Val staggered into the kitchen, panting from the effort of keeping pressure on her chest wound while also driving home with a dislocated shoulder.
“Lydia?” she called out as she shuffled forward, her blood dripping onto the floor. “Simon?”
She heard the jingle of Toby’s collar and his high-pitched whining, before he appeared at the threshold of the dining room. He was limping.
“Lydia! Simon!”
Val shambled as fast as she could go through the dining room, then to the living room. She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw Jamal facedown on the carpet, a pool of crimson around him.
She rushed over and knelt beside him. “Oh, God.”
A guttural moan came from beneath his body.
“Jamal?”
Another moan. Holy shit, he was still alive. She pushed him onto his back, and his eyes fluttered. He clutched a wound on his stomach, blood seeping through his fingers.
“Jamal, can you hear me? What happened?”
He groaned and looked at her with eyes open to slits. “She…stabbed me…”
“Who?” Val knew who. But she needed him to confirm her worst fears had come true.
“Your…mother.”
Mother—Val’s mother, and Eleanor’s Mother. Stacey had said Northwalk was in town for a succession ceremony to hand the organization over to Kat. Bullshit. They’d come for her children, and Dani was their inside woman.
“I came back because I forgot my bag…and she was taking the kids out somewhere…I told her to stop, and then she stabbed me and left”—because knives are less loud than guns, Dani had told Val—“I don’t want to die…”
Mother controlled Eleanor, and Northwalk controlled Mother. But Eleanor had wanted to kill the twins. Why would Northwalk risk it? Maybe…maybe because they knew Eleanor wouldn’t succeed.
“Where did she take Simon and Lydia?”
“I don’t…”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t say. I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t die here.” She didn’t know if that was true, but she hadn’t seen his death in a vision, for what it was worth. With shaking hands, she fumbled in her pockets for her cell phone and called an ambulance. Then she limped to the kitchen, grabbed a hand towel, and pressed it to Jamal’s stab wound.
“Help is coming. Keep pressure here.” Val squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, fighting back blurriness growing at the edges of her vision. She needed medical help, too. But she couldn’t wait. She needed to find her children first.
Struggling to her feet, she left Jamal and staggered through the front door. “Jamal’s bleeding to death in there,” she said to the useless bodyguards as she passed by. She’d told them to trust her mother, so they’d let Dani walk right out with her children. “An ambulance is coming. Go stay with him until it gets here.”
The guards gawked at her for a moment, totally confused about what was happening, then ran inside as she walked away. She crossed the interior courtyard and went out the iron fence, stumbling onto the sidewalk. Gripped by panic, she dragged herself down the street, no idea where she was going or what she was doing. Her children were out there somewhere, with her mother, their nana, the traitor. She should have seen it coming—
A sedan roared up to the sidewalk and came to a screeching halt in front of her. The driver’s side door flew open, then Sten got out and walked to her so fast he might as well have been running.
“Get in,” he said.
She ignored him and kept shambling down the street. Whatever he wanted, it could wait. She had to save her children. They came first. Her children. God, her children, her children—
He grabbed her good arm and jerked her to a stop. She groaned as fresh pain spiked through her body.
“Get in.”
“No—”
Without another word, Sten dragged her to the car, threw open the passenger’s side door, and shoved her inside. Too weak to fight with him, she sat hunched over in the seat and struggled to stay conscious as he punched the gas. A radio crackled with indistinct chatter in the console; they were in an unmarked police cruiser.
“An ambulance and a couple cop cars are responding to your 911 call,” he said, sounding tense and annoyed at the same time. “They’re also very interested to know if you had anything to do with Eleanor Fatou’s dramatic death tonight at the waterfront Christmas festival.” He glanced at her as he drove like a maniac away from her condo. “I’m going to guess by your fabulous makeover the answer is yes. Can’t let my partner land herself in jail.”
She leaned back against the seat as her head began to spin. “She took them,” Val muttered.
“Who took what?”
“My mother. She took my babies.”
Sten glanced at her again but said nothing, his rare silence a testament to the seriousness of the situation.
“I should have shot her in the head like you told me to. She played me. She fucking played me, and now I have nothing. Max is brain-dead, the woman I thought was my mother is dead, my children are gone…I have nothing to live for. Nothing—” A weak sob escaped her chest and cut off her words.
“Where did Danielle take them?” Sten asked, his voice gruff and somber.
“I don’t know. Probably wherever Northwalk is.”
His lips tightened, and deep anger twisted his features.
