by S. M. Reine
But he kept going and going and going, until Deirdre thought there was no way he could still be transforming.
Gage was just that violent.
She started to climb back into bed, but the mental image of Gage breaking through her wall and killing her was far too vivid.
Deirdre locked the steel-clad bathroom door before lying down again.
He didn’t stop banging around until the sun rose and the doors unlocked.
And Deirdre didn’t get any sleep.
—VII—
Deirdre’s friend Niamh met her in New York City—disturbingly close to Rylie’s sanctuary. It was no real shock, though. If Stark was out to kill the Alpha, it made sense to position himself as near the Alpha as he safely could. And a big city would be perfect for hiding in.
Niamh showed up wearing a thigh-length band t-shirt with fishnet tights. She was probably wearing shorts underneath the shirt¸ but Deirdre couldn’t tell. Niamh was so damn tall that most shorts were no better than underwear on her anyway. The wild red hair, frizzy enough that it looked like she’d jammed a lacquered nail into a light socket, was good at distracting from her pantslessness.
The feathers were distracting, too.
All the glossy white feathers interspersed through her hair made her look like she was ready to fly away at any moment. In fact, Niamh couldn’t fly at all in her human shape, but Deirdre had always been convinced that Niamh’s brain was one hundred percent bird. She was always somewhere in the clouds, metaphorically speaking.
“Dee!” She leaped on Deirdre with a squeal, lifting her off of her feet. “Oh my gosh, it has been years!”
“Months,” Deirdre said, face smushed against Niamh’s chest. “Around Christmas.”
“Oh, I guess I forgot about that!” Her giggle was almost more of a honk—a really unattractive laugh for such a gorgeous woman, although Deirdre had always found it endearing. “I can’t believe you’re enlisting with me!” She was so perky about the idea of joining a rebellion.
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about that on a street corner,” Deirdre said.
Niamh dropped her. Her hands fluttered over Deirdre, rearranging her hair, tugging on her shirt, smoothing out the wrinkles. She even leaned in close to inspect Deirdre’s makeup. “Teeth?”
Deirdre obediently peeled back her lips to show that she hadn’t gotten lipstick on her teeth.
“Flawless, as always.” Niamh linked her arm with Deirdre’s. “How do I look, Dee?”
She didn’t need to check. “Flawless.” Niamh’s wild hair and patchy tights were a carefully constructed fashion statement. Everything looked exactly the way she wanted it to look.
Niamh had dragged her halfway down the block before she remembered that Deirdre hadn’t come alone.
“Come on!” Niamh shouted over her shoulder.
Gage hurried after them.
He’d been quiet and withdrawn ever since they left the shelter that morning. Considering how his night had gone, Deirdre was surprised he was even walking. She was curious to know what kind of shifter spent the entire full moon ricocheting off of his walls, but not curious enough to ask.
Gage looked different that morning. Maybe even dangerous.
Niamh took them to a comic book shop called No Capes. Appropriately, the comics displayed on the other side of its dirty, barred window were from Vertigo and small publishers—no caped heroes. Niamh had taken a stance on Marvel versus DC and it was a very firm “neither.”
“I’ve got the new Godslayer issue.” Keys jingled as Niamh unlocked the front door. “It doesn’t come out for three weeks, but I have it.”
“How did that happen?” Deirdre asked. “You moving up in the world of comic book stores?” It didn’t really look like it. No Capes was still in a tiny, miserable closet of a store, with no sign that customers had darkened their doorway at all that week.
“I’m dating the artist,” Niamh said. “He said he wants to draw me into the next issue. Wouldn’t that be a riot?”
The bell over the door chimed when they entered. No Capes was a relic of the old paper publishing industry, its comics lovingly arranged in boxes and on shelves. Niamh also sold collectible figurines and cosplay gear—although all the costumes were in her size, and the figurines were her favorite characters.
Niamh stepped over her couch to reach the cash register. It was the same furniture she’d been carting around since Deirdre met her as a teenager, along with the posters on the walls, the easy chair, and even the hideaway bed.
