Authors: Jory Strong
The comment took Rebekka’s eyes off Levi, and she startled at the man now standing where moments ago there’d been nothing but shadows and a raven perched in a tree just beyond the gate marking the boundary of the Wainwright property.
Shapeshifter,
she thought, but even from a distance, she knew he was nothing ordinary. He was clothed, where a true shapeshifter wouldn’t have been. More telling, eyes the color of a dense forest blazed with inhuman fire, while a stylized raven marked his cheek.
“If all goes well,” Annalise said, “I will speak with you again in the future. You may keep the token in the Were’s possession as a symbol of alliance; it no longer holds a spell capable of bringing help.”
Rebekka nodded and Annalise went inside, leaving Rebekka free to hurry into Levi’s hug and barrage of questions. Before she answered the first of them, she glanced at the stranger who leaned against the oak tree where he’d once been perched.
Levi stiffened. A low growl emerged, only to be met by a laugh.
The man pushed away from the deep shadow and approached. “That’s hardly the appropriate greeting for the poor escort and messenger boy charged with ensuring you spend the night in a place free of trouble.”
“Who are you?” Levi asked, making Rebekka cringe.
“You’ll have to trust the little healer when she tells you I mean you no harm, though as a courtesy to Aisling and her prince of a mate, it would be best if we appeared on her doorstep before full dark arrives.”
Rebekka gave Levi another quick hug then disengaged, saying, “We can talk as we walk.”
Lion gold eyes issued another warning to their escort before Levi took up a position next to her. And as they walked, she told him what had happened since they parted upon seeing the guardsmen and Gulzar near the Mission.
When she reached the part where Aziel had appeared, Levi produced the blackened token and handed it to her. He stopped in his tracks when, moments later, she got to the end of her story, telling him, “Annalise prophecies a war between supernatural beings. She claims healers will emerge who are able to do what I can’t for those trapped between forms.”
“What you can’t do
yet
,” their raven-marked guide said, causing them both to look at him, though he neither looked back nor stopped walking.
Levi let the stranger advance a block before he took a step. Rebekka doubted even ten blocks would be enough distance to keep their escort from hearing their conversation.
“Is he right?” Levi asked.
“Yes.”
“What do the witches want from you?”
She curled her fingers around his arm. “They didn’t ask anything.”
“Yet. They involved you in their schemes from the first, by sending for you. You could have lost your life, either at the hands of the guardsmen or the Church.”
“Because I
chose
not to leave Eston in the truck for guardsmen to find,” Rebekka said, and she wasn’t sorry for that choice. Just as she wasn’t sorry they’d ambushed the trapper or waited in the woods to offer shelter to Araña. “If not for the witches, Anton would have dragon lizards and Cyrin would be dead.”
Levi snarled at what Anton had planned for his brother. She squeezed his arm, hardly daring to mention the dream they shared of freeing the animals and Weres held at the maze, but she didn’t know Aisling or her mate, and Annalise hadn’t said it was safe to speak freely once they arrived at the shamaness’s house.
“I think the witches intend for Araña to gain control over the demon. If—”
“She and Tir intend to break into Anton’s house. Araña made a bargain with Draven Tassone. I don’t know the details of it.”
Confusion buffeted Rebekka. The vampire’s involvement was unexpected. “Tir is the prisoner?”
“Yes.”
“When will they attempt it?”
Levi stopped her once again, this time putting his mouth close to her ear. “She has three days to complete whatever task she agreed to.”
Rebekka’s palms grew suddenly damp. “Then they have until tomorrow at noon unless they want to face the magistrate’s men as well as the demon.”
“I warned her about the magistrate’s arrival when I saw her earlier. She and Tir witnessed the assault on your house and she came to the brothel to warn me. Her boat is hidden in the outer harbor. I’m meeting them there shortly after sunrise tomorrow.”
Rebekka’s breath caught. Her thoughts went to the patriarch, trapped in his wheelchair, his limbs slowly becoming useless. She could think of only one thing Araña and Tir had that could be used for bargaining with the vice lord who controlled the outer harbor. “Rimmon’s daughter?”
