by S. M. Reine
Deirdre snorted. “I take it you’ve never seen an actual castle before.”
“Well, it’s not a castle, but it’s our castle. You know what I mean. Right, Gage?”
He was eating the meat with enthusiasm, though it was a cheap cut with more gristle than meat. His cheeks bulged with roast, so he nodded vigorously.
Deirdre sighed and propped her chin on one hand. “Castle or not, one thing is for certain: I need a new job.”
Gage swallowed. “I’ve got one for you.”
“I’m not interested. But while we’re talking about that, I couldn’t help but notice that your timing is suspiciously impeccable. Did you stalk me back here?”
“Security footage showed that you were being pursued even before Colin Burgh went on his rampage,” Gage said. “I figured whoever’s out to get you would try again once you got home. I’m under instruction to make sure you’re safe, so I stuck around.”
She did feel a lot safer with the lantern and battery pack in the middle of the dining room table. It was an odd centerpiece, but a reassuring one. She wondered if Gage would let her keep it. She’d run the damn thing all night, every night.
“So you stalked me,” Deirdre said.
Gage shrugged. “Stalked, protected, whatever.” He shoveled more meat into his mouth. “Good thing I did, too.”
“I had it under control.”
“You shot at him with an iron bullet,” Jolene said. “An iron bullet against a nightmare. What were you even thinking? We were both toast and you know it.”
“I’m sure you would have had plenty of time to escape, Jolene,” Gage said cordially. “This gravy is fantastic, by the way. Can I get the recipe? I’d love to serve it on the next night I have to make dinner.”
Jolene brightened. He’d hit her in the soft parts by complimenting her cooking. “Do you make dinner a lot?”
“Everyone in the pack has to. We take turns. There’s enough of us that we only have to work the kitchens once a month, but I bet this gravy would knock the socks off of my Alpha.” He tilted the plate so that the juices trickled into his mouth. “Not that she usually wears socks. That was great, ladies. Thanks for feeding me.”
“Any time.” Jolene leaned back in her chair to take a lingering look at Gage’s body. “Seriously, any time.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He checked his watch. “For now, I have to get back to the sanctuary. Other people need to use the jet. Will you come with me, Deirdre?”
She grabbed his plate and stacked it on top of hers. “I’m going to do dishes.”
“Why aren’t you going to run off with him?” Jolene’s voice hissed from between her sharp teeth with a faint lisp. “If you don’t, I will. He looks delicious.” The odds that she was being literal were about fifty-fifty.
“Neither of us are going to run off with him,” Deirdre said. “Much as I appreciate his help, I’m sending him home. Alone.”
That last part was directed at Gage, who had been pretending not to listen to Jolene. It must have taken willpower of steel to ignore her. Fanged mouth aside, Jolene was hot. Her measurements were the highly coveted thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six, with ridiculously long legs.
Hollywood agents had tried to recruit her for movies until she opened her mouth. There still wasn’t a market for asanbosam headlining blockbusters. They weren’t one of the “sexy” vampire breeds.
Gage polished off his glass of five-dollar wine, then wiped his mouth with the paper towel. “Hear me out first. You owe me that much.”
“You do,” Jolene agreed.
Deirdre glared daggers at her roommate. “I know where this is going. Gage wants me to be the bitch of his pack. Officially an Omega. I wouldn’t be interested even if he saved my life a hundred times.”
“Rylie felt bad about using that word,” Gage said. “She knows she hit a nerve. She wants to apologize personally.”
“Apology accepted. Done talking?”
Jolene lifted her hands. “Wait, let’s rewind this conversation a couple of seconds. Rylie? Rylie Gresham?”
“I told you that I was at the press conference today. It’s not my fault you thought I was being sarcastic.” Deirdre dropped all of the plates in the sink with a clatter. “Look, Gage, it’s not just the Omega thing.”
“What, you like being here? No offense, but this place is a dump,” Gage said.
“It is totally a dump,” Jolene said.
