CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ski stood at the hiking trail by a large set of boulders and gazed down into an open valley.
“This is nice, Bear.”
“Yeah.”
Erin stood beside him, but she shook her head and said, “This place looks familiar. And I’m not a hiker.” She looked at Bear. “Where are we?”
“Old Santa Susana Stage Road.” When no one reacted, he added, “This used to be called Spahn Ranch.”
Ski still didn’t know what that meant but after a few seconds, Erin stumbled back, her mouth open in shock.
“Spahn Ranch? The Spahn Ranch?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s Spahn Ranch?” Kera asked.
Erin put her hands to her forehead and began massaging what Ski was guessing might be a headache. “That’s where the Manson family lived.”
Ski and Gundo turned to their brother. “Bear!”
“What?”
“Why would you bring us here?” Ski growled, beyond angry.
“Because she needed a safe place to talk.”
“So you take us to the hangout of a murderous cult? That really seemed like a good idea to you?”
“I knew she’d like it.”
“Why would she like this?” Kera asked. “She’s trying to get away from cults. Not relive someone else’s nightmare.”
“I knew her dark soul would connect with this place.”
“Hey!” Ski barked.
“I didn’t say evil. I said dark. There’s a difference.” He gestured to Jace. She had her back to them, her hand resting against one of the boulders. “Ask her.”
Ski walked over to Jace, placed his hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Jace looked at him. There was absolute peace on her face, her smile wide. “Yes.”
“You . . . fascinate me,” he told her, not knowing what else to say.
“Yeah.” She gazed over the open valley. “I know.”
“You don’t have to say anything, honey,” Jace heard Kera say. “We’re just here for you.”
Frowning, Jace asked, “Don’t have to say anything about what?”
An awkward silence followed while everyone stared at her.
Finally, not surprisingly, it was Erin who said, “About the whole . . . life-in-a-cult thing. Chloe gave us all a short run-down, which is why Rachel came looking for you.”
“Oh. That.” Jace shrugged. “I can talk about the cult thing. I don’t care. Don’t want to talk about waking up in a grave, though,” she added. “That I will not discuss.”
“If you can talk about being in that cult,” Erin asked, “why haven’t you before?”
“No one asked.”
“Everyone asks a Crow about her death,” Kera pointed out.
“Actually, almost everyone volunteers, but I didn’t want to talk about my death unless I was asked. Besides, I figured Chloe would have told all of you by now”
“No,” Erin replied. “All Chloe told us was that your husband had killed you and at that point, what was there left to ask? I mean, sadly, that’s how a lot of our ladies end up as Crows.”
“That’s upsetting,” Bear admitted.
“Isn’t it? But Chloe never mentioned a cult or anything else until today. We all just knew that Skylar helped you get a permanent protection order against your ex and that you’d tried to kill him, which made sense to all of us.”
“Skylar knows everything. She worked with me from the beginning. Used her connections to get me a divorce lawyer, while she got me the permanent protection order.”
“And now she’ll be handling whatever’s going on with that federal prosecutor.”
“Yes. But don’t blame Jennings. He didn’t know what he was dealing with.”
“So are you going to tell us?” Bear asked.
“Tell you what?”
“About the cult.”
“Bear!” Eriksen barked.
“What?” Bear demanded. “She said she could talk about it.”
Jace patted Bear’s arm and gestured to one of the big boulders. He grabbed her around the waist and gently placed her on top of it.
“Thank you.”
“Sure.”
“So,” Jace began, “when I was six years old, my father died and my mother disappeared. Everyone said it was the grief. She couldn’t handle it. My father’s mother raised me. She was Albanian by birth on her father’s side, but her mother was Romanian and that’s kind of how she lived. Anyway, when I was ten my mother suddenly returned. My grandmother wouldn’t let me see her, but she showed up one night and asked me to walk with her. I did. That’s when she and her new friends took me. It turned out her new friends were loyal cult members of the Patient Dove Congregation. An end-of-the-world cult that was convinced their leader was an immortal prophet sent by God to protect them during the Rapture. He wasn’t. Martin Braddock was a con man from Fontana who knew how to play people like puppets. He got a lot of money from the first members he had, and he used that money to gain power with those who had any kind of control in government or finance. He wasn’t above blackmail. In fact, he really liked it.”
