by Jory Strong
Her gaze slid to Melina’s lifeless body then back to him.
“The Weres will see no evidence except that left behind by an unknown tiger.”
“What do I call you?” she asked, putting off the moment of choice.
He cupped her chin, his hand sun-baked and warm. “One day, daughter, I hope to give you my name. But that day is not this one. Now tell me your answer.”
Her heart did a slow, painful roll in her chest. There was only one she could give. She couldn’t deny the calling of her gift. “I’ll return to Oakland.”
“My spirit to yours,” her father said, touching his mouth to hers, his breath passing to her through lips parted in surprise.
He stepped away and tossed something in the air. Reflexively she caught it, looking down to find the blackened Wainwright token in her hand. A touch to her pocket confirmed it was missing, lost somewhere on Were lands and now returned by her father, perhaps as a renewed sign of alliance with the witches.
Before she could ask anything further, his shape changed to a tiger’s. He padded over to the dead Jaguar, roaring repeatedly as if to draw attention to his presence, then with a final glance in her direction escaped into the forest.
ARYCK started running at the sound of a tiger roaring. It wasn’t Canino. The voice was too deep, and he was fairly certain the Tiger and Caius were with the Lions, if not on their way back to Jaguar lands.
With each step he cursed himself for ever agreeing to allow Rebekka to wander the woods unprotected. He’d been certain no Were would dare risk the wrath of both ancestors and pack, and the purely animal would remain in hiding or leave until things returned to normal in the area.
He caught Melina’s scent and felt an icy foreboding. A primal scream built inside him, a Jaguar sound of fury and a man’s of fierce denial. It welled up, the emotion like a balloon expanding in his chest, putting pressure on his heart, swelling to squeeze his lungs and make it nearly impossible to breathe.
His surroundings passed in a blur. He was only barely aware of others crashing through the brush, rushing to confront the intruder without knowing Rebekka was there as well.
Branches slashed at his arms and face and bare chest as he ran. Inside him the Jaguar was crouched, ready for a swift change of form and a fight to the death if necessary.
He stepped into the dry creek bed, feet barely touching the smooth stone and cracked soil. Fear gripping him at what he would find ahead.
Relief and shock whipped through him when he saw Rebekka standing several feet away from Melina and unharmed. He didn’t stop running until she was in his arms, held tight against his body, both of them shaking.
Aryck pressed kisses to her mouth, her neck, her ear. His hands roamed feverishly as he assured himself she was truly alive and uninjured. Questions assailed him but he couldn’t keep his lips from returning to hers long enough to ask them.
Wolves and Coyotes, Lions and Jaguars arrived. Some continued on, following the scent of tiger that remained thick in the air. Others lingered, Nahuatl and his father among them.
What happened here? Koren asked.
His father’s use of their mental pathway helped force Aryck’s mind back into reasoned thought. He couldn’t bring himself to release Rebekka but he managed to contain his emotions so conversation was possible.
“What happened?” he asked her.
Rebekka’s shudder was followed by trembling, the tightening of her arms around him. “It’s Melina, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“She attacked. But before she reached me a tiger came out of nowhere. Not Canino. This one was larger than he is. The fight was over in seconds. There was nothing I could do. He stood over her, roaring, and then he left.”
Rebekka pressed her face to his chest. Her body continued to shake as tears wet his skin. “I can’t stay here. I have to go back to Oakland.”
A wave of agony slammed into him with her words, drenching him in failure at the realization she no longer trusted him to keep her safe. He shook it off, or tried to, denying it would end this way.
“This won’t happen again,” he told her.
She tilted her head, revealing eyes wet with pain but shimmering with resolve and pleading. The sight of her face was like a slash through his chest, a ripping out of his heart even before she whispered, “Come with me. Please come back to Oakland with me.”
The pain crashing through him increased as it occurred to him Melina’s attack might only have cemented an earlier decision, might only be an excuse. That Rebekka had already chosen the outcast prostitutes over a future with him.
He wanted to latch onto the explanation, so it wouldn’t be his own failure to keep her safe from attack that was responsible for her desire to return to the human world.
His throat clogged with emotion. She had to know he couldn’t leave Were lands.
He was an enforcer. He was needed here, now more than ever if he wanted to keep his vision of a far-reaching alliance between Were groups alive.
Had she forgotten what Nahuatl said only a short time ago? As long as she remained on Were lands, becoming his mate was acceptable. To follow her to the human world and take her as a mate there would be a direct challenge to the ancestors’ will.
Didn’t she realize she was asking him to become outcast? He would be judged and punished.
Surely she had to know what the ultimate cost would be, the loss of his jaguar form when she was forced to heal him as she’d done Levi.
“I can’t,” he said, expecting the Jaguar to separate and add to his pain by raking savage claws through his chest and belly. But his two Earth-bound souls remained fully integrated, united against the idea of living among humans and outcasts. United in their suffering and braced to endure losing her now, especially if her choice to leave had nothing to do with Melina’s attack.
Yet he couldn’t let her go without one last attempt to make her stay. His mouth covered hers and, regardless of their audience, he poured all his emotion into the kiss.
