by Mark Henwick
I spun around. Had it upset her so badly she’d left the protection of the dungeon?
Diana made a calming gesture.
“She’s not really gone. She just gets upset easily at the moment,” she said. “We really need to find Tullah. I’m afraid that means you really need to find Tullah, though we’ll do anything we can to help once Kaothos comes back.”
Bian touched me on the shoulder.
“Julie’s just taken a message from Pia. You’re needed urgently back at Manassah. Something’s seriously wrong with Scott. And there’s also a problem with Tove.”
Oh, hell.
Chapter 18
I drove, despite my mind whirling with the news about Tara and Hana. Julie got to hold the cell phones.
We made great time in the Hill Bitch. People saw it coming up in their mirrors like Thor’s hammer descending on them and got the hell out of the way.
As I drove, I got the bare details about Scott from Pia on my cell phone’s speaker.
He’d woken up fevered and shivering. I knew that was reasonably common in crusis. That didn’t worry any of us.
He was talking, but, according to Pia, he was lapsing into incoherence from time to time.
Crusis affected different people in different ways. Talking rubbish wasn’t so worrying. It didn’t mean he was going rogue.
But what wasn’t common was he was getting terrible pains throughout his body. From his description, it was as if his limbs were being twisted, or at times, as if he were getting electric shocks.
Pia was on a simultaneous call to Bian and Diana and they were really worried to hear that he had that kind of pain. It wasn’t a common feature of crusis.
I got a sick feeling in my gut. My first infusion was going wrong.
Was I venomous? Would Scott die? Or go rogue? It would be my duty to kill him if he did.
My House. I’m thinking of killing a man I took into my House and infused. My responsibility.
Could Diana do something? Could we move him to Haven?
I could hear voices in the background. Amanda—in tears, trying to hold them back.
“He wants to go outside,” Pia said. “Into the garden.”
No one else spoke.
My call.
“Let him,” I said, ignoring the ice in my chest. “Only the garden, and stay with him, of course. Move the guards to the front of the house.”
Because the guards around Manassah were still human. Security was still being provided by my old friend Vic Gayle. Another thing I was going to have to re-evaluate.
“Just keep telling him to keep it together,” I said. “I’m nearly home.”
Five minutes later the guards saw us and had the gate open in time for us to drive straight in.
I ran down around the house and into the garden, Julie close behind me.
Scott was lying in the shadows beneath the gaunt larch and thick cypress trees that bordered Manassah. Amanda was clutching him to her as if she were trying to shield him from the pain in his body. Pia looked as if she were trying to pull Amanda back. Flint and Kane stood awkwardly, unable to help.
Scott had clearly gotten worse.
“She’s locked them together with her eukori,” Pia said. “I can’t break it.”
Scott’s back arched and his heels drummed in the dirt.
There wasn’t time to ask anybody else for help. All I had was an aching certainty that if Scott died while they were locked together like this, then so would Amanda.
I grabbed her head.
“Amanda!” Her eyes were open, but they looked straight through me. I tried to compel her, and I had no more success than Pia. Her eukori was bright and hard as steel.
In desperation, I reached out with my eukori.
Julie and Pia first. Then Flint and Kane.
I took their strength and slammed back into Amanda’s mental defenses. I tore her away from Scott, physically and mentally.
Eyes blind with tears, she swung fists wildly at me until Julie caught her wrists.
I ignored that. I pushed the other eukoris aside and linked into Scott, not holding him, simply resting my hand on his chest. He’d torn his clothes as if the touch of them was painful. His bare skin felt feverish. I pushed my senses beyond that and felt the surge of Blood in his veins, the throbbing of his heart, the air rushing into his lungs. The mad scurrying of his thoughts.
And yet he welcomed the pressure of my hand; his thrashing calmed a little.
Why had I put my hand on him like that?
It just felt right.
Was there something going on at an instinctive level between Scott and me? Did I have a special bond with an Athanate that I had created?
Then why didn’t this feel like connecting with another Athanate?
Because it didn’t feel like that at all.
And yet he was becoming Athanate. He had to be. He’d be dead if he wasn’t.
“Hurts,” Scott groaned.
“I know,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
I could feel it. The pain. Muscles cramping. Joints in agony. Skin tearing. The need for something without knowing what it was.
I pulled as much as I could bear from him. I could sense him struggling against it.
The pain made it difficult to speak. My mouth felt numb. My jaw wanted to clench, but I forced the words out.
“Our pain,” I said. “Share.” It came out as a gasp.
“No.”
But I was stronger than him. I took more, until it seemed to fill my body. Everything hurt. Everything felt wrong. It hurt so much, I wanted to rip my skin off and scream bloody oaths at the sky.
Stop thinking like that. Pain is an old friend.
I could work with it, and it was somehow familiar.
Even in the heart-squeezing grip of the pain, I shuddered. Blood magic witch.
“Stay with me, Scott.”
He groaned. “Can’t.”
“You can and you will.” I bowed my head and tried to clear my mind as the urge to scream built and built in my chest.
Think.
There was a reason he’d come outside. He needed... more space? More light?
