I didn’t miss the guys behind me. I let them grab my elbows. As the skin between my shoulder blades tightened, I knew I was waiting for something. Every instinct in me told me that I needed to wait. Something whispered to me that I needed to wait and it wasn’t Spencer this time. It was deeper, cellular almost, in the air as I breathed it in.
“And why,” Carlisle bellowed. “Would anyone follow you if this is what you let happen to your people?”
I was wondering where Carlisle had harvested these tall blocks of cement that he had as henchmen. Another one walked in from a door behind a curtain, as if on some sort of stage direction with a carpet loaded in his arms.
The boulder stopped between us and unwrapped the Persian. Cristina’s body rolled out and across the marble floor. I could smell the blood immediately. Tyler’s restrained cry turned into something more akin to a whimper, but I felt it all the same. His longing dug into me, his regret.
She had been beaten, and with the way her eyes were blackened, she’d been forced to See. Most important, there was a symbol carved into her chest, the same symbol I’d seen in my vision. Traitor.
Her energy was low, so low that I almost believed her dead, until I saw a slight twitch in her long fingers.
“Is this what you offer your followers?” Carlisle said. “Death?”
“She was innocent,” I growled and pulled at the men who held my elbows. Their rock grips crushed my bones but I bit back the wince, letting it fuel the fury within.
“Far from it. She was the pack Seer. She knew everything. She was hardly innocent.”
“She chose a different life. You’re the one who did this to her.”
“She was nothing but a filthy traitor to her king, and she will pay for it.”
With a flash of silver, Carlisle bent over Cristina with a knife to her throat, the Haverty knife, or at least what looked like the Haverty knife. But how many others like that could Haverty had made? And even though it might not hurt me, that sharp edge was still capable of slicing Cristina’s pale throat.
“No!”
Carlisle stayed his hand as the blade pressed against her throat.
And I said the stupidest thing I may have ever said, but again, in my head, there wasn’t a choice. This was the something bigger I’d been waiting for. “Take me. I’ll give you all my power if you’ll let them go.”
“Violet! No,” Tucker cried out.
“I know how,” I continued my eyes fixed on the blade at Cristina throat. “I’ve learned how from Yasmina herself.”
Slowly, Carlisle’s hand pulled away from her throat when I finally saw a pulse. She was alive.
With a small flick of the blade, my boys were released.
As I was shoved to the ground, Tyler ran for Cristina’s body, pulled her to her feet. She clung to him, her head on his chest. He ran his fingers through her hair and whispered things to her that I didn’t dare try to listen to.
The rest of them stayed, waiting, ears perked. Even Jessa maintained her place in line. They could feel it, running along the lines that held us together. We were all waiting for something together. I slipped my shoes off waiting for it, know that it would probably involve blood, and it wasn’t going to be mine.
Cristina’s head lulled to one side, and I caught a glint of her eye as she looked at me.
“I’m sorry I don’t take direction very well,” I told her. “Not the brightest color in the box.”
“Violet,” she whispered, and I could have sworn there was a smile.
The men hauled me to my feet. I looked down at the blade in Carlisle’s hand.
“Do it,” Carlisle growled.
“What? This?”
I wriggled an arm away from my captors and put my hand on his chest. I could feel the sick slimy current of his power underneath his breast bone, like putting my hand in a jar of slugs.
The lightening strike of power that I ran through him was greater than anything I’d flung at Chaz. Yasmina had given me one thing: new ideas to try out. I launched him across the ballroom and into a mirror.
The silver pieces rained down around him as his small frame fell limp to the floor.
In a blink, I shifted. Ever see two grown men try to hold onto a seventy-five pound cat by two legs? Neither did anyone else in the room. I slipped their surprised grasp like an oiled pig.
Their gasps were nearly missed in the cacophony that started around us.
This was the moment we’d all waited for. It wasn’t my people’s choice. They’d already chosen their side.
A shrill cry, a battle cry from someone, something in the audience heralded the fight. Someone else was as tired of Little Boy Blew’s monologues as I was.
As I ran after Carlisle, I watched as five people jumped on the nearest Rock. I felt the magic in the air as others pulled for their animals and Shadow’s howl echoed through the hall.
Carlisle was a quick little devil, using his air strikes to propel him off of walls and around the ballroom.
As an animal, I knew the flight response intimately, but this was ridiculous. As we bounded off tables and scurried up tapestries, I wondered why he wasn’t going for a door. He kept trying to reach the windows.
And then I felt a hint of gold.
Chaz stood by the only other closed door to the ballroom with possibly the biggest shotgun in his collection. Be damned, the boy is sexy with his gun in his hands.
The table Carlisle ran over collapsed, and I took my chance.
I leaped, claws out, and caught his shoulder. My talons shredded that terrible acid-washed jean jacket he was wearing. In that respect, I was doing him a favor, as I practically detached his arm.
I landed on him like a professional surfer catches a wave until he stopped moving. He went perfectly still and his energy was gone, like the dead body in the morgue, I stood on a void.
That was too easy.
I shifted back to human form and reached out to press my fingers into his neck.
