Chapter Twenty-five
Patrick
Across the city, the moon began to crest, fat and silver in the night sky. Pat stretched his head back, watching its laborious ascent. Around him, his pack gathered across the park, their blood thrumming to the call of the moon above them, feeding on the collective energy that expanded with so many wolves together in a single place. He could sense his mother nearby, her serene eye counting to make sure every wolf who should be present was, and his sisters playing together a little further off. Vector had disappeared into the crush, nose to the ground scenting something.
It was hard to think in strictly human terms when he was in this skin, but still Pat felt his wolf brain straying back to Ethan, curious to know what the mage was doing at that exact moment. Curious if he felt the pull of the moon on them through their connection. If he had gone home, or if he’d decided to drown himself in the skin and stink of faceless strangers because Pat couldn’t—
He growled in his chest, a sound that rumbled between anger and anguish. But he wasn’t left to drown in his sea of emotions—too turbulent for a lone wolf to navigate—because his mother took that moment to leap up onto a picnic table, her the smoky grey fur on her chest gleaming like pewter in the lights reflected off the nearby lake. Her body bowed back as she raised her head and began to howl.
Ethan
The address Graham had given him led to a dark street lined by warehouses in various states of disrepair. For once the sky was a deep, endless dark, spattered with gleaming stars and hung by a bright moon not obscured by rainclouds. For though water lay on the streets, the weather itself had cleared up remarkably well, leaving behind a crisp chill that slid through the driver’s side window. He’d rolled it down to get a better look at the buildings, hoping to see some sign of life or illegal activity—Ethan rolled his eyes at himself, like he would ever have that kind of good luck.
Adam had disappeared from view between leaving Graham’s apartment and his arrival here.
Ethan pulled the Honda over and climbed out, unsure what to do without the ghost there to guide him. A gap between two especially tall industrial buildings across the street caught his eye, and he froze, wracking his brain as he tried to place the gap. Why would an alley be familiar?
He jogged across the street and stood at the mouth of the alley, a sense of cold dread that had nothing to do with the chilled air grew thick in his veins. He knew this; he’d been here before. Only that didn’t make any sense— Sure, but this stretch of road lay just north of their district, but it wasn’t directly between the station or his home. Still, he couldn’t shake the sure sense that…
Scummy water lapped at his shoes; he wrinkled his nose at the pervasive smell of abandoned garbage, something almost coppery—metallic—about the tang of stagnant oil and industrial waste. His feet carried him down the alley without any input from his brain. Ethan thought, Light, and watched a ball of blue energy coil in his left palm. The mage light threw heavy shadows around him that wavered and bounced off the pools of standing rainwater and slick cement.
“Fuck,” a soft voice spoke, wavering over the word.
Ethan glanced back at Adam, who looked even more spectral than usual, deep lines etched into his pale face. His arms hung at his sides, shoulders hunched as he stared past Ethan at where the alley terminated at the back wall of—no, Ethan brought the light up and saw the outline of a loading door—just a peephole in the middle of the door and the seam where it blended into the rest of the wall, no handle so that it would be impossible to open from this side.
“Do you recognize this?” he asked the ghost.
Adam looked frozen, nearly transparent as though he might wink out of sight again at the slightest provocation, and he didn’t reply.
With an irritated sigh, Ethan kept going, examining the walls for any clues, but there wasn’t even a forgotten garbage bin let alone a clue about what made this one spot so—
He stepped into a puddle, deeper than the others, and stared down at his heavy rain boot with a sickening sensation of deja vu as the night seemed to stretch out and compress around him. A soft scuff behind him made him tense, hands curling a little to dim the mage light into something less blinding. Ethan spun and shone it back towards the street, but there was nothing to see there except Adam standing fixed, staring blankly. He sighed and returned to the loading door. It took a couple of tries thinking Open at it before Ethan heard the interior lock depress and the door swung open. Stale air rolled out, carrying with it that same metallic smell that churned his stomach.
“Are you coming?” he asked the ghost.