Jace smiled a little when Lev nuzzled her neck before going back to sleep. “Anyway, Braddock became very, very rich in very short order and enjoyed having his own puppets to order around all day. Then the immortal prophet found out he was not so immortal. He got cancer and passed everything on to his only child, Davis Henry Braddock. The problem was that Davis believed his father was a great prophet and that with his death the power had passed on to him. He truly believes the Rapture’s coming any second. He truly believes he can even help it along. He truly believes he’s a great prophet. He truly believes he will sit at the right hand of God.”
“What does he truly believe about you?” Eriksen asked.
“That I’m truly his property. That I belong at his right hand, monitoring the women and leading the children. That is my role.” She glanced off. “I was promised to him when I was ten.”
Kera let out a breath, but Jace quickly held her hand up. “Don’t panic. We didn’t get married or have sex until I was sixteen. When I was eighteen, I also became the Finder of the Word.” She scratched Lev’s neck and smirked at Eriksen. “Now you know why I choked when I heard your title. Anyway, it was my job to track down any information about the End of Days. I used that as an excuse to learn multiple languages, so that I could decipher ancient texts. I always had an easy way with languages and already knew Albanian, German, Romanian, French, and Spanish. While he thought I was researching information that would help him end the world as we know it so he could start his own reign—and no, I’m not joking—I was actually reading anything I could get my hands on: Pride and Prejudice in Russian, To Kill a Mockingbird in Greek, and The Narcissist Next Door in Polish. But things got really bad between us when I read Raven: The Untold Story of the Reverend Jim Jones and His People’s Temple in Italian. That’s when I knew exactly what I was dealing with and how bad this was going to get. I guess he could read the concern on my face. At that point, he made it his business to subjugate me even more. He never hit me. Not before that last day. Just words.” She sighed, closed her eyes. Such words.
“And I took it,” she admitted regretfully. “Like I always took it. Until one day . . .” She shrugged. “I snapped. Started yelling at him. Told him I hated him. Wished he was dead. Said I’d call the cops about all the guns. But it was when I told him he was nothing special, that he wasn’t God’s prophet . . . he threw me to the ground, started beating me, then he put his hands around my throat and the next thing I knew . . . I was talking to Skuld. When she sent me back . . .”
No. She couldn’t talk about that. The dirt falling on her. The feeling of being suffocated a second time. She couldn’t go through that again.
“I tried to kill him then,” Jace went on. “Would have, too, if Norris Bystrom hadn’t been one of the ATF agents there. They’d come to search the compound because they’d finally gotten a witness to talk about the guns and Jennings had gotten a warrant based on that.” She shook her head. “I would have killed all of them that day. My husband. The agents. The rage had me. All I wanted was his blood covering me. To know I’d finished him. But Bystrom stopped me in time, which is good. Braddock should properly pay for his crimes like everybody else.”
“He’ll come for you,” Kera said, her voice low.
“Of course he will. I’m his property. He wants his property back. Like a bratty child who won’t give up his tricycle to his little brother even though he’s moved on to his big bike.”
“So we track him down and we kill him,” Erin announced, but Jace shook her head.
“No. We’re not doing that.”
“Why not? I mean . . .” She glanced around at the others. “Isn’t that what we do?”
“He’s not an assignment from Skuld. He’s stolen nothing mystical, nor involved himself with our gods in anyway. He’s not our problem.”
“If he’s your problem, he’s our problem.”
“So then you’d be doing this for me?”
“Of course.”
“Then stay away from him.”
“Jace—”
“No. I’m serious. I love you guys more than I can possibly say. And knowing that you will always have my back means the world to me. But I’m not going to kill him, and you guys aren’t going to kill him, either.”
“Why not?” Erin asked.
“Because we’re not murderers. He is, but we’re not.”
Bear pointed at Erin. “She kinda is.”