A burst of wind lifted me up and slammed me onto my back. Carlisle was over me in an instant Haverty’s blade in his hand again. He knee ground into my pelvis as his hand with the knife pressed into my shoulder.
“Didn’t know you could shift into a possum.”
A gash in his forehead quickly covered the left side of his face in blood and sputtered into his mouth as he spoke. “Shut up.”
He held his hand out over my mouth, and I felt his cold power reach into me.
And then I couldn’t breath.
The bastard had taken the air from my lungs.
Underestimation of the century.
I kicked and struggled. Spots filled my vision as I slapped the ground around my like a dying fish. He held my air in his hands, a small dancing whirlwind of breath and he smiled.
What I thought was a flash of red in my oxygen deprived vision was actually the trails of Cristina’s dress. Her bloodied nails raked at his cheek as she threw herself on top of him.
His concentration on me broken and his spell released. I sucked in as much air as my diaphragm would allow.
When my head stopped spinning, I jumped up and reached out.
It was a moment too late.
I heard the gurgle of Cristina’s breath as Carlisle rammed the dagger up into her ribs. Her dark eyes lighted on me as she fell into his arms and then as he dropped her, the silver dagger still in its place between her ribs.
With my ever lightening reflexes, I was there to catch her this time before she hit the floor.
“Bet she didn’t see that coming.” Carlisle snickered.
He was tackled to the ground by Tucker, and Chaz, and Nash, whose bloodied lip made him look twice as young as he already did.
I reached out for the dagger, but the silver burned at my flesh. The real Haverty dagger.
Cristina knew. I held her body gingerly, Tyler dropped on the floor across from me.
“No, babe,” he shuttered. “Not like this.”
Her hand reached out and tou
ched his face and then fell weakly. He caught it and kissed very finger tip he could.
Cristina turned to me. “My daughter,” she managed out.
“I am so sor—”
She began speaking and I had to lean in to hear her over the battle that raged around us. “When the Veil is broken a demon will come through, and we will know and love her.”
“Cristina,” I whispered.
I felt her go, felt the life leave her until she was a void in my arms. I wiped the tears from my eyes and let Tyler take her from me.
I couldn’t watch as he cradled her, as he grieved for her, but I felt every last drop of his anger. Nash’s disbelief. Tucker’s sorrow.
All of it fueled me as my eyes landed on Carlisle.
Unable to contain it any longer, I opened up the power within my chest. It burned like hellfire around me—smelled like the sweetest magnolia blossoms. It whipped my hair around my face and made Carlisle go pale.
Chaz released Carlisle from the ground. “Violet?”
Carlisle attempted to jump up and flee, but I didn’t let him. I pressed my power down on him and he couldn’t move, like a bug pinned to a display case by my sheer will.
I walked over to him and knelt down on his chest. I felt the panic, felt him call for his own power, but mine was thick and hot and burned away any attempt. I could crush him. I knew that. My power was so strong I could make him into nothing thicker than a pressed flower between pages in a book.
“You can’t kill me,” Carlisle hissed as he writhed beneath me. “It’s not in you.”
He was right. I couldn’t kill him. That was the Havertys way of doing things, and I was not going to do anything their way. Didn’t have any problem messing up his face, but I couldn’t kill him.
A cool hand slid over my shoulder. Jessa leaned over us. “Let me take care of him. Go help the others.”
I looked up and her lavender eyes held a plan. I just couldn’t have imagined what the plan was.
Tucker was by her side in an instant. “I’ll help Jessa. You help them.”
I let my knee up from Carlisle’s chest just as Tucker’s went down into his midsection. It wasn’t unjustified. I felt no pity for the man on the ground.
I looked up at my boys and wanted to just take them home and make sure that they would be all right. But I’d just gotten a lot more people involved in this. I had a responsibility to them now, if they would accept it.
I did the next best thing I could think of. With a quick thought, I sent the four my power. I felt them grow stronger, more confident.
There was a gleam in Nash’s eyes that I hadn’t seen before, a warrior spirit that was usually hidden behind all those books.
Shadow slipped his collar and his teeth sunk into the man who held his restraints.
I stood and watched the fight around us. It was less Crouching Tiger and more Bridget Jones’s Diary. These people weren’t fighters. They were lawyers and business men and college professors for all I knew. I’d imagined that this was the first time that any of them had been given a choice to fight. So when a duo passed by me, a woman on top of a man beating him with her shoe, I knew they had something to fight for.
Chaz squeezed my arm. “Meet me in the middle,” he winked before he sped off to the left.
“That’s my boy,” I muttered as I ran off to the right.
IT WASN’T PRETTY. Fighting an eighty-year-old man in a dojo is a little different from taking on a man twice your size while trying not to injure your companions. I don’t know how much I fought in panther form or with human fists.
There were wolves and goats and a few birds. I narrowly missed a fireball and daggers that slashed around a young woman not using her hands.
But they were fighting and as I assisted each one of them, I felt them open up.
The first was a girl, not too much younger than me who needed a sandwich. I could see her ribs through the thin T-shirt, and I could also track marks up her arms. But she was wailing on one of the biggest of the men.
