Authors: Jennifer Safrey
Before I could do anything, Not-Rocky bull rushed Clayton, breaking up his celebration. “No!” I cried as Clayton once again blinked out of view. Not-Rocky stumbled, flailing his arms to stay on his feet as his target disappeared and moved out of the way. Before he could turn, his arm jerked up against his back and twisted, his fingers scratching nothing, reaching in vain for his assailant. I winced at the loud crack of breaking bone and gasped at Not-Rocky’s scream of pain before he went down face first.
I ran in his direction but a now-visible Clayton stepped into my path. Eye to eye, we stared at each other until he looked away to where Mahoney lay unmoving. “Reporters,” he mused aloud, and shrugged. “They always say they’ll do anything to protect a source, but kick them in the head a few times and they’ll give up their own mother’s name and address.”
He looked back at me, smiling again. “I knew you were behind my media scandal, but I just wanted to make him say your name before he called you to come here. Then I had him call Avery McCormack, and tell him he had some extra information about my case. Too bad I wasn’t mollified by Greg’s eventual obedience. He really needed to learn more of a lesson, so I taught him one.”
“Where’s Avery?” I said through a clenched jaw.
He smiled as I tightened my fists at my side. “He’s safe and sound.”
I stepped even closer, and noticed a dark bruise on his jaw where I’d caught him in his office. My eyelashes nearly swept against his as I said, slowly and with danger in every syllable, “Where is Avery?”
He stepped away and flicked a wall switch, and Smiley’s office lit up. “Right in there, all along.”
Avery. I could see him through the glass window. He struggled against ropes that wrapped around his chest, and his lower jaw worked against a hand towel stuffed into his mouth. His eyes met mine, and he stopped moving.
I’d been home waiting for him, and he’d been here.
I ran to the window. “Hang on,” I mouthed, and he drew his brows together, the only response he could give.
Looking at him, helpless and vulnerable, rage surged through me. I pulled it out of the ground through my legs and drew it up my torso, electrifying every muscle in my body. A blinding, black rush spun through my mind and clogged my ears. Every inch of me was hyper alert, on the offense, and when my wings burst out through my back, I barely felt it.
“This didn’t have to go so far,” Clayton said behind me. “But you decided to make this public, and now I have to get rid of him too. Such a shame for the voters of Virginia. Oh, and for you. But you won’t be around long enough to miss him.”
I grasped the front of my T-shirt, tore the remains of it off me and threw it to the ground. My wings, pushing out either side of my racer-back bra, pulsed with the powerful force that had risen in me. It was the urge to defend myself and to protect Avery and the friends who had rushed to help me without a second thought. It was the urge to avenge my broken family and a fae-seeking journalist.
I was ready to kill.
I whirled around but Clayton had advanced on me while my back was turned. He sucker-punched me in the gut. Already sore from his attack on me in his office, I lost my breath for a moment, but homicidal adrenaline pumped through me—and my fae form strengthened me. I sprang and surprised the now-winged Clayton with a left hook to the jaw and a strong right to his stomach.
His lower body caved in, rounding his back, and he shook his head, a trickle of blood seeping from the corner of his mouth. I barely registered the pain in my newly split knuckles as I bounced on my toes, back and forth, feinted in, hopped out and landed a jab hard into his sternum.
My half-human nemesis exhaled sharply but the half-fae in him recovered quickly. He grinned. “Finally,” he said. “Gemma Fae Cross unleashes some fight.” He ducked into me, and I pummeled his stomach once, twice, until he pushed away. He retaliated with a hard, sloppy cross, but I saw it coming and I blocked it.
“Unfortunately for those who paid to see this headline bout,” he said, “I’m not much of a boxer.” He jabbed again and I sidestepped it. “I’m more of a do-what-you-have-to-do-to-win kind of fighter.” His right side twisted and I raised my arms to block a punch, but he lifted his leg and kicked my shoulder, pushing me back a few feet. I righted myself and he spun 360 degrees, cracking me on the temple with a backfist, and I dropped, lights sparkling across my vision.
This wasn’t my kind of fight. I boxed for sport, controlled by rules and by limitations. Despite my desperation to make him hurt, I had no experience in fighting dirty.
