The barn was empty. No howls split the air anymore. Nora wished she could burn it down and collect the insurance money. The house and barn had no place on this earth anymore. It never should have existed in the first place.
Cordelia threatened her mate’s soul when she dared leave. Nora had years of bloodshed on her hands and still, the shifters took her in like it never happened. It was so easy to believe in all the wrong things all her life. She knew she yearned for something else, Walter’s presence in her life more than evidence enough. Yet, it wasn’t until now that she realized what that meant.
Her soul had been tarnished, but beneath that was goodness. It’d been there all along. So had strength.
Nora didn’t bother knocking. Instead, she took the upper hand away from her family and barged in unexpected. Even if they did live in the mountains, they really needed to start locking their doors.
Behind her, Sydney hesitated. Not because she was afraid for her life, but for her job.
“Technically, I’m inviting you inside.”
Sydney seemed to digest Nora’s words. Perhaps it wasn’t to the letter of the law, but it was good enough for both of them, and Sydney stepped over the threshold.
A distant string of curses floated on the air, growing louder with each word until a bald man stood in the hallway. Confusion filled his eyes when he saw Nora. That confusion turned to anger when he noticed the shifters behind her.
“Where’s Cordelia?”
Her cousin and once fellow hunter, Benny, scowled at her. At first, she thought he would reach for a nearby weapon and force them out, but the scowl turned to a smile of victory. Nora’s heart flipped.
“She isn’t here.”
“What do you mean she isn’t here?” Nora snapped.
Benny looked at her with wide eyes, surprised at Nora’s outburst. Gone was the quiet girl who wore sundresses. That person had been a lie, built around the life she thought she could build with Walter. In her place was the real Nora. Her soul screamed for the magic it’d once held and her stomach throbbed from the healing wounds, but she managed to keep her chin up. Defiance was painted over her face. She would overthrow this horrid regime. This version of her was the person she’d been meant to be.
Once her cousin recovered, his surprise fell into a scowl. “Exactly what I said. Your ma isn’t here.”
Nora gagged. “She’s not my mother. She’s a witch and you know it.”
Once again, her cousin was caught off guard. This time, he deigned to agree with her.
Sydney stood in the background, smothering her laughter with her hand. Javier stood beside her, ready to lunge at the hunters Nora once called family if they tried to move even an inch. Her cousin glanced to Javier with worry.
“Are you fucking that?” her jerked his head toward her mate.
Nora wanted to rip his face off at his insinuation, but she held back. “Yeah, I sleep with my mate. If you have any qualms about it, you can talk to the hand you sleep with.”
Nora thought she might have heard Sydney say sick burn behind her hand, but she couldn’t be sure. Still, it made her smile.
“What’s the problem?” Another cousin appeared. His thick hair was tied back, and his dark eyes cast a glare over Nora’s mate and friend as he entered the room. Vance was a brute, but at least he was prettier than her other cousins.
“Cordelia missed a court appointment so we’re here to arrest her.”
Vance didn’t stop glaring, even as she watched him put together the pieces. “You aren’t a cop.”
“Very astute.” Nora nodded. “But, Sydney Jackson back there is a detective. Lead detective on mom’s case, in fact. She broke the law and now it’s coming for her. You guys can either stand by Cordelia’s side and go with her, or you can be good people for once in your lives and help us out.”
“You think you’re on the right side of this?” Benny asked. The vehemence slowly bled out of his voice to be replaced with true confusion. The balding cousin jerked his chin at Javier. “He treats you right?”
Nora nodded. “For a man with no soul, he does better than anyone else could.”
Vance and Benny shared a long look. While they shared an unspoken conversation, Vance’s shoulders remained tight. His eyes slid to Javier. For a moment, Nora thought they might turn on her. If she knew anything, there was a gun somewhere nearby. She started to look for it, mentally turning over the clutter in the house. Anywhere she looked, the hidden gun would be out of her reach. There was no way she could reach it before one of her cousins. Not with the stitches in her stomach.