I caught her in my arms as the man flung her away and that’s when it happened. She looked up at me, and I felt the connection, the brief flutter of feathers against my skin.
I smiled. “Go for his knees on three,” I said to her.
She nodded and I counted.
A minute later, he was cinched with his own belt and she was gone, helping out the woman beating the man with her shoe.
The next was an older man. His frail figure was being shaken like a soda can by a thug.
His power reached out to mine. A snake. A snake shifter. My world was getting larger by the moment. I held back for a moment and just sent the older man my power. I felt the block, felt the unused muscles as he pulled at his animal.
But suddenly, the man shrunk up into a snake, his clothes draping around him. The thug grabbed at the pants as they fell to the floor. I heard the rattle of the snake and then the scream of the man as he ran off, snake still attached to his arm.
The next was a wolf, pulling at the pants of a man who held two girls in his meaty arms.
I simply stuck my foot out and tripped the man. As the wall fell backward, he let the two girls go. The wolf quickly bounded around him and onto the man’s chest. Teeth bared, he went for the throat before I caught his scruff.
I stomped down on the man’s chest and looked into the wolf’s silver eyes and saw the man within. “You will not go for the kill.”
I felt the man’s rage brush back at me, but he welcomed the connection, as rough hewn as it was, like twine rather than the silken strands from the other two.
The wolf stayed on the man’s chest until I managed a tie from a curtain to bind him with.
By the time I’d met Chaz in the middle, I had six extra heads running around in my own and the room had grown much quieter.
“My future wife.” He greeted with a smile, though it was slightly swollen smile and his eye was just about to turn a beautiful shade of blue. He had his shotgun in his hands like a bat, and I hadn’t heard a shot fired.
“My future husband,” I whispered.
A cry echoed through the hallway and all eyes were on the front of the room just to see Jessa push Carlisle into a mirror.
“What the . . .”
I dashed to the front of the ballroom and looked down into the surface where Carlisle seemed to be falling, forever falling into the never-ending mirror.
“I made a cell for him.” Jessa’s voice was simple and clear, and if she wasn’t holding a cloth to her bleeding hand, I think she would have been offering up a high five for a job well done.
“You can do that?” I asked as I ran my fingers through my hair.
“I’m a warden. What do you think I’ve been practicing for three months?”
“I don’t know, curling your hair with a flat iron.”
Jessa punched me on the arm. “The more powerful you get, the more powerful I get, remember? You were made for leading; I was made for throwing assholes in jail.”
I put my arm around her. Tucker reached down and wiped the blood off the mirror.
Then, he carefully rose and reached out to bind Jessa’s hand. I watched enthralled. She was letting him touch her. The scene was only enhanced as the long thin scar of her forearm seemed to glow in the light of the ballroom as he took what looked like a ripped piece of his T-shirt to wrap up her small hand.
Carlisle’s cohorts who could still run, ran. Those of us left, about twenty, cheered.
I turned around and surveyed the survivors of the rebellion. My new pack.
Chapter Twenty-Six
AS I SMILED at them, their connections hit me all at once.
I was temporarily lifted off the ground as little fireworks went off behind my eyes. All at once, they had chosen me as their leader.
I don’t know why someone didn’t catch me, but I found myself on the floor. My chest burned like I’d eaten too many tacos in one day. I took in a deep breath to prevent the brief round of nausea from my h
ead spinning.
I pushed myself up on my elbows.
Chaz knelt and lifted my chin and his golden eyes burned into mine. “What have you done, Violet?”
I took in a deep breath and felt the weight of them, the presence of them all around me. “I think my baggage just got about”—I quickly counted through the animals dancing around in my head—“fifteen people heavier.”
Carefully, I stood on my own two feet, and Chaz waited until I was stable to pull away. My head spun and when I closed my eyes, I could see their power running around in my head like the electric light parade at Disneyworld. All shifters.
“You need to pull it together, Vi,” he whispered.
I found those strong golden eyes again and with that, found my strength. With a force of will, I put up the some sort of protection. Piper had used a piano to help her visualize closing herself off from her packs thoughts and feelings. The piano didn’t work for me. Like my little town house metaphor, I need something more personal.
A horrible as it was, the only thing that I could think of was my curio cabinet with my turtle collection in it, or what was left of my turtle collection. It held my special things, figurines, signed editions of my favorite books, the DVDs of some of my favorite writing gigs.
I saw the cabinets in my head with the animals in side, and I closed the door, still being able to see them, protect them, but not feel everything from them. Using the power that they had given me, the power that was now mine to wield, I pushed up a border around their animals running around and my head cleared.
“Better,” Chaz said. His hand slipped down my arm and his fingers intertwined with mine.
I looked out at the crowd. The scent of blood and magnolias permeated the ballroom. So many eyes on me to make the next move, and here I was fresh out of inspirational speeches.
My eyes fell on Tucker. Blood had crusted on his strong cheek bone and the wound might be deep enough to scar.
Tucker cracked a smile as he looked at me. “I knew it, kid.”
“You knew squat.”
But he kept that smile as he turned to the rest of the people standing, waiting for an order I didn’t have for them.
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