She scoffed. “What do you care? This was the plan all along, wasn’t it? Why you helped Delilah bring Max and me together, why you fucked me and then declared us partners, why you pretended to check into my mother’s background and verify with your contact she had nothing to do with Northwalk, you lying piece of shit bastard—”
“Shut up, Shepherd,” he snapped. “I did check into your mom’s criminal history.” His face darkened further. “And my contact lied to me. Guess our goals don’t align after all.”
Val’s cell phone rang. She thought about ignoring it, but decided the timing was too specific to be a coincidence. Fumbling it out of her pocket with weak fingers, she looked at her caller ID—an unknown number.
“It’s them,” Sten said. “It’s what they do.”
Val sucked in a trembling breath and tried to clear the fog from her head. Then she answered the phone. “Where are my daughter and my son?”
“With their nana, of course,” Dani said on the other end of the line. The usual uncertainty and softness were gone from her voice, replaced with a sharp, ominous edge. “Congratulations on winning your bout with Eleanor. I wasn’t sure which of you would come out alive. My money was on her, honestly, but I guess I underestimated you and that pesky ability of yours to change the future.”
Tears born of both anger and sadness burned Val’s eyes. “You goddamn bitch. I should have killed you when I had the chance—”
“But you wanted your mommy back too much for that.”
Through clenched teeth, Val asked, “How long have you been working with them?”
“Oh, I don’t know, a few decades maybe. They pay well, and have excellent benefits. You know, I really did suffer from serious mental illness before they found me. Most of what I told you about that was true. Then they found me and cured me, and I’ve been grateful ever since. I didn’t know you were one of their seers until recently, though. Who would’ve guessed—my own kid! Well, I’m sure that’s why they recruited me in the first place, which seems obvious now. Look at you, keeping important secrets from your mother. How did Max like those pictures I sent him of you and your other boyfriend, by the way? So many secrets you’ve kept.”
“Where are my children?”
“I said they’re with me. What you mean to ask is, ‘What do I need to do to get my children back?’”
Val swallowed hard and rubbed her cheek, smearing her tears and blood together. She choked the words out, “What do you want?”
“My employers think your particular brand of seer ability could be very valuable, if harnessed correctly. You know their Alpha calls you the Omega? No other seer has a unique designation. You must feel special. They’d like to employ you, too. We could be a mother-daughter team, you and I.”
Bile rose in her throat at the thought of working for those people, or seeing her mother alive ever again. “Why wouldn’t I end up like your last partner?”
“Oh, Eleanor, that poor, confused girl. She was a lot like you, desperate for a mother to love her. I have to give her credit, though—she made an excellent distraction. Cassandra said the odds of us succeeding in taking your kids increased dramatically if you and your husband were separated. Boy, did Eleanor ever come through on that front, despite having no idea what her true purpose was. But now you’re all alone. Why don’t you take Eleanor’s place? I think you’ve earned it.”
“No.”
“Are you sure, pumpkin? Because what you’d get in return is the assurance your children are safe and well taken care of. They’re both Alphas. Either one of them could replace Cassandra. Northwalk only needs one.”
Val felt the blood drain from her face. The world spun.
“In fact, having an extra Alpha around could be a problem, if Yongjai ever got their hands on it—”
“I’ll kill you first! You hear me? If you or any of you evil fucking people even touch my children, I will kill all of you!”
Dani chuckled. “Sure you will, pumpkin. Well, think about it. We need to decide which one to keep and which to kill anyway—assuming you won’t cooperate. I’ll call you back when we’ve made our decision.” The line went dead.
Val let the phone drop from her hand onto the floor. She rested her head against the cool glass and closed her eyes, her mind and body in so much pain, everything had gone numb. Maybe now was a good time to die after all. She’d dodged death before, but everyone died eventually. Perhaps what her mother—the old, fake Dani—had said about visiting her sister’s grave and wanting to crawl into the coffin wasn’t such a bad idea. She knew now that story was a lie, but it was still inspiring—
“Jesus, Shepherd, get your shit together!” Sten hollered from the driver’s seat. Had she been talking out loud to herself? Yes, she had. “Your kids aren’t dead yet. You can’t die until you’ve at least tried to save them. And you still owe me.”
“Whatever you want, just take it,” she muttered. “I can’t fight. I don’t know where my babies are. I can’t work for Northwalk.”
“You can’t give up.”
“Just take what you want and let me die…”
Sten yelled something else at her, his voice growing urgent and…concerned? But she’d either lost too much blood or gone into shock, and his words floated past her like snowflakes in a windstorm.