CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jace stared up at the gothic-style building in the middle of downtown Los Angeles.
“Why are we here?” Kera asked, sounding panicked.
“Because they asked me to come.”
“Nuns?” Kera turned away from the St. Mary Magdalene Convent of All Saints and faced their leader. “Nuns asked for you to come here? Nuns?”
“Why do you keep saying that over and over with that tone? Yes. Nuns asked me to come here.”
“Why?”
Chloe patted Kera’s face. “So much for the new girl to learn.”
“Why are you still calling me that?”
“Until tonight, until the rites, you’ll be the new girl.”
Kera glanced at Erin. “What rites?”
“You haven’t told her yet?” Chloe asked.
“I thought it was just a party.”
“Well . . .” Chloe shrugged. “There will be punch. And some beer. You like beer, right? And Cheez Whiz!”
“Again with the Cheez Whiz?”
Laughing, because she enjoyed emotionally torturing others as much as she enjoyed the royalty checks from her historical fiction books, Chloe headed toward the convent.
Kera pointed a finger at Erin and snarled out between clenched teeth, “There better not be fuckin’ Cheez Whiz at my party. Understand me?”
“All right. But you don’t know what you’re missing out on.”
“I was in the military. I know exactly what I’m missing out on.”
She stomped after Chloe, and Erin began to follow, but Jace caught her arm.
“You stopped me,” Jace said, her mind still scrambled from all that had happened in the last hour.
“I did.”
Focusing on the ground, Jace said, “Thank you.”
Gentle fingers gripped Jace’s chin and lifted her head until she was forced to look Erin in the eyes.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Jace. Not a damn thing.”
“I knew he’d come. I knew it. And I was going to be very calm and rational. I wasn’t going to let him get to me.” Jace could feel tears beginning to well. She fought her desire to cry. This wasn’t the time.
“But now I’ve shown him weakness. I’ve shown him a way back in. Even if it is just to irritate the living fuck out of me until I snap.”
“Narcissists do like any attention. Even bad attention.”
“I’ve just handed him power.”
“Let me kill him for you, Jace. He’ll just disappear and you’ll never have to worry about him again. It’s not like I have any moral center to stop me.”
“Don’t even try that bullshit with me,” Jace snapped, yanking her face away, residual anger still moving through her veins. “You have a very high moral center no matter what lies you tell everybody else. But don’t fucking lie to me!”
“Okay, okay!” Erin laughed, hands up to placate. “I’m a very moral person. Except when I’m fucking with Kera.”
Jace let out a breath. She refused to let her anger gain control. Even though it was always waiting. Waiting to snap. “Besides. . .”
“Besides what?”
“I don’t think it’s a task for us.”
“What does that mean?”
“When I touched him, I . . .”
“You . . . what?”
“I don’t know. Just leave him alone. Promise me.”
“Jace—”
“Promise me,” she spit out between clenched teeth.
“Fine. No need to get homicidal.”
“Are you ladies coming?” Chloe loudly asked from the steps of the convent. “Or do you bitches need a special invitation?”
Erin smirked. “I love how Chloe yells curses from the convent steps every time she comes here.”
Jace shook her head. “It’s just so embarrassing.”
Alessandra didn’t have a lot of time to get the party set up. Everything would be out back and, when Erin returned, she would be the one to get Kera downstairs for the “rituals” before the former Marine could see anything.
A lot of work just to fuck with the new girl, but even Alessandra had to admit . . . she was having a blast!
Snatching the front door open, she glared at the caterer standing there. “You’re late,” she accused.
“Do you want the food or not, freak?”
This was the problem with working with these people. Shifters, they called themselves. They could literally change from human to some predatory animal with no more than a thought.
But they weren’t the freaks, according to them. Instead, they were genetic gifts from God.
The Crows, however, were freaks because they weren’t born with wings, talons, and enhanced skills, but they had to die and be brought back that way. That slight change in the “natural order of things,” as they called it, seemed to offend their shifter sensibilities.
Interesting, since the woman standing in front of Alessandra was six-nine with brown and gold hair and could change her entire body into a grizzly bear. She also smelled of honey. Like she’d bathed in it or used it as a perfume.
Yet Alessandra and her girls were the freaks.
“Get in, set up . . . be nice.”
The She-bear stepped into her, over her, glowering down into Alessandra’s face. “Or what?”
“Or I destroy your goddamn business in this town. And trust me, sweetie, I’m the one who can do it.” Alessandra moved back so the bear and her team could come in. “Now get your big, fat ass out there, and get to work.”
Growling just like the bear she was, the caterer lumbered into the house, her team of fellow shifters behind her. Varying, Alessandra assumed, in species and breed based on the body size and hair colors streaming through the Crows’ doorway. Some had to be about seven feet tall. Others didn’t even reach Alessandra’s shoulder.
