Chapter Thirty-eight
“My mom and dad hooked up right out of high school,” Helena said as she stared into the flames of the fire her spell had created. There were no plants in this realm, and hence there was nothing to burn. By point of fact, there was nothing to breathe either. Plants produced oxygen. So if it hadn’t been for the fae magic inherent in all fae realms, Helena and Will would have been dead moments after they’d arrived on the plane.
But magic there was, and plenty of it. There was enough that it was easy to funnel into something as simple as a pretend campfire that would last hours. Even her latest spell didn’t drain her enough to dampen her ability to start the fire. That was how much power the fae had.
Helena had been born with many powers, some of which she was only now coming into. She’d been able to move things with her mind since she was a toddler. She’d been able to stop time, or temporarily arrest it anyway, since she was five. She could do simple elemental things like freeze things or set them on fire. And one time she’d been really thirsty, so she’d made herself have more Kool-Aid than her friend. And then she’d felt bad and given her friend more Kool-Aid too. That was one of the times she and her father had been forced to move. Just before he’d died, in fact.
Right now, the conflagration of rocks and sand burned with rainbow colors as Helena gazed into the dancing flickers of light and recalled her childhood. “When I was five, my powers with time started to… show up.” She licked her lips. “A lot of stuff happened. We always moved around. I missed kindergarten, then first grade.” She hesitated. “When I messed with time, I paid for it, but I was so young I couldn’t control it. Not really. One night, I woke up from the Night Terrors and my mom was gone.”
The fire popped, then fizzed, crackling back down into its normal flicker. Will had taken a seat on a rock not far from her, and not knowing what else to do at the moment, they’d begun talking. Eventually he’d asked her about the Night Terrors and her ability to manipulate time. He was more interested in this than anything. So she’d begun sharing.
“Everyone said my mom had run away. They talked about it to each other when they didn’t think I could hear them. But I always could. They said she’d been too young to have kids, that she wanted something different or better than what my dad could give her.”
She stopped talking and bit down on her bottom lip to make it stop shaking. The emotion was still raw, even after all of these years. So she bit down to the point of pain and waited for the trembling of her spirit to pass. She didn’t want Will to see her weakness. For some reason, it meant a lot to her that he find her strong.
When she felt it was safe to speak again, she continued. “I knew it wasn’t true. I knew my mom. And I knew how mom and dad felt about each other.” She shook her head, remembering the frantic fury in her father’s eyes as he’d searched for her. “My dad didn’t believe it either. Not for one second. We both knew she’d been taken.”
She expected Will to ask then, “By who?” But he didn’t. He was quiet. So she looked up at him, wondering if he was even listening.
He was watching her intently, his eyes boring into her from where he sat on the large rock beside the fire. The flames reflected in the color of his verdant, keen gaze and his brow was furrowed with concern. He was listening, all right. Steady and still.
Helena’s gaze dropped to his arms, where his shirt-sleeves had been rolled up to keep them off the fresh brand. She squinted, noticing other lines, new lines, drawn across his skin. “Are those tattoos? Like your cousin’s?” she asked, changing the subject for a moment because she could have sworn Will didn’t have tattoos. She’d seen all of him, after all. Every magnificent inch.
Will looked down, lifting his arms. His expression became troubled as he turned them over. The markings were very faint, as if he’d been inked when he was a child and now they were barely there. But they were visible, all the same. And they looked just like Liam’s.
Will slowly lowered his arms, and his green gaze flashed with that strange light it had shown earlier. It was there only an instant and gone again, and for all she knew it could have just been more firelight reflection. But he straightened on the rock as he rolled down his sleeves and cleared his throat. “It’s not important. Please… tell me what happened with your mother, Helena.”
His tone was quieter, more serious. She could also swear that his words were laced with the slightest hint of an accent now. She had no idea what kind; it was unplaceable to her even though it was impossibly familiar.
First the magic she’d sensed coming off him and the glow in his eyes, now the lines and an accent. I think I might be going nuts, she thought. Could the best sex in the universe do that to a woman? Probably.
Or it was the spells she’d cast and the drugs in her system, not to mention the effects of the Night Terrors, the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything, and that she’d had a few beers hours before.
Or it was all of it combined.
Helena closed her eyes for a moment, shifted on her own stone seat, and ran her hands up and down the legs of her jeans. “We were right. She was taken,” she continued, letting everything else go. “My dad was good at tracking monsters. Like his father, he was a warden all his life. But it still took us two years to find her. By the time we did, she wasn’t my mom anymore.”
The memory was bitter sweet and tasted like metal on her tongue as Helena dredged it up from the bowels of her consciousness and shared it with Will Slate. Her mother had been taken by a vampire and turned. But it wasn’t the vampire that ultimately killed her.
