by S. M. Reine
“Tell him we’re still getting married in two weeks and I expect him to be there,” Summer said.
Uriel snorted. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll tell him that.”
He lifted off, stirring the cool spring air around them. It smelled like it was going to rain again. It had been raining a lot since the snow melted, and it always tasted faintly of ash.
Rylie watched him climb toward the clouds, flying slowly under the force of his wings rather than using magic. He really was incognito, trying not to clue any of his fellow angels in to what he was doing, where he was going, whom he was visiting. Which meant that he wasn’t going to be able to travel quickly by supernatural means.
“Abel?” Rylie said.
A dark shape moved among the trees. Abel was in his hulking wolf form, as big as an elk, yet silent as he emerged from the trunks to stand on the trail. His tail swished lightly from side to side when he saw Rylie. It was a silly, almost puppy-like gesture, but she understood that he was trying to make her smile.
And then Abel was gone, flying up the trail in the direction that Uriel had vanished.
Werewolves were incredibly fast and had incredible stamina. He’d be able to keep up with Uriel.
Abel would find how the angels were getting in and out of New Eden, and they would follow whether or not Uriel wanted them to.
“Run, Abel,” Summer whispered. “Run.”
The sound of fists beating against leather drew Rylie to Abram’s cottage. The fact that she could hear it so easily was distressing enough on its own—the sanctuary had been a peaceful place before the Breaking, but it had never been quiet. Not with forty rowdy werewolves in residence. Yet now she could hear the rattling of a chain and Abram’s huffing breaths from the street, and it made her heart ache.
When she rapped her knuckle on the door, the punching noise stopped.
“Come in,” Abram said.
Rylie entered. All the doors in the little cottage stood open, letting her see the entire building at once. One bedroom was an art studio. The other was a gym. Rylie had no idea where Abram was sleeping, or if he had been sleeping at all. Summer would have known but she wasn’t talking. The twins had some kind of pact about that kind of thing. Summer didn’t talk about Abram’s business, and Abram didn’t talk about…well, anything. Even with his mother.
Abram inhabited the gym at the moment. He’d hung a punching bag from the ceiling, and that was the current recipient of his attention.
“What do you need?” he asked, grabbing the bag to stop it from swaying. His knuckles were wrapped with tape. His sweats were dusted with chalk. He sounded gruffer than usual.
The question made Rylie stop in the doorway. What did she need? She didn’t need anything. She hadn’t been thinking when she’d headed into the sanctuary. Summer was still waiting on the trail, and all Rylie had known was that she couldn’t possibly wait breathlessly for her mate to return, hopefully unharmed.
She wanted a distraction and Abram was all that remained. Aside from Stephanie, anyway, but they weren’t exactly on the best terms anymore.
“I don’t know,” Rylie said.
He nodded like he understood. “Make yourself at home.”
Abram resumed punching the bag. Rylie’s eyes wandered over the cottage.
Her son had once shared the cottage with Seth, and her ex-boyfriend’s scent still lingered. Some of his clothes and sparse belongings were still in the closet. Rylie had never gotten up the strength to go through them, and it would have seemed cowardly to let Summer do it, though she had offered.
Rylie smoothed a hand over the stomach of her dress, flattening the wrinkles. Maybe it was time to go through Seth’s things. After all, she didn’t know how much longer they’d be in the sanctuary—or if there would be a sanctuary at all after this war.
But her feet wouldn’t allow her to leave the miniature gym. She couldn’t approach Seth’s old bedroom.
Instead, she stepped carefully over the free weights and slipped along the wall of the gym. There was a white leather jacket draped over the chair in the corner. Rylie traced a finger over it. She couldn’t imagine her son wearing anything that ostentatious, but what did she know? Abram was so quiet. Anything could have been going on inside of him and she would never know.
