s not wrong to protect my friends. To finish the mission.”
“It’s wrong to lie to people you love.” My voice grew heated, in contrast to his unshakable calm. At the moment, I wanted to shake that cool demeanor.
He shrugged. “Some things are more wrong than others.”
“Please—” I began, desperate to get Silas to listen to me. But how was I going to reason him into believing in a different set of ethics and expectations than had been forged in his brutal childhood?
“What’s wrong?” Rafe demanded from the doorway.
My heart fluttered, as if I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t. Apparently Rafe had given us as much time to talk as he could bear.
“Maddie and I were just discussing a little trip to Elegiah,” Silas said. I moved to his side to face Rafe and Jensen, and he rested his elbow on my shoulder, the gesture familiar—he’d done that even before the two of us began a relationship, when he’d offered me easy, comfortable friendship in a world where everyone else seemed to be against me.
Silas added, “And everything about Elegiah is wrong.”
I stared at Silas, knowing that telling the truth to Rafe would feel reckless to him.
Loving people is terrifying. To love someone is a reckless act, at times, or at least it feels that way. The thought that I might read Rafe wrong and he might deny Silas the chance to save his friends struck me hard, and so did the thought of what that would do to our team, to our family.
Silas didn’t have to come home with us. His mission for the Rebel Magicians could end, and he could choose to stay in his own world. I wasn’t sure which world even truly felt like home to me.
If he didn’t seem as if he were going to lay all the cards on the table, should I force his hand? I glanced at Jensen’s cards and mine, still scattered across the table. Jensen had a winning hand he’d never get to play.
“Tell me about why we’d go to Elegiah,” Rafe said calmly. He leaned against the doorway, watching Silas with those dark eyes that never seemed to miss a thing.
“I have friends imprisoned there,” Silas explained, and I almost exhaled in relief before he went on, “We aren’t breaking into Castle Eastbrick without Isabelle and Sebastian.”
Rafe nodded, his arms crossed over his powerful chest. “What can they do that you can’t?”
“Isabelle is a master of disguise,” he said. “I can’t go into the castle with my own face, and I can’t hide behind an enchantment, because they’ll detect the magic. Facial illusions are forbidden in Eastbrick.”
“We’ll send Maddie in,” Rafe said determinedly.
Silas shook his head. “You’ll need my magic to get the shield.”
He sounded so convincing, I would have believed him myself if I hadn’t known he was twisting the truth.
“And Sebastian?” Rafe asked. “Do we need him too?”
“No,” Silas confessed. “But they’re a package deal. Anyway, getting Seb won’t hurt; Sebastian is the best lockpick in the Greyworld. The security at the castle will be warded against magic; you need old-fashioned pick skills. Together, we can get the shield, then open a portal and be back in our world ASAP. We’ll make up any time
we lose on their rescue, because the three of us work well together.”
Silas flashed Rafe that boyish grin before he added, “We’ve stolen a few things before.”
“I’ve no doubt about that,” Rafe said slowly. He seemed to be thinking it over. “So without them, you don’t think we’ll be successful?”
Silas hesitated, and my breath froze in my chest. If he lied to Rafe, I had to decide which of them I was going to betray. He glanced at me, and our eyes locked. I thought for sure he’d do the right thing.
“We’d have a chance,” Silas admitted. I wondered if he was as obvious to Rafe as he was to me; he was pulling back now instead of insisting that we had to rescue his friends. He wanted Rafe to latch onto the idea himself.
Rafe nodded slowly. “But we need to get your friends from Elegiah if we want to be sure.”
Silas said, “I know it adds time to the clock.”
Rafe cocked his head to one side, still studying Silas. “I’m just curious about one little thing.”
Jensen gave me an oh shit look. We’d heard this tone before; Rafe’s quiet clarifications were a sure sign one of us was in some serious trouble. My stomach clenched. The thought of Silas and Rafe fighting made me miserable. Could our little family survive Silas deceiving and manipulating or Rafe ordering with no regard for what his commands cost Silas?
They needed each other just as much as any of them needed me. But sometimes I wasn’t sure they understood how they needed each other.
“What’s that?” Silas didn’t look at Jensen or me. He faced Rafe with a look of wide-eyed innocence, and yet I was sure he was squaring off with Rafe.
“Just how fucking stupid you think I am, Silas,” Rafe exploded. I’d known it was coming, but his growl still made me straighten, and Jensen winced. “You are seriously going to stand there and lie to me? We’re in your territory. We’re all depending on you—and you’re going to use us?”
“I don’t know what you’re going off about,” Silas said coolly. “Always so angry. You should see someone about that.”
“Cute,” Rafe said, “but no. Just admit it. You want to rescue your friends. Helping them is just as important to you as the mission.”