by Jayla Kane
“Well, that’s basically true,” I told him, and shrugged. The coffee felt good, something to warm me up while I thought about having to leave Baby behind again; I’ll never be able to explain how difficult it was to do that, even though I hated getting between her and her sisters. It hurt to walk away when I knew she was so damn unhappy.
“I declared war on the Guild, Hunter,” Tristan said, drawing me back to the moment. “I’m not sure you understand exactly what that means—”
“Seems pretty clear,” I said, giving him a look. He interpreted it correctly and tried again.
“I can’t let them kill her,” he said abruptly. His voice was rough with buried emotions, the words simple. He met my eyes straight on. “That’s the first thing they’ll do. They’ll bait her—her temper will make it easy, and with two sisters and her mother to protect they’ve got plenty of options to draw her out. They’ll murder her, then they’ll probably kill Jake next. They won’t be able to keep him in Darry--his power might be able to rip a hole in the cells, even the deeper ones; I can’t tell if he’s a conduit or a source, but either way he’s too strong for them to chance it. They’ll save his DNA though,” Hunter went on, his face blank, all the horror he described etched in the layers of his voice, a voice he kept from wavering, somehow. “They’ll use it to make newer versions of him, maybe chimeras, blends with captured werewolves, sirens, something they think will give them an edge but can be manipulated through loyalty or appetites.” My canines were starting to elongate. I took a deep breath. “They’ll recruit Morgan. He’s been away from us, and without the book and… And sex with an Ashwood descendant, he can be used for breeding.” Breeding. “They’ll kill him later. Same with Molly, and the other girls. Baby they might marry out, because she’s still single, but Raven they’ll breed, then kill, and Molly, if she has—”
The coffee cup I was holding shattered in my hand.
He didn’t even flinch, his eyes burning in to mine. “If Molly has the same parents you do, they might not even chance breeding her, Hunter,” he said evenly. “They might just kill her. Not take any unnecessary chances.”
She doesn’t have the same parents; Molly is my half-sister. I was there when Stacy gave birth to her. But she still has the half that carries the curse, the Black name, the name of our father.
Same with Molly, and the other girls.
They might just kill her…
Because she’s still single…
“Does Baby have a better chance if I stay away from her?” I couldn’t look at him when I asked, but I saw his movement shift slightly in the periphery of my vision.
“No,” he said softly. “Not in the way you mean. Not in any way that matters.” Tristan sharply inhaled. “In fact, I’d say she’s safer staying close to you. We’re all better off staying close to one another.”
“Can y’all come here?”
“It’s not a good idea,” Tristan said, shaking his head. “Not all of the wolves are going to be excited about an influx of witches, and some of them might go whisper about us at the edge of the woods. If they’re besieged by too many they’ll have to hand us over, and if they didn’t, I couldn’t live with what our enemies would do to them.” He met my gaze again, both of us ignoring the cooling puddle of coffee mixing with my blood in the middle of the table. “I suspect you couldn’t either.”
It was a good read. I sighed, leaned away from the table and found a rag to clean up with. At least my claws hadn’t cut through my knuckles; my canines had receded almost instantly. Progress, I guess. When I sat down again I gave him an assessing look; he didn’t even blink.
“Is all this happening because you declared war on the Guild?”
“I could have murdered Leo,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “That would have given us a little more time, but then they would have investigated. They would have come eventually.” He didn’t say it, but Zelle basically sent them a telegram when she set the forest on fire. I guess… If we looked far enough back, maybe we never had a chance. Maybe the Rose, decades ago, decided it was time to declare war on the Guild and chose to do it like this, setting a couple wheels in motion that resulted in… Me. And Tristan, Baby, Jake—all of us, for all we knew.
Which was mostly nothing.