“And don’t even think about spitting in our food!” Alessandra remembered to yell after them.
Alessandra snapped her fingers at two of her sister-Crows and pointed at the caterer, silently signaling them to follow Her Lady Bitchiness and her Bitchy Animal Menagerie.
Before Alessandra could close the doors, the chairs and tents arrived. A company also owned and staffed by shifters. Then security. Men and women so large, she would have guessed they were all Vikings except they ranged in race . . . and apparently species.
The shifter-owned companies were overpriced, the management and staff rude, with a tendency to snarl and/or bark. But there was just nothing better than being able to unleash one’s wings during a great party, while still having someone else serve you. It was the only reason the Crows and Ravens hired shifters. Because the Clans didn’t tell anyone about the shifters’ ability to chase their own tails and the shifters didn’t tell anyone that the Crows and Ravens had a molting season.
It was an agreement that worked as long as some hyena didn’t hit on some tipsy Valkyrie who responded by cutting his throat and laughing. That was usually when trouble really began.
But that was why Alessandra had also hired a shifter-owned security company. Just to prevent that sort of thing. So she had high hopes all would go well this evening.
The DJ and her staff made it in, and Alessandra ticked them off the list on her tablet.
Seeing that the entire staff was now here, she began to close the door for the last time. But a hand slapped against it and pushed.
Startled, she stepped back, then grinned. “Yardley! You made it, girl!”
“Yeah.” She tossed her luggage in. Most stars had their security team or assistants handle their luggage. But Yardley’s entire team was made up of Crows . . . and they knew the woman could handle her own goddamn luggage. “The shoot is currently on . . . hiatus.”
“What? Why?” Alessandra owned a Spanish-language TV network, so she loved hearing industry gossip. And rumors about the director Yardley had been working with were swirling everywhere. She was dying to hear the scoop.
“Well,” Yardley began, “they found the director without his skin. So that sorta halted production for a while.”
Alessandra gasped. “What?”
“Yeah. Guess I’ll have to go to his funeral tomorrow. And he turned out to be such an asshole. But I’ll need to at least make an appearance.”
“Wait. Hold on. His skin was missing? What the fuck happened?”
“Not really sure. But there’s every chance . . . Brianna ripped it off him.”
Alessandra’s arms dropped to her sides and she gazed at her sister-Crow in shock.
Not surprisingly, before either woman could say another word, a number of Crows were suddenly surrounding them, having overheard and being naturally downright nosy.
Leigh held up one finger. “I’m sorry . . . what?”
“Brianna?” Alessandra asked. “Betty’s Brianna?”
Yardley scrunched up her nose in a way that had made her “one of the sexiest ten women alive” according to some men’s magazine a year ago. “Yeahhhhhh.”
Maeve grabbed Yardley’s hand and dragged her toward the living room. “Come with me. I must hear everything.”
And considering Maeve didn’t like touching anyone because of the whole “germ transference thing,” as she called it . . . this was huge.
So while the shifters got the party set up outside, the Crows got the dirt.
They were sitting in the waiting room outside the Mother Superior’s office. The Mother Superior was out of town, but her second in command, the one who’d called the Crows, was in attendance. And she, like the Mother Superior, was not to be ignored.
Because in the Crows’ world, there were nuns . . . and there were nuns.
And then there were the Sisters of St. Mary Magdalene Convent of All Saints aka the Chosen Warriors of God.
Since the dawning of Christianity, the Sisters had been working in the background to protect the world from itself and to prevent the End of Days. In a lot of ways, their goals were no different from that of the Crows, but the two groups had a bloody history. One filled with violent sneak attacks, assassination attempts, revenge killings, and a particularly ugly event that brought on the Salem witch trials. But when that led to a bad time for boths sides, a treaty was born that still held to this day.
A treaty that was, at best, shaky.
Jace reached for a magazine on the coffee table in the middle of the room, and noticed that Kera had a nervous tic. She was using the ball of her foot to bounce her leg the way one might nervously tap one’s fingers against a desk.
At first, Jace didn’t mind. But five minutes in and she was getting annoyed.
Jace was about to gently lay her hand on Kera’s leg—she probably didn’t even know she was doing it—but Erin barked, “The leg, dude! What is wrong with you?” before Jace had the chance.
Of course, Kera was immediately defensive, which was why Jace had planned to try something different.
Sitting across the room, Chloe read the latest Vanity Fair with a nearly naked Yardley on the cover while Jace did her best to separate Erin and Kera as they slapped and punched at each other over Jace, who sat between them.