The whole shop was more like a tiny studio apartment than a place intended to sell comics. Which was exactly what was going on. There were many grants and tax breaks for preternaturals who owned businesses, especially those who had come out of the foster system. If one were willing to go through the effort of filing licenses, maintaining a storefront, and keeping stock, the influx of government cash was greater than benefits for people like Deirdre and Jolene.
Considering that she lived in her store, Niamh was probably doing well without selling a single comic.
Gage picked up a figurine of a muscular woman with auburn hair and twin swords. “What’s this?” He tried to reposition the model’s arms.
Deirdre smacked his knuckles. “Don’t touch that!” If Niamh saw a werewolf pawing her collectibles, he’d be on his ass in the street in a heartbeat.
“Whoa, okay.” He set the figurine down. “What is it, though?”
“Main character of the Godslayer comics. It’s geek stuff. Don’t ask.”
Niamh lovingly extracted a comic book from behind the counter. It was already entombed in acid-free cardboard and a UV-resistant plastic envelope. “Behold!” She lifted it so that Deirdre could see. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yeah, looks great,” Deirdre said without really looking at it. “You must be stoked.”
“Beyond stoked. Over the freaking moon.” Niamh stroked the edge of the envelope.
Gage squeezed through the shelves. He wasn’t a particularly huge guy, but the aisles had been arranged so that Niamh could traverse them easily, and she was a wisp of a woman. “Is this where Stark’s hiding?”
“Don’t be silly,” Niamh said.
“But you know where he is, right?” Deirdre asked.
“Well, yeah. You know how the unseelie sidhe wanted access to the sewers through my basement?”
“You mentioned that at the Christmas party, yeah.” The unseelie sidhe were the dark half of the fae. They’d done well after Genesis, much better than their “lighter” counterparts. But they were also far more violent, with twisted urges that the Office of Preternatural Affairs didn’t approve of. They’d gone underground in a lot of places to avoid the law. Literally.
“They built a portal to the Middle Worlds down there. It doesn’t take up much space, and the rent they pay is awesome.” Niamh got a dreamy look. Her fingers continued stroking the Godslayer comic mindlessly.
“What’s that got to do with Stark?” Deirdre asked.
Niamh snapped out of her reverie. “Oh. He heard through a friend that I’ve got covert paths in my basement, so he offered me a similar deal. He’s got a route to his house under my shop.”
Gage grimaced. “He lives in the sewers?”
“Just travels by them, sometimes,” Niamh said. “It’s cleaner down there than you’d think. So many demons and sidhe use them that they’re swankier than an uptown condo.” She carefully returned the Godslayer comic to its hiding place under her counter. “I’m not sidhe, by the way. Just in case you were worried.” She said that directly to Gage. Men were particularly susceptible to the unseelie sidhe’s unsavory charms.
“No, you’re a swanmay,” Gage said. “Right?”
Niamh flipped her hair over her shoulder, flashing the glossy white feathers. It looked like they’d been woven into her curls, but really they grew directly from her scalp. “That’s right. Swanmay. Have you met my kind before?”
“I learned about your kind at the Academy,”
he said.
The beginnings of flirtatiousness vanished instantly. Niamh’s expression shuttered. “Oh.”
Only kids from the sanctuary could attend the Academy.
Niamh, like Deirdre, couldn’t shift. Swanmay weren’t like werewolves, waiting for the turn of the moon or the whim of the Alpha to take their animal forms. They had to don a swan skin to shapeshift. Each was born with a single skin and had to protect it in order to maintain their ability.
Though she’d never said exactly what happened, Niamh had lost her swan skin. She couldn’t change.
And she couldn’t live in the sanctuary.
Deirdre elbowed Gage hard. If he shot his mouth off about the sanctuary among Stark’s followers, they’d get killed before their first day ended.
Gage understood. He switched topics instantly.
“You’re incredibly beautiful,” he said.
Niamh wasn’t impressed. “I know.”