Deirdre glared at the plates in the sink, since glaring at her roommate didn’t seem to actually help. “Whose side are you on here?”
“I’m on the side that gets you out of the city, away from Gutterman, and into a pack. A real pack. I’ve always been worried you’d go all moon-sick, hanging out here with me.” Jolene slammed a fist on the table. “And not just any pack. The pack! I’d be Rylie’s bitch if I had shifter parts.”
“The pack is the reason we live in this dump in the first place,” Deirdre said. “They’re in charge of the benefits system. Heck, they created the system.”
“And we’d be homeless without it,” Jolene said.
Deirdre started rinsing off the plates and tossing them into the dishwasher, maybe a little too vigorously. “I don’t want to be part of it. I want life to go back to normal. I want to find another job, make enough money to rent a normal apartment, and—”
“Wait,” Gage said suddenly. He grabbed the remote and turned the volume up on the TV.
Riley’s face had been replaced by a man’s. Deirdre was shocked to realize that she recognized him.
Everton Stark—the man who ordered her to “kill them all”—was handsome in a frightening, intense sort of way. His neck was as thick as his jaw. His shaggy beard gave him the look of a man who had lived in the wilderness for years. His nose was long and hooked, almost too big for his features.
He was speaking. “Your Alpha has lied to you. She has lied to all of you. The rash of shapeshifter murders hasn’t been because of the moon sickness. They have been because of me.”
Deirdre’s hand crept to cover her mouth. “Oh my gods…”
“Unlike your current Alpha, I will not lie to you. Those so-called moon-sick people have been killing under my command. I have the ability to compel other shapeshifters to do my bidding, even things they wouldn’t usually do—like murder. Every person I’ve directed to kill has been innocent. Yet every person I’ve directed to kill has still done it.”
Deirdre felt Gage looking at her.
She didn’t look back at him.
“I’ve done this to make a statement—to prove a point.” The camera crept closer to Stark until his face filled the frame. There was a hint of scarring on his right temple and bolts of red hair through his beard. “Rylie Gresham colludes with the Office of Preternatural Affairs to oppress our people. Shifters are treated as cattle by a merciless system. I will tear that system apart. I will make a better world for shifters. A more genuine world that does not deny we are beasts.
“My name is ever Everton Stark and I am challenging Riley Gresham as Alpha,” he went on. “Those of you who side with me will enjoy a world without the idiotic rules that the current Alpha has created. A world where you don’t have to subsist on scrap and live in shacks. A world where shifters rule.” Anger flashed in his eyes. “Those of you who are against me…well, you won’t be for long.”
That was the end of the video. The news anchors came back on to discuss it, calling it a declaration of terrorism.
The words rattled within Deirdre’s skull.
Terrorism. Oppression. Alpha.
Deirdre felt numb. “What did he mean when he said that those who are against him won’t be for long? Does that mean he’ll kill everyone who doesn’t align with him?”
“Worse,” Gage said. “He wasn’t joking when he said that he can make shifters obey every command. He’s completely literal about that. His command is irresistible.”
“That’s not true. He told me to kill and I didn’t,” Deirdre said.
“Exactly,” Gage said. He pushed back his chair and stood, gazing down at her with a sudden seriousness that he hadn’t shown before. “And that is why Rylie needs your help to win this war.”
—IV—
Deirdre and Gage arrived at the sanctuary at first light. The private airstrip was guarded by several shapeshifters—some in their beast forms, others carrying automatic weapons. The werewolves were almost as big as horses, and they looked like far more of a deterrent than the guys with the guns.
She had seen videos and pictures of the sanctuary before. It was always shown as some kind of Eden. A safe place for shifter children to grow up.
This looked more like a war zone.
Deirdre was reluctant to step out on the tarmac, knowing what Everton Stark could do. If any of those burly-armed guards had been compelled, then there was no way to know they wouldn’t shoot her on sight.
