Graeme nodded toward the house. “We aren’t telling Lieutenant Burbank?”
Mac shook his head. “Like you said, he’s busy.”
Khain paced, fire shooting out of his fingertips, his eyes imploding and reforming in his head. “Boe!” he shouted. “How long do preparations take?”
Boe yelled back something he couldn’t hear. Khain let out a string of curses and paced harder. When he’d been in the
Ula
, he could feel the new
shiften
determination, and something like hope. He knew exactly what it was about. The Promised had been discovered and some mangy
shiften
was mounting her all night long. Maybe a hundred mangy
shiften
. The better to ensure her pregnancy took.
Light fuck it all! He hadn’t been able to take her. The one he wanted over all others. He hadn’t been able to stop the curse of the first Promised.
But maybe there was still time, if Boe would just finish with that
foxen
he had snatched from his evening walk. He’d gotten lucky with that one. Boe had recounted the locations of all the
foxen
houses he’d known when he’d lived in the Ula, warning Khain repeatedly that it was different up there now, and there might be nothing to find. But as soon as Khain had popped over to the second location, the air had been rich with the vibration of
foxe
n, and he’d found one in a lamb’s shake and been able to pop back over to the
Pravus
without alerting any
felen
. He hoped. He hated how the
felen
in the area were able to track him so quickly, but he couldn’t move anywhere that they were more lax. This was where Rhen was, and somehow, she gave him strength.
Besides, he had plans along those lines. He hadn’t quite perfected his vibrational subterfuge and it hadn’t worked when he’d gone into the Ula like he thought it would, but he was closer. Maybe someday he’d be able to walk among the humans and the
felen
would be none the wiser.
Khain had marked the area where he’d found the
foxen
for future mining, but now he just wanted to get started.
“Argh!” he screamed, clenching blood from his fists, his eyes shooting all the way across the room and then taking a moment to regrow in his head. “Boe! I want him now! I wait no longer!”
“Yes, Sire,” Boe said, pulling an inert
foxen
behind him on a cushion of air. Boe had learned a few tricks over the years.
Boe positioned himself directly in front of the angel’s enclosure and Khain did the same. Boe turned to him questioningly and Khain nodded. He was ready.
Boe threw all of the locks on the tiny door at the bottom of the angel’s enclosure. Khain stared on. The angel was weak and there would be no fight in him. The
byzant
metal Boe had mined from the inner edges of the
Pravus
did its job well.
Boe opened the door and slid the foxen in. Khain could sense the foxen’s thoughts and sensations at once, as the extreme light and heat of the angel woke it up as soon as it was inside.
The sight of the angel began to unwittingly destroy the
foxen’s
mind and body, and as it disintegrated, Khain was treated to the inner thoughts and knowledge of the angel, as the two beings within the enclosure began to merge. The ground rippled under his feet as the angel woke and began to complain.
Khain had discovered this by accident, when Boe helped him wrestle the angel into the enclosure after they had first caught him, years ago, weakened by his forty nights of debauchery. Khain had no problem touching or looking at the angel, but Boe had done it only under great duress, and whenever he was too near the angel, Khain could hear it’s innermost workings. Boe had almost lost his hands and arms that day, but Khain had been able to arrest most of the disintegration.
Still, the angel had put up a great fight, destroying so much of Khain’s house that Boe had needed to move them while Khain slept off the damages from the battle.
When he’d woken, years later in human time, but only a few moments for him, he’d tried to make sense of what he’d heard from the angel’s mind, but he couldn’t. All he could get was a general location in the
Ula
. He’d gone to the
Ula
, in that location, and found a pack of human boys about to molest a human girl in a satisfying fashion. He’d stayed to watch, but something about the girl had called to him. He’d been unable to stay away from her. What had happened then had amazed and destroyed him. The girl had hurt him. Almost as bad as the angel had. A human girl!