Abram was attacking that punching bag like he was trying to make the seams explode, and it swung wildly under the blows. Rylie moved to hold it in place for him. He didn’t acknowledge that she had taken up position on the other side. He just hit harder, faster, making clouds of chalk with every blow.
He finally hit it so hard that it bucked in Rylie’s hands, pushing her back a step. Surprise washed over her. Abram was strong, sure, but she was a werewolf. “Wow,” Rylie said. “What’d the bag do to you?”
It was the kind of thing Summer might have said to lighten the mood. It didn’t work.
“I went to Eve’s temple from Shamain,” Abram said.
Rylie’s hands tightened on the bag, digging her fingernails into the leather. “Why?”
His glare burned through her. He ripped the tape off of his hands. “You know why.”
She didn’t. She really didn’t. But as she watched him fling the tape onto his desk, strip his tank top off over his head, and grab a fresh t-shirt, she thought it was easy to imagine. “The gate,” Rylie whispered. “Abram…”
“Yeah. Not going to try to make excuses. But I’m going to tell you right now, because I don’t think I can tell anyone else. Because I think you’re the only one who I can trust. My blood worked.”
He said it with only the faintest quiver of emotion—a strained tension that sounded like it must have hurt him. Rylie knew that it hurt her to hear it.
Her knees wobbled. She hung on to the bag tighter.
“But Summer,” she said, touching her stomach again. “And Abel.”
“Yeah,” Abram said. “But Summer and Abel.”
Neither of them had been able to unlock the gates to Eden with their blood. Only the descendants of Adam were capable. Seth had been able to do it, and James had used him to unlock two of them.
Abel was Seth’s brother, but couldn’t open the locks. Neither could his daughter. Which meant that neither had Adam’s blood in them.
Even though Abram did.
“Yeah,” he said. He was watching Rylie closely, and he’d seen the moment that the thought crossed her mind. “Yeah, exactly.”
“I think I need to sit down,” she said in a tiny voice.
Abram moved the white leather jacket from the chair to his desk, then steered Rylie to the chair. She sat down. It didn’t help. She was still falling—tumbling through a black hole of thought down into a very dark place.
Rylie started to say, “If Seth and Abel had different fathers…” And then she stopped.
“Two fathers, same mother,” Abram said.
He was trying to guide her to an idea. A horrible idea.
“But you and Summer are twins,” Rylie said.
“Yeah.”
The air in the room was suddenly too close. Seth’s smell, faint just a few minutes earlier, was now overwhelming. She couldn’t breathe it in. It made her feel like he was there. Like he was asking her again to choose between him and Abel, like that question she’d answered so long ago was suddenly open again.
Rylie’s jaw ached. She rubbed her gums through her lips.
She was wolfing out.
“I have to walk,” Rylie said. If she didn’t move—if she didn’t stop herself from falling—she was going to lose control.
And she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to get it back again.
It was raining again. It left gray circles on Rylie’s white dress as she hurried down the sanctuary’s single paved road. The dirty rain made everything feel grungy and sick and wrong, even the asphalt under her feet.
Asphalt that had been laid by Seth.
The grief from his death had never gone away, but she’d been able to go whole days without thinking about him. No
w she couldn’t go a second. He had roofed Crystal’s cottage all on his own. He had helped pick out the siding on all the buildings. He had made all the decisions, really—the human Alpha of a werewolf pack. A pillar that Rylie could lean on.
The man that she had almost married.
But then his brother mated with her as a werewolf on the full moon. She had fallen pregnant with Abel’s twins, and she had picked him. Stephanie had performed the paternity test herself. There was no question about their parentage.
But Abram’s blood had opened the gate, and Summer’s hadn’t.
Rylie walked faster, until her heart was beating hard and she was sweating underneath the rain. The pavement turned to dirt under her feet and began to slope upward, cutting through the forest toward the pass.
She was getting drenched by that filthy rain and she just didn’t care. She wasn’t there in that immediate moment. She was caught in memory, yanked back through time by the question of “what if?”
