Avery
“Chlorine-shock eyes,” a male voice said with a chuckle, right next to my ear, startling me. “I’m using that from now on.”
I turned to find a werelock with brown hair and gorgeous, deep-set green eyes standing directly beside me. He had the kind of bone structure and enviable features that could make a girl jealous at first glance, but unlike Gabe’s, this guy’s features were assembled in a way that still made him look masculine. It was something in the harder set of his jaw, perhaps, or the subtle hint of “you don’t want to fuck with me” that his eyes projected.
“I’m Remy,” he introduced himself. “Alcaeus and I are stepbrothers.”
Chaos had thrust me behind his back in some hero-complex protective gesture, and he was now holding me against him with one muscled arm wound behind him, shackled around my waist, while he and Kai argued with Raul and Gabriel in Portuguese. Didn’t make much logical sense to me—considering Gabriel could probably cause me to choke to death on my own tongue if he wanted to—whether I was standing in front of or behind Alcaeus. But I decided I’d point that out to Chaos later, when he and his wolf were in a more receptive mood.
“You must be Avery,” Remy surmised with a smile. He held his hand out to me, and I shook it. His grip was warm and firm, and he held onto my hand a few extra seconds too long—as if he were trying to absorb information about me through our palm connection. “Or is it Cynthia? Or perhaps Blythe? Franchesca, Holly, Paris, Charlotte, Gertrude—”
“You’re so funny.” I yanked my hand from his.
Damn. Apparently Raul’s little shower rescue had resulted in a lot more snooping into my past by Kai and company. This was bad news—potentially disastrous—depending on where they’d sourced their intel. In my head, I went back over the names he’d just rattled off and realized that he had, in fact, said Holly. Not good news at all.
“Are they really arguing over who’s going to Jedi mind trick all of these people?” I asked.
Remy looked surprised. “You speak Portuguese?”
“No, I just know men.”
He chuckled. “I have a feeling it’ll end up falling to me, anyway. That sort of task usually does. I’ve spent a great many years researching and dissecting the human brain and psyche.”
Interesting. And unnerving. Not sure if that was something I’d be so quick to brag about. What did that research and dissection entail when you were a werelock, I wondered?
“Wow. You really don’t have a scent,” Remy observed aloud. His brow wrinkled as his eyes assessed me in a manner that made me feel as if my life story was scribbled in permanent ink all over my face. “You just might be Al’s mate after all,” he concluded slowly, “if he can truly scent you when the rest of us can’t. Tell me, has anyone else ever been able to scent you before Al?”
“He goes by Chaos,” I said in retort. “He prefers Chaos as a nickname.”
Whoa. Where the hell had that come from? I didn’t even know if that was true, and I’d just insisted on it to his own brother.
“Oh?” Remy raised one brow and grinned wide, exposing perfect, white teeth. “Good to know. I wish he’d told me that one hundred and fifty-three years ago when we first met.” He shrugged. “Although … I can’t say that I ever would’ve agreed to call him that.”
Yep … he hated me. I’d just bombed out with the first family member of Chaos’s that I’d met.
I gave myself a mental shake. What the hell was I thinking? Of course he should hate me! And why should I care? Alcaeus’s family and entire pack were my enemies, as Raul had said. It’s not like our mate bond was real and we were going to live happily ever after together.
And even if it was real and Alcaeus wasn’t my enemy, over my dead body would my daughter and I ever become another “rescue case” for Alcaeus to indulge his ego and hero complex over.
“What did you say to upset her, Remy?” Alcaeus barked suddenly, releasing me just long enough to turn around to face us before mashing me up against his front.
“Nothing,” Remy insisted, taken aback.
“She’s upset, and you were the only one talking to her just now.”
He could sense when I was upset? But I wasn’t upset. Well … maybe a tiny bit—although my reasons were irrational.
“I called you ‘Al,’ and she told me you preferred ‘Chaos’ as a nickname,” Remy said.
“I am not calling you Chaos,” Kai halted his banter in Portuguese to interject. “Ever. Don’t even think to ask it of me.”
“Chaos,” Raul threw up the shaka hand signal to Alcaeus, prompting both Gabriel and Kai to roll their eyes. “Take care of my girl, ’kay? I’ll see you at the Final Rose Ceremony,” he taunted, piggybacking on my earlier joke.
With that, Gabriel and Raul vanished, just as I started cracking up and Alcaeus looked ready to lunge at Raul. Surfer-boy werelock was growing on me.
