Moment of Truth

by Edwards, Hailey

  “Yeah,” I croaked. “We can pull energy from Midas when we run low.” I wet my lips. “He says the reverse is true. That we can feed power into him too.” Might as well tell them the whole truth. “He told me the symbiosis of our bond will allow Midas to live for as long as we do.”

  Eyebrows arching, Linus asked, “How long will that be?”

  “Oh, you know.” I swallowed. “Forever.”

  “Interesting.” Linus tapped his steepled fingers against his lips. “Shades are already dead, so it stands to reason they could linger for an interminable amount of time, assuming they fed regularly, but an immortal necromancer is unprecedented.”

  “Yay me.”

  “So little is known about your condition, and less is understood about the modifications I’ve made to you. I’m sorry, but the best I can do for Midas, if Ambrose is right, is tattoo protective sigils on him as well.” His tone went soft. “We can’t afford Ambrose learning to use that link to take control of Midas.”

  “There’s no bargain between them,” I protested. “He can’t do that.”

  “Midas accepted you,” Linus said quietly. “Ambrose is a part of you. Ambrose might only need that bit of gray area to manipulate Midas the way he controlled you prior to your tattoos.”

  The shadow on the wall shook his head and mimed shoving his hands into his pockets.

  I wanted to believe him, so much, but I couldn’t gamble Midas’s life away on hope.

  “The power transfer could give you enough energy to finish the wards?”

  “Come again?” I whipped my head toward Midas. “Now who’s talking crazy?”

  “This bond doesn’t have to be a bad thing.” He lifted his head. “It gives me an opportunity to help you.”

  Expecting fear or revulsion from my big news, I received only absolute acceptance and staunch support.

  Goddess, what had I ever done to deserve him?

  “It might also get you killed.” I wanted to strangle him for thinking it. “We have no idea how it works.”

  A prickle slid down my arm, and I turned my head to find Ambrose’s hand on my shoulder.

  “There’s another way.” I withdrew. “Ambrose can feed, and it will give him energy to finish the job.”

  There was a veritable smorgasbord of coven members to choose from, a buffet of tantalizing powers.

  A wave of nausea crested within me, and I was certain as the moonrise Ambrose had given me the idea.

  “Never mind.” I clamped a hand over my mouth. “Forget I said that.”

  Sympathy softened the harsh lines of Linus’s face as he came to his own conclusion about my outburst.

  “The pack bond connects more than you and me,” Midas said slowly, as if thinking it through. “It also links you to Mom and the rest of the pack. I wonder if you could draw on them through me? I was born in, and my alpha is a blood relative. I’m the better conduit in that scenario.”

  Jaw smacking my chest, I croaked, “You expect me to endanger not only you but the entire pack?”

  “If you spread the draw across that many lives, the impact will be minimal.” Linus kept his expression as neutral as I had ever seen it. “That’s the safest option available to us, unless you consent to a contractor. I have a trusted coven on retainer. They can be there within two hours.”

  Within two hours, if I did as Midas suggested, I could be finished. The whole building, and all its occupants, were in the coven’s crosshairs. It was my fault for using the Faraday as an extension of the OPA’s HQ. I had fallen into the habit a little at a time, as I interacted more with enforcers, but I shouldn’t have let those lines blur.

  Waving away the offer, I made my choice. “I’ll try again.”

  “You’ll kill yourself,” Midas growled. “You’re not strong enough to handle this alone.”

  I palmed the phone’s screen, unable to look at Linus, and it was all the mistake I had to make for Midas to hit the ceiling.

  “Linus is your friend, Hadley. He’s not going to write you off because you asked for help one time. He’s not going to flunk you. This is not a test. This is your life. You have to take better care of it. If not for your sake, then for mine.” He gripped my upper arms. “What would I do without you?”

  “The bond Hadley described,” Linus interrupted, “leads me to believe her death would end your life.”

