“Why are you both after me? What do you want from me? Why can’t everyone just leave me alone?!” The bite in Sunday’s tone came across loud and clear in spite of the trembling of her voice.
Before she could impose her will on him some more and force him to answer her, however, a memory seeped out from a crack in a wall that Bernadette’s sorcery had erected in her mind. The whipping of iron manacles smashed into her skull. She grabbed her head and howled. She was losing control. Energy balled itself into fists and pounded against her chest. Her grasp on the werewolf weakened. Eyes still yellow, the beast was on the verge of transforming at her feet.
Something was coming back to her.
A memory. Memories.
Something that Bernadette tucked away into the furthest recesses of her mind. Cyrus’ face flashed through her memory.
He was the same… but he was different. She was the same… but she was younger.
It was all too much. Sunday’s mind raced with possibilities of her past and the very present danger she was in. Any hopes that she could keep her cool and focus on the task at hand was here now were lost. Beside her, a store window shattered.
The werewolf hissed, eyes aflame and boring into hers. He was hurting, and he was
pissed.
His mind was a laser into hers. Just as he was open to her, she was open, too. The attempt was novice and clumsy, it might have even been ill-advised, but the werewolf focused all his might on Sunday’s vulnerabilities. She was in her head, so
he
was in hers.
She had to raise her shields. Doing so would limit her ability to control the werewolf, but it meant she could flee.
Break the connection.
The chains smashed against the insides of her skull as the manacles burst over the locked memories.
Forget it. It doesn’t matter now. Let go of him.
Painfully, Sunday reigned in her awareness and slammed the door shut on her ability. It took a second to gather her thoughts, and while she did, the werewolf regained control of his body. She was going to be sick. Right there, right in front of him. She was going to tear the hair from her scalp and vomit everything she’d eaten onto the concrete, but she couldn’t. As much as she wanted to collapse and recover, she needed to run.
She fumbled for the keys on the way, fighting for breath, shoving a man walking by as she darted past him to her driver’s side door. Eyes blurred by oncoming tears and hardly able to catch her breath, she drove blindly. Cyrus was after her. This new werewolf was with Cyrus. Her friends were in danger. Constance was a murderer and probably a seriously evil witch.
There was no getting around it. She was in the shit. Kayla and Sammy were in the shit. She had to figure out what Constance was plotting
now
before her friends ended up on her to-do list.
Just let these werewolves get in my way.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“You’re positive she didn’t know who the dead man was?” Cyrus probed.
Together, in the truck, the werewolves had to come up with a next course of action. Cyrus brushed the beard down the side of his face with his hands. It was a nervous habit, a tick. His eyebrows gathered tightly and his forehead was carved lines. He felt every day his age.
They drove around in circles, scouring the street for the Incarnate. With the windows rolled down, they pushed their senses further than humanly possible, trying to pick up her scent. She was out there somewhere, and Cyrus knew she wouldn’t leave.
If she hadn’t left yet, she’s not going to leave now.
“She didn’t know about him,” Angel stressed. “She asked what I’d done to a witch. I didn’t know what the Hell she was talking about. She stopped asking about it and asked how I knew her. That’s when she put the Voodoo on me. I fought it, but I had to tell her. She screamed that I was lying to her, but in my mind, I could hear her believing me. She was thinking a million things at the same time, but she wasn’t thinking them to me. She was in her own head. I heard something break. That’s when she grabbed her head. She pulled at her hair. She was going to rip it right out, then everything went to shit. Cars crashed. A window blew out. And she fucking dipped.”
Angel paused, dark eyes digging sternly into Cyrus.
“And
you
. She knew
your
name. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me how the Incarnate knows
your name,
when she couldn’t remember your face even a few fucking days ago?”
Now she knows. She knows everything.
And now Angel was going to know everything, too. Cyrus had allowed his partner to believe that the hunger for capture was what had driven him these past few days, but the reality was anything but. Hearing that she’d lost control of her ability
for the second time in hardly a day, Cyrus’ mind replayed her howls of pain like a broken record. Awful. Guttural. Ripping through her delicate throat like razors. Searing into his eardrums. Revelation upon revelation of her past. The chain Angel had heard break apart in Sunday’s mind, Cyrus had felt slamming into his chest the previous night.
