Rivals and Retribution

by Shannon Delany

  He readied the needle.

  And then she said it, soft as a breath. “Please. Please,” she said. “I don’t want this. Shouldn’t it be my choice?”

  He trembled above her, the needle poised to deliver the cure. The tremble was part rage and part love and part sorrow. He nodded then, just one fast jerk of his chin, and his eyes stormy, he rocked back onto his heels and stood.

  He looked down at her as she lay between his feet, all at once utterly vulnerable and fierce in her resolve. And then he turned the needle away and extended his hand, helping her to her feet once more. “You are right,” he whispered. “It must be your choice.”

  He handed her the needle.

  “Yes. It must.” And she crushed the syringe in her bare hand and let the cure dribble out between her fingers with the bits of glass.

  Marlaena packed her bag and left that night as the news hit the television that Mr. Wondermann, and all of his computers and documents, had been seized and locked up on tax evasion charges.

  It seemed like good news on top of good news.

  But losing Marlaena was strangely like shooting Gabriel. She’d been an outcast from society before and now she’d make herself an outcast a second time by choosing to live (and die) as the untamed wolf. She couldn’t be forced to change and she certainly didn’t care to try to change. As much as I didn’t like her I still felt bad for her. She’d only found her place and a group who would love and support her a little while before rejecting them.

  I wondered if it had been a preemptive strike. Reject us so she didn’t have to risk being rejected herself. But I’d have years to ponder it, if I really wanted to. Now I had a few more things to clean up before I could feel good about collapsing into a heap.

  Alexi

  As stunned as I was by the news of Marlaena’s choice, I still recognized it as her own and I had to respect it as such. Da, she had crushed the last syringe of the cure, but Hazel and I knew how to create more as easily as if it were now in our nature. We had persevered and we had won the day.

  And, later that night, back at home, I wrapped my arm around Nadezhda as we sat cuddled together on the aptly named love seat, resting well in the knowledge that if more oboroten came looking for a cure, they could make their own choice about taking it.

  Jessie

  I found Wanda at the horse farm late that night after I’d tucked Pietr into bed and called Dad to bring me home. Amy insisted on coming along, and I welcomed the company. And Dad needed dear daughter number three, from the worn look on his face.

  Wanda was in the kitchen, poking at a cooling pizza that looked as loaded as the ones we’d ordered for the pups. Dad and Amy made themselves scarce, and I sat down across the table from her.

  I opened with small talk, but she wasn’t buying it, so, knowing I’d regret it, I began to eat a piece of the pizza to give me a legitimate reason to be there. Between bites, I talked about Dad and Annabelle Lee and the farm. Nice, normal things.

  She shoved her chair back from the table and gave me such a look, I swallowed prematurely and choked a moment.

  “Look, I understand what you’re trying to do, Jessie, and I respect it,” Wanda said. “But it won’t work between your dad and me. Some things just aren’t meant to be,” she explained, reaching out to pat my shoulder. “Your dad needs someone nice and loving—”

  “Do you love him?”

  Her mouth hung open a moment, empty of words. “Yes. Very much. More than anything. But he deserves someone nice and loving. I’m a fighter,” she said, rising and reaching for her coat. “It’s all I ever wanted and all I ever dreamed of.”

  “No. No, it’s not. Not all,” I said firmly, taking the coat that now hung in her hand. “Don’t you remember ever wanting something else? Something like you just described? Nice and loving?”

  She blew out an exasperated breath. “Sure. Everyone wants to be a firefighter, an artist, or a writer at some point—pipe dreams. That doesn’t matter when you start to grow up and get real.”

  “What if I told you I know you wanted to be something else when you grew up and someone took that away from you?”

  “Aw, crap, Jessie. In any place and talking to any other kid, I’d say you’re full of it. But we’re still in Junction, aren’t we?”

  “Very much so.”

  She shook her head, her ponytail snapping. “You know what? It really doesn’t matter. The past is the past. I don’t even remember any other plan or dream.”

  “When was the last time you meditated?”

  She snorted at me.

  “Prayed?”

  “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?”

  “Fine. When was the last time you did a visualization exercise?”

  “Yesterday, before heading to the range for practice.”

  “Awesome. Go sit on the couch. You’re not the only one doing some practice here or there.”

  She sat, and I tossed the coat down beside her.

  “I want you to visualize an office space about as wide as my arms and three times as long. Fill it with things—tell me what they are.”

  Her eyes closed, and she whispered, “A desk with some potted plants on it, a couple tall bookcases…”

  I smiled. Even if she didn’t realize it, the room in her head was coming into view again.

  “… there’s a whiteboard…”

  “Good! Is there anything written on the whiteboard?”

  She gasped, and I knew her eyes had opened. I flicked her shoulder. “Close your eyes again. Breathe.”

  The sound of her breathing slowed again.

  I lowered the pitch of my voice and steadied its rhythm, working to lull her into the space inside her head. “Enter the room. Slide your hand along the cool surface of the desk. Lean over to smell the moist scent of the soil in the potted plants.”

  I heard her inhale.

  “Now make your way to the whiteboard. Tell me what’s written on it.”

