Avery
“Are you seriously on Facebook right now? Wait, who is—oh, my God, is that like your catfish profile? Lemme see.”
Raul jerked his iPad from my line of sight, locked the screen, and set it aside. “Finish your steak, Avery. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”
I took another bite and went through the motions of chewing and swallowing as I again tried to distract myself with something—anything—to pretend that I wasn’t close to having a full-blown emotional meltdown as Sloane and I sat beside one another, eating steak for lunch.
We were seated across from Raul at a dining room table in the house we’d spent the night in with Raul and about twenty or so other werelocks. I wasn’t sure how many there were, really, because Raul had the other werelocks steer clear of Sloane and me for the most part. Azda had stayed back at the house in Durango.
I’d caught some of the werelocks talking in Portuguese, others in Spanish, and more than a few had spoken on their phones in French. I wasn’t entirely sure they were all part of Raul’s Salvatella pack, either. Because it seemed like some of them were just meeting one another for the first time.
I also hadn’t been able to figure out where we were staying. We’d teleported to wherever we were, and there was no indication anywhere in the house as to where that might be. The view outside our windows didn’t reveal much, either. There was nothing to see but dense woods stretching in all directions.
Since coming here with Raul, Sloane hadn’t had a single bad episode. She hadn’t had a screaming fit or set anything on fire, and she’d slept through the night without any indication of suffering nightmares. She was acting so passably normal it felt like we’d teleported into an alternate reality.
I, on the other hand, hadn’t slept a wink. I was a fucking wreck.
I missed Chaos. My heart hurt whenever I remembered the look of devastation on his handsome face as I’d told him that Sloane and I were going with Raul instead of with him.
“So who’s the hot blonde?” I teased the werelock who was now the only hope my daughter and I had of living to see dinnertime. “The one you were stalking just now on Facebook?”
“No one, Avery,” Raul said, shutting me down again as he wiped his mouth with his napkin and pushed his finished plate aside. He was upset about something. And he’d been fine only a minute ago—before he’d gone on Facebook.
Weirdo. He’d been friendly and goofing off around Sloane all morning—doing his best to engage her. And he’d been utterly nonchalant about the upcoming meeting with Alpha Milena and her pack, yet someone’s status update on Facebook had put him in a foul mood?
“I ate all of my steak,” Sloane announced, her violet eyes trained on Raul.
I swore my heart stopped and I nearly fell sideways out of my chair.
She’d said it without emotion, as usual, but her eyes remained fixed on Raul—looking to him for something.
Acknowledgement.
Approval. Connection.
Raul’s eyes leveled on hers, and he smiled and said, “Awesome. You want another one?” He extended his fist across the table to her. He’d been trying to teach her to fist bump all morning. “Come on, Sloane, don’t leave me hanging, girl.”
She didn’t extend her fist to bump his, but I could’ve sworn I saw her eyes warm just a fraction as she stared stoically back at him, and a hint of emotion—amusement even—softened her little pink lips.
I could’ve cried.
How the hell did he do that? What was it between them?
It still disturbed me on some level—this sense that Raul and my daughter were strangers who seemed to share some cosmic link beyond rational comprehension—but since seeing him interact with Sloane, I was comfortable now that he wasn’t that kind of predator.
Sloane rarely allowed me to pick her up without throwing a fit. The fact that she’d allowed Raul—a perfect stranger—to pick her up and hold her yesterday was unprecedented. The fact that she’d ceased screaming and torching things as soon as he’d done so was miraculous.
My daughter felt safe with Raul for some reason. I had to trust her instincts on this and believe that he could protect us.
Raul teleported us to a vacant swath of desert in Round Rock, Arizona: a small community on the Navajo Nation where we’d agreed to meet with Milena and her pack. Raul had told me that he had a bargaining chip to offer in exchange for the Reinoso pack agreeing to back off from hunting my daughter. But he’d yet to tell me what it was.
I’d more or less assumed that all the other werelocks who’d been at the house in the woods with us would be coming to the meeting with the Reinoso pack as well, so I was a bit flustered when Raul said it’d just be the three of us going.
“It starts to look desperate when you bring too many soldiers to a simple negotiation,” he said. “We don’t want to go in overgunned—looking like we’re nervous or something.”
But I was nervous.
As I stood there beside Raul, who was holding Sloane again, I scanned the horizon and spotted a gathering of what looked to be at least twenty-some people about three hundred yards or more away, standing closer to the rock formations the area was known for.