“Where the fuck were you?” I stared at him, my jaw grinding. “You couldn’t have shown up half a fucking minute before Jake signed that goddamn book—”
“I came as soon as I could,” Tristan said, the first and only flash of anger appearing in his voice, but it was gone when he spoke after a tense pause. “I have—had—an arrangement with the Guild. I knew Jake was eighteen, knew he was graduating from high school, but Leo said…” He shook his head, then stared at something out of the window, his face grim. “Leo said even if the two of them ended up at the Institute together, even if they ended up in that stupid Society together, there was no way…” He clenched his eyes shut, the shadows around him snapping up the light that poured in from the bright day outside; it was fascinating and creepy as hell to watch. “I found out they were both going to the Institute, and I came as soon as I could. I understood… I knew. Leo just didn’t know. He couldn’t.”
“You could have fucking called—”
“No,” Tristan said with a finality that made my nostrils flare and my blood pressure rise. “No, I couldn’t have.”
“One day you’re going to tell me that fucking story, Tristan Warfield.”
“No,” he said, leaning towards me. His eyes were bright in the dark hollow of his face. I heard myself growl instinctively as my body reacted to the magic embedded in him, the predator he allowed himself to reveal. “No, I will not.”
We stared each other down for a good long minute in the strong sunlight, the shadows swarming around us and my claws cracking through my skin. He got ahold of himself first, and I jumped when he abruptly turned his head towards the light coming in from the window and the shadows slid away, like water running off a duck’s back. It was fucking eerie. In another moment, my claws retracted, and I watched his shoulders slump; we were both as much at ease as we could be, given who we were. His voice was quiet when he spoke. “I’ll tell my brother. One day. But I’m not telling anyone else.”
Alright. Fair enough, I thought. “You fucking better. He’s the one that lost all that time. He’s the one trying to rebuild a life with Raven.”
Tristan watched a late lark flit from pine to pine, his eyes growing dull, the shadows making his skin look almost grey. “I know.” We were both silent, watching the bird move back and forth in the bright winter sky, for a long time.
“So what the hell’s the plan? I’m supposed to be the escape route, kinda?” I was ready to stop kicking him; I liked Tristan generally, a hell of a lot more than I expected to, and certainly more than I wanted to at the moment. I knew there was some truth in what he said, even if I didn’t like that any better. Jake’s powers were always there, dormant, if what the Rose said to Baby was true. If he hadn’t been able to tap into them, they might have done something to him, something bad. And if he was never able to be with Raven… My heart took flight at that thought, at the idea that it would be possible to love someone that much, for that long, and never be able to touch them. Never even be able to say a kind word. Baby’s perfect face, imprinted forever on the forefront of my mind, appeared and vanished in the space of a heartbeat. If the magic in Jake hadn’t eventually killed him, the heartbreak would’ve, whether he knew it or not. I knew it like I knew my own name.
Is that what would happen to me, I couldn’t help but wonder, if I never told her how I…
“Of sorts,” Tristan said, and for the first time he gave me a good, hard look. The kind of look I used to get from coaches, back when I lead a very different life. “You have a lot of scars.”
“Mmm.” Whatever.
“Have you trained? Or just pick-ups, brawling, fist-fights? What?”
I eyed him. “Why?”
“Why do you think?�
� He gave me the smallest hint of a smile, and the shock of his sarcasm made me smile back the same way. “We need to train, like I said. All of us. Everyone.”
“Well, I’m not sure about all that, but I have some experience, I guess.” Not with magic, though. If there were more monsters like me out there, I wasn’t sure how that would end. “Do warlocks fist-fight?”
Tristan snorted a laugh. “Sometimes. If there’s enough tequila at the party.”
“Did you just make a joke?” I couldn’t help the surprised grin that slid across my mouth, and he gave me a full smile in return. It looked like something he needed to practice, like his face had forgotten how to do it, but I could suddenly see the resemblance to Jake. They actually looked a lot alike; it just didn’t seem that way because Tristan… Tristan was Tristan, and had lived whatever hellish life he’d lived, and Jake just enjoyed causing hell for other people.
“Warlocks typically use a combination of hand-to-hand called Mrveka and their elemental talents during a fight.” He shrugged at the look on my face. “It’s Babylonian. Anyway. We should all start training in a more disciplined way, especially since none of us were raised to use our powers and they are, without a doubt, significantly more dangerous than any other witch’s alive.”