“Move away,” I said over my shoulder. My voice was hoarse.
There was movement behind me. A little of the pressure eased off and Scott responded as if it had been a weight on him.
It’s too soon for him to develop that kind of ability in eukori.
I dug deeper in his senses, trying to work out what his body was doing, what it needed.
Cold—he wanted that.
Dark—it’d been too bright in the house.
He’d wanted the sensation of the wind, the sweet pine scent of the trees.
Oh, my God! That’s why this pain is so familiar.
Oh, shit!
No time. I have to do what I can.
I took his hand. “You have to trust me, Scott,” I told him. “I’m the one who infused you, and your body knows it. Listen to it. Listen to me.”
“You’re Farrell?” His voice cracked.
I nodded. There was only a little time.
“P... P... Pleased to... meet...” He gave up and his eyes closed as another storm of pain built.
“Don’t fight me,” I said, and let the pain flow through me while I tried to send back what I knew he needed. He had to sense what I wanted him to sense.
Our hearts surged together, beating so fast I felt lightheaded.
Run!
There was no space here at Manassah, but my memories were vivid. I ran in my mind, through the deep shadows of the trees at Bitter Hooks, and Scott came with me. I forced my memories into him, so his own eyes couldn’t see, his body couldn’t feel.
See! Through the trees. As free as the wind.
Wrong! Something wrong, I could almost hear his mind was telling him.
No, this is right. This is us. This is how we are.
There. The light. There!
“Run toward the light.”
F
ear coursed through him, and I cursed my clumsy mental metaphors.
“It’s not dying,” I said, through gritted teeth. Closer. Closer. “It’s rebirth. Follow the sound of my call...”
In our shared vision, we burst out of the trees to the clearing around Falcon’s Bluff. I let him truly see me, and see himself in my eyes.
“No!”
He stumbles, his body suddenly uncontrollable. He’s falling. His joints demand to move in the wrong direction.
No time for anything else. No other way.
“I am your alpha,” I snarled. “If you stumble, I will raise you up.”
I put all my strength into that, as if I could will him to do what he needed to do.
In the gloom beneath the larch and cypress, Scott’s body arched in one great spasm. A last tortured sound was torn from his throat, and then he collapsed.
Chapter 19
“I warned you,” I said as I pulled myself shakily to my feet.
“Scott?”
Julie let Amanda go and she ran past me, just as Scott managed to get himself under control enough to stagger upright.
He was a handsome man, and he made a handsome wolf too, even if he was a bit unsure about it.
Amanda didn’t hesitate or show shock; she knelt and threw her arms around his neck.
Not what I would recommend with a werewolf, especially a brand new werewolf who was also probably suffering from Athanate crusis. Fortunately, Scott just stood there, looking wolf-embarrassed.
It was Pia who broke the silence, with a short laugh. “Well, now we know what happens when you infuse someone. You get hybrids.”
I nodded. “I guess so. Of course, he hasn’t shown us he’s Athanate yet, but I can’t see how he’d turn out only werewolf.”
How did that make me feel?
When Skylur and Diana first realized I was a hybrid, they’d been astounded. That was nothing to the reaction of most of the Athanate community. I was an anomaly, a freak. There had been those in the Assembly who’d wanted me killed. The more rational of them claimed it was because the influence of becoming a Were at the same time as I was working through Athanate crusis meant I was certain to go rogue.
The Were hadn’t been much better to start with. I guessed I’d gotten past that with the halfy ritual, but suspected many of them continued to think I was a freak. A useful freak maybe, but still, a freak.
In a strange way, I’d enjoyed being the freak, and now I wasn’t the only one.
I felt kinda upset about that.
A couple of more sensible thoughts came to me.
First, would this make Mykayla change her mind?
Second, and more important, I couldn’t let Scott out of my sight for a while. I knew from personal experience just how difficult it was becoming Athanate and Were at the same time. There was a risk he’d go rogue, and my enemies, Were and Athanate, would love it if they could say my infusions did that.
I was fairly sure I could keep Scott sane just by keeping him close by, in the same way that Alex had helped me.
“This is a first?” Flint interrupted my thoughts. “A hybrid? I mean by biting.”
“As far as we know,” I said. “Let’s get him inside, out of sight.”
Kane gathered Scott’s ripped clothes off the ground. “I’ll get him my spare tracksuit.”
He ruffled Scott’s back as he passed, and Scott bared fangs silently. Amanda might be able to take liberties, but the others had better not.
Definitely not letting him out of my sight for the moment.
In the living room, we sat and watched as Scott paced up and down, getting used to his wolf form with its extended senses.
He sneezed at some smell and Amanda laughed nervously.
“When does he change back?” she said.
Scott’s head turned and his yellow eyes locked on me. He understood perfectly what was being said, of course.
“When he wants to,” I replied.
Werewolves could get lost in their wolf form, but that was something that affected older ones, not a cub like Scott. Though, of course, he was a very old cub. How old had Amanda said he was? Two hundred and thirty? He’d been a poet, a contemporary of Shelley and Byron in Georgian England before she’d taken him as her kin.