“I don’t feel overgunned.” I felt decidedly undergunned, in fact. “We’re one werelock, a werewolf, and a child, Raul.”
“Don’t worry,” he told me with a smile. “Sloane and I got this.” He set Sloane down on her feet in between us. “Right, Sloane?”
I still couldn’t get over the fact that she let him hold her so easily. Or that she hadn’t hum-talked to herself since early morning.
“Are we going to teleport closer, or do we have to walk all the way over there?” I joked anxiously.
Why was he so calm? Did he have some grand master plan? Or was he just an idiot?
“Neither. We’re gonna wait right here and make them come to us.” Raul crouched down so that he was at Sloane’s eye level. “You remember me from your dreams, right?”
She didn’t respond, but Raul continued as if she had, telling her, “I used to get really scared sometimes. And when the darkness closing in around me became tough to handle, you used to tell me that no one ever found daybreak by avoiding night—only by passing through it. Do you remember that?”
What was he jabbering about? Dear Lord, please let this surfer werelock saying bizarre, unsettling things to my child about dream encounters have an actual plan for today’s confrontation of superbeasts.
The gathering of werelocks was on the move now, walking swiftly in our direction. “Wow, they really are coming to us,” I announced to myself as my heart rate kicked up. “And they don’t look happy about it. Particularly … Alpha Milena.”
A willowy brunette with long, wavy hair was leading the charge—and she looked pissed. I suspected that had to be Milena, judging from the beefy hotties flanking her and the Brazilian god at her side who, at a distance, strongly resembled the photos of Alex Reinoso that Wyatt had shown me.
“Milena can’t teleport,” Raul commented. “I might be rubbing it in.”
I studied the werelock group approaching, hoping to spy the tall, gorgeous werelock I missed most among them. I spotted Killjoy Kai, and then Remy. I didn’t see Chaos anywhere, though. Why wouldn’t he have come? Was he all right?
Clouds rolled over the band of werelocks marching closer to us, partially blocking out the afternoon sun.
“Yes,” Sloane answered Raul’s previous question, her voice carrying a surprising measure of excitement. “I remember,” she said. Then she repeated, “No one ever found daybreak by avoiding night.”
Thunder cracked in the sky.
I felt myself frown. “Wait a minute … are they—”
“That’s right,” Raul confirmed enthusiastically to Sloane. “You do remember!”
“You said that to me,” Sloane told him, causing me to glance away from the sky and down at my daughter. For a split second, I thought I almost saw her smile as she said, “That’s what you say to me.”
Holy shit. She never smiled.
“That’s true,” Raul said with a laugh. “But you said it to me first. I’m just borrowing your cool lines.”
“Would you like to be her nanny?” I blurted. How was he so good with my kid? “Hey, are they somehow … causing this sudden weather change I’m witnessing? I know that sounds crazy, but it kinda seems as if—”
“Calm down, Avery. Your heart rate’s all over the place,” Raul said to me before telling Sloane, “I need you to stay close to your mom while I talk to the Blind Warrior about some stuff. Okay? Hold her hand and try not to set anything on fire. Keep your cool, and just think: What would Queen Elsa do? Think you can do that?”
“I can,” she agreed.
Blind Warrior?
Sloane reached for my hand, and I gratefully gave it, grasping her small one in mine. It was rare that she let me hold her hand. Was it some kind of Alpha pull that Raul had on my child?
Raul stood and faced me. “They believe you’re Alcaeus’s mate. Even if they don’t like you or want to accept you, they won’t harm you. But still, keep your head down as much as possible if shit goes to hell fast, and try to remember that you’re not a werelock.”
I nodded and turned to watch the Reinoso pack as they came to a stop about twenty yards away, bringing the first drops of rain from the sky with them. Along with loud, rolling thunder—and more lightning than was at all normal for any flash storm.
I squeezed Sloane’s hand tighter as bolts of lightning illuminated the sky and smaller ones fell to singe the ground around us.
Hellfire. Alpha Milena wasn’t the Burning Man flunkie I’d pegged her to be.
When the angry sound of thunder finally quieted, Raul leaned into me. “So there’s something I meant to mention to you sooner about Milena.”
If side-eye could kill. “Such as the fact that she’s capable of electrokinesis?” I whisper-screamed through clenched teeth.
