by S. M. Reine
Deirdre touched her hair, wondering if it was sticking up funny. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Were you doing lethe?” Niamh asked.
Reflexively, she covered her arm, even though the injection point had long since healed. “What makes you ask?”
“You’ve got the flush. And you look guilty.”
Deirdre spooned rice into her mouth, trying to conceal her absent appetite. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It kinda matters. Where’d you get lethe? We’re not allowed to bring it into the house,” Niamh said. When Deirdre didn’t immediately respond, she said, “Oh my gods. Stark.”
“Like I said, it doesn’t matter,” she muttered, getting another scoop of rice. The second one tasted as flavorless as the first. “Finish what you were saying. Geoff is alive, but…?”
“But he’s going to have scars,” Niamh said. “Gage screwed him up pretty bad. I’d hate to see what a guy like Gage might do if he was unleashed on a mundane population.”
“He’s not dangerous like that,” Deirdre said.
Niamh lifted her eyebrows. “You think?”
A woman approached their table. Deirdre’s hand immediately dropped toward the Ruger concealed in her boot. But the newcomer didn’t attack.
It was Colette, one of the feline shifters. She wasn’t a member of Jacek’s Deirdre Hate Club. Colette was a friend of Niamh’s, someone whose love of video games aligned with the owner of No Capes, and Deirdre considered her low threat.
She bent to whisper in Niamh’s ear.
“What?” Niamh stood so quickly that her chair fell over backwards. It banged into the floor. Everyone turned to look at them.
“He’s with the healer,” Colette whispered.
Deirdre’s heart sank. She hoped that “he” would be someone she didn’t know, but she wasn’t surprised when Niamh grabbed her by the arm.
“Let’s see him,” Niamh said.
Colette hurried ahead of them, leading the way.
“What happened?” Deirdre asked.
“They released Gage this morning and…” Niamh couldn’t seem to make herself say the words.
“And what? Is he hurt?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s hurt.”
The medical bay was on the first floor in the rear of the building. It probably wasn’t all that far from the dining room, but it felt like it took years for Deirdre to get back there.
Niamh and Colette blew through the doors without stopping. Deirdre hung back as the door swung shut, rooted to the floor by what she’d glimpsed on the other side.
Gage was on a bed, and he was covered in blood.
Fear slowed her motions as she entered the room—fear that Stark had hurt Gage after she left his room the previous day, and that she had failed to save him by choosing not to shoot Stark. But she quickly realized that was stupid. If Stark had wanted Gage dead, he’d be dead.
Someone else must have done it. Jacek seemed like the likeliest suspect.
Deirdre would kill him.
“What happened?” she asked, hanging back by the wall. “Did someone attack him in the basement?”
Gage’s eyes were open. He looked at her.
But he didn’t speak.
“This happened after he left the basement. Colette found him in the courtyard with his arms shredded.” Niamh lifted the sheet to check out one of his arms. Even from against the wall, Deirdre could see that the skin was smooth. Gage had healed.
“I got pictures,” the healer said helpfully. “Wanna see ‘em?”
“Don’t you dare,” Niamh said.
“He was chewing on his arms, you guys. Like he was trying to keep them from healing, I think,” Colette said. “There was blood everywhere.”
Deirdre had to laugh, the idea was so ridiculous. “What?”
“Enormous blood loss might kill a shifter eventually.” The healer rolled a crystal between his hands, gazing at Gage thoughtfully. “It would have to be truly enormous. Practically drained for at least a few minutes. That would slow the healing factor long enough to die, I think. I haven’t experimented with that yet.”
“Were you compelled to do that?” Deirdre asked Gage. It seemed like something Stark might do. He liked things messy and theatrical.
The healer wouldn’t shut up, though. “His eyes weren’t fixed and dilated as I see during compulsion. They were responsive to light. It takes quite a while after the compulsion wears off for the eyes to return to normal functionality, so…no, it wasn’t the work of our blessed lord.”
And Gage still wasn’t talking.
Deirdre couldn’t say half the things she wanted to in polite society, and the other half weren’t safe when their enemies were in the room.
“I want to be alone with my boyfriend,” Deirdre said.
Niamh shook her head. “No, no way, he’s a berserker and he’s nuts.”
“He won’t hurt me.” Her lips pressed into a thin line. “I won’t let him.”
The healer tossed his crystal onto the tray beside the bed. “I can’t do anything else for him. Next time you try to commit suicide, have the courtesy to do it more thoroughly, kid. Easy to hose the blood away and toss your remains in the incinerator.” He limped out, taking Colette with him.
Niamh lingered, but only for a moment.
Her last look was sympathetic.
And then Deirdre was alone with Gage, and she couldn’t find the words for what she was feeling. The emotions were hot as anger, yet far colder, bleaker, like a wasteland opening in her chest where her heart should have been.