She had no idea. And now she knows everything.
What Sunday had seen in their minds, she agonized over. She
had
to have known the truth, now. Angel had felt every emotion as it washed over Sunday. It wasn’t just Cyrus’ betrayal that she suffered; it was the betrayal of what she believed about her entire life.
“We have to get to her,” Cyrus demanded. His heart beat loudly in his chest. The words flew rapidly from his lips. “If she doesn’t know who she really is, that could explain why she hasn’t gone home. She’s afraid. She doesn’t have anywhere to go.”
“Maybe she’s not what everyone thinks she is,” Cyrus bellowed, slamming his fist to his thigh. It would bruise, but it would heal quickly. Such was their werewolf gift.
“It’s not our call, Cyrus!” He was infringing on a delicate balance of power, but Angel didn’t care. Fueled by frustration, pack pecking order didn’t matter anymore. “You can’t deny that she’s dangerous. No matter what the hell is going on between you two, you can’t deny that she killed all those people.”
For all these years, Cyrus and his pack had been led to believe that the Incarnate was singularly dangerous. The child they abducted and laid at Bernadette’s feet had to be controlled in order for her power to be contained. Age-old wisdom made sense in the case of the Incarnate:
the Devil you know is better than the Devil you don’t.
Better to have Bernadette, a human, get her hands on the Incarnate than allow the Incarnate to reach her full potential in the hands of much more powerful creatures. Better to have her under control than let her roam free.
“Maybe it was Bernadette. She was a power-hungry bitch set on world domination. I was there, Angel. I knew her.
I worked for her.
Maybe she lied about Sunday being the Incarnate. What the fuck is the Incarnate even? It’s just her bullshit lie! The woman doesn’t even remember us kidnapping her as a kid. She doesn’t remember
anything
. You know it’s true!”
“Bernadette’s not our
job
anymore. We’re here for the Pastophori. The cult wants her, and that’s
all
that matters. Get over this shit, brother. Get over it right now.”
Angel was right. They had to find her. He needed her, and she needed his protection so much more than he could have ever anticipated. Powerful and broken simultaneously, Sunday was a catastrophe waiting to happen, with all the power of a god-like creature that she never asked to be.
Angel repeated the question that Cyrus refused to answer with the exclamation point of his fist pounding onto the dashboard of their truck.
“How did the Incarnate know your name, Cy? Why on fuck’s earth did she feel like I’d ripped her heart out when she pulled your name out of my head? What happened that you’re not telling me? Because something happened, Cyrus, and I don’t like not knowing my ass from my elbow when I’m face-to-face with the fucking
Incarnate
.”
The tension was taut between them. Neither man spoke for a while. Angel could poke Cyrus, but Cyrus wouldn’t bite. There was nothing to say and nothing he
could
say that would make going behind Angel’s back acceptable. Instead, Cyrus moved onto the more pressing issue.
“Go back to the witch.” Cyrus sighed. He rolled his shoulders to force himself to calm down. Even so, his muscles twitched. “Let’s figure this out. What was she talking about when she asked what you did to the witch? Which one was she following again?”
Angel growled. His nostrils flared. The wolf had baited Cyrus, his dominant, but Cyrus had backed off. It was clear that Cyrus wasn’t going to answer Angel’s question. Right now, it didn’t seem to matter.
The wolves hadn’t learned the names of the witches besides Sunday’s friends, Kayla Thompson and Samantha Wills.
“One of the young ones. Dark hair. Not the one who lives in the house or the Asian one. The other one.”
“Let’s go, brother,” Cyrus said as he made a U-turn in the middle of the road. “We’re retracing your steps.”
The blue lights from police cars strobed ahead of them as the wolves drove up to the street where Angel encountered Sunday. A crowd of people gathered around the yellow tape of a crime scene perimeter set up by the cops. This part of town shouldn’t have drawn so much foot-traffic at night. It was a commercial strip of stores and businesses that didn’t stay open this late. The wolves slowed down behind a rubbernecking driver in the car ahead of them. Following their lead, the men looked at the scene to pick up any clues as to why Sunday had been there earlier. The cops were searching an establishment called Bearers of Mystical Fruit. As they were about to pass it, a police officer stopped them and directed a black coroner’s van to cut them off.