Erin slowly faced the big Viking. “Thank you,” she said with great sarcasm.
A sarcasm that was completely lost on Bear.
He shrugged. “You’re welcome.”
It took Tessa longer than she thought it would to repair Rachel’s crushed windpipe.
She wouldn’t say that Jace had been trying to kill her sister-Crow, but if she was asked under oath, Tessa didn’t think she could deny it, either.
Jace had hit the woman with some force. But the beauty of being a Crow was that you were no longer the normal frail human you once were. True, they could all die again, but it took a lot more effort to kill them the second time.
Rachel, whom Tessa had to knock out in order to get her to stop trying to follow poor Jace so she could—most likely—beat her up, was still out cold in the Healing Room. So Tessa tracked down Chloe in her office. Their leader sat at her desk, feet up on the mahogany wood, her gaze focused out the big bay window.
“Find out everything about Jace’s ex,” Chloe ordered.
“She doesn’t want us involved.”
Chloe looked at her. She was still pissed about whatever argument she’d had with Josef. According to Annalisa, he’d stormed out before the thing with the federal prosecutor went down, so Tessa had had no time to help them work out anything. Not that she ever could. Tessa was sure Chloe and Josef enjoyed arguing too damn much.
“Okay, okay,” Tessa said quickly. She didn’t want to argue with her leader at this moment. “Ormi and Ski Eriksen stopped by.”
“Yeah, why the hell were they here anyway?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“At this moment, I don’t like anything.”
“Well, don’t get pissed, okay? But . . . they walked in on a massive sacrifice site last night. They found gold, jewels, and the Mara. So . . . Ormi is wondering if we—”
“Really stopped Gullveig.”
“Right.”
Tessa expected Chloe to explode. She was already in a bad mood over her ex, then the shit with Jace, and now another Clan was questioning what she’d said and had believed.
Yet Chloe didn’t explode. Instead, Chloe replied, “I got a call.”
“From?”
“Yardley.”
“Everything okay?” Yardley had been on a location shoot for a few weeks now, but she never called Chloe about anything unless there was a problem. Otherwise, she went directly to her own team leader.
“No. But her call makes sense now.”
“Do we need to move on something?”
“Not yet. We keep this between us.”
“Okay.”
Chloe dropped her legs to the floor and turned her chair. She motioned to Tessa with a jerk of her chin. “Close the door.”
Ski settled down on the boulder beside Jace. She’d had her eyes closed, silently meditating for the last fifteen minutes.
“How can you find peace here?” he asked.
“Because I see beyond the evil of one man to the land beneath. This is beautiful country.”
She finally opened her eyes, looked around, and asked, “Where’d everybody go?”
“It suddenly occurred to them that we’re on a hiking trail with no water, food, or supplies. They went back to the SUV to pick up a few things. Bear took Lev because he seems to really like that dog. But they shouldn’t be too long. The Isa”— the Viking goddess Skadi’s human Clan—“runs this place now that it’s been folded into the park and I can promise they know exactly where we are at this very moment.”
“Okay.”
“You seem very . . . calm. Considering.”
“I knew that it was coming. And now that it’s here . . . it’s here. You know?”
“No. I really don’t know what that means.”
“I don’t have to worry anymore because it’s happened. He’s out. I always knew he would be, but now it’s a done deal. I can stop worrying, because he’s out.”
“And when he comes?”
“I’ll deal with it.”
“You know, you may be able to keep the Crows from getting involved in this. But the Ravens like you. And Rundstöm is the wild dog they have on a really cheap leash. Preventing him from going after your ex will be next to impossible.”
“Yeah, but they’re a little scared of me. No one likes when I get rage-y.”
“I don’t mind it.”
“Seriously?”
“Well . . . if I wasn’t one of the mighty Protectors, then I would mind; of course, because you’d beat me into the ground. But Tyr blessed me with awesome strength.”
“Do you see Tyr a lot?”
“Yeah. He comes to the library all the time. He likes to chat. So . . . be forewarned while you’re working with us. I know how you hate chitchat.”