That’s it!
Nora didn’t want to reveal her weakness, but with Javier and Sydney behind her, she knew she’d be safe. Gripping the bottom of her shirt, she lifted to reveal the wounds that ran across her stomach. While she knew it’d been Javier’s claws that ripped through her skin, she also knew it never would have happened if her mother hadn’t toyed with his mind. It was Cordelia’s manipulations that caused her pain.
Their gazes broke and fell on her revealed wounds. The tension in Vance’s shoulders snapped, his lips parting in horror. Both looked to the shifters standing behind her, but she shook her head.
“Mom did this to me. I let her take what she wanted from me and now that she has it, I’m as good as dead to her.”
She prayed it would be enough. If her cousins continued to stand beside her mother, it would be that much harder to stop this madness. They’d lived with the idea that they were making the world safer, but all they were doing was causing pain.
They had to see it.
Vance sighed, and Benny nodded.
“You’re right,” Benny acknowledged. “It was fun while it lasted, but this is over.”
Both Nora and Vance looked at Benny with disgust. Nora wondered if her mother hadn’t fed on a bit of Benny’s soul when they released the shifters from the barn. While Vance held onto the ideology of what they’d done, Benny had far less reservations and only conceded to avoid going to jail.
“Call the rest of the idiots. Tell them it’s over.” Nora felt a small amount of elation. Her mother’s greed for dark powers had dismantled the hunters from the inside out. None of them wanted to get caught up in the firestorm that would descend upon her once the court found her guilty.
It was nearly over. She could almost breathe. Well, if it weren’t for the stitches in her stomach.
Benny walked away with his cell phone pressed to his ear. While he was gone, Vance turned toward her. He studied the man behind her from head to toe with a scowl on his face.
“Keep it up and I’ll let him eat you,” Nora grumbled.
Vance’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.”
Javier’s lips pulled back from his teeth, but Nora thought she saw something else flash across his eyes. A connection? A lie? “I would like nothing more after being prodded with cow pokers for years.”
Vance swallowed and slowly nodded, color rising over his cheeks. “You’re not wrong.”
Nora moved to put her hands on her hips, a defiant stance that felt like second nature, but the stitches in her stomach made her wince. Javier dropped his angry demeanor and stepped toward her. Vance caught the exchange.
“So, you are… uh, bumping uglies with the monster?”
Nora narrowed her eyes at him. Briefly, she wondered if she could stab him with one of her mother’s silver knickknacks.
“I hope you get a mate of your own someday, Vance.” The words slipped from Nora’s lips like a curse. Would his days forever be filled with a kind of torment that would eventually tear him from this life. “But that might be cruel to someone else.”
“You’re too much like your mother for your own good.”
This time, Nora ignored the pain in her body. It lit like a blazing bonfire when she pulled her fist back. Her knuckles hit cheekbone and Vance reeled back.
Once the moment passed and she huffed for breath, the pain in her stomach threatened to drop her. She wou
ldn’t feel this if she were a shifter. The wounds would be closed, inconsequential in the long run. Instead, they crippled her and sapped her strength.
Javier stepped behind her, as if to pick her up, but she just leaned against him for support. He was the brick wall that kept her standing.
Just then, Sydney’s head snapped up. Her lips parted just as they heard the sound of a dart gun.
Nora threw up her hand. No magic surged to her fingertips. Instead, the needle embedded in her skin. She cried out at the stinging pain. Betrayal made her teeth grind together as she yanked the dart from her hand. The syringe in the dart was still nearly full, but there was enough tranquilizer in them to bring down a cow.
Her body screamed for the power she’d given up. It could have stopped this. With a fragment of her soul and a flick of her hand, she could have kept anyone from getting hurt. Her resolve crumpled as she stared at the pin-prick sized swell of blood on her palm.