“Are you going to help me?” Jace asked their leader.
“Help you with what, babe?” She didn’t even look up from her magazine, but she did say, “I can’t believe nuns have a subscription to Vanity Fair. Like, shouldn’t they be reading something called Nun News? Or Daily Nun?”
Fed up, Jace forced her two friends apart, screeching, “Stop it! Stop it now!” as four men entered the waiting room and sat in the chairs across from them.
Big and buff, they flipped through magazines or talked on their cell phones while Jace’s sister-Crows settled back into their chairs and muttered curses at each other.
Jace didn’t think much about these men because she already knew them. But when one winked and smiled at Kera, making her friend smile back, Jace knew she had to step in.
Jace had no worries that Kera would even think about cheating on her boyfriend. Kera loved Vig with all her heart. And most women enjoyed a little light flirting. Not catcalls, but light flirting. But these were not men to flirt with.
“Stop it,” Jace said, keeping her voice low.
“Stop what? I barely touched Erin.”
“Not that. Stop flirting with him.”
“I’m not. He’s flirting with me. I’m just appreciating it.”
“Every girl likes to know she’s still got it going on,” Erin noted, her mini-fight with Kera already forgotten. The girl was not big on holding grudges once the initial heat wore off.
“You don’t want to flirt with those men,” Jace informed her friends.
“Why not?”
“Because they’re the Four Horsemen.”
Kera blinked. “The Four Horsemen of what?”
Jace and Erin gazed at her for a moment before Jace said, “The Apocalypse.”
Kera snorted and gave a little laugh. “Now you’re fucking with me, Jace? Did Erin tell you to do this? Like when she told me I’d have to sleep with all the Valkyries so Odin would allow me to shack up with one of his Ravens.”
“Erin!”
“I didn’t say she had to,” Erin corrected. “I said I’m sure Odin would appreciate it.”
“You’re an asshole,” Kera barked.
“You act like you’re telling me something I don’t already know,” Erin shot back.
“Both of you stop before I get terse,” Jace warned, and the women immediately settled back in their chairs.
But Erin Amsel was a born shit starter. It was like she couldn’t help herself.
Still, Jace initially had no idea what Erin was doing when she grabbed Jace’s hand and gently placed it against Kera’s forearm.
She said something in Old Norse, and when Kera looked across the room toward the Horsemen, her entire body jerked out of the chair, her back slamming against the wall, her arms up to protect herself.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” she bellowed. “Where’s his face!”
Erin, laughing, leaned forward and gave the man a little wave. “So you must be Pestilence. Nice to meet you.”
Jace used her thumb and forefinger to briefly rub her eyes. “Is there something psychologically wrong with you?” she asked her friend.
Erin stared at her. “Yes.”
The Mother Superior’s office door opened and one of her assistants stepped out. “Ladies,” she said, her hand gesturing.
Kera was still in the corner of the room, her eyes closed tight, her body turned away. Jace was reaching for her, but Chloe got there first. She yanked Kera over and shoved her through the door. “Get over yourself. Trust me when I say, they won’t be the worst things you’ll see in this life.”
“How did you do that?” Jace asked Erin.
“It’s something Betty taught me. Want me to show you?” Erin grabbed Jace’s arm, but Jace slapped her hand off and pushed her. Erin pushed her back.
“Would you two bitches get in here?” Chloe yelled. “Now!”
“Awww, come on, Chloe,” one of the Horsemen lightly complained. “I was enjoying that.”
“Let me guess who you are—” Erin began, but Jace grabbed her by the back of the neck and pushed her into the office.
Jace forced a smile. “Gentlemen,” she said to the Horsemen before quickly walking into the Mother Superior’s office and closing the door.
Sister Theresa Marie Rutkowski, the Mother Superior’s second in command, sat at the large wood desk, dark eyes calmly gazing at them.
Smiling, Sister Theresa asked, “And how are you ladies doing today?”
Chloe put on her best fake smile and replied, “Wonderful, Sister, and you?”
That was when Jace knew this might not go too well . . .
Ski was sitting in the backyard, his feet up on another chair, while he read a book about the Jonestown cult from the perspective of a survivor.
He wanted to know more about the life Jace had lived. So many questions he wanted to ask, but after what she’d been through, he wasn’t going to do that. If she wanted to tell him, he’d be there to listen. But he wouldn’t push her for details she was not ready to give.
So, instead, he’d found about twenty books on different cults in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and had read nineteen of them in the last two hours. He’d found them interesting, but Jace was so different from the survivors he’d read about. He’d believed her when she’d told him she’d never bought into the cult’s belief system. She wasn’t in denial. She really hadn’t been part of that life—at least not emotionally— otherwise her Second Life would have been much harder. Yet she’d happily joined the Crows, never looking back except when she had to.