But she did emerge, nobody shot at her, and Deirdre took a first breath of fresh mountain air.
The landing strip was on top of a mountain looking down into a verdant valley with a city too perfect to be real. A waterfall frothed nearby, and the lake at the bottom was ringed by cottages, each of which had their own vegetable garden.
Mundane cattle grazed in a field at the southern end of the city while other animals frolicked on the north end. Those ones weren’t normal animals, but shapeshifters. Deirdre could tell that their minds were human even at that distance. They moved like men playing around on four legs, graceful but purposeful.
Gage stepped up beside her. The musk of his scent was as strong as the pine, the damp earth, the cool morning wind. “What do you think?”
Deirdre thought that she could’ve grown up there. She could have spent her childhood in some peaceful shifter Mecca instead of living in group homes with other preternatural children.
But she hadn’t.
“I’m ready to see Rylie,” Deirdre said.
His mouth slanted into a sad smile. “Don’t want a tour first?”
“Not especially.”
“Then follow me,” he said.
The armed escort followed them down into the valley. Reaching the sanctuary from the airstrip required traversing a steep, narrow trail along the waterfall. Gage walked at her side, agile on the rocks. The shifted werewolves took the lead. The men with the guns took the rear.
Deirdre understood that they were all there to kill her if it became necessary.
That was how she’d been treated her entire life—dangerous. As if there was any animal she could turn into that would be able to take down four giant wolves and three machine guns. As a child, she’d found the fear baffling. It had even made her cry a few times, wondering what kind of awful thing she had become. Now she found it exhausting.
“I’m not stupid enough to attack Rylie,” Deirdre said. “And I don’t have motive.”
“I know that,” Gage said, leaping from one boulder to the next.
“Then what’s with the bodyguards?”
“Everyone’s protective of our Alpha. Especially now. That’s all.”
Deirdre eyed the wolves at the front. They didn’t look to be paying any attention to her, but as Colin Burgh had shown, they would be fast and brutal once their attentions turned. “Can you get rid of them?”
Gage’s expression was somewhere between amused and confused. “You need at least one escort. Do you think it’s better to be alone with me?”
She shrugged. He hadn’t tried to kill her yet, and she didn’t think that he’d been compelled by Everton Stark—he didn’t have the crazy dilated pupils look. Almost as importantly, he didn’t seem to be afraid of the unknown animal lurking inside of her.
“Okay,” Gage said. He reached out and snagged a wolf by the tail. Deirdre’s heart skipped a beat when the beast whipped around, focusing its golden eyes on Gage. “I’ll take care of this visitor. The rest of you can go back to what you were doing.”
The wolf snapped at his hand, but didn’t bite. It was a gesture of annoyance, not aggression.
One by one, the shifters peeled off, leaping down the trail or clambering back up the mountain, skipping the trail to tackle the slopes directly.
When Deirdre looked behind her, the armed guards were already gone.
She was alone on the trail with Gage.
Deirdre burst out laughing. He laughed along with her, somewhat more weakly. “What?” he asked. “Did I miss a joke?”
“You grabbed a werewolf’s tail,” Deirdre said. “You’re nuts.”
“You won’t think I’m nuts when you see how completely harmless the pack is.”
The pack could have been populated by the nicest, happy-go-luckiest people in the world, and Deirdre still wouldn’t have called them that. Nothing that had razor-sharp teeth and lightning-fast reflexes could be harmless.
When they entered the sanctuary along the north end of the road, though, she kind of saw what he meant. All the open fields were occupied by shifters at play, and she realized that they were much smaller now that she was on their level. There weren’t any wolves the size of horses enjoying playtime. Most only reached her hip.
Shifter children.
They were supervised by a cluster of older kids in human form—young teenagers, really. They lounged in hammocks while sipping from drinks with umbrellas.
It looked nice. Really nice.
Gage caught her looking. “Those aren’t shifter kids, in case you’re wondering,” he said. “The ones in the hammocks.”