  Her voice was slow, thickened by a state neighboring a true trance. “My goal of joining the CIA. Weird…”

  “What’s weird about it?”

  “It’s not my handwriting,” she said, her voice plodding along.

  “That’s because someone else wrote it. That’s not your dream, is it?”

  Silence.

  “Remember, Wanda. Remember your dream. You can still have it.”

  She sighed.

  “Do you see an eraser?”

  “Yeah, but no markers…”

  I remembered Derek stuffing them in his pockets right before he left. “Doesn’t matter. Erase the board.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “There’s something underneath,” she said, her tone bordering on reverent.

  “Let it bleed out,” I said, my voice slow and steady. “Let it reveal itself.”

  “Oh,” she whispered. “Is that it? It looks like it…”

  “What does it say?” I asked, my brain sticky from the stress of the last few days, the effect of late-night pizza, and trying to lead a visualization for a woman who was everything she’d never wanted to become.

  “Kindergarten teacher.”

  The spell broken, I heard her flop back into the couch, and I opened my eyes to see her face—a tumult of emotion. “Kindergarten teacher,” she repeated, stunned. “I—I remember now…”

  Her eyes were bright with moisture. “I wanted to teach. How did I…?” A deep breath escaped her. “Why do I get the feeling you just opened up a whole can of worms in my head and the label reads, Derek?”

  I moved over to sit beside her, dropping an arm over her shoulders. “We always need good teachers. Always. Probably more than we need any profession.”

  “I’ve lost years,” she whispered, realizing.

  I grabbed her hands as they started to tremble. “But you still have years. Maybe it’s even more important now to spend whatever you have left on the right track. The track you wanted to be on originally.” I reached up to her head. “Let’s
start small. Loosen up,” I instructed, pulling the band out of her hair so a curtain of blond strands hung loose around her shoulders like it had the first time I’d seen her in Derek’s memories. When she was still innocent and hopeful.

  “This is a lot to take in, a lot to change,” she said, playing with her hair.

  I stood, smiling. “Then I guess it’s a good thing our species is so very adaptable.” Adapt to survive. I wobbled on my feet a moment, remembering Derek’s first lesson for me.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll be fine. I’m just a little tired. I think I’ll say good night, do a little writing for my lit assignment, and head to bed. I have a great ending for the book I’m supposed to write for class now.”

  “Congrats,” she said. And then, standing, she folded her arms around me and gave me a hug. “And thank you for everything.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Jessie

  I woke to someone calling my name, my head still thick with the fog of dream images swirled away, evaporating into the dim light of early morning.

  “Jessie!” the voice called again, and I sat bolt upright, the blankets falling away from me as the chill of early morning snatched at my face and arms. Squinting, I focused on the sound of the voice, its timbre and tone, and my heart sped in my chest, rattling against my ribs. Could it be? I swung my feet off the mattress and drummed them on the carpet.

  “Mom?” I whispered.

  Damn it for being so dark.

  But if that was Mom’s voice, then …

  I steadied myself, clutching my pillow with knuckles that ached. My brain was full of spiderwebs, pictures sticking and stuttering in the sticky gossamer mess. If that was Mom, then … there’d been no accident. No death. No depression, no struggle with forgiving Sarah, no dating Derek, no Russian Mafia, no Alexi, Max, and Cat, no …

  No Pietr.

  No.

  My hand released the pillow to touch instead the stack of notebooks on my nightstand. My writing assignment … fiction and fantasy meeting nonfiction. Real life plus werewolves …

  No Pietr?

  I gasped.

  Could it all have been a combination of my dreams and homework? Dear god. Had I eaten pizza last night right before bed?

  “Jessie.” The door opened, and Amy stepped into my room. “Can I steal a blanket?”

  I shuddered.

  “Jesus. I don’t look that bad this early, do I?”

  Not my mother then. Amy. Jessie, she’d said—not Jess.

  So …

  “You don’t look so good yourself,” Amy commented, heading straight for me.

  “Why are you here?” I whispered, searching her face for answers to the questions I wasn’t sure I really wanted to ask.

  “Umm.” She pursed her lips and tilted her head. “Blanket?” she said. Very slowly.

  “No. I mean—why are you sleeping here?”

  “You weren’t feeling really great last night after pizza—”

  Damn the pizza. My eyes struggled to focus on the notebooks. Could that be what it all was? My writing assignment and a pizza-induced dream?

  It all seemed so real.

  The way he looked, the way he smelled and tasted, the way he touched me—loved me …

  Holy crap. I hoped I’d managed to write all that down as convincingly as I’d imagined it—that’d get me an A plus for sure.…

  But reaching out for the notebooks I stopped and struggled to swallow the lump in my throat.

  I was never eating pizza before bedtime again.

  It all seemed so real.

  He seemed so real.

  Even as a werewolf.

  My chest ached and I tried to take slow, deep breaths. Tried to get a handle on the new surge of loss that threatened to sweep me under and drown me …

  But if he was just a character I’d devised … I hadn’t lost him, really—I’d never had him. He was just a construct of my imagination.

  A really undeniably hot and troublesome construct of my imagination.