He’d retreated back to the
Pravus
to recover, and try to figure out the great and shameful mystery, which he never had. Until he’d thrown four more
foxen
in with the angel and learned to better interpret what he heard as they were dying. The girl was a Promised, the first Promised, the one with the most of the angel’s blood in her, and somehow she had some sort of a power against him. A power he would know if he could. Would destroy if he could. Would harness if he could.
He’d tried again with the girl, a young woman now, more curious than anything, steeling himself beforehand with power, trying to drink from the angel like an emotional vampire stealing good thoughts and strong character.
Then he’d gone after her. The experience had left him shaken and harmed, but not as laid-out as he’d been the first time. Siphoning the angel’s energy, her father’s energy, before and after had helped greatly.
He hadn’t been able to mark her, as she was a curious blank to him, unlike most humans. But he had her address from the angel and had watched her through the eyes of
foxen
in his sleep, until he knew what was going on with her life, and had overheard an appointment she had.
Khain pulled himself back to his home, where the angel rumbled angrily in his cage. He dialed in to the conduit that
foxen
had created, opening himself up to catch any bits of information he could.
An image flashed before him, of the house of the mother on the night the Promised was conceived. A young girl, a toddler maybe, creeping through the house, eating Cheerios out of the box and clutching a stuffed teddy. An older sister.
Khain raked what more he could out of the conduit before the
foxen
disappeared altogether, then began to make his plans.
Ella woke up with a start, listening to the old farmhouse creak in the early morning wind. Trevor lay beside her, breathing deeply, his naked form under only one sheet, when she’d needed two blankets, even curled up against him. Her eye traced his face and his shoulders, and the cut of his body under the sheet before she crept out of bed and stood, trying to decide what had woken her.
She found her pants and dug out her phone. Accalia had sent her two messages over the last few days but Ella didn’t know how to answer them just yet. Accalia wrote fan fiction for all the members of the chat room they’d met in, and one memorable story Ella had read had dealt with almost the exact situation she was in right now. A human women falling in love with a werewolf. Ella shook her head, for the first time wondering if perhaps she’d gone all the way crazy and what was happening to her was really a dream, or some mental-health-drug-induced nightmare.
Then she realized. She hadn’t blacked out or walked in her sleep recently. She wasn’t even hearing voices in her head anymore, unless you counted Trent and Troy, and she didn’t think they counted, because they were real, weren’t they?
She looked at Trevor on the bed again and wondered, remembering the feelings of surety she’d had when they’d first touched. The feeling that everything was right in her life─ for the first time.
Before she could follow the line of questioning again, her phone came alive in her hand, the screen showing a crisp picture so lifelike, she swore she could see his hands moving in space.
She stared, horrified, about to drop the phone and scream for Trevor, when the man was replaced with her sister’s face, her makeup smeared, her mouth a rictus of terror.
The main selfie camera panned to the man and he held a finger to his lips, then said something. Slowly, she moved the phone to her ear, not wanting to let it get too close to her, but knowing she had no choice. When it was within six inches, she heard the man speak.
“Lose the wolf. All the wolves. Or she dies in front of you.”
Oh, good God, that voice, it made her physically ill. And what did his words mean? How could she lose any of them? She looked around frantically, realizing if she went down the stairs, Trent and Troy would wake up immediately. They slept a lot lighter than Trevor did.
She tiptoed out the door, not daring to pull it shut behind her, all the way to the room on the other end of the hall. She went into the bathroom there and cowered in the very back corner, then turned the phone to her face again. The man was there. She held the phone up to her ear.
“Very good. Meet me at your house. One hour on the dot. Any
shiften
follow you or even know about it and your sister’s blood will forever stain the nice carpet in your entryway.”
“Wait!” Ella whispered fiercely. “I have no way to get to my house! I don’t drive.”
“Tell me where you are. I will come to you.”