“Nice save, Gage.” Deirdre was getting a headache. “Sorry, Niamh. My friend is kind of an idiot.”
“Where’d you find this asshole anyway?” Niamh asked. “I mean, I get why you’re here, Dee. I’d be surprised if you weren’t. But what’s sanctuary scum doing looking for Stark? Your guy is drenched in privilege. He probably sniffs the Alpha’s ass and piddles himself for treats.”
“It’s love,” Gage said, slinging his arm around Deirdre’s shoulders.
She stiffened. “What?”
“Love. We’re in love.” He grinned at her. “I saved Deirdre from her nightmare of a boss—literally, he was a nightmare. And we fell in love. Which was when I realized what she had been through, along with many other preternaturals, and I became sympathetic to the cause.”
“Oh,” Deirdre said. “Yeah.”
“You could try to sound more convincing.” Niamh rolled her eyes. “I can’t even smell lies and I smell them all over you.”
“Our relationship is mostly about the sex,” Deirdre said.
“Now that I believe.”
Gage snorted. “I am pretty good.”
She elbowed him again, harder this time. “You’re lucky you’re pretty or I wouldn’t keep you around.”
“I’m pretty?”
He was hot as far as insufferable “sanctuary scum” went, actually, but Deirdre wasn’t going to inflate his ego by telling him that.
“You guys are cute together,” Niamh said grudgingly. “I just never thought Dee would go for the muscly type. She was always after the nerds when we were kids. Same nerds that I was after, as a matter of fact. Like Wil Cornet.”
“Wil Cornet,” Deirdre said at the exact same time Niamh had. “I tried to forget about him. He always wore that stupid Star Wars t-shirt.” The nerdy guy thing wasn’t a matter of taste. They were just less likely to be repulsed by the fact that Deirdre couldn’t shapeshift. But even Wil Cornet had been grossed out when he’d discovered that Deirdre was Omega.
“He smelled like Doritos, Mountain Dew, and way too much Axe body spray.”
“But he was cute.”
“So cute.” Niamh didn’t feel like she was settling for nerds. She genuinely loved them.
“Is that how you met Deirdre?” Gage asked. “Fighting over some guy with a Star Wars t-shirt?”
“You’ll never believe me. Get this,” Niamh said. “We met because we both competed in the same beauty pageant.”
Gage burst out laughing.
It was exactly the reaction Deirdre would have expected. She didn’t blame him. She felt much the same, though with less laughing and more groans of regret.
“You’re right, I don’t believe you,” he said.
“No? I’m pretty sure I have pictures.” Niamh pulled out her phone.
Deirdre tried to grab it. “Stop. Don’t you dare.”
Niamh held the phone above her head. Stupid leggy swanmay—Deirdre couldn’t reach the phone without leaping for it, and her pride was already dented enough.
Luckily, Niamh didn’t manage to find the pictures before the bell over the door jingled and a trio of men entered.
Deirdre was shocked to hear the bell. She hadn’t expected to see any customers at No Capes.
But that was because the visitors weren’t customers at all.
The delight in Niamh’s face drained away, taking the color in her cheeks with it. “Stark,” she whispered.
Deirdre’s heart clenched in her chest.
The man who stepped through the front door of the shop was bigger than Deirdre remembered, and she remembered him being pretty big. He was broad, much too broad for the confines of comic book shop, and flanked by a pair of men that Deirdre could only imagine were guards.
His hood was pulled up to hide his face, but she could still feel the weight of his golden eyes upon her.
“Niamh.” His voice was a tenor, not as deep as Deirdre remembered. He must have been playing up the growl for his video.
The swanmay stepped out from behind the counter. She fluttered her hands at Deirdre and Gage. “These are the people I was telling you about. The ones who called yesterday.”
Stark glanced at the sidewalk through the shop window as if checking to see if they were being watched. For an instant, the gloomy light fell on his face, highlighting the shock of red in his beard and the dark gems of his irises.
“We’ll talk about this downstairs,” Stark said.