Things were ticking into place and Cyrus didn’t like what they suggested.
“You said Sunday went in after the dark-haired witch?” Cyrus asked.
“The Incarnate watched for a while from there,” Angel responded pointing to a spot along the street that was currently occupied by another car. “She waited for almost a half-hour, and then she got out of the car. I looked into the window of that hippie shop when I walked by, and she was in there walking through the merch. When I was coming up on the block again, she was getting into her car. That’s when she saw me.”
“Was she bloody?” Cyrus darted probing looks at Angel as he maneuvered the truck around the farther block.
“Nah, man. But she doesn’t have to get her hands dirty to kill someone,” Angel reminded him.
“If there wasn’t blood, the cops wouldn’t have set up shop for a crime scene investigation, Angel. Think about it. She could have made it look like a heart attack. Natural causes.”
Angel responded with a humorless chuckle. He was completely biased against her and wasn’t buying that Sunday was innocent of murder.
“She asked you what you’d done to the witch,” Cyrus reminded him. “She thought you did something.” Angel shifted in his seat and exhaled a cloud of smoke, forced to begrudgingly accept that Cyrus had a point.
“Did she think anything or say anything to lead you to believe she had been lying when she asked you about it?”
Angel shook his head in response.
“We know when the Incarnate gets the juice flowing, she’s destructive. Did the windows of that shop look blown out? Did it look like a hurricane smashed through it, or a wildfire?” Cyrus was forcing Angel to look at the evidence, to comb through his own testimony for verification of Cyrus’ hunch. Angel shook his head again, puffing with intensity, projecting his fury through his cigarette.
“That’s what I thought,” Cyrus continued. “What we have here is proof that the Incarnate found something out and was suspicious of one of the witches.”
“When did you become her biggest fan?” Angel snapped accusingly. “At the club? She shake her pretty tits in your face and cast her siren-spell on you?”
Cyrus ignored his question. Angel was trying to get a rise out of him, and he knew it. Turning his attention back to the matters at hand, Cyrus rounded the block again to drive past the crime scene one last time.
“Call Neal. Tell him and Marcus we stumbled onto something else.” Angel dug into his pant pockets for his phone. “Tell them that Sunday has been stalking a witch from some nothing coven. We’re going to need to get on this ASAP and we’re going to need them on board. The Incarnate’s involved, and she’s not going to let this go if it concerns her friends.”
Angel made the call, and briefly told Neal all of Cyrus’, and now his, suspicions.
“You’re taking us to that witch’s house from this morning,” Cyrus ordered as he pulled the truck over to the side of the road and thrust the shifter to park. “Jump seats, brother,” he said before he opened the driver’s side door. “You’re driving.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The wolves held their pow-wow almost as soon as Neal and Marcus arrived the next day. They gathered in Cyrus and Angel’s room and listened closely with stone faces while Cyrus briefed them on their latest findings. Angel leaned on the dresser beside him, nodding along as Cyrus spoke.
As much as he’d fought against doing it, Cyrus had confided in Angel about going behind his back to meet Sunday. After a long drive and more than a few drinks at a country bar, he stumbled into the motel room, woke Angel, and confessed that he’d been with her on the night prior to their latest encounter. He’d apologized, telling Angel as much as he could of the truth without implicating himself in some grand conspiracy to whisk her away. He told Angel, Neal, and Marcus that he’d wanted to try to gather enough intel directly from her so that they could figure out a way to get her to come willingly.
“We have to find a way to lure her out, to get her to trust us,” he said.
“Not you, though, right? We can’t get her to trust
you
anymore, right?” Angel spat.
“Not anymore,” Cyrus conceded with a sneer. “Drugged or not, just grabbing her off the street isn’t going be possible. What she did to Angel and to me, she can do to the whole city, just like she did in Washington.”
As he tried to convince his brothers that his dalliance with Sunday didn’t pose a threat to their mission, he’d bitten back the part about
him
being a possible threat to it. Never once did he even suggest that they might fall back on their pack’s word. Though he admitted growing fond of her, he made it clear that he was sticking to the terms of their agreement with the cult.