Ella considered, her throat squeezing off any air she might have been able to pull into her lungs. If he came to this big house, surely Trevor and Troy and Trent were a match for him. And there were more
shiften
in the driveway. But what if they couldn’t? What if someone got hurt? Plus he would always know where Trevor lived after that. She bit her lip drawing blood. She had no idea of his limitations. Did he even know where she was? No, he couldn’t, or he wouldn’t be asking. She couldn’t bring him here.
“I can be at the stone cat on the west end of Serenity in twenty minutes,” she finally said. “You’ll let my sister go?”
“Of course, that’s how this works, isn’t it?”
The phone went dead.
Ella curled a hand around her lower belly and wondered if she really was going to go to him.
Did she have a choice? Her sister might not treat her well. Her text the night before saying she was back in town had been less than kind, but her sister was still all she had left of the family she had been born into. And Shay was still a human being.
Right?
***
Ella ran down the road in her sneakers as fast as she could. The twenty minute deadline had come and gone. It had taken her almost ten of it to figure out how to get out of the house and off the property without anyone seeing her. Finally she had climbed onto an overhang on the roof and slid down a tree, tearing her pants in two places, then ran through the farmland and woods back towards the main road. Once she found it, she turned left and ran for her sister’s life.
Ahead, she saw the stone statue of the big cat guarding the entrance to Serenity. The three statues on the three major roads into town made more sense to her now. The red wolf, the stone cat, and the growling bear. There was so much she still didn’t know about the area though. Were there
shiften
only in Serenity? Or everywhere? Would she live long enough to find out?
She had to believe Trevor would come for her. Somehow. If she could just hold on─
A rip in the world appeared in front of her and before she could even slow her steps, she ran right into it, tumbling down three feet, landing on a cracked, hard ground that hadn’t existed a second before. She hit the ground hard, rolling, seeing fire spurt out of the dirt in front of her, and putting her feet out to stop her forward momentum. Her feet slid right into the fire and her pants blazed almost instantly. She stood and beat it out with her hands, then remained bent like that, breathing hard, not daring to look around.
“That’s good, Promised. Stay just like that and I’ll put all the young you want inside your belly.”
Ella shot straight up and ran six or seven paces at a full sprint before she realized there was nowhere to go. She slowed, then stopped, as awful laughter surrounded her from everywhere.
She looked around hesitantly as she turned to face him. The terrain was bleak, unforgiving, like a desert made of fire. He stood in the center of it like a paragon of the landscape and his true form made her cower in spite of himself.
He scoffed. “Little girl, this is not what I look like.” He clucked his tongue. “It’s sad that I cannot be myself, even in my home, but your brain cannot conceive of the reality of my appearance. It would melt, just like it would if you actually saw your father, and we can’t have that, can we?”
“My sister.” Ella hated hearing her voice shake. She shouldn’t have spoken at all.
“Ah yes, your sister. Regrettably, I must hold on to her for just a little longer. Just long enough─ well, we’ll discuss that in a bit. For now, we walk.”
He pointed a finger at her and Ella felt herself be lifted into the air in some sort of a bubble. It skimmed along the ground, just high enough that most of the flames shooting out of the cracks in the ground only grazed the bottom of her feet. Ella didn’t even try to get out. She scanned the landscape, caught in a crazy, deadly world that hadn’t even existed to her a week before, and tried to think of her next move.
In reality, all she really wanted to do was have a very noisy breakdown and insist there was no way this could be happening.
Trevor awoke with a jerk, scrambling out of bed and falling into a defensive stance, the sheet wrapped around his legs, the remnants of his dream of The Destroyer taking Ella falling away. He stood and rubbed his hand over his face, shaking his head. It had been a bad one.
He padded into the bathroom, took care of business, then pulled on some shorts and headed downstairs. “Ella?”
The kitchen was empty and only the wolves were on the couch. Trent hopped to the floor immediately.
She never came down.
She’s not upstairs.
Panic filled him as he struggled to hold on to anything that was left of the dream.
Trent and Troy pushed past him up the stairs, their noses to the ground. Trevor let himself feel weak for just a moment, then he pulled it together and followed them.