  Maybe I needed to see a counselor after all.

  But none of it had been real: not the love, the loss, or …

  … the werewolves.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded my head. Hard. It was an attempt to convince Amy as much as it was an attempt to convince myself.

  Of course, if he was just a character—an invention of my overactive imagination—I could revisit him anytime I opened my notebook and flipped through the pages. I could write us a future that would make other romance novels pale in comparison.

  But it would never be the same.

  Imagining. Or having.

  “I can get a blanket from Annabelle Lee, if that helps.… I just didn’t want to wake the adults.”

  Adults. Plural. That was it then. Mom still existed.

  But Pietr didn’t.

  “No. No,” I said, standing up. “It’s no trouble.” The sheet and blankets dropped away from me as night wrapped her icy fingers around me.

  Maybe Mom and I hadn’t even had that final argument.… If I had to lose Pietr but I still had my mom … I sucked in a deep breath and padded over to the closet. I dug around a moment before tugging free a blanket that somehow still smelled like mothballs. I spun, holding it high so it draped down and briefly obscured my vision of the rest of the room.

  “Here,” I said.

  Amy took it and I gasped as it folded into her arms and I saw him standing there in my doorway.

  His silhouette was stark. All angles and strength, with an easy grace that made him seem fluid even when standing still.

  Pietr.

  In his jammies.

  I blinked.

  Amy waved a hand in front of my face.

  “What?” Pietr asked, his voice as deep as the room was dark. “I had to pee.”

  I laughed. Loudly.

  “It’s a natural bodily function,” he said, perplexed. “Not particularly a funny one, that I know of.…” He looked at Amy for support, but she just shrugged.

  “You’re for real,” I whispered, still stunned.

  “Daaa. I for real had to sneak out of your room to use the bathroom.”

  That wasn’t what I meant, but I didn’t correct him, I just stood there gawking at him. Watching him talk. He was gorgeous when he did that, too.

  “I didn’t want to wake you. Or anyone else,” he muttered, casting a glance at the still-open door.

  “How’d you get in here?”

  “Door…” He pointed back the way he’d come.

  “No, I mean…” I widened my eyes and peered at Pietr in pajamas.

  “You don’t remember? Through the window.” He scrunched his face up at Amy. “It’s not like your father would let me stay with you—in your bedroom,” he emphasized.

  True.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, stepping closer.

  I grinned. “I’ll be fine.”

  He looked at Amy again, but she was no help.

  She simply shook her head and headed out of the room with the blanket over her arm.

  “Good luck,” she wished Pietr softly. “I’ve known her for years and I still haven’t figured her out.”

  He was real. My Pietr was flesh and blood and … He wrapped an arm around me as soon as the door clicked shut, his skin hot as if glowing embers lined his bones.

  And very much werewolf.

  My heart skipped a beat as my brain puzzled the pieces back together and I leaned my head on his broad chest.

  Pietr was alive, which meant Mom was dead.

  But people died—even people like my mom, someone I’d loved and thought I couldn’t live without. And somehow I’d gone on in her absence; I’d have to go on, living, learning and growing, making mistakes so I could make better choices later.

  My life in small-town America was exactly like what most people thought real life should be.

  Plus werewolves.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Strangely, t
hese are even harder to write in the last book of my debut series than they were in the first. So many people have helped me along the way, and inevitably, I will forget to thank a half dozen of you. Or more. For that I apologize.

  Of the people who started this journey with me, only a few have stayed by my side, and they are truly of the most remarkable sort. I should mention Karl and Jaiden, who ask me how the writing or the revising or the proofreading or the copyedits are going and keep coffee in the house and remind me from time to time that things beyond the publishing world exist. The Morgans (both of them) just for being who they are and listening or talking at the right times. Robin, who is one of the first people I call about any of the madness that comes from this business. She is my shoulder to cry on, my listening ear, and simply put, a tremendous friend. My editor, Michael Homler, who is simply the best editor anyone could work with (if I explained all the reasons why, I firmly believe this section would have to be trimmed because there are so many reasons). My cover designer for the entire series, Ervin Serrano (yes, you’ve loved his eye-catching work throughout and there are plenty of reasons to adore it).

  Then there are the people who are relatively new to me but very much appreciated: the publicity and marketing staff at St. Martin’s Press—all of whom have been easy to talk to, quick to respond, courteous, and tremendously helpful; the proofreading and copyediting staff at St. Martin’s Press—people with sharp eyes and a great attention to detail; the bloggers and booksellers who have become my friends during the course of this crazy journey; the aspiring authors I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and teaching—especially through RWA and my Fall into Writing Class of 2011; they met with me weekly at the Harris Memorial Library and inspired me as much as I hope I inspired them! Special thanks to my agent, the amazing Richard Curtis. And last, but far from least—YOU: my readers, my cheering section, my fans. I hope you adore this series as much as I adore YOU! And I sincerely hope we meet again and again over action-packed scenes involving hot heroes and bright and daring heroines and the quirky characters in their circles of friends. Much love to you all!

  OTHER 13 TO LIFE NOVELS BY SHANNON DELANY