Around her, people shouted. Javier pressed Nora into Sydney’s grip before leaping at Benny. Nora shouted. Vance jumped into action. It was a mess of sound and blurry bodies. Nora thought Vance might attack her mate, but she watched her cousin’s blurry form rip the dart gun from Benny’s grip.
Javier held Benny to his chest, arms pressed at his sides. The human man sneered at them. He spat at his own cousin. Vance wiped it off with a sour look.
“You had to go and ruin a good thing,” Benny shouted. “We were doing the world a favor!”
***
Javier wanted to rip the man’s bald head off. The sight of the dart in Nora’s skin had filled him with rage. It twisted him into the monster Cordelia wanted him to be. The urge to hear the man’s screams fill the air, to turn, bend and break his body was overwhelming.
Somehow, Javier held onto himself. He gently passed his mate to Sydney before jumping on the bald man. Instead of hurting him or killing him, Javier restrained him. It took everything he had not to squeeze until he could no longer breathe. The only thing that stopped him was the sight of Nora, slowly sinking toward the floor with her lips parted in a confused look.
The other hunter tore the gun away from his cousin’s grip and tossed it across the room with a glare. Javier had thought he would be the problem, especially after the way Javier stalked him through Fangway. The man with the long, dark hair had seemed intent on seeing shifters as nothing more than pests to be exterminated. His help was surprising.
“The hell is wrong with you?” Vance shouted at his fellow hunter.
Javier looked to his mate again, checking on her. She’d managed to remove the tranquilizer dart, but not before some of it entered her system. His mate had wanted to stand tall as they took her mother in, but now the drug filtered through her system. Javier swallowed back his anger and told himself it would at least diminish her pain.
He squeezed the bald man before leaning to whisper into his ear. “Where is the witch?”
The bald man wriggled in his grip, but there was no chance he could break it. Distantly, he heard the jingle of cuffs. Sydney stepped up to him and touched his arm. She couldn’t order him to do anything. She was below him, a pup.
The bald man wheezed. He couldn’t breathe. He could barely fight. Still, he refused to talk, so Javier squeezed tighter. It was the least he deserved. Something cracked beneath his grip.
Sydney shouted, bringing them all back to the present. Javier’s grip loosened, as if burned by what he’d been doing. The bald man wheezed. Sydney jerked him free of Javier’s grasp, spun him around, and wrangled his wrists into cuffs.
“I just witnessed an aggravated assault. You’re going to have a ride to the station with me.”
The man struggled to breathe. Javier had cracked one of his ribs. Any further, and the rib could have punctured his lung. Would his mate have forgiven him if he killed one of her relatives? Sure, they were hunters, but they were also her blood. Javier might have had a part of his soul back, but he was unpredictable under the sway of the emotions it offered. They pushed and pulled him like crashing waves.
Sooner or later, they would drag him under if he didn’t find a way to settle them.
A hand touched his arm, begetting a snarl from Javier’s lips. Vance flinched, but didn’t move.
“He deserved what you did. Benny is a moron and I hope, for the world’s sake, that he gets a few years behind bars for this.”
Sydney ushered Benny out the door. In his weakened state, it was nothing for the shifter to push him around. Though, this meant the back seat of the SUV would be occupied. Sydney would not want to put anyone in the back with him.
“If you wait a couple of hours, Cordelia will be back. She’s out… doing whatever it is she does. Probably preparing for doomsday if she missed her court date.” Vance offered what could have passed as honesty in his eyes.
Javier could not trust the man, but his mate was slowly falling unconscious and they had no way of getting off the blasted mountain. Javier hated driving in the mountains back home, and he hated driving in them here. The only thing he could trust were his own four feet.
In the end, Javier nodded and lifted his mate’s head to sit beneath her. He would be there when she woke back in this nightmare. Hopefully, that would be long before Cordelia arrived. He would force the witch to give back what she stole from his mate. Nora worked so hard to try to make him whole again. It was only right of him to give that back.
Chapter Fourteen
“You haven’t killed me yet,” Vance acknowledged from the other side of the room.