  Trembling, I ripped my hand away from the phone as if it had burned me. “But Ambrose said—”

  “In our final moments, we struggle to survive at any cost. Are you strong enough to die without a fight?” The words stung, but he only spoke the truth. “The instant you enter that battle, the moment you choose to live, you’ll consume whatever it takes to make that happen. From Midas.”

  “A life for a life,” I murmured through numb lips and shrugged off Ambrose’s touch.

  The shadow melted into my shape then slid onto the floor in a dejected puddle.

  That’s what Ambrose meant when he said Midas could live as long as we did, and I had misunderstood. I might have even chosen to misunderstand, the alternative too horrifying to contemplate.

  I wasn’t only risking Midas’s heart when I endangered myself, but his life too. I didn’t have a suicide wish. Far from it. But I also didn’t have a problem throwing myself at problems until I solved them or gave myself a concussion, or both.

  This changed…everything.

  Fear, doubt, and worry speared my chest, piercing me, paralyzing me on the spot.

  To hold that much power over another person was terrifying.

  “Make your calls,” I told Linus without hesitation. “We need people here as fast as possible.”

  Midas stepped back. “Hadley?”

  “I’m not going to risk your life.” I tossed the covers off me. “Not when there’s another way.”

  “We don’t know how much time we have—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You can’t put my life above the lives of everyone in this building.”

  I swung my legs over the edge of the bed then glanced back at him. “Watch me.”

  Seven

  Within the hour, Linus had called in his marker to a coven of tactical witches, Ford had been volunteered to pick them up in his warded truck, and I sidelined myself to watch onscreen with Bishop as Ford played cabbie right under the coven’s nose.

  It took him two trips, the witches packed in the bed like sardines, but he delivered thirteen imposing women to the underground parking garage. Safe from aerial magical assaults, dressed in black tactical gear that made identifying them as the good guys easy, they unloaded their warding supplies.

  The wards would cost us time to build, but the witchborn fae coven would waste more time unraveling them bit by bit.

  “There you are.” Midas nudged a drooping fern frond out of his way. “Are you hiding?”

  Leave it to Bishop to tattle on me for escaping the room for a breather.

  The traitor.

  “Why would you think that?” I straightened from my hunch. “Just because I’m standing in a dark corner behind a few tall plants?”

  He saw too much, as usual, and I loved him for it. I got skilled at conning Boaz over the years, as all little sisters do, but it was different with Midas. He might as well have one of the coven’s X-ray frames. He saw me, saw through me, that clearly.

  Softly, as if his concern might spook me, he murmured, “It’s okay to need a moment.”

  “I can need a moment later.”

  “There never seems to be a later with us.”

  All the good intentions in the world meant nothing if we didn’t make time for one another.

  The world could really do us a solid by not catching fire every time we tried for a date night.

  “You’re right.” I linked my fingers at my navel. “I’m sorry I sprung the Ambrose thing on you.”

  “You wanted to wait for the right moment to explain it to me.” He eased closer. “I get that.”

  “I
could have handled it better.”

  Unraveling my tangled fingers, he took my hands. “Do you know why I proposed to you when I did?”

  “Your mom threatened to beat you up if you didn’t make an honest woman out of me?”

  “I wanted the timing to be perfect. I wanted everything just right. I wanted to sweep you off your feet.”

  “Well, mission accomplished.” I flashed my ring at him. “I’m a very happy girl, if you can’t tell.”

  “I can tell, and that helped me come to an important decision.”

  “You can’t have the ring back.” I tucked my hand against my chest. “It’s mine. No refunds or exchanges.”

  “The point I’m trying to make,” he soldiered on, “is we don’t have the luxury of perfection. We gave that up when we decided to be leaders. We sacrifice for our people, and that starts at home, with us. You and I will always pay the most for the choices we’ve made that brought us here.”

  “You’re making me nervous, Stud.”

  “We have to stop waiting,” he said patiently, one eye twitching at the nickname. “We have to be willing to live our lives, even if it’s in the eye of a hurricane.”