He brushed past Deirdre on his way to the back of the store. She was so tense that she thought her quivering muscles might make her bones snap in half.
She couldn’t breathe until he was past her again.
Niamh tried to smile as brightly as she had earlier, but a shadow had fallen over her features. “This way.”
One of Stark’s guards locked the front door.
The basement for No Capes was a concrete box with a door on each wall. One of the doors had an inverted horseshoe hanging over it; another of the doors was painted blue.
The third door stood open, revealing a hallway on the other side.
That was where Stark led them—through that open door.
After hearing about how he was hiding in the sewers, Deirdre expected to find squalor on the other side of the door, but instead she found a tidy tunnel with water stained walls and a few puddles gathered on the floor. All the water was clear. Not sewage; just runoff from the rain.
Still, she balked at the door.
“Problem?” Gage asked.
The tunnel was dark, enclosed, and wet. It was a big problem.
Deirdre squared her shoulders and entered anyway.
She tried to make sense of the route as they went, imagining how it would correlate to the city above, but there were too many turns. All she knew was that Stark’s home wasn’t far from No Capes. They reached a set of stairs after only ten minutes of walking.
There was another basement at the top of those stairs, this one much larger than Niamh’s. It was filled with bookshelves, crates, and weapons’ racks. It looked like Stark was a gun collector.
Green light filtered from the narrow windows on the surface, diffusing the sickly glow over the cluttered basement. Deirdre thought it looked a little bit like a museum with the mosaic floor, the dark wood wainscoting, the high rafters.
“Now we can talk,” Stark said. His guards automatically flanked him. The way they moved almost looked military, with measured strides and rigid posture. “Take their bags. Inspect them.”
One of the guards moved forward to seize Deirdre and Gage’s backpacks. He tore through their belongings, dumping them out on the floor. It looked like he enjoyed the search way too much.
There wasn’t anything to find. Deirdre had gotten rid of both their cell phones that morning, after one last text from Gage to Rylie’s kids.
As the guard ransacked the backpacks, Niamh touched Deirdre’s arm. “This is my friend, Deirdre Tombs. We grew up in the system together.” She scowled. “And this guy’s named Gage. He’s Deirdre’s boyfriend.”
This time, Deirdr
e managed not to flinch at the lie. They really should have talked about cover stories earlier.
“I take it that you saw my video,” Stark said.
“Yes, sir,” Deirdre said. “Everything you said—everything about the Alpha—you were right. We need to fix it.”
Stark strolled around them, looking at the pair from every angle. Deirdre tried not to squirm, even though she was certain that he had to recognize her. She had stared straight into his eyes not two days before.
But for the moment, Stark seemed more interested in Gage. “You look familiar.”
“I don’t know why,” Gage said. “I’ve only ever seen you on video.” He didn’t sound afraid enough. He should have sounded more afraid.
Stark turned to Deirdre. “How was it?”
She stared straight ahead, not meeting his eyes. “What are you talking about, sir?”
“Killing people. How was it?”
Stark did recognize her after all.
Deirdre searched for words, hands clenched into tight fists. The fact that he thought she’d killed at all meant that he had seen the results of Colin Burgh’s rampage on the news. He thought that she had been involved.
How would she feel if she had obeyed Stark’s murderous demands? How would she have felt when she woke up to find blood on her hands?
“It felt awful,” Deirdre said.
Stark stood in front of her, and there were those eyes again, boring straight to Deirdre’s soul. She fixed her gaze on the floor and fought to suppress a surge of panic that beat within her ribcage.
“Look at me,” Stark said softly.
Deirdre wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a compulsion. She didn’t risk defying him. Her gaze met his, and she let herself sink into the cold golden pools of his eyes. It was amazing that irises so similar to Rylie’s—which were warm and welcoming on the Alpha—could look so chilling on this man.
“I won’t compel you again unless I have to,” Stark said. “I want volunteers. I want you to want what I want. I want us fighting together, side-by-side, to achieve the same goals.”
Now he was starting to sound a little bit like Rylie, too.