In any event, my answer seemed to satisfy Scott and he continued walking around the room and sniffing things.
“Or when I tell him to,” I added.
I am your alpha and I am the Mistress of your House, Scott.
The side of his lip lifted; that might be a sort of wolfy smile rather than a snarl, but I had the feeling until we got through the Athanate crusis and sorted out the werewolf alpha signals, Scott was going to be a handful for me, no matter how nice and polite he was as a man.
A challenge.
I don’t back down from werewolf challenges. I can’t. I’m an alpha.
Scott needed me to guide him. He couldn’t have any idea what he’d gotten into. Even if he didn’t go rogue, there were paranormal laws he could break that would end up the same way for him.
Kane came back in with the promised tracksuit. Seeing Scott still in wolf form, he grunted and sat down next to Amanda. He and Flint were on either side of her, eyes fixed on the wolf. Scott’s lip did that twitching thing again, and I felt the faintest deep rumble of Were dominance display coming from him.
Enough.
I had a second problem tonight, as if a furry, snarling Scott wasn’t enough.
“Look, this is weird for all of us,” I said, “and you all have questions, but I’m not sure I have the answers. What I need now is to know what’s happening with Tove.”
Pia looked uncertain. “She said she was bored and wanted to go clubbing.”
Amanda nodded, eyes never moving from Scott. “She was getting agitated.”
“So what happened?”
“I wasn’t sure what to do,” Pia said. “I mean, she’s not a prisoner here, is she? Anyway, she didn’t know where to go and she has no money, so David offered to go with her.”
My fault; I’d been too distracted to leave specific instructions about Tove. More truthfully, I hadn’t really wanted to think about her. I was beginning to regret offering her a place to stay. Not just because she was going to be difficult to handle, but also for her own sake. It hadn’t been safe for people to be too closely associated with us for a while now, and it looked as if it was going to get worse.
So much for the what-ifs and maybes. David’s decision to go with her was better than nothing, but I was unhappy with it. The Northern Adept League hadn’t actually threatened us yet, and the Denver Adepts only had an issue with me directly, but still, I was not having my people out there without backup.
“Do we know where they are?” I asked.
Pia nodded. “The Pool. I think she overheard you talking about it.”
The Pool was a club, just south of the Capitol, off Broadway. Its name wasn’t actually the Pool, but no one remembered its real name.
I’d been speaking to Jofranka this morning and mentioned I’d heard that the DJs on tonight were Electric Breath. They had been my favorites on the illegal rave circuit, and it seemed they’d gone respectable while my back was turned.
Meanwhile, Pia was right, Tove wasn’t a prisoner, and we had no real right to prevent her from doing anything she wanted, however self-destructive that might be.
I wasn’t sure she was out to score drugs. In fact, I suspected she wanted to turn herself around. The trouble was, no one had been able to have any meaningful conversation with her about what she really wanted. She’d been reasonably polite: thanked Jen, thanked me, thanked Yelena. Apart from that, yes and no, mainly, and little or no eye contact.
Nick Grey had seemed to get through but apparently, whatever Were stuff that needed Alex had turned out to need him as well.
So it was down to me. I had to make progress with Tove. And I sensed my time to do that would be very limited soon. Tonight it would have to be—make or break.
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“I’m going partying,” I said. “With Julie and Keith.”
“Not a great idea, Boss,” Julie said.
She and Yelena hadn’t been happy with some of my decisions about security and safety recently. They had my sympathy on this one, but I wasn’t happy with the alternative.
“Probably.” I laughed it off and gave her a hug. “And we’re taking Scott,” I added.
Everyone looked at the wolf. The wolf stared back, lip lifting again.
“Two legs or four?” Pia asked with a small smile.
“Much as I’d love to stroll into the Pool with a huge wolf straining on a leash, I think we’ll go on two legs,” I said.
I turned to the Adepts. “And one of you two. Who’s the better dancer?”
“That’d be me,” Kane said.
Flint rolled his eyes but didn’t bother arguing.
By the time I looked back at Scott, he was in his human form, looking... not actually sheepish, but a little confused by the carryover of his emotions from his wolf form. Keith nudged the tracksuit aside with his foot disdainfully and led him off to find clothes he could borrow.
“Will he be all right?” Amanda came to me and asked quietly.
“No point whispering; he has wolfy hearing now.” I grinned, then got serious. “To partly answer your question... it’ll be better for him if he’s with me for the moment. I’m sorry I can’t give any more assurance than that.”
Amanda wasn’t happy, but kept silent.
“I know it’s difficult,” I said. “I’m guessing you still feel he’s your kin, your responsibility. But now he’s also a werewolf, and I’m his alpha. He’s become my responsibility.”
“Or a hybrid instead of a werewolf,” Julie said. “Even more clearly Amber’s responsibility.”
I could see Amanda struggling, but in the end she nodded.
She was standing close to me. I took a deep breath, savored the scent of her marque and felt my eyes go black with desire for her Blood.
The pulse in her neck responded. Our Athanate instincts didn’t care what else was going on.
But she took off after Keith and Scott, which might have been a good thing.