“I don’t think we should—”
“You’re not chickening out on me now, are you? This is what you wanted.”
Adam shook his head over and over.
“Graham said they took him to a warehouse. So, if there’s something to find it’s going to be inside one of these buildings.”
“Why this one?”
Ethan frowned. “Why not? It’s obviously got you wigged out. Do you know why?”
Adam’s mouth moved soundlessly, his chest hitched on a breath he didn’t need, and then he vanished.
The back door opened onto an abandoned ground floor. Ethan opened his hand so that the blueish light could stretch out into the corners of darkness. Dirt scuffed under his wet boots on a bare cement floor. If he had to guess, he thought this area might have been used as offices, there were a dozen abandoned desks scattered across the room and the broken detritus of what might have been cheap wall partitions. Ethan made his way across the room with his eyes scanning over the debris, looking for anything that might look like—he cocked his head and studied a broken chair on its side. Was that blood? No. Ethan shook his head; he was seeing what he wanted to see, not what was real.
The building sat silent around him, not even the scraping and rustling you’d expect from vermin who loved to infest the walls of old buildings like this one.
On the far side of the room, Ethan turned down a short hallway that led to a corner set aside for two restrooms, an elevator, and a door marked with a sign for the stairs. The doors to the bathroom were locked, and someone had stuck caution tape across the elevator. The tape hung tangled up on itself and coated in dust. The door to the stairs swung open soundlessly, and Ethan stepped onto the landing, his light illuminating the stairwell as it climbed into darkness above and below him.
“This is a waste of time,” he muttered and turned back to the ground floor, froze when his light cast a long human-shaped shadow across the floor. Ethan looked up and met the cool black eyes of a woman. She was small, just over five feet, dark brown hair plaited and wrapped around the crown of her head, pale, and slender. He took all of this in with a sinking sensation, but that was all the time he had, the next second she was in his personal space, one nimble hand wrapped around his throat and lifting him off his feet with terrible strength.
The mage light flickered and died as the vampire shoved him back into the door, knocking all of the air from his lungs.
“Why come all this way if you’re just going to leave,” she murmured, hand tightening around his larynx.
Ethan kicked out at her without connecting, wrapped both hands around her wrist as he tried to pry her off, but it was like trying to make granite let go of you: impossible.
She jerked him forward and back, and starbursts bloomed across his vision, the sound of his skull knocking against the heavy steel the only thing he could hear for several seconds. Ethan realized with a lurch that he wasn’t going to be able to match her with strength, and so he latched onto her cool, bare skin, summoning up his magic in the same way he’d used it to force Graham to drop his gun. The vampire’s skin smoked under his touch and she growled, slamming him into the wall harder this time.
“Ethan!” Adam shouted from somewhere nearby. Good of him to make an appearance, Ethan thought distantly.
He reached for the vampire’s face with his left hand, but she grabbed it with her right. His wrist broke with a single snap that stole the strength from his body. Ethan choked on a shout and sagged hard into the fist around his throat.
The vampire’s nostrils flared the same way Pat’s did when he was scenting something. She leaned in, eyes widening as she sucked in a deep breath, and a sharp gleam entered those dark depths, chilling Ethan to the bone.
“Well, well. Clanahan’s pet mage, here in my domain. If you thought you could hurt us just because its the full moon, you were sadly mistaken.”
Ethan reached for the magic that had been so accommodating of late, felt it surge through the tracery of blood and bone, burning bright frantic electricity that made the hairs on his body stand up on end and then—nothing. The energy pooled in his forearm, an almost physical weight, pressure and heat that had no where to go, fizzing uselessly. He was so focused on trying to call up his magic, he didn’t see the fist aimed for his face, only felt it as pain in his eye, his cheek bursting into flames as his head knocked into the door again.
The hand around his throat jerked him down into a knee to the ribs. Ethan stumbled, cradling his broken wrist. He couldn’t get enough air into his lungs to speak and his magic—even though it felt close to boiling over, it was like water that kept slipping through his fingers; he couldn’t grasp it with a broken hand. Nails raked over his skin, gouging deep lines as the vampire drew blood. Ethan pushed himself off the wall and threw his weight against her smaller frame, but she retaliated with a series of quick, sharp blows to his head and gut.