How many times had she ridden up that road on the back of the motorcycle, arms wrapped around Seth so she wouldn’t fall off? How many times had they held each other on rainy days instead of going outside to work on the Gresham Ranch? How many times had they had sex without protection because Rylie was convinced that werewolves couldn’t get pregnant?
Would she have picked Abel if she thought that one of her children might have belonged to Seth?
“It’s over,” she said out loud, trying to give force to the words. “I made my choice.”
She hadn’t felt this twisting sickness and self-loathing in so long that she didn’t know how to handle it anymore. She wasn’t that girl. She wasn’t someone who messed with guys because she couldn’t make up her mind.
But the thing was, her mind had been made up. Her mind had chosen Seth. Easy.
It was the wolf that had always needed Abel.
“No,” Rylie said.
Now she was so freaked out that her mind was creating revisionist history and she had no idea what was truth and what was her panic.
It shouldn’t have mattered anyway. Seth was dead.
She was already up and over the pass and flying down the road on the other side of the mountain. She didn’t remember getting so far. Northgate spread below her, no longer a picture-perfect Christmas-card town, but a collection of wreckage in a world claimed by Hell. The fissure seemed redder than usual today. It was definitely steamier, what with the rain and all.
St. Philomene’s Cathedral seemed to leap out at Rylie, and she knew where instinct was leading her.
She didn’t get all the way to the church before running into Stephanie Whyte. The doctor was on her daily walk around town wearing a flower-patterned raincoat. She looked perfect and fashionable. Like the world hadn’t fallen apart around her. Like her husband wasn’t trapped in New Eden with the rest of the Apple and the werewolf pack. Rylie hated her for the composure. It burned in her gut.
As if Stephanie knew what Rylie was thinking, she stopped dead in her tracks, giving the young werewolf a wary look.
“What’s wrong?” Stephanie asked. The question came out as curt as everything else she ever said, but Rylie thought that she could almost hear a soft edge to it. Almost.
Everything was wrong. Everything was so incredibly freaking wrong.
“Werewolf biology,” Rylie said. “Well, wolf biology would work too, I guess. What do you know about it?” The fact that she managed to speak instead of bursting into tears was probably some kind of belated Christmas miracle.
“I know everything that I’ve learned from the limited studies I’ve performed on you. Which is to say, I know virtually nothing.” She arched an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Could a single—um—could one litter be fathered by different guys? Wolves, I mean.”
Stephanie was very quiet. Too quiet. She had stopped spinning her umbrella and the rain pattered sharply against it, drizzling off the rear edge. “Why?” she finally asked.
Rylie couldn’t explain without telling her why she thought that Abram and Summer might have different fathers. Abram hadn’t wanted anyone else to know. And neither did Rylie.
Seth had died because of his blood. He had been forced to give everything up to James Faulkner, and then he had gone and died.
What would happen to Abram if anyone found out?
“Curiosity, I guess,” Rylie said, and she knew it sounded stupid even as she said it. “I don’t know much about werewolves although I’ve been Alpha since I was sixteen, and now the pack is gone… I’m just thinking about it a lot. That’s all.”
The doctor was still giving her that weird look, and Rylie didn’t like it at all. God, she wished she were a better liar. She wished she knew about biology herself. She wished she’d gone to college. She wished—well, she wished for a lot of things, most of all that her son didn’t have blood that was likely to get him killed.
“I can look into it,” Stephanie said. “Are you wondering if your pregnancy might be—”
“Get the fuck away from her,” said a low, dangerous voice from behind them.
Rylie knew who it would be when she turned, but she still had to look.
It was Abel.
Guilt lurched through her, making her heart skip a few beats. He always made her heart do that, though. The sight of him standing naked in the rain, freshly changed back from his wolf form, was absolutely breathtaking. It wasn’t that she was wondering if she loved him as much as she thought she did. That was stupid. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
Crap, even her thoughts were rambling. How was she going to keep everyone from finding out about Abram when she couldn’t control her brain, much less her mouth?