“Nah, not that,” he whispered back. “Don’t worry. She’s just trying to intimidate us. She’s all bark. And actually, she’s got full-on powers of empathic meteorokinesis or something, from what I hear. Not sure. We haven’t interacted much—at all—for about um … ten years or so.”
“What?” I gasped. “You said you were the only one capable of stopping her! You’ve put my daughter’s life on the line with a werelock you’ve never fought before?”
“It’s complicated,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth. “We should talk about it another time.”
“You mean if we’re still alive?” If the Alpha bitch didn’t kill him, I’d find a way to do it.
“Where’s your keeper, Raul?” Milena hollered in greeting to us, stepping forward. “I was counting on seeing Gabriel today.”
She looked every bit the waifish hippie she’d appeared to be in Wyatt’s photos, but her voice was far stronger—a lot more confident—than I’d imagined it would be. It rang with authority.
“Don’t worry, I got this,” Raul spoke quietly to me before shouting back to her in acknowledgement, “Miles!” He gave her a jubilant grin and threw up the shaka hand sign in classic surfer salute. “S’up, Sis?”
Oh. My. God.
“Milena’s your sister?” I hissed under my breath. “She’s your fucking sister?” I repeated, incredulous. All this while, I’d assumed he was an only child, given his relationship cluelessness. This could only prove to be a disastrous development.
He waved me off and took several steps forward, proceeding to project his voice conversationally across the barren desert that stretched between him and my daughter’s executioner, “Hey, so listen, I know it’s been a while, and this might not be the greatest timing, but I feel like we need to talk about some stuff. Like … Mom.” He paused. When there was no reaction from Milena, he added, “Probably Aunt Cely, too.” Another pause. “Maybe even … Mateus?”
My eyes rolled to the heavens, and I prayed for a miracle. He’d said the last one like it was a question—as if he was just tossing out family issues she might have with him to see which would stick—because he had no idea what his sister’s beef with him was.
I’d known our situation was grim when Milena’s mate, Alex, who was standing to the side a few paces behind her, had visibly cringed in reaction to Raul’s “S’up, Sis?” opener. But when Alex started making not-so-subtle throat-cutting gestures behind his own wife’s back to her clueless brother to get him to shut the hell up, it was a dire sign that I’d bet it all on the wrong horse.
I’d unknowingly pitted my daughter’s life against the mother of all supernatural sibling rivalries. Major parenting fail, Avery.
After what seemed like an interminable minute of awkward silence, Milena finally responded to her estranged brother. Her cold, glowing green eyes failed to mask the disgust that she managed to keep from her voice as she calmly told him, “Alcaeus was mistaken. You haven’t changed.”
The ground shook beneath my feet. I felt Sloane tug my hand as she took a step back. I stepped backward as well when I felt a great gust of wind and saw the dry, dusty earth kick up and circle around Raul’s feet.
“Aw, come on, Miles!” Raul shouted in complaint as the makings of a windstorm the size of a small tornado brewed to life around him—encircling and encapsulating him in its unnatural vortex. “This is over the top. We can work things out.”
Sloane tugged my hand again, and we both stole another step back—away from the supernatural ass-whooping about to take place.
I was desperate to pick Sloane up and hold her. But this was the longest she’d ever let me hold her hand before. My daughter never wanted me to pick her up. I couldn’t risk attempting it now and sparking a meltdown that might further betray her true Rogue nature that we’d come here in an attempt to deny.
“I know this one,” Sloane said, tugging my hand for a third time.
I glanced down and saw that her little forefinger was pointed at Milena and the gathering of Reinoso pack werelocks.
“Who?” I asked. “The Alpha? Milena?”
She shook her head.
I tried to follow the line of her finger, to see which one she was pointing to, but she kept redirecting it, as if she was following a moving target. An invisible moving target, I realized, when she said, “The one who’s coming.”
Shit. Raul had warned me that Gabriel was among the few werelocks capable of teleportation.
I scanned the group of Reinoso werelocks. If any of them had sensed the arrival of whoever it was that Sloane saw coming, it wasn’t apparent. They all seemed too engrossed in watching the spectacle of Raul, who’d just been launched at least two hundred feet into the air.
Milena’s face was tilted up to the clouds, along with everyone else’s, as Raul shouted down from his personal twister in the sky, “Is this about the time I kidnapped Bethany?”
Even though he’d pretty well screamed the question, his tone had still managed to sound surfer-boy blasé somehow. I had to hand it to him: He was something else, the big idiot.