“One of my own Night Terrors had followed me out of my dreams and into the real world two years earlier,” she said, her tone going soft and even, where it was safe from the inflection of emotion. “I was only five and I had no idea what it all meant. Hell, sometimes I still don’t.” She shook her head and closed her eyes, shutting out the crystalline desolation of the realm. “But this monster was the worst of them. I’ve always just called him the Terror. He was a powerful beast, and smart.”
She swallowed hard, barely able to make it past the tightness in her throat this time. “It knew how to get to me. How to punish me for messing with time. It possessed the body of a vampire. That vampire took my mother. And he turned her.”
Silence stretched and she opened her eyes again. They were dry. All of the crying to be done over her past had been done long ago. “My father killed them both.”
But that wasn’t all.
“And then the Night Terror left the vampire’s body and materialized as its own monster. The monster attacked my father. That night, I lost both of my parents. Ashrim raised me from then on out.” She glanced up at Will, meeting his gaze. “That gun your cousin shot you with? It was my dad’s. He was holding it when he died. It was covered in his blood, in my mom’s blood, and in the monster’s blood when my dad pressed it into my hand and told me, ‘Never miss.’” She smiled wryly. “I honestly think that’s why it never does.”
Across from her, Will glanced down at his chest.
“Until now, it would seem,” she said. But then something blossomed inside her, some kind of courage. Or perhaps it was still the truth serum. “Or…” she hazarded, licking her lips before she said what she’d been suspecting for some time now. “It did hit you.”
Will slowly lifted his head, and there it was again. That flash of bright, glowing green in the depths of his gaze. There and gone like lightning. “What are you saying, Helena?” he asked in that soft, serious tone that she found irresistibly sexy.
Helena treaded carefully. She didn’t know why, but she was afraid to breach this subject. “There’s something about you, Will. I can’t put my finger on it. But I feel like I know you from somewhere.” She shook her head. Or from some when.... “You’re more than what you seem,” she tried to explain. But her cheeks were heating and her throat was feeling ever tighter by the second.
It was just that at first glance, Will Slate was kind and compassionate, empathetic and considerate. But sometimes something else broke through, and he was different. A completely separate person. One that was dangerous and powerful. And perhaps a little bit cruel.
When he’d taken her, possessed her on his bed, she’d been completely lost to him in a way that felt blissfully unnatural. It felt more than mortal. It was all-encompassing and wonderful and terrifying. “And there’s that…” she began, her tone lowering to a whisper as she recalled the final thing she’d seen in his eyes before she’d succumbed to a climax that had ripped her heart in two. Something like machinery, a magnificent mechanism of the multiverse, ever ticking, ever recording the eons of endless Time. “S-something in your eyes.” She shook her head. “It’s not human.”
“You’ve got good instincts, Helena,” said an utterly unexpected but familiar voice.
Will and Helena leapt to their feet, and Will at once placed himself between Helena and the newcomer. Liam Slate watched him with cold blue eyes.
Not Liam, thought Helena. Cain.
“Don’t sell the gun short,” he said without looking at her. His gaze bore into his cousin with hard, frozen hatred. “It made its mark all right. It’s just that Will Slate is a man who can’t be killed.” He cocked his head to one side and narrowed his gaze. “Isn’t that right, Cuz?”
Will said nothing. He seemed a monument of silence to Helena in that moment. She couldn’t see his face; his broad back was a wall of mystery until he slightly turned his head to glance back at her over his shoulder, and she caught the flash of glowing green.
“Yeah…” Liam smiled wryly and looked down at the ground. “That’s what I thought.” He seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. No portal had opened. There was no sign of how he’d gotten there. He’d just appeared. And he seemed different somehow. Taller maybe. And was his hair longer than the buzz cut he’d sported before? Now it brushed his shoulders, nearly the length of Will’s.
The crystals and gemstones crunched beneath his boots as he slowly paced a little to the left and lifted his gun hand. It was still her gun he held in his capable grip; that hadn’t changed. But when he casually lifted it to scratch the back of his head with the barrel as if he were thinking, she knew she was right. This wasn’t Liam. No warden in their right mind would play that way with a loaded weapon. Or an unloaded one for that matter.
“Helena, I’m only going to tell you this once,” said Liam. Even his voice had changed. It was still Liam’s, but it was laced with power that made it echo a little and felt like something electric on her skin. “Step around the fire and come to me.” He looked up and met her gaze, binding her in rings of glowing blue. Then he cocked the Magnum and put the barrel to his own temple. “Or cousin number two takes a dirt nap.”