Ethan fell, dazed, landing badly on his broken wrist.
“I expected more,” the vampire mused.
“Who the fuck are you?” he ground out between clenched teeth.
She made a tsking sound in reply and kicked him onto his back, bruising his ribs and knocking the air out of him all over again. Ethan’s eyes shot open as she straddled his hips, pinning him to the ground with her knees. She shook her head at him, fangs sliding into place over her blunt human teeth: two gleaming needles.
“Don’t worry; I don’t play with my food. That’s the problem with these young upstarts. They leave their meals alive to talk. They dance with them and fuck them and don’t clean up after themselves, and suddenly we’re being written about in the local paper, and it’s all I can do to keep the word ‘vampire’ out of the public eye. It’s been too long to let leftovers ruin everything for the family.”
She leaned down over him, framing his face with her arms, one pressed hard against his sternum and the other curled over his head. Cool fingers raked through his hair.
“I thought it would be the beta. He must want us badly. Or the other one. The tracker. I’d heard there was a mage who’d got himself a wolfmate, but I didn’t expect— Too curious for your own good, aren’t you?”
“I thought you didn’t play with your food,” Ethan said with a cough.
She nodded, and then, instead of elaborating like he’d half-expected, leaned down and sank her fangs into the side of his neck. Ice shot through Ethan’s skin—he stared up at the dark ceiling without really seeing it. He couldn’t move his head, caught in her grip, and no matter how hard he tried to buck her off, her weight remained steady, pressing him into the cold cement. His magic burned uselessly just beneath his skin, all of that considerable sulfurous heat pooling at the break in his bones. Ethan felt his blood rush out of him as her tongue lapped roughly against his skin, coaxing it out of his body and into her own.
“Oh, night, it’s been too long since I tasted a mage.” Blood smeared across her face as she smiled down at him, euphoric. “Like fucking electricity in the blood. And don’t worry, I know how to make this into a pretty picture.” And then she leaned in and latched back on.
The last thing he heard was Adam shouting his name over and over, like listening to the echo as you fall down a long, dark well.
Ethan
“Ethan! Come on, don’t do this— Fuck!”
Ethan Ellison, twenty-nine years old, formerly—was it formerly if they hadn’t gotten around to retiring him yet?—of the Seattle Police Department, squinted up at the apparition yelling in his face and winced at the noise.
Why was Adam always so damn loud? What was it about ghosts they felt the need to scream everything they wanted to tell you? He was dying, not deaf.
He stared up at Adam, surprised at how solid the ghost looked. He wasn’t alone, a woman stood above them, average height and weight, dark hair cropped short and shot through with threads of sliver that glinted with the moon light. How had he missed all that light?
He frowned, trying to place the woman’s face, there was something familiar about it like— Ethan’s eyes slid away, searching the corners of his vision for Ali, but his personal ghost was no where to be seen, just Adam and this—
“Shit, you can see her too,” Adam muttered, following Ethan’s line of sight. “Ethan, you’ve got to listen to me, dude, you do not want to follow her.”
“Who—?”
The woman knelt at his other side. “I believe you know my sisters.”
I’m dying, he thought, caught by her endless eyes. Somewhere, Adam’s words faded off into a toneless drone, an irritant to be put in a box along with the slick wet sensation soaking through his sweater and the stinging pain in his neck, wrist, head, fucking everywhere he had nerve endings that could register pain.
“I’m dying,” he tried to say, but his mouth moved without any sound coming out because his lungs didn’t seem to be working quite right anymore.
The woman—oh, Hecate, he grasped futilely for her name—nodded down at him. She didn’t seem especially bothered by the ghost hovering next to her, but Ethan supposed that she must be used to that sort of thing.
Adam reached out and froze, like a slap in the face, like the blow he couldn’t land, and Ethan’s head lolled, hair in the muck and the wet grit on the pavement.
