Alcaeus
“Alex promised me more men. He agreed to it when I agreed to go to Morumbi to visit Milena. I need those soldiers now, Remy. I needed them yesterday. So line up at least eighty of our best and get them ready to go in the next two minutes, because I’m sending Kai to start teleporting them here. Got it?”
“Ah … okay … Would you put Kai on the phone for a sec—”
“Now, Remy! There’s no time.”
“Right. I hear you, Al. But Alex and Milena aren’t back yet, and—”
I hung up the phone and barely restrained myself from crushing it in my palm as I turned and ordered Kai, “Go. Bring back as many as you can at a time.”
“Al, you need to calm down before we do anything else. You’ve already dispatched all of the wolves that we have here in Denver to search for her. We need to think this through and approach it sensibly. She has no scent.”
“She does so! Stop saying that.” I shot a blast of magic that caused the hotel room television console to explode. When that wasn’t enough to calm me, I shot a blast into the uncomfortable, ugly settee in the corner. It was useless anyway.
“Not to anyone but you, she doesn’t,” Kai snapped. “At best, our soldiers might be able to pick up and track your scent on her if she’s still carrying it. But beyond that, all we have are photos of her for them to go on. And we have to face reality: it’s not as if she slipped out the front door on foot and couldn’t have gotten far. We know Raul teleported her, which means she could literally be anywhere on the planet right now.”
I knew he had a point. I just didn’t want to hear it. We had to keep moving. The faster I rounded up more werewolves to search for Avery, the faster I could get out and search for her myself. We couldn’t afford to lose any time. I would be out of my mind until I knew that she was safe.
“She’s still close by. I can feel it. Besides, she’s cunning and resourceful. My mate will find a way to prevent Raul from taking her too far away from me.”
“Al, your ‘mate’ had Raul’s number programmed into her phone—a phone with a tracking device,” Kai said, his voice rising in exasperation. “This could all be part of a trap that Gabriel and Raul set for us—using her as bait. Have you thought about that? You’ve just deployed all of our soldiers throughout the city in search for her, leaving us vulnerable. What if that’s exactly what Gabriel and Raul were hoping we’d do?”
“I don’t care. Let Raul and Weenie Gabe come for me.” I pulled Avery’s phone from my pocket and redialed “Scary Stranger” for the four hundredth time. For the four hundredth time, it went straight to voicemail. I forced my hands to be gentle as I slipped the offensive little black device back into my pocket for safekeeping, when all I wanted to do was grind it to dust between my fingers.
“I will rip that little shit’s throat out when I get my hands on him. I will torture and kill him, Kai,” I seethed as I paced the room. “And Milena is not stopping me, either. She gets no say in this when my mate’s life is on the line.”
“Right.” Kai scrubbed a weary hand over his face. “Look, who among us wouldn’t relish ripping out Raul’s entrails? But the fact is Milena does get a say in her brother’s torture and execution—and not just because she’s the Alpha of our pack and more powerful than the rest of us at this point.”
“About that …” I stopped pacing to level my pointer finger at him. “We need to discuss the issue of Milena’s power. But later.” I resumed pacing. “After we recover Avery. Why are you still here? I need those soldiers.”
“Issue?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Since when is Milena’s power an issue? Or something that is up for discussion? It’s a fact, Al—and a positive one at that. Milena’s the best thing that ever happened to our pack.”
I nodded and paced. “I don’t disagree. But what if we made a mistake ten years ago—in disabling her guilt reflex?”
“We didn’t disable it; we balanced it.”
“What if we balanced it too far in the wrong direction?”
“It’s Milena,” Kai reasoned. “She’s the most levelheaded and fair-minded among us. She’s fixated on fairness and justice in all things.”
I couldn’t dispute that either. “Right, but what if in balancing it we accelerated her power development a little too far? Maybe we should’ve let it balance on its own as she matured? I’m just wondering if—”
“Are you serious? Al, we had to. That was the whole point—to accelerate her ability to honor her own instincts and innate self-preservation faculties that were being thwarted too often by that Catholic-girl predisposition of hers to feel as if everything was always her fault. I disagreed with you at the time, but in hindsight, it’s one of the best calls you’ve ever made.”
I nodded, only half-listening as I pulled Avery’s phone from my pocket once more. I redialed “Friend” this time as Kai continued to rationalize and justify our interference in Milena’s psyche a decade ago.
“Milena might’ve let Raul guilt-trip and manipulate her forever. She might’ve been paralyzed by the shame of success and plagued by indecision for decades before she grew out of that habit. She never would’ve been able to lead our pack, Al. And besides, it was only a subtle shift that Remy and I made. We did the right thing.”
“Goddamnit.” I threw a blast that incinerated the coffee table when the call went straight to voicemail for the umpteenth time. “This is all my fault. I never should’ve let Avery shower alone.”