“I’m game,” I told him, and he nodded. “Are you expecting a real attack?”
“It’d be stupid for them to come to the house,” he said, worrying his lip for a moment as he studied the tabletop between us, his thoughts far away. “It’d be smarter to pick us off, one by one, while we tried to live our normal lives.” I snorted again, and he glanced up at me. “The girls are going to want to keep going to school. Even Jake is unlikely to want to stop attending college if it means Raven will go without him. At the very least, everyone should be moving in pairs.”
“Molly—”
“Molly and Baby are going to have to start going to school together,” Tristan said, his eyebrows low. “I know they’re in different grades. I doubt the Guild—or whoever they recruit—has the power to infiltrate their school and isolate one of them, at least at this stage.” He sighed. “Soon enough, we’ll have to address the fact that they’ll do anything to get at us, and deal with it.”
“Molly loves school,” I muttered, my heart seizing. I didn’t want to take that away from my little sister. She had all these geeky little friends, this whole life that had nothing to do with how shitty our home had been. I didn’t want any of that to change; it seemed so fucking unfair. Like she hadn’t missed out on enough already, Jesus.
“We might… We might be able to arrange a truce,” Tristan said carefully, and I narrowed my eyes at him; I realized this was all a lead-in, that he’d been working towards this revelation the whole time. He really was a Warfield after all. His manipulations just looked a hell of a lot less vicious than Jake’s.
“How?” I crossed my arms over my chest and prepared myself.
“I’m not sure yet, honestly,” he said, considering my reaction, and I could tell it was the truth.
“Alright,” I said slowly, staring at the shadows that crept around the corners of his mouth, the way they clung to his throat like a collar. As soon as he was comfortable where he was and uncomfortable with what was on his mind, they started seeping out of him, curling around him like a mist.
“I think, in the end, people will die,” he said quietly. “Probably a good number of them.”
“Alright,” I said again, watching him closely. His face didn’t give a lot away, but I was starting to recognize some of his tells. “As long as its none of ours.”
He turned and watched that bird again through the window, the shadows on him growing longer, darker, the tendrils rippling in the air around him. “Some of us will die,” he said finally. “But for everyone who does, Baby will be our priority,” he told me solemnly, with an air of finality that told me he’d thought about this a hell of a lot. His strange eyes met mine, the darkness around them making that odd color almost electrically bright, like stars on a night with no moon. “That’s your job, Hunter. Baby is our top priority, because we can make sure through her that everyone will survive, even if it means pretending everyone is still dead.” I knew the rules of that game pretty well.
And it was easy enough to say yes to protecting her. “Done.” As if that weren’t right on the top of my list anyway. But when his face didn’t change, the shadows didn’t recede, I knew it wasn’t over. “What else?” He didn’t turn his head. “Tristan. What is it?”
“They’ll want me, in exchange,” he said quietly. “They’ll want me back at Darry, in exchange for a truce with us.” I could tell there was more, but he wouldn’t say what it was. And from the set of his mouth there was a good chance I didn’t really want to know.
Darry was the prison. Back at—did that mean that he—“You want us to break you out?” How the fuck would that work, exactly? Would my powers allow it?
“No,” he said, his eyes blazing into mine out of his disappearing face. “No. Absolutely not.” There was an air of finality to his declaration I didn’t want to question. He took a deep breath and the shadows abruptly vanished, and then there he was, watching a bird out of the window, like nothing was going on at all. “There’s a chance, by the time this all comes to pass, I’ll be dead anyway—really dead, dead in a way Baby can’t fix. But if I’m not—”
“I thought death was your power?” I stared at him. “I thought you couldn’t die?”
“I can’t be killed.” He corrected me without glancing over. “No. But if enough time passes… There’s a chance I’ll die, and we’ll have to make a plan for that.”