Javier shrugged. Once, there’d been a burning desire to snap the man’s neck and leave him for dead, but now… Things had changed. Javier rubbed his chest with his knuckles. He pressed, wondering if things had changed because more of his soul had returned. When he looked at Vance now, he saw nothing more than a mislead man.
“I don’t need to.”
Vance grunted. “If I were you and I suffered through the shit we put you through, I would have ripped my head off by now.”
“Consider this your lucky day then.”
Vance nodded, his face pale. He handed Javier a coiled rope, still damp and crusted with salt. Javier knew he’d made the right choice when Vance gave up Cordelia’s weaknesses. It’d taken no convincing on his part. Vance simply watched the way Javier held Nora and blurted everything.
“You actually love her. It wasn’t a ploy to escape.” Vance looked between Javier and Nora.
Javier’s fingers brushed the stray tendrils of Nora’s hair away from her face. Her freckles looked dark against her wan and nearly transparent skin. He let his fingers trail down her cheek to reason in the space between her neck and chest. There, beneath his thumb was the steady pulse that reminded him she was still alive.
“Why are you digging?”
“Because, my entire life, I’ve been told you people are conniving monsters that eat human flesh. Seeing you…” Vance gestured to the tender way Javier touched his mate. “Well, you’ve blown my world out of the water.”
Good, Javier thought. There was a chance some of the hunters could turn around and live normal lives. They could go on to be simple people with simple jobs. He hoped their pasts gave them nightmares the same way it gave him nightmares. No one would forget what happened here. There was no way to rid one’s self of a torment like that.
Javier opened his mouth to say something he might regret when he caught the sound of tires against gravel outside. He shot to his feet, putting himself between Nora and the door.
The witch’s voice assaulted the front door, signaling her arrival. Javier’s head perked up. He looked to the man that’d been an enemy only hours ago. Vance nodded, his cheeks devoid of color.
With Nora’s head cradled in Javier’s lap, he’d almost fallen asleep. Glancing down, he found Nora still unconscious. Gently, he tried to rouse her, but the grip of the tranquilizer was just too strong.
What felt like hours ago, they’d devised a plan. Every monster had a weakness; Cordeli
a’s was salt. It was a natural blocker of magic, Javier recognized. It worked against any spell-weaver. Vance, leaning in the hallway with his arms over his chest, looked up at the same time. Their eyes met.
The witch was home.
Javier’s hands curled into fists. Would the world miss her if he tore her limb from limb? Would the human man fight him? He swallowed and fought against the urges. They would make the world safer, but at what cost? A glance at the woman in his lap told him it was too high.
He would have to let the human law take care of Cordelia. But, not until Javier and Vance did their work first. It was strange, to work with a man who’d been an enemy for so long. The human hunter clearly did not like anything about magic in this world. He seemed to hate every ounce of it and considered the world better without it.
After what Javier went through, he didn’t blame the man. Still, not everyone with magic was out to hurt. Humans hurt all the time, if the den was any example. The ability to hurt did not change with the addition of magic.
Javier eased out from beneath Nora’s head, gently setting her onto the bench before bending to pick up the rope at his feet. It was crusted with dried salt, crunching in his hands. It was the only thing, Vance assured him, that would stop Cordelia from pulling on her magic.
The door swung open and the men attacked. Javier swung the rope around Cordelia’s middle and twisted it. Her arms snapped to her sides, the stuff in her hands falling to the floor. Objects rolled out of the paper bags to hit the wall opposite them. Vance lifted the bag of salt at his feet and poured a circle around Cordelia.
All the while, she glared at Vance. She’d noted his betrayal and marked it with a promise of vengeance. Javier should have feared the look in her eyes. If he’d been in possession of a full soul, it would have shaken him. With only a portion of it and the pack far away, Javier was empty enough to remain impartial.
If they succeeded, Vance would have no need to fear her vengeance.
Javier Page 10