But I still had to find a way to kill him.
“Remy, you got this, right?” Alcaeus told more than asked his stepbrother.
“Of course,” Remy responded. He turned to me. “See? What did I tell you?”
Kai was transporting Alcaeus and me back to Denver Star Trek-style when something odd happened with the process. Having only been teleported a handful of times, I wasn’t exactly a qualified judge of how it was supposed to go, of course, but even I knew that something had gone wrong when instead of a fluid reentry, it was so violent I felt like my innards had rematerialized a fraction of a second before the rest of me had.
The next big tip-off that something had gone terribly awry was the fact that we’d rematerialized in the woods somewhere. Not in Denver. I was pretty sure we were nowhere near Colorado—or even within the United States anymore.
I fell to my hands and knees atop the leaf litter, seriously on the verge of blowing chunks. There was an awful pressure in my head. Having all those shots with Raul was definitely not the brightest decision.
“What in God’s name was that, Kai?” Alcaeus demanded. “Are you trying to kill Avery?”
Chaos rushed over to me and knelt at my side. But when he tried to do that face-cupping move on me, I shook my head and pushed him away. We had a smokin’ hot chemistry thing going that I didn’t want to wreck by projectile-vomiting in his face this early in the hooking-up stage.
“It’s not my fault. I don’t know what the fuck happened!” The alarm I heard in Kai’s voice was not reassuring. “Some force of magic pulled us way off course. I couldn’t control it.”
“Oh, no …” Alcaeus murmured. “Kai—you know where we are?”
“Yes.”
“This is bad.”
“I know it’s bad!” Kai growled. His heart was galloping. For the first time, I scented fear from Kai.
“Where are we?” I took deep breaths, trying to get my nausea under control.
“The Hoia Baciu Forest,” Chaos said.
“Where?”
“It’s an ancient forest in Romania that—”
“I know where it is!” I screeched as panic gripped me. I also knew that it was one of the most legendary haunted forests and timeless wonders of the world, renowned for magnetic anomalies and paranormal activity that scientists had tried and failed to explain. How had we been blown this far off course?
Adrenaline pushed my nausea down as I sat back onto my heels and took in my surroundings. I’d always wanted to see the vegetation of the Hoia Baciu Forest—during daylight hours. The trees were as I’d seen them in photographs—bizarrely shaped and creepy-looking as fuck. They were of a strange, twisted wood so strong that reportedly it could not be cut with an ax, and the trunks frequently displayed char marks that scientists could not explain. Electronic equipment malfunctioned and failed within the forest, which was also often referred to as the “Romanian Bermuda Triangle.”
I knew that the main magnetic, paranormal “hub” within the dark forest was a circular area three hundred meters wide where vegetation would not grow. Countless scientists from around the globe had sampled and studied the soil from this famous “dead zone” and had found no reason for the absence of growth.
The forest was known for everything from ghost and UFO sightings to talking wind and moving balls of light. I recalled reading how people had experienced severe migraines and nausea from being in the forest, and had emerged with unexplainable burn marks and rashes on their skin. Forest travelers had reported being attacked by unseen forces—clawed at and thrown to the ground. There were countless stories of people getting lost and losing track of time and their hold on reality while inside the forest—legends of those who had ventured into these woods and had never returned.
Kai had crouched to the ground and was holding his head in his hands now, muttering curse words and mumbling in Portuguese. Then he began rocking back and forth on his heels, groaning “no” over and over, before falling into a repeated chant of one name: Maribel.
I wondered if it was the same Maribel that Raul had told me about. Raul had said that the undead werelock who’d struck the deal with Lupe had been a member of the Reinoso pack.
Alcaeus’s scent had grown beyond anxious as he observed Kai’s breakdown.
Shit. We’d crash-teleported into the most frightening forest on the planet at night, and our only ride out appeared to be inoperable.
Alcaeus left my side to squat down next to his Beta. “Kai, talk to me. What happened? Was it a vision that threw you off? Was it Maribel? Did you see her?”
“No.” Kai shook his bent head. “It wasn’t a vision of her that pulled us off course. I never see her anymore when I teleport—not once these past ten years have I seen her.”
His voice cracked with emotion, but I couldn’t tell from the way he said it if not seeing her was a misery or a relief to him.
“It was magic,” Kai insisted. “A magnetic force powered by dark magic. I’m pretty certain Gabriel was behind it. He must’ve drawn on the magnetic energy of the forest dead zone to magnify the effect.”