It only made things worse.
She answered with like emotion.
Pain and desire.
Longing and hope and loss.
Love.
“Stay,” he asked again, eyes burning as he suppressed his tears.
“Come with me.” Her voice broke. “At least for a little while.”
“I can’t.”
It would only prolong the suffering if he did.
Unlike him, she didn’t try to stop her tears. They coursed down her cheeks. “I understand,” she whispered.
He could see she did, that despite her request she’d known what his answer would be. Accepted it.
Pride made him release her and turn away.
This is her choice, he told himself, leaving her without a backward glance.
Thirty-one
REBEKKA hadn’t thought she had any more tears to shed. But when she knelt next to Caius and solemnly took the amulet he’d found in the woods and kept safe for her, a new wave of pain washed through her and she felt the tightening of her throat.
His lips trembled and his chin jutted out. He already saw good-bye in her tearstained face and the shaking of her hands.
“I have to go back to Oakland,” she said, her tears starting to flow again. “I’m needed there.”
He swallowed, his small frame stiff as he tried to face yet another loss in his life. “Will you come back when you’re done? And teach me to read like you promised?”
Rebekka wanted to say yes, even if it meant returning and finding Aryck mated to a Jaguar female. But she knew there was every chance she would be killed if Allende found out she was helping the prostitutes escape. And if she managed to avoid death, there would be other cities, other places.
She’d been created for a purpose and given a choice whether to embrace it or turn her back on it. She’d been forced to choose between the two things she had always wanted the most, and now she had to live with the choice, though it felt as though her heart
was being ripped from her body.
Rebekka pulled Caius into a hug. “I can’t promise anything except that I’ll try to come back for a visit.”
Caius gave a sob, his arms tightening around her and her shirt growing wet as he cried. Canino joined them, rubbing his side against them. Circling, purring in an offer of comfort and solidarity. Then finally butting his head against Caius’s back and pressing his nose into the cub’s armpit as if to say, “Enough is enough. You’ve got me.”
Rebekka ended the hug. Words clogged in her throat. She couldn’t bring herself to say good-bye. “You two should get back to Jaguar lands,” she said, trying for a light tone and failing, though her effort was enough to help Caius stop crying.
He took a long shuddering breath and offered a tremulous smile. “I asked Phaedra if she thought I should take Canino to my house again. She said yes. She said it’d be a good thing to do every day if Canino is willing to let my mother chase him away.”
“I’m glad,” Rebekka said, managing a wobbly smile, though she felt frozen in this final moment of good-bye, the last of them before she and Levi began the trip to Oakland.
Caius didn’t move away and neither did she. Canino came to the rescue again, pushing between them, grumbling deep in his chest and using his sheer size to reposition Caius so he faced Jaguar lands.
Rebekka swallowed hard and willed herself to turn toward where Levi waited and, beyond him, the Wolves who would ensure they made it to the border of Were lands safely. She forced herself to take one step, and then another, and another, to not turn around and look back one last time. She managed it until she heard the sound of running footsteps behind her.
She turned in time to have Caius barrel into her. He gave her a fierce hug. Then just as quickly released her and ran to Canino, climbing on the Tiger’s back so Rebekka’s last memory of him brought a smile instead of tears.
They traveled in silence. The Wolves almost never visible. Levi respecting her privacy, her need to deal with her heartbreak on her own, though she knew he wanted to ask what had happened to make her leave Aryck and the Were lands when she could have stayed.
Whether it was because of her father’s gift, or her desire to escape thoughts of Aryck, Rebekka kept moving forward, her endurance matching the Weres’. Surprising them.
For a time loss drove her on relentlessly, barely allowing for eating or drinking. Denying the possibility of sleep and making her push the others to keep running through the night rather than stop.
And then it was anger keeping her going, that Aryck hadn’t been willing to accompany her to Oakland, even for a little while. If he’d said yes, then he would know her reason for leaving and understand the choice she made.
Finally it was hope, excitement. Anticipation making it impossible to slow or stop until they reached the border of Were territory and the Barrens were visible in the distance, and, beyond them, Oakland.
She thought the Wolves accompanying them would leave without speaking. Other than appearing to mention the proximity of water or to call a halt long enough to cook and eat whatever game they’d killed, there’d been little sign of them.
Instead Jael emerged. He took her hands in his and met her gaze with piercing gold eyes, searched for something before giving a small shake of his head and saying, “I don’t understand your choice but may the ancestors welcome you again to our lands, and if the Jaguars are so foolish not to make you one of them, then become Wolf.”
He released her hands and turned, loping back into the forest. She and Levi traveled through the area where the ferals roamed and finally entered the blackened destruction of the Barrens. Levi broke his long silence then, asking, “Do you want to talk about it?”
She could hear compassion and caring in his voice, as well as anger and the desire to tear Aryck apart, with human fingers and knives if lion claws and teeth weren’t available. She took Levi’s hand, felt a lump rise in her throat at the prospect of returning to the place where it had begun, where she’d first seen the Jaguar barely clinging to life.