That even as a ten-year-old she’d avoided being brainwashed said so much about her. Manipulating the situation so that she could expand her mind with languages and books . . . simply amazing.
“Hey,” Gundo said, dropping into a chair at the patio table, a Diet Coke in his hand. The man was drinking from a curly straw.
A grown man.
“Did you know her grandmother isn’t dead?”
“Whose grandmother?”
“Jacinda’s.”
Ski shook his head. “What are you talking about?”
“She constantly speaks of her grandmother. The one who raised her before her mother took her. The way she spoke of her, though, made me think she had passed. She hasn’t. She’s still quite alive. And with an extensive criminal record.”
Now Ski laughed. “What?”
“I know. Shocking! I mean Jace is so . . . non-criminal. Even though she’s a Crow. But her grandmother and other members of her father’s side of the family cannot say the same. Several have actually done hard time.”
“It sounds like her grandmother was the only one who—”
“—kept her from being psychologically trapped in that life.” Gundo nodded. “Exactly. I’m just wondering why she hasn’t contacted her since she became a Crow.”
“Some of the Crows never lose contact with their families. Some never want to see them again. It’s a personal choice.”
“But the ones who don’t want anything to do with their families are usually the ones who were killed by their families. That’s clearly not the case here, and the way Jacinda speaks of her—”
“You’ve already called her grandmother, haven’t you?”
Gundo gave a small shrug. “I left a message.”
“By Tyr’s missing hand, Gundo!”
“I know, I know. I didn’t think I’d find a number. But I did. And I kind of ran with it.”
Ski closed his book, ready to give his “You can’t just do things you want to because you think it’s the right thing to do” speech, when something hit the metal patio table, startling both men.
It was Ratatosk. He’d landed on his back, little arms and legs spread out wide from his small body, panting heavily. He looked like he’d been through hell.
Gundo leaned in to take a closer look. “He’s bleeding. And I see teeth marks.”
Ski sighed and asked in Icelandic, “Who did you piss off now, little rat?”
Having dealt with Ratatosk personally since the day Ormi had drop-kicked the little bastard across the library floor, Ski was sure he’d pissed someone off. It was Ratatosk’s way. Running between the eagle at the top of Yggdrasil and Nidhogg—the dragon who would one day bring about Ragnarok—at the bottom, for no other reason than to carry bitchy words back and forth between the two was a job created for an asshole. But no matter what Ratatosk might say, he enjoyed his role among the gods and the Vikings.
Ratatosk placed the back of one claw against his forehead and moaned. Dramatically.
Ski rolled his eyes and Gundo dropped back into his chair, already ignoring the long-tailed rodent.
“Do you have something to tell me or not?” Ski pushed.
“He’s here to tell you about an All-Clan meeting on Monday.”
Ski stood, looking around for the voice that boomed at him from all sides, and desperately covering his ears. His poor neighbors for about ten miles would think they’d just experienced a small earthquake.
“Could you not do that?” Ski asked.
“Sorry!” Tyr, the god of war, battle, and justice, cleared his throat since his voice was still booming and said in a more human tone, “Sorry. I forget.”
Tyr stood by the glass doors leading to the patio. He didn’t actually look the way one would expect a god to look. Not in that black Led Zeppelin T-shirt that had probably been purchased at an early seventies concert—the Nordic gods did love Zeppelin so—and thick black work boots that appeared just as old as the T-shirt. His brown and gray hair reached to his waist in a long, loose braid. A thick dark beard hit just above the collar of his T-shirt and covered the lower half of his face, several braids woven in. His arms were covered in tattooed runes except for his right forearm, which had the face of an angry wolf branded onto it. Where his right hand should have been was a metal glove covered in powerful runes and created by ancient dwarves. It allowed Tyr to use it as if his hand was still there.
A string of tattooed runes also circled his very thick neck, and a brutal scar went from under his chin, across his mouth, abruptly ending in the middle of his cheek.
It made Tyr appear terrifying, but he was one of the most cheerful and pleasant gods Ski had known. He only became angry when he felt a true injustice had been done.
And no one wanted to deal with an angry Tyr.
“An All-Clan meeting? Why?”
“I think you already know why.”
Ski sat back down, shrugged. “Gullveig.”
“Gullveig. The Crows and Ravens didn’t stop her. Although they made quite the effort. So I don’t hold it against them.”
“I don’t see the other gods being quite so forgiving. At least not of the Crows.”
“We remember Gullveig. She’s a deceitful female. That she fooled the Crows, the most distrusting of the Clans, was no easy task. Sadly,” he said on a sigh, “it’s not really us the Crows need to worry about.”