My intuition was that Raul’s comment about the Bethany kidnapping hadn’t been the smartest one to make when I saw Remy cover his face with his hand.
“I know this one,” Sloane said again.
I tried to pay attention to where her moving finger was pointing, but a crack of thunder rolled through the sky above, and I watched in horror as a bolt of lightning struck Raul. Followed by another one. And then a third!
This was bad.
Worse yet, Raul seemed to be trying to antagonize his sister now, as he burst out laughing and taunted from his cyclone in the sky, “I’m telling Aunt Cely that you hit me first!”
When the earth rocked beneath us a second time and Sloane actually grabbed onto my leg momentarily in order to keep her little body upright, I could no longer suppress my maternal instincts. I picked her up.
Bad call. “It’s just so you don’t fall, okay?” I told her when she immediately protested and flailed her limbs, struggling against me, wanting to be put down.
She growled and tossed her head from side to side, looking like she was on the verge of screaming bloody murder.
Please don’t do this now.
Please not now.
“Sloane, honey, it’s okay,” I tried to calm her. “I’ll put you down in a minute … just as soon as the ground is steadier.”
My daughter wasn’t having it, though, and she started screaming. Loudly.
“Put her down,” an arrogant, cultured voice demanded as Alpha Gabriel materialized next to me, bringing the offensive scent of furniture polish, gold bullion, and stinky cheese with him.
Oh, fuck.
I squeezed Sloane’s squirming, kicking, screaming little body closer to mine, hanging onto her for dear life as the sadistic, chlorine-shock-eyed werelock proceeded to lecture me on my own child.
“You don’t even understand her,” he spat with disdain. “She doesn’t need you—doesn’t want to be held or coddled by you. Can’t you see that?”
My claws came out before I could stop them. My canines did too. And I growled like the devil in his direction.
“This child is the true Rogue of rogues,” he proclaimed. “She’s the future of our species—the deliverer of our race. You were never anything but a host to her, and she has no use for you anymore.”
Somewhere deep down, I recognized that he was baiting me. Using his special brand of emotional rapey skills to yank on my darkest, most insidious parenting fears—and trigger my greatest handicap. But knowing it was intentional didn’t make it any easier for me to ignore.
Because it still felt true.
“You’re nothing but a common werewolf—a defective one at that. There’s nothing you can teach her. You can’t even protect her.”
Sloane was screaming louder and thrashing about in my arms. I saw the earth catch fire around us, felt flames lick my feet and legs. But it was nothing compared to the fire that raged within me as I set my daughter down behind me.
You can’t even protect her.
I remembered Chaos’s words of advice to me about shutting my human mind off when I shifted, and I gave in to my wolf’s instincts completely this time: the instinct to protect, to defend, to kill.
“Avery, don’t!”
I heard Raul’s order. But it didn’t stop me. My body was already shifting—morphing with brilliant speed into the form of my wolf in the smoothest, most graceful transformation I’d ever accomplished.
And I attacked—going straight for Alpha Gabriel’s throat.
I didn’t get far, though. Not even close.
I was knocked on my ass with a blast of magic before I’d so much as gotten a claw swipe at him.
That had never deterred me before. And it didn’t now.
I went back for more.
Raul teleported in between me and my target just in time to take the blast that Gabriel had intended for me next.
Sloane was still screaming—and setting the desert earth ablaze around us.
All hell broke loose as more werelocks rushed to the scene and Sloane reacted by lighting them on fire whenever they got too close.
Soon there were blasts of magic flying right and left. I circled around my daughter, guarding her like the mad mama boar I was inside.
The sky opened up and torrential rains descended. I heard Alpha Milena shouting orders as more werelocks encroached upon us from all sides of the desert—seemingly from different packs.
Another ambush?
I heard Milena yell, “Alex, get Avery out of there.”
I’d known that I was in way over my head before Milena said it. I’d known it the moment that Raul and Gabriel had stopped trying to kill one another and had started fighting as a team against the new wolves attacking.
I should’ve kept my head down and backed off then. Still, I didn’t stop when I should have. Not even when a blast took my left hind leg out and I felt jaws sink through my shoulder.
Because this was the story of my life.
It was a lesson I’d failed to accept on the playground, and I’d carried it too far into adulthood. Some kids went down from a single hit and stayed down. And some of us never learned when to stop getting back up again.
Until the choice was made for us—because we couldn’t.