  Leaning into him, I wrapped my arms around his waist. “I like that.”

  Heavy bootsteps thumped in our direction, coming straight for us.

  “Oh, hey.” Ford skidded to a halt as he spotted me. “Everyone’s looking for you.”

  “Yeah.” I mashed my face into Midas’s shirt. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Noticing our embrace, Ford took a step back. “I’m not interrupting something, am I?”

  “No.” I forced myself to let go of Midas. “We’re done here.”

  As tempting as it was to plunge my head into potting soil, I couldn’t go ostrich in front of witnesses.

  “Oh, hey.” Lisbeth smacked into Ford’s back. “Everyone’s looking for you guys.”

  Craning my neck, I cupped my ear. “Is there an echo in here?”

  “You’re one to talk.” She poked me in the arm. “You and Midas finish each other’s sentences.”

  “I have thoughts, I start to voice them, and then she finishes for me with her opinion,” Midas clarified. “It’s not finishing my sentences so much as tweaking them until I’m saying what she wants to hear.”

  “Huh.” Lisbeth considered him. “You know what? You’re absolutely right.”

  Ignoring them both, I turned to Ford, who had yet to insult me. “Who, exactly, is looking for us?”

  “Bishop mostly,” he admitted, “but Linus is still on the phone with him.”

  “Two of the witches are done with their rooms,” Lisbeth informed us. “They don’t look so hot, but Abbott says it’s a consequence of them burning through so much magic so fast.”

  “They can crash at our place.” I checked with Midas, who was already nodding. “They’ll be safe there.”

  “I’ll let them know.” Ford rubbed his stomach. “I’ve got some volunteers cooking meals for them.”

  “Thanks.” I shut my eyes for a beat. “I should have thought of that.”

  Instead, I had been focused on next steps, and hospitality for the coven hadn’t crossed my mind.

  “You’re one woman.” Lisbeth bumped my hip with hers. “You can’t think of everything.”

  “That’s why you’ve got us.” Ford slung an arm around her shoulders. “It’s a team effort.”

  Given Linus’s endorsement, I’d pegged the witches for heavy hitters who would stroll in, set the wards, then bail. I hadn’t considered they might have earned his approval by scoring average in skill but above average in integrity. A rookie mistake, given how well I knew Linus and how he valued effort above talent.

  Lisbeth’s report highlighted the witches were relying on strength in numbers to get the job done, spreading the load across their members, but it was still draining practitioners lower on the spectrum if they were burning out in ones and twos instead of all together.

  A big heart did not a big gift make, and I should have remembered and respected the difference.

  They were the ones doing me a favor, after all. I should have taken better care of them without prompting. I was learning, slowly, to trust my friends and my team to pick up the slack for me.

  I wasn’t Superwoman, Wonder Woman, or any other superheroine.

  I was just me, and I was doing my best.

  It was all I requested from those around me, and it had to be enough for me too.

  “Thanks, guys.”

  Lisbeth guided me to Bishop, who had gone back to stalking the witchborn fae coven via drone. He could have delegated, but he didn’t share his toys well. As I entered the room, he piloted past a pinkish lightning bolt of power, his wild laughter enough to earn him wary stares from the enforcers positioned along the back wall.

  Thumping his ear, I got his attention. “Did you need something, or did you just want an audience?”

  “Kid, we got problems.”

  “That ought to be the OPA’s slogan.” I heaved a sigh. “What now?”

  “The witchborn fae are getting twitchy as the wards go up, which is a good thing. It means they’re scrambling to counter now that their magic spyglasses aren’t working. It gives us breathing room to figure a way out of this mess.”

  Experience told me there was more, and worse, news he was building up to sharing. “Okay?”

  “There are twice as many coven members on the rooftops as there were at dusk.”

  As much as I wanted to scream, throw a punch, or kick a hole in the wall, I held myself together.

  “Okay,” I repeated myself, taking control of the word. “We expected a negative response.”