“Okay,” I said, still not following. “But if you don’t die—”
“If I don’t die, if not enough time passes, and we have to fight it out with them—if we have a chance at a truce, a real one, and the price is my… My surrender…” He swallowed, then met my gaze again. “Then I need you to do something for me, Hunter. You’re the only one who can, I think.”
“Okay,” I said, frowning. There was a single shadow creeping over his face this time, the tendril almost a caress that cradled his scarred cheek; while I watched, it vanished into nothing when he rubbed a hand over his face, as if he were suddenly exhausted. Tristan’s eyes met mine, his mouth set in a hard line.
“I need you to kill me.”
Chapter Three
Baby
I got the message that Miss Molly and I were supposed to be new besties and just—just—managed not to roll my eyes. I liked the kid, don’t get me wrong. She’s a sweetie. What’s not to like?
But let’s be real about this. I’m dealing with some shit, and I was never nice. I am not ‘a sweetie.’ There’s a lot not to like about me, and that was before I staved off my nervous breakdown by dyeing my hair with box bleach.
Molly was even nice about that.
At least I got to drive to school now. I didn’t need to think of ways to convince Rae she mattered; she had Jake to do that these days, and bizarrely enough, he seemed to be good at it. I had been through enough shit that even Zelle had to admit I might be tough enough to survive for a full day without texting her constantly. And given what exactly it was I’d been through, Charlie felt guilty enough not to go a full day without texting me.
So there were some upsides to being kidnapped by witches and raped in a medieval jail cell, I guess.
See what I mean? Weird shit like that kept creeping into my brain all the time. I mean, I was always sarcastic, but I’m like… Resilient. I don’t let things get to me. None of the bullshit matters, it never has, and I’m kind of immune… Except now I’m kind of not.
I’m constantly walking on eggshells around myself.
And I can only push things so far—I can only be but so independent, or so bitchy, or so whatever before the balance in our family tips too much and something goes wrong; I can only be myself, freaking the fuck out, for a minute or two before I know Raven might read my damn mind and get completely
wigged or Zella might stop believing me when I tell her I don’t care about mom not coming home when this happened to me or Charlie might stop coming home altogether. I have to hold it down. It’s what I’ve always done, in one weird way or another. I’m not one of the puzzle pieces, I’m the frame.
But not right now. Not like I was.
“Thanks for the ride,” Molly said the first morning we drove to school together, the day after our weird-ass club met for the first time and I finally got to see Hunter again. It was too short, the more I thought about it. It barely counted. I couldn’t wait to leave for that weekend, even if I couldn’t let myself think about what ‘going away for the weekend’ with some dude usually implied. Usually didn’t really apply to Hunter and I even before all this crap happened.
“No problem,” I told her, and then I turned the music up a little louder, just enough for her to know I didn’t want to talk, but not so much that she’d take it personally. Molly looked like she always did, mousy but in this cute way that made me wonder what she’d be like when she was older. I realized she was staring at me and tried to avoid her eyes in the rearview mirror, but it was useless; we had an hour long drive, and I’m not super good at avoiding confrontation, or whatever mom used to say when I pissed her off by asking a pointed question or mentioning her latest fuck-up. “What’s up?”
“I’m just…” I had to wait a solid minute, which is hard for me to do under the best of circumstances, but I managed. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel and kept my mouth shut; Molly was probably the only person staying at the Warfield mansion I had absolutely no interest in being an asshole to. Literally everyone else dished as much as they got, but she didn’t, and she was just a kid, besides. “I think my brother likes you,” she finally said, and it took me a minute to remember that she was just fourteen. “I’m pretty sure he likes you a lot.”
“Oh?” I kept my eyes on the road this time.
“He talked to you after I left, yesterday. Right?” I nodded, then had to glance over when she didn’t say anything else. She didn’t remind me of him too often--except for those ridiculously gorgeous eyes, of course--but she could for damn sure hold her tongue just as well as he could. Maybe those eyes of hers were why I had a hard time looking at her; they made me miss him, which still made no damn sense given how complicated our very brief history was… But there you have it. “Did you know him before… Before?”