She reached out to touch his chest and then dropped her hands to her side.
“It’s okay, I came to talk to Stephanie,” Rylie said. “She hasn’t done anything wrong.”
But the doctor was already drawing back. Whatever almost-familial bond had once existed between Stephanie and the werewolves was gone now, scratched away at the end of the tattoo gun that had imprinted a bleeding apple on her flesh.
“I’ll let you know what I find,” Stephanie said.
She didn’t turn her back on them until she was already at the end of the block, and then she sidestepped into the trees, taking a shortcut toward the cathedral.
Abel jerked Rylie against his chest. “Running to Northgate in the rain? Alone?” There was no real animosity in the words. He almost looked amused. “I bet you didn’t warn anyone about where you were going, neither. Why do you have to be such a pain in the ass?”
God, she loved it when he picked on her. It was probably masochistic, but it was like he was reminding her how much he cared about her with every little jab.
That was how he’d talked to Seth, too.
She tried not to let her heartbeat accelerate again. He’d be able to smell the stress on her. He would know.
“What did you find out about Uriel?” Rylie asked, smoothing her hands over his skin. It comforted her to see him unharmed. “He didn’t know you were following, did he?”
“Secret agent werewolf? You kidding?” He caught her by the wrists, encircling the delicate bones in his large hands, and pushed her toward one of the houses. He forced her to stand under the awning where it was dry. “He went to Shamain. That big old slice in the sky—seems like it’s not totally closed. He went out about fifty miles into farmland and then straight up.”
“So there’s a route to New Eden in Shamain.”
“Seems like it.”
That was a start. It was better than any other lead they’d had since the pack went missing.
It might have been a chance to get their family back.
She rested her cheek against Abel’s chest. He was slick and warm and familiar. It was horrible to think, but even though they had lost everyone else in the pack to New Eden, she still had the people who mattered most. She had her mate. She had her children. As long as she had them, she could survive anything.
>
Including Abram’s deadly little problem.
It was stupid to get caught up in the past and what could have been. She needed to focus on what was real. What was now.
“I love you,” Rylie said, wrapping her arms around his waist.
He rumbled with satisfaction. “Yeah, you do.”
A wind slammed through Northgate, making screen doors flap all along the street. Abel held Rylie tighter as he turned, glaring out at the swaying trees.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
The wind died just as suddenly as it had hit, and a smell struck Rylie hard. The smell of brimstone, blood, and sickness.
She dropped down the steps onto the lawn. She wasn’t surprised to see three people standing just up the street.
Elise Kavanagh dropped her grip on a man she had been carrying slung over her shoulder. He hit the pavement and didn’t move. The other man fell to his knees of his own volition, gagging and heaving. Pretty typical reaction to being jerked across dimensions rather than taking the fissure.
But why would Elise phase in such a hurry like that?
The answer settled over Rylie’s shoulders with dreadful certainty: Something had gone wrong.
Abel tried to grab her arm, but Rylie moved too fast. She jogged over to Elise. It was Deputy Lincoln Marshall at her feet. He was the one covered in blood, and his stench made her recoil. She didn’t want to be anywhere near him. He wasn’t just sick. He was…wrong.
Elise was speaking to James, who had stopped vomiting. “Pick a house with enough space. Get the ritual going.”
It shouldn’t have comforted Rylie to have a demon show up at her door in obvious distress. It could only mean bad things. Like, probably apocalypse bad, since Elise wasn’t with the army. But it seemed easier to handle an external threat than think about her feelings for even another second.
“Tell me what I can do to help,” Rylie said, adrenaline racing through her veins.
Elise finally looked at her. The demon’s eyes were shadowed, and she smelled almost as sickly as Lincoln did. “Help James find an empty building. We’re casting a spell, and we need to do it fast.”