“Ethan…?”
He blinked. But he was tired and cold, and it seemed like too much effort to open his eyes again. Ignoring Adam’s protests, he left them closed.
From behind his eyelids, Ethan felt aware of the moon shining down on him in a way that he had never accounted for it before. And because it was the moon, casting its full shadow upon the scene, his thoughts turned to the wolves running. Did Pat already know what had happened? Had he felt the attack? Could he sense Ethan lying here even now all but out of blood and fading fast if the woman’s presence was any indicator?
Fate, his mind whispered to him out of the looming depths. That was not her name, but neither was it Atropos, not really, not in this century.
His mouth moved, throat thick with what little blood was left still trying to pump through him. The edge of a cool hand brushed over his brow, and Ethan forced his eyes open.
Despair welled up in his chest as he met her gaze. Despair pressing against that weight of inevitability, which pulled down on him.
Once before he’d believed himself to be at this crossroads, chest shredded under the evening sky, the work of a rabid wolf. But even now as she knelt close to his side, and he could confirm his first suspicion—that she did bear a strong resemblance to her sisters—he realized that he had not seen her on that night. Ethan felt so many little pieces of information click into place inside the sluggish workings of his brain. He had never been here before, staring into the eyes of the ending, and alone but for the ghost haunting his—
His mate.
How long would it take someone to stumble over his body? How long before Pat got the call? Dead here in this alley where—
Beside him, Adam hovered, an anxious presence rubbing at his own arms since he couldn’t shake Ethan. He kept darting looks around them, shoulders hunched, and shivering, though Ethan didn’t know what could make a ghost cold.
“You can’t do this here,” Adam hissed, voice cracking.
Ethan tried to laugh, but it hurt, and he tasted blood in the back of his throat, pooling where the vampire had ripped into him.
“Not like I’ve got a choice,” he mouthed the words.
“You can’t,” the ghost repeated. “I—” He clutched at the sides of his face, rocking back and forth on his knees.
“He died here as well,” the woman said, looking at the ghost. “But he wouldn’t come with me, poor thing.”
“What’s your name?” Ethan asked, trusting her to understand despite his shortcomings.
She smiled at him and ran her thumb along the line of his hair in a gesture that felt soothing, like what he imagined it might have felt if his own mother had ever tried to soothe him—not that she had, not that she’d been around to.
“Annalise.”
Adam moaned something unintelligible under his breath and leapt to his feet, pacing just outside Ethan’s field of vision.
“S’pretty,” he murmured. And then her words filtered past the somnolence fogging his brain.
Adam had died here.
Had Pat come to view the body before they’d carted it away? How much worse would it be for him when the call came to let him know that they’d found Ethan in an identical position?
Something hot stung at his eyes, remarkable because the rest of his body felt so damned cold.
“What if I didn’t want to go with you either?” he couldn’t be sure whether he spoke the words aloud or in the echo chamber of his mind, but either way it made Annalise meet his eyes again.
“Do you wish to be a ghost?”
An image of Ali flashed across his mind’s eye.
Annalise shook her head. “That’s just a figment of your imagination, Ethan. The question is, do you want to be like him? Would that satisfy you?”
“No,” he rasped, tasting blood on his tongue.
“Precisely. Best not to linger.”
And it sounded like the truth, spoken in her even voice, despite the rough rattling sound Adam made—as loud and jarring as any Marley dragging his chains—but Ethan still felt a twinge of guilt, an ache where that hook in his heart tugged at him, pulling him back towards Pat. Guilt that he’d be just another black mark in the wolf’s life. Why had this happened to them? What ridiculous ordering of the universe had decided to sew them together?
He was a wizard. He was always set to burn out hot and blinding, but he wasn’t supposed to take some poor fucking wolf’s heart with him.
Around him, over the sounds of muttering and his own shallow breathing, the night lay quiet. For the first and last time, Ethan looked inside himself at that hook and the line stretching from it, and wondered what it would feel like to hold on.
Above him, Annalise knelt hallowed in silver light, fate come to snip his last threads.