  A politically neutral phrase for what meant lose their ever-loving minds.

  “The wards haven’t been up long enough for that.” He grimaced. “This was already in the works.”

  A shiver of unease left chill bumps dotting my arms as the bad news kept coming.

  “They’ve located Liz.” Midas set his jaw. “This is their strike force.”

  “I should have thrown up the wards myself,” I growled. “I shouldn’t have wasted so much time.”

  Fear for Midas had forced me to take a step back, and I couldn’t swallow past the hard lump clogging my throat. Guilt pricked my conscience for putting him first, but I would do it all over again to protect him.

  Goddess, what a mess I had made of things.

  “You blacked out after your first effort, when you were freshest,” Linus said, his voice tinny in my ears. “Your apartment is one quarter the size of the infirmary, and the holding cells are twice its size. Even if we kept Ambrose fed, we can safely assume your endurance would degrade more with each effort. I estimate you would require an hour—likely two or three—recovery time between each ward.”

  “Using the witches got the job done,” Bishop agreed. “It also saved your strength for what comes next.”

  “That sounds encouraging.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Hit me.”

  “I don’t hit girls,” he teased, but I wasn’t in the mood and didn’t rise to his bait. “Think, kid. We’ve turned this city upside down for weeks searching for the coven’s base of operations and come up empty. Where are the reinforcements coming from?”

  “The archive,” I realized. “They’re pulling the troops as needed through the portal and into Atlanta.”

  Midas’s lips flattened into a hard line. “That gives them an endless supply.”

  “We’ve got to take out the archive, or they’re going to keep coming until their numbers are too great for us to defend against, let alone defeat.” Bishop shifted in his chair to face us. “As much as I hate to say it, the archive must be our priority. Not the Faraday. The city must come first.”

  Already shaking my head, I took a step away from him. “The tenants—”

  “You’re not thinking big enough.” Bishop rocked back and forth. “Do you believe the coven would bring a whole army here for one retrieval?
Even if Liz is a vital asset, ask yourself if this baby of hers is worth the trouble.”

  “You think they meant us to overhear the child price talk?” I leaned my hip against the wall. “To focus us on defending the right while they dart in on the unguarded left?”

  “We don’t know what they want.” Midas rubbed a hand over his scalp. “Their attacks are scattershot.”

  The coven was gunning for Tisdale and her pack, but their hatred for wargs was well-documented too. It made sense to target shifter groups. They represented the biggest predators in the city with the highest populations.

  Aside from the OPA, the packs were the strongest deterrent against any new faction moving in and deciding they wanted the whole pie instead of one slice.

  “You’re trying to fit a puzzle together without all the pieces.” Bishop nudged the toe of my shoe with his boot to get me to focus. “Start with the border first. It’s the easiest part.”

  “They want Liz. Unharmed.” I tried it his way, keeping it simple. “Otherwise, we’d be under attack.”

  “When the time comes,” Midas added, “they’ll count on brute magical force to take what they want.”

  “And…” I circled us back to Bishop’s advice, “…until we know otherwise, we’ll strategize like it’s Liz.”

  Despite their previous claims, the coven had bigger designs on Atlanta than me.

  But maybe they had been targeting me, drawing me in, distracting me, this whole time.

  Sure, the coven could do a lot of damage if they killed me and added me to their closet, but it got me thinking the only reason they would need me to facilitate a peaceful transition was if they planned on relocating to Atlanta en masse.

  The coven hadn’t been twiddling their thumbs since our last encounter. They had tried and failed to wrest control of the city from me, so they were taking it. And I had done what they wanted, focused on the right hand while the left slapped me into next week.

  “We need eyes on the warehouse in Buckhead.” I checked with Bishop. “Can the drones handle it?”

  “Not from this distance.” He kicked his legs out in front of him. “Their range isn’t that good.”

  “How do we get out?” I chewed on my bottom lip. “We can’t risk sending Ford on another errand.”