“I told them she suffered from the wasting disease. If Tir healed her as you think he might be capable of doing, there’s no rumor of it yet.”
Levi turned away from her and began walking, hands shoved into his pockets and shoulders hunched in an uncharacteristic way. “I contemplated betraying them. I asked her to use her gift to find you. When she claimed not to have control over it, I told her about Annalise sending for you. I told her to seek out the witches and learn how to use her gift. When nearly a day passed . . .”
Levi shrugged. “I was on my way to the outer harbor to see if Tir had succeeded in stealing the boat and making a deal with Rimmon. Then I was to meet with the werewolf we freed. He approached me at the brothel—
“Now I know he lied. He said he was there when Tir was turned over to the trapper. He claimed Tir was a demon-possessed human being sent to the maze.”
Rebekka slid her arm through Levi’s. “You wouldn’t have betrayed them.”
“I’ve thought about little else but the possibility of you being held at the maze and Gulzar—” A shudder went through him. “If Araña had arrived a few minutes later, I would have missed both her and the messenger bringing news you were safe. I might have—”
“No. You wouldn’t have betrayed them.”
He shrugged again and remained silent. Ahead of them, the stranger leaned indolently against a fence in front of a white adobe house with a profusion of flowers underneath the windows and on the porch.
Rebekka touched her pocket and felt the folded pages she’d ripped from the journal on the patriarch’s desk. Choices. Paths taken and not taken.
Sitting across from Annalise, she’d accepted that maybe she couldn’t know the cost ahead of time. Maybe she could only go with her heart and do what she considered right at each juncture. “There might never be a better chance to free those held in the maze.”
Levi didn’t respond until they’d halved the distance to the shamaness’s house. “I had the same thought as I passed from the red zone into this area. Vampires aren’t known for wasting their resources. Draven Tassone least of all. He would have provided her with information to increase the odds of success. I’ll listen to her plan, and if it’s a sound one, I’ll go with them. You can wait—”
“No. Both the Weres and the animals will need me or they’ll end up dying in the traps outside the maze or slaughtered in it when the magistrate’s guards and the police arrive and find them loose.”
The stranger opened the gate and proceeded to the shamaness’s front door. As they neared the house, Rebekka could hear music coming through the open window, an exotic mix of instruments making her think of shimmering desert and primal heat.
Their escort knocked and the door was opened by a man. Rebekka’s steps faltered. He had the same otherworldly beauty as their escort, the same hint of ready death.
“Was that the door I—” The shamaness’s question was cut off by her laugh, and it remained thick in her voice when she said, “Didn’t you warn your father against making you his pawn again, Zurael?”
The teasing question earned her a growled “Aisling” and had their escort’s teeth flashing white in the rapidly approaching darkness. He extended a hand toward Rebekka and Levi. “I’ve brought guests in need of safekeeping.”
The shamaness nudged her mate aside and stood in the doorway. He curled a protective arm around her waist, but she smiled and Rebekka felt welcome. “Come in,” Aisling said. “We’re just about to sit down for dinner.”
ARAÑA brushed her fingertips over a taut masculine nipple and smiled at the sound of Tir’s heartbeat speeding up beneath her ear.
Just a little bit longer,
she told herself, savoring the closeness as his words of love continued to sing through her like a musical refrain.
She closed her eyes in contentment and sighed as his fingers combed through her hair, gliding sensuously over her vertebrae, his palms caressing her buttocks at the end of each downstroke. She wanted this forever, but even as she thought it, the knowledge that he’d once killed and enslaved the Djinn pushed her peace aside.
Against her back, Tir’s hand stopped moving. “What are you thinking about?”
She longed to tell him, to ask for reassurance. But how could he give it when he had no memory of his past? When he’d already refused to give up his claim of vengeance?
Araña snuggled closer and wedged her leg more firmly between his. None of it would matter if she didn’t succeed in the task she’d agreed to. “I spoke to Levi after I left L’Antiquaire.”
“At the brothel?” There was no mistaking the purr of menace in Tir’s voice.
“Yes.”