He raised his leg to kick me again and I rolled out of the way. I scrambled to my feet and put the hanging heavy bag between us, but Clayton punched straight through the bag, the molecules of his fist splitting and reassembling inches from my face. I leaned back, stepping on a free weight plate near the dumbbell rack. I picked up the five-pounder as he walked around the bag and pushed he weight with both hands into his chest, knocking him onto his back. I crushed the plate into him, gritting my teeth, trying to suffocate him, but he lifted his lower body, hooked his feet over my shoulders and flipped me back. I threw my hands out to the floor as he reversed our positions. He squeezed my sides with his thighs and hovered over me. I reached for his throat but he held the plate six inches over my nose.
“Move a muscle,” he said. “Just twitch. Anything. And I’ll smash your face into a million pieces with your boyfriend watching through the window.”
I stilled.
“Actually,” he whispered, “I think I’ll do it anyway.” He lifted the plate up and I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Riley!” I heard. “You know you’re not supposed to show anger! Hold it inside! They can’t find out what you really are!”
Clayton froze, and I opened one eye. “Dad?” he asked and snapped his head around.
“No,” Svein said.
The overhead lighting switched on. I tried to raise my body onto my elbows, but Clayton threatened with the disc again, and I sank down. He stayed silent, but the ugly, amused smile he’d worn since I arrived was gone. He wasn’t looking at me anymore, but at something in front of him. When Svein spoke again, I realized he’d come around behind me and it was him Clayton was looking at.
“I talked to Carl,” Svein said. “Your dad. He said when he returned to the morning fae after your mother died, he was afraid for you. He didn’t want to lose someone else.”
Like my mother, I thought. Clayton’s dad tried to keep his warrior child safe. This murderous bastard who held a blunt weapon over the fragile bones of my face once had someone who loved him.
“Said one day he caught you shoving a kid in the playground. Remember that? So he had to teach you how to control your human emotions so the fae wouldn’t sniff you out. How was that?” Svein asked. “Couldn’t have been easy. You can’t bind your human side in any Butterfly Room. All those emotions, bubbling under the surface, so many years. How did you live with it? How did you…”
“Shut up!” Clayton exploded. “You don’t know shit.”
I risked speaking from under the heavy plate. “They ripped you in half,” I said, echoing his last letter to me, one he’d written so many years ago. Did he feel anything anymore? “Your human side died. Your mother’s side.”
I thought of his first letter to little me, saying I might need a friend. But he did.
My father had left us, and because of that, I’d embraced my true self and finally took up my warrior role.
Clayton’s mother had died, taking his true self to her grave, and because of that, he’d taken revenge on everyone.
Svein surged on, words his only possible weapon. “I hadn’t realized your father worked in the Butterfly room,” he said. “Interesting. A Butterfly agent could bound your sense of essence, off the record, because you wanted to be a dentist, so you could help the fae.”
“Good one,” I said.
“And here you are,” Svein said, “about to kill your fellow half-fae whose parents hid her too. Why the hell would you do that when she’s the only one like you?”
“I
gave
her a chance,” Clayton said.
“To stop you,” I said. “You wanted me to stop you.”
“I wanted you to
know
me,” he said. “With someone like me, I could have—we could have doubled our strength. In fact,” he said, “we still can.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I said.
He took the plate away from my face, placed it beside me, and dropped to his hands, close to me. “I tried to warn you, Gemma,” he whispered. “My father was right, after all. Your parents were right. At birth, we were drafted into a war we didn’t start. Now you’re fighting for the Olde Way. Why? Don’t you realize,” he said, dropping his voice to an intimate whisper, “that they’ve sold you a bill of goods?” He poked his knee hard into my ribs. “Don’t you see that the Olde Way is not for me,
or
you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“We have no place there. You’re breaking your neck for a club that won’t let you in. If the Olde Way is ever recreated, the fae will live in everlasting harmony and peace, and you, the great warrior—you’ll be the underpaid security guard at the gate.”
“No,” I said. But I paused. I’d lost and sacrificed and now I was staring death in the face. That was my destiny?