“What are they?” Deirdre asked. Not who, but what. Everyone was defined by what they could do or become in a place like this.
“Well, Dana over there is mundane. She’s the dirty blond. Dana’s sister is the one with all the brown hair—she’s a mage,” Gage said. Deirdre tensed all over. Mages were half-angel, half-human witches, capable of casting vicious magic. “The two of them visit every spring as soon as school gets out. And then Benjamin’s the boy. He’s Rylie’s kid. Another mundane.”
The news that Rylie had birthed a human child was almost more shocking than the presence of a mage.
“Werewolves breed shifter pups,” Deirdre said.
“Yeah, usually.” Gage waved a hand over his head. “Hey guys!”
The two girls ignored him. Only Benjamin waved back. He was making his hammock swing by kicking his legs. Some kind of big cat—maybe a mountain lion?—lounged between the roots of the tree, swatting at his feet with paws the size of dinner plates.
Big cats, angelborn, mundanes.
Everyone was welcome at the werewolf sanctuary…except Deirdre.
She turned from the field of shifter children and hurried up the main street. Gage picked up his pace to remain at her side. “You’ve got two mundanes and a mage at the sanctuary,” Deirdre said. “What else do you have? A full-blooded angel?”
“Nah, Nashriel’s been too busy with the school,” Gage said. Deirdre nearly tripped over her feet. He laughed and caught her arm. “I’m not joking. We do have an angel in the family. He’s married to one of Rylie’s daughters.”
“He’s married to a child?”
“Rylie’s got adult children. It’s hard to explain.”
Deirdre imagined that an adult “daughter” must have been Rylie’s child in the same way that Gage was one of her “sons”—a foster child of the pack. And she was married to an angel.
That was terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. Angels were the worst of all the non-human species. They could warp minds, fought like soldiers who’d been in a thousand wars, and were impossible to defend against. They’d had problems with ethereal uprisings in Europe. Deirdre hadn’t realized any of them lived on the same continent that she did, much less that he would have been tangled with the pack.
“For what it’s worth, I agree with you. I think this is a horrible idea,” Gage said, even as he smiled and waved at a wolf loping past.
“My visit to the sanctuary? Rylie’s supposed apology?”
“The fact that Ry
lie thinks you’d ever want to help the pack out. I watched your face when we arrived at the sanctuary. You hate us.” He didn’t say it in a mean way, but it still hurt Deirdre somewhere deep inside to hear him say that. It wasn’t all that different from saying she hated other shifters. And that wasn’t true.
Well, it mostly wasn’t true.
“My first home after Genesis had about two hundred other kids in it,” Deirdre said. “We lived in an old hospital. It was funny—the storerooms were fully stocked with medical supplies, even though that building hadn’t been used as a hospital in, I don’t know, twenty years. Like someone knew there’d be a ton of orphans after Genesis and wanted to make sure there’d be enough to take care of us.”
Gage rubbed his jaw, scratching his fingers along the stubble on his chin. “I remember that. I went to one of those places, too.”
“And then they came through to categorize us.” She remembered the werewolf who had done it—a black man with a goatee and a scarred face. He came through, smelled them one by one, and separated the kids into groups by species and breed. “The ones he picked out as shifters went to another home. A holding place. And when the full moon came around, they figured out what animals we were and sent everyone to the sanctuary or one of the other pack ranches.”
“Except you,” Gage said.
She probably didn’t need to finish the story. All the kids who used to be human had gone through the same thing, whether in group homes or when their parents volunteered them to the government. So Deirdre said, “I went off with the other preternatural orphans, like Jolene. The ones who weren’t demons or shifters or sidhe.”
“So you’re angry, right?”
How could she possibly have been anything but angry? The sanctuary was gorgeous. It was perfect for shifter kids, who would never grow up feeling lonely, or out of place, or scared that the moon might someday drive them crazy. They were with pack.
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s a bad idea for Rylie to bring me here. I’m not going to stay.”