“Let’s go to the shelter we spent the night in,” she said, unsure of what would be involved in healing Levi and not wanting to do it out in the open.
He glanced upward and frowned. Opened his mouth, no doubt to say they could make it to the brothel if they pushed, but she stopped him by saying, “I want to try to heal you.”
She couldn’t tell him more, but he knew. It was there in his eyes, in his hoarse whisper. “The witches spoke the truth about your gift?”
“I won’t know until I attempt it,” Rebekka said, her palm growing damp against his. She didn’t think her father had lied, either about the gift or not being demon, but she couldn’t be sure.
Levi gave her hand a squeeze before releasing it. “It will only take a few minutes to get to the shelter. Should we walk?”
His nervous anticipation matched hers. She laughed, doubting she could walk now that she was so close to realizing a dream she’d had from the moment she’d stepped into a Were brothel and seen what life was like there for those trapped between forms.
“Race you,” she said, feeling carefree, joyous in those moments it took to reach the structure of narrow passageways formed by twisting, rusted steel.
They climbed slowly, careful of the jagged edges. She avoided the tearing of flesh even as memories of Aryck sliced through her with each step.
He made his choice and I made mine, she told herself, but the anger she’d managed earlier was gone, leaving an aching, empty place behind.
Despite her attempts to suppress the pain, her eyes grew wet with tears as they entered the room where she’d healed Aryck. A sob escaped when Levi hugged her to him, his hand stroking her back, his cheek against her hair.
“This is why you left, isn’t it? To heal the outcast.” She felt him swallow. “To heal me.”
“Yes.”
“And Aryck feared the ancestors’ wrath? He forbade you from doing it?”
“He doesn’t know. I couldn’t tell him unless he left Were lands.”
“Then how—”
“I can’t explain.” She tightened her arms around him in a silent plea for him to accept without questioning further.
“Aryck is a fool for letting you go. And a coward for not being willing to see for himself what it means for outcasts to live among humans.”
Part of her wanted to agree, to fill the empty, aching place with hate or anger, to use those emotions to eradicate the feelings of love and the pain of loss now accompanying it. Instead she found herself defending Aryck. “He’s needed in Were lands. I think if the Weres are going to survive the war between supernaturals that Annalise Wainwright told me about, then they need to be united.”
Somehow, speaking the words out loud erected a barrier, walling off everything except hope and anticipation. “Ready to try this?”
Levi gave her one final hug before dropping his arms and stepping back. “What do you want me to do?”
“Sitting would be best. Or lying down.”
He stripped out of his clothing and put them on the floor, using them as a pad to sit on beneath the hole in the ceiling that allowed a beam of light to stream in.
Rebekka sat down cross-legged in front of him. Her hands lifted to the amulet, intending to take it off as she’d once had to in order to heal, but when her fingers touched the beads that were the same size and color as those braided into her father’s hair, she hesitated.
The first time she’d healed after getting the amulet had been in this place, and her gift was changed. She’d suspected then that the amulet was tied to her father. Now she was sure of it.
Guided more by instinct than anything else, Rebekka left the amulet on. She gathered her will, imagined Levi as a Lion as she placed her hands on his shoulders and closed her eyes.
Nothing happened.
There was no tingling sensation followed by a gentle, unconscious blending of purpose and a desire to render aid as she’d once experienced. Nor was t
here the taking, as if she was nothing more than a tool, that she’d come to expect.
Rebekka exhaled on a sigh, thinking perhaps she’d been wrong about the amulet after all. Her hands slid from Levi’s shoulders to his chest and her breath caught at hearing the faint beat of distant drums.
Her mouth went suddenly dry. Her own heart began thundering as various pieces of what had been an unsolvable puzzle fell into place.
The reason why she couldn’t attempt this on Were lands.
The reason why outcasts who entered Were territory had to seek out the shaman.
The reason why she was accepted without undergoing the Rite of Trial but warned against the dangers of coming back to the human world and the risk of having her spirit corrupted.
And the reason why Levi had been warned against presenting himself for judgment in Lion territory. So he could face the ancestors now, her desire to heal him leading to this moment, this choice, because this was not to be a healing of the body, but a healing of the soul, and her gift had been changed to enable it
Her eyes opened and went to Levi’s face. His features were taut, his jaw clenched and breathing carefully controlled. She licked dry lips, knew the answer by what she saw in his face but asked the question anyway. “You hear them?”
“Do it, Rebekka. I’m willing to be the first so you’ll know what the cost is to yourself and to others.”
Once again she closed her eyes, consciously allowing her right palm to slide lower. The beating grew louder, more insistent, and when her hand finally lay over Levi’s heart, the surge of power came like a wind at her back, pushing her spirit from her body and against a gale force battering her as if trying to keep her from answering the call of the drums.
Gray nothingness swirled around her, and she knew, from her visit with Aisling the night before she and Levi entered the maze to free Cyrin and the others, that this was the ghostlands. Fear tried to turn her back, but she’d endured too much since the Wainwright witches set this in motion with their summons and the offer of the token, and she’d lost too much to turn away from the path now.