Note to self: Never teleport again.
Kai covered his face with his hands and sobbed, “I can see Maribel’s memories, Al. Her final ones—when she tried to teleport back to the wreckage in Madrid that last time.”
I remembered now that I’d also read stories of people entering this forest and experiencing visions and memories of the deceased, or of recalling detailed memories of past lives, only to forget all but vague recollections once they’d exited the forest.
“I can feel her emotions—her initial sense of panic when she couldn’t control the teleport; the confusion she felt—how inconceivable it all seemed to her at first. Her absolute denial that any of it could possibly be happening to her—she never made mistakes.”
Kai broke down in a fit of sobs again, and Alcaeus put a consoling arm around his friend’s shoulders.
I felt a strong vibration of magic shift the air around me. I knew Alcaeus felt it, too, when his head jerked up from where it had been bent over Kai’s form. Chaos’s heart rate spiked, yet he turned and gave me a casual smile and a “thumbs up” and said, “Don’t worry, he’s totally fine. This is a great breakthrough moment he’s having. Everything’s good.”
“There was no way in Maribel’s mind that Nuriel and Gabe could ever best her,” Kai continued to relay. “The final destruction of the Salvatella pack had been prophesied to come by her hand—she was smarter, more powerful than the Salvatella brothers could ever hope to be, and she knew it.” He shook his head. “She knew it in her last moments that this was all wrong, and she simply couldn’t accept defeat.” He cried out and yanked on his hair, unraveling. “Oh, God, Al, I can feel her desperate scramble to figure out a way to stop it as she felt her body begin its inevitable separation from her spirit—because she’d been caught in the teleport for too long. And me … her thoughts of me when …”
His voice broke as he resumed sobbing, his body curling into a ball on the ground.
I felt my eyes blink with tears as Alcaeus spoke softly to Kai, consoling him. I’d like to say that mine were tears of empathy for Kai and for how he’d obviously suffered over the loss of this Maribel, but it felt more personal than that somehow.
“Kai, man, keep in mind, this place—the spirits here … they do weird things to people’s minds,” Alcaeus told him. Then he turned and whispered to me with a reassuring smile, “He just needs a minute.”
When Kai began growling and clawing at the ground and at himself like a distraught, wounded animal, Alcaeus winced and said, “But, hey, this is all good. You just … go there, man. It’s important to finally work this stuff out … after one hundred and eight years …”
Alcaeus turned to me and said, “Maribel was Kai’s mate.”
My mouth formed an “o,” even as I felt my brows draw together.
Alcaeus must have sensed my confusion, because he explained, “Yes, they were true mates—like you and I are. They even marked one another. But when Maribel died, she couldn’t accept the idea of Kai dying because of her—because of their mate connection. So she found a way to remain in limbo between worlds for ninety-eight years—unbeknownst to Kai and the rest of us—in order to keep Kai alive.”
My mouth fell open. Jesus. Talk about dedication. And for Killjoy Kai?
“No one knew how Kai had managed to survive his true mate’s death. For nearly a century, his survival was an unexplainable anomaly of the werewolf world.”
The ground shook beneath me.
Alcaeus felt it, too, because he muttered, “Fuck,” before quickly continuing to explain for my benefit, “Maribel stole life force from the living and consumed souls of the dead who were on their path to crossing over in order to remain in limbo and absorb more power.”
When another, stronger vibration of magic pulsed over us like a current, Chaos frowned and looked down at Kai, who remained inconsolable. He was behaving more animal than human now.
To me, Alcaeus said, “What Maribel did was an unprecedented phenomenon that breaks every rule of the cosmos and our species, basically. Eventually, she amassed enough power over time and figured out how to communicate with and forge alliances and agreements with members of the living—those who could be bribed or coerced into helping her—in order to hijack a power source strong enough to sever her mate connection to Kai.” The ground shook again. “So that he could live on freely without her. And be miserable.”
He’d spoken the very last part under his breath, but I still caught it. Wow. Again, that seemed like a Herculean effort just to save one guy who was a total pill to be around. Then again, it was just possible Maribel had actually done it for herself—so she wouldn’t have to spend eternity with Killjoy.
“Kai, man, I know this is probably a cathartic, super-important emotional breakthrough moment you’re having here, and as much as I’d love to camp out in a haunted forest with you tonight discussing this shit, I think your Gabe theory is spot on. This was no accident. It was a set-up—because we’re about to be ambushed.”