“Think about it,” he said. “You and I, together, we can make a new reality. The Olde Way is gone, and the human world has so much wrong with it, I don’t even know where to begin. But you and I can start a lineage of mixed breeds.”
“
What
?”
“Imagine,” he said, hooking a finger underneath the bottom of my sports bra, “what we can do together.”
The smash of glass made us both jump, and Clayton’s head snapped around to look at Smiley’s office, where Avery had kicked through the window with his bound feet. It was only a moment of distraction, but it was enough. As Clayton turned back to me, I swept my arm around, whipping the back of my right hand hard across his mouth. He fell to the side, and I jumped up as he spit out a tooth.
I laughed bitterly. “Good thing you know a thing or two about cosmetic dentistry,” I said.
Clayton got up but his head still hung and he wiped his mouth. “I assume this means you don’t want to work together,” he said, “and that you’d rather just die here.”
“What makes you think you can do this, anyway?” I asked. “Are you stupid? The political candidate who promised on television to investigate you, his girlfriend, and the D.C. Digger. You think the police won’t figure that one out?”
“Who cares?” He straightened all the way up but he didn’t come after me. “They won’t see me to arrest me when I blink. Or maybe I’ll get careless and they will arrest me. And what happens then? Do you think there’s one woman on the jury who I can’t convince, with glamour, that I’m perfectly innocent? Do you think, if I end up in jail, that I can’t convince a guard to let me out, or convince an entire floor of inmates to do my bidding? I’ll be fine, and I’ll have a new plan by then, but this time, you won’t be around to stop me.”
“Pretty sure of yourself,” I commented, still smiling. “I guess you’d have to be, because you never had anything else. If you weren’t someone I was about to kill, I’d feel sorrier for you. If your father was trying to squelch your emotions, you’ve never been to a gathering, have you?”
“Who cares?”
“Don’t you think that if you’d ever seen the Olde Way, just for a second—really seen it yourself, and not heard morning fae romanticize it—you might have had a much different goal?”
“I told you, Gemma,” he said, advancing slowly, putting one foot deliberately in front of the other, “it’s not for us.”
“But, see,” I said, refusing to back up, letting him get closer and closer, “that’s where you’re wrong. I’ve
seen
it. And it’s calling me home.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“Svein was wrong,” I said, gesturing to where Svein now knelt beside Mahoney. “And you’re wrong. I’m not like you. Here’s the difference.” I stepped forward and met him once again eye to eye. “I belong to both humans and fae. But you belong to
no one
.”
I anticipated the punch before he let it loose. I heard the swish of air as I dropped to the ground and rolled away. I popped back up to my feet but he rose also, and I mean
rose
—suddenly he was in the air, his wings holding him aloft with no effort and barely a flap. Shocked at the vision of him floating before me, he caught me off guard and was inches from me in an instant, pulling both his knees into his chest and slamming both feet into my sternum, sending me sprawling back against a weight bench before I slid to the floor.
Again, I never saw him move, and he was upon me. His wings were warp-speed. I scrambled but whacked the top of my head on the chair, and in the moment between pain and movement, Clayton fell back to earth with all his might, on top of my left ankle.
Whether it was the white-hot knifing pain or the sickening crack of splintering bone, I didn’t know, but I screamed. I screamed out the raw, searing, intolerable realization that I was about to lose everything I’d done this for and everyone I cared about.
When my scream was only an echo reverberating around the dusty room, Clayton smiled that disturbed smile and said, “Good job. You certainly did make this interesting. I’ll be with you shortly.”
He headed to Smiley’s office.
“No!” I yelled, but he’d turned deaf to me. I looked at Avery, twisting frantically against the ropes that held him as Clayton approached the room.
Think,
think
. I gritted my teeth with the effort to force logic to break through the pain and the fear.
I wasn’t going anywhere on this foot. How else could I move? Crawl? Hop?
My right wing twitched.
I breathed in sharply, the oxygen shooting straight to my brain.
Bracing himself on a chair against the back wall of the tiny office, Avery used his feet to push the large metal desk in the direction of the closed door. It moved a half-inch every two or three pushes. Clayton paused at the window to watch, chuckling.
Svein was looking at me. My wings opened and closed. He nodded once. Yes.