Alcaeus
Once Kai had teleported to and from Morumbi ten times, returning with a total of twenty soldiers, in addition to Remy, to aid us in our search for Avery, Kai and I went out to look for her ourselves, teleporting all over Denver. We’d canvassed Union Station and every corner of LoDo, LoHi, Wash Park, Cherry Creek, Uptown, RiNo, and Capitol Hill when Remy tapped my mind and said that he had news.
Kai teleported us back to the hotel suite, where Remy had been busy reaching out via phone and videoconference to various contacts across the U.S. that he said he’d gotten from Lessa.
“I just heard from a small pack in North Carolina,” Remy announced upon our arrival. “They recognized Avery from the photos I circulated to werewolf packs across America.”
“You did what?” I shouted. “What photos? Who told you to circulate my mate’s photo to enemy packs? Goddamnit, Remy, I thought you had specific contacts you were working with who we could trust to be discreet about this?”
“Riiight,” Remy said in a maddeningly calm, patronizing voice as his green eyes squinted questioningly at me before cutting to Kai.
Fucking Remy and his bullshit touchy-feely empathic powers. He’d been trying to read my emotions and force his calming mojo on me ever since he’d arrived—lecturing me about how all the angry, threatening texts I’d fired off to Raul from Avery’s phone would only put her life in more danger. And now he was treating me as if I was the one overreacting, when he’d just put my mate’s life in jeopardy by blasting her photo across the Internet to American packs who, like the Highlands Ranch pack, might be out to kill her simply because she’d survived a rogue attack.
“They’re not enemy packs,” Remy defended evenly. “These are all American packs on the list that Lessa identified as being on our side—at least as far as wanting to destroy the Rogue.”
That was exactly my fear. The Highlands Ranch pack had been on Lessa’s list. “Lessa gave you that list?”
“Well,” Remy said with a sheepish shrug, “I kind of swiped it from her computer files when she said she had an emergency of her own to manage and couldn’t help us.”
“What did the North Carolina pack have to say about Avery, Remy?” Kai interjected.
“The East Lake pack knew Avery as ‘Holly Bishop Carmichael,’ actually,” Remy said, reading from the notes on the pad of paper in his hand. “They said she was nine months pregnant at the time that she came to them, reportedly fleeing from an abusive ex-boyfriend werewolf who had knocked her up.”
“Pregnant? What? Who? He’s a dead man. Did you get the name of the ex-boyfriend?”
Kai covered his face with his hand and exhaled audibly next to me. “Yes, let’s make sure we track down that abusive ex-boyfriend werewolf of hers. I’m sure he’s every bit as real as Avery’s ‘Holly Bishop Carmichael’ identity.”
“It’s not the same thing!” I snapped. “He could very well be real.”
“Ah …” Remy held one finger up as he again referred to his notepad. “You should know, Avery has also been identified as Franchesca Amelia Dupont, Paris Kenya Watterson, Theresa Jane Havensworth, Charlotte Anne Rousseau, Gertrude Katarina York, Arabella Justine DePaul, Camilla Beatrice Ravenscroft, Jacqueline Grey Margot …” He paused to look up from his notepad. “Shall I continue? There are a few more names that various packs and rogue hunters have assigned to her image.”
“No, please don’t,” Kai said. “When was she with the North Carolina pack?”
Remy glanced back down at his notepad. “She came to them seeking shelter on May seventeenth, 2014, and they helped her give birth to a baby girl on June thirteenth, 2014.”
“Fuck,” Kai swore. “That puts her date of conception right around September twenty-second, 2013, the same day that Avery miraculously survived a rogue werewolf attack while on a camping trip in the White Mountains with her friends and fiancé.”
“Oh, shit,” Remy murmured, sharing a look with Kai. “You’re not thinking—”
“Wait—Avery has a daughter?” I blurted the obvious aloud, realizing I’d overlooked that bombshell in my anger over the abusive boyfriend.
My mate was a single mother! What an ass I was that I’d never even thought to ask her if she had any children. I’d just assumed that she didn’t when I’d scented that she was single and hadn’t been with anyone in a long while.
“What happened with the baby, Remy?” Kai pressed. “Was the child born healthy? Normal?”
“Healthy, yes. Normal—not entirely. The baby girl was born completely scentless, according to the East Lake pack.” Remy’s eyes flicked from Kai to me. “Stranger yet, they said that the baby’s mother, Holly Bish—I mean, Avery—ceased to have a scent as well after the birth.”
“She does so have a scent!” I raged at Remy. Goddamnit, what was wrong with everyone? “What did that pack do to her? I will kill every last one of them.”
Remy’s eyes widened. He darted a glance at Kai. “Uh … nothing, really. They’re a fairly religious pack, as I understand it. So when Avery’s baby girl werewolf was born on Friday, the thirteenth, utterly devoid of scent and having somehow caused Avery, the birth mother, to lose her scent in the process as well, they declared the newborn the spawn of Satan. Avery no doubt sensed that she was no longer welcome or safe there, because she fled their compound that same day with her baby.”
I felt my eyes shift and had to focus to stop my claws and fangs from extending as outrage burned and bubbled up within me at the thought of Avery having to flee for her life from every pack that she’d ever tried to join. Envisioning my mate on the run and in hiding with a newborn—alone and completely on her own for so many years—was enough to make me want to tear the whole world apart avenging her.
“I want names,” I demanded. “I want a list of every werewolf who has ever threatened or persecuted my mate. Make that every human, too, while you’re at it.”
I was stomping over to the little bar next to the settee I’d destroyed earlier to pour myself a stiff drink, when the realization hit me. I stopped in my tracks as a huge grin broke across my face. “Oh, my God.”
I spun around to face Remy and Kai. Remy was regarding me strangely. Kai was sporting his normal harassed-and-put-out expression. “Guys—I’m a dad! Can you believe it?”
Remy’s jaw fell open. Kai’s eyes closed as he reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose.
My excitement dwindled, along with my grin, as another thought occurred to me. “Wait. Where’s Avery’s daughter? We need to find her right away. We have to make sure my daughter is safe, too.”