His fingertips found one of the scars on her back and traced it, sending a pulse of erotic fear through her. “I should punish you. You knew I expected you to go directly to the
Constellation
.”
“I told him what we’d seen and heard at Rebekka’s house,” she said, neither making excuses nor refuting Tir’s charge, but unable to hide her reaction to his threat of punishment, not with her clit and bare mound pressed to his thigh. “I also told him I’d made a deal with Draven Tassone. Levi will be here shortly after sunrise.”
“He intends to go with us?”
“I don’t know. At the least he’ll share what information he has. He once hunted in the maze.”
She lifted away from Tir so she could see his face. “Normally there are only three people in the maze compound, beside the—beside Abijah.” When there was no flicker of recognition, she continued, “By noon tomorrow, the traveling magistrate will arrive in Oakland. Some of his prisoners will be taken to the maze.”
“Meaning additional guards,” Tir said, also remembering Thane’s comment about apartments being available for those required to be on the premises at certain times. “And meaning we need to act before noon tomorrow.”
“Yes. Thane was right in his assessment of the best way to get into Anton’s house. There are cameras throughout the maze, and cages of wild animals forming a gauntlet at the back of it. The day I was taken there, the guardsmen stopped at the gate and were buzzed in from the front office by Farold after they identified themselves. There are probably others who receive the same treatment, but there’s also Farold himself and a helper named Gulzar.” Araña smoothed her palm over Tir’s chest. “I’m going to use my gift to see if I can find a way to get into the office.”
Tir frowned, but didn’t protest.
She forced herself to roll away from him and sit up.
He sat as well, pulling her onto his lap, his chest to her back and his arms secured around her. A kiss followed, in the hollow of her neck where the spider stretched across her skin.
Araña glanced at the lantern Tir had lit earlier when they’d left the bed long enough to drop anchor a short distance away from the pier.
Remembered pain and fear pressed in on her as she thought about the night she’d climbed aboard the
Constellation
and seen Erik’s death. She swallowed down the emotion and found a smile when Tir said, “I won’t allow this if it’s going to hurt you.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, focusing on the flame. Willingly accepting its call.
Almost immediately soul strands settled, forming a carpet spreading before her, as if she could walk its path into eternity. Around her colors and threads shifted subtly. She sensed then what she
knew
had to be true, though she’d never noticed it before. She wasn’t alone here.
She had no form, only the spider-shaped illusion she now understood was the manifestation of her soul. The others weren’t visible either, and yet the echo of the changes they made to the pattern vibrated through her.
Panic threatened to seize her. For an instant she didn’t know where to begin, how to find the threads she was looking for. Then, like a beacon, her own life blazed near her feet, only to disappear. Where it slid beneath the pattern, it was entwined in the blue black of Tir’s.
She turned away from the present and the future and looked to the past, followed the bright flare of her own thread until she found the place where it intersected with Levi’s at the brothel. There was no subtle movement around her, and in texture the carpet appeared more solid, more vivid, as if now that it couldn’t be changed, the full truth and all its nuances could be revealed.
Levi’s was the only thread she was certain would lead to Gulzar, and maybe Farold—though she held little hope his soul could be touched here given what Malahel had said about Anton.
Araña traveled further into the past, being careful not to violate Levi’s privacy until it became necessary—when it ran concurrent with a pus-colored strand she had only to concentrate on to hear the name she’d been hoping to find. Gulzar.
He had Levi strapped naked to a table slick with blood, instruments of torture and rape scattered haphazardly around him.
Charmed silver wrapped around various segments of Levi’s limbs, creating a monster that was neither lion nor man.
Nausea and hate swelled inside Araña. She reached for Gulzar’s thread, meaning to grasp it so she wouldn’t lose it, but she hesitated at the last moment. She had no desire to see the entirety of his sins, to walk the path of his evil.
She concentrated instead on retracing her imagined steps along the patterned carpet, from past into present. And her desire to kill him grew when she found him in a house in the red zone, a young girl strapped to his table, terror coming off her in waves.
He circled her, as if she were a slab of clay and he was an artist contemplating what he would make of it.