“I don’t hate it.”
“You just hate it with me.”
“No. I’m just not good at it. It’s awkward and uncomfortable. And when I was in the Congregation, I had to pretend-chat all the time.”
“Why?”
“It was my role as his wife.” She frowned at Ski, her face earnest. “I never believed, you know. Not for one second.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it sounds like you took every opportunity to expand your mind even though you were trapped in a pretty horrible situation. If you believed, even for a moment, you wouldn’t have bothered.”
“I was lucky. I had my grandmother. That woman taught me two very important things before I was taken. How to make learning new languages easy . . . and how to trust goddamn nobody.”
“Well, what you need to remember is that you’re not alone in this. You’ve got the Crows.”
“True.”
“The idiots.”
“Why do you hate the Ravens so much?”
“They’re stupid. Purposely stupid. I have no time for that. Or patience.”
“They’re really not that stupid.” She cringed. “I mean, they’re not stupid.”
“You probably had it right the first time. And, to continue our conversation, you now have the Protectors.”
She smirked. “Really?”
“You got the Ormi seal of approval. Let me rephrase that. You’re a Crow and got the Ormi seal of approval. That just doesn’t happen. Plus, Bear—of all people—is out making sure your puppy has water. And I haven’t seen that man show interest in anything that wasn’t between two covers in . . . forever.”
“He is myopic.”
“Very. But it works for us. And then there’s me.”
“The big man who’s going to rush in to protect me?”
“No. I’ll respect your boundaries. As boring as that may be.”
“Because you’re a progressive male?” she asked, laughing.
“No. Because you’re a Crow and if I get in your way, you’ll just tear my face off with your talons. One of the first things my dad taught me . . . ‘never get between a Crow and her prey.’ According to him, you guys hate that.”
“We do hate that.” She turned on the boulder, sitting Indian-style so that she could face him. “You do understand why, though? Why I won’t go after him?”
“I understand. You’re not the girl that you were. To kill him would give him the ultimate power, because it would mean he still mattered to you.”
“That’s it exactly.”
“But you need to understand, he’ll never stop. Men like him never do.”
“I know what my ex-husband can do. I know what he’s willing to do. I also know that if he does come for me, I’ll be ready. But I’m not going to him. I also won’t have my sisters hunt him down like an animal.”
“Even though they’re really good at that?”
“Yes.”
Ski turned to her, sitting the same way she was. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Did you turn down going on a date with me because of your ex-husband?”
“No.”
But she kind of snapped that at him and said it really fast. So Ski kept staring at her until her mouth twisted a little in frustration and she finally admitted, “Maybe.”
“I thought you were beyond him now,” he teased.
“I am. I just . . . I’ve never been on a date before. He’s the only man I’ve ever been with.” She let out a breath. “What if you go out with me and realize I’m . . . a mess?”
“You’re a Crow. Of course you’re a mess.”
And he was glad when she laughed.
“But,” he quickly added, “I’m a Protector. They took me from my family when I was six. I knew how to kill a grown man by the time I was twelve. I’d actually done it before I was eighteen. You’re Clan, Jace. You’re gonna be a mess. All I’m saying is, why don’t we be a mess together? One date. That’s it. We give it a try.”
She cringed. “Except I hate the idea of dating.”
“The idea of dating?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this the chitchat thing again?”
“Yeah.”
“You have to talk to someone sometime.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Do I?”
Now they both laughed.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “How about . . . you come to the party this weekend? At the Bird House.”
“The one Kera was complaining about all the way here?”
“Yeah.”
He forced a smile. “Because it sounds like such fun.”
“No, no. It’ll be fun. She just thinks no one will be there.”
“Why would she think that?”
“Because Erin’s a dick.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He nodded. “She is.”
“So you’ll come. We’ll hang out. See if that works.”
“All right. I’ll give it a try.”
“And bring Bear.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because I know you’ll bring Gundo. And you’ll bring Borgsten. But you won’t bring Bear. Even though you should.”
“But he’ll cramp my style,” Ski joked.
“What style?”
“All right, then . . .”