Betrayal. That was what she felt.
“What the actual fuck?” Deirdre asked. “Did you really do this to yourself?”
Gage glared at the wall. He wouldn’t make eye contact.
She grabbed him by the chin, forcing him to face her. The truth was written in his eyes.
“Why?” she asked.
He still didn’t speak.
She had the urge to slap him silly. Maybe clobber him with something heavy. Whatever it took to knock the words out of his mouth and sense into his skull.
“If you’re not going to talk, fine,” Deirdre said. “I’ll do it for you. You hate being a berserker. You don’t like feeling out of control. You thought you could handle it while you’re away from Rylie, but you’re wrong, and now you’re scared. You thought you’d just go ahead and kill yourself before you hurt someone you like. Am I on the mark?” Gage’s fists clenched. Anger flamed within Deirdre’s chest, unable to handle the silence. “Talk to me, dammit!”
“You’re half right,” Gage said.
“Which half?”
“The half where you said I’m out of control and don’t like it.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “But Rylie couldn’t always control it, either. I changed a couple times while I was there. Almost hurt people. Abel took me down whenever it happened. Even a berserker’s nothing against an Alpha male werewolf.”
“It’s like a game of rock, paper, scissors,” Deirdre said. “Alpha beats berserker. Silver knife beats Alpha. Berserker beats—”
“I’m not joking around.”
“Obviously not, since you almost managed to kill yourself. What the hell?”
“Every time I go berserk, it’s worse,” Gage said. “It all gets hazier. I’m not sure I’m going to come back. And it’s leaking into my mind even when I’m not in the bear form. When I broke your collarbone yesterday, I felt my beast rising.”
“Because it rises when you’re distressed and you were angry at yourself,” Deirdre said.
“Because the beast is winning.”
“It’s not a competition! You and the bear are the same damn thing.”
“I could have killed you when I shifted,” Gage said. “I didn’t jump over you because I was trying to protect you. I jumped over you because I just wanted to kill Stark more than anyone else in the room. And as soon as I got the chance, I mauled Geoff—someone who hadn’t even att
acked me.”
There was no point in arguing with him. He’d convinced himself of his monstrousness, and nothing would change his mind. “Then why’d you come here if you were on edge? Because you thought you’d risk a bunch of Rylie’s enemies instead of her family? It makes a sick kind of sense, but—“
“I hoped they’d kill me,” Gage said.
Deirdre felt like she was so heavy that she might break through the floor, sink to the basement, and keep going until she hit rock bottom—or whatever was under that.
“You didn’t come with me because you thought you’d be able to help redeem a suicide mission. You were hoping it would be a suicide mission.”
Gage shut his eyes.
Nobody would have blamed Deirdre if she’d left the room right at that moment. There was a reasonable level of bullshit that any woman could be expected to tolerate and Gage had successfully exceeded it by a million miles.
“You don’t care about the mission at all,” Deirdre said.
“That’s not true. I want to protect Rylie, but it’s complicated,” Gage said.
She leaned over his bed, gripping the sheets in her fists. She glared at him from inches away. “Make it uncomplicated.”
“Shifters don’t get it anymore. Most everyone came along after Genesis, and they’ve always had a network of support from therapists, pack members, and Rylie. She makes being a shifter less awful for most of us. But me…” Gage swallowed hard. “I’ve been like this my whole life and it’s not getting better. It will never get better.”
“Couldn’t you choose a better time to go suicidal?” Deirdre hissed.
“I’m just risking the mission by being here. Stark could make me do anything. The sooner I’m out of the way—”
“That’s not what I mean.” She released him and stepped back. “Couldn’t you not kiss me and then try to kill yourself? If you’re going to be dead, you could try to make it so I don’t care about you first!”
Gage’s eyes widened. “Deirdre—”
“You’re an idiot and I hate you,” she said. “I’m just putting that out there.”
“You hate me but you don’t want me to die?”
“Oh, shut up.” She wanted to tear her hair out by the roots. Or, better yet, tear his hair out. “This is going to be a problem, isn’t it? I can’t trust you to back me up on this. On anything.”
“I’ll back you up,” Gage said. “I was in a bad place this morning. That’s all.”
Nothing had changed. He was just saying what he thought he needed to say to get away with it next time.
Rylie had been right. Gage never should have left the sanctuary.
—XVI—
They left in the fleet of vans that afternoon.
“Where do you think we’re going?” Colette asked as she sharpened her sword, which had a blade nearly as long as she was tall. She’d described it as a “bastard sword” with great pride. She looked like she knew what to do with it, too.
Bowen scoffed. “Isn’t it obvious? The Alpha’s town hall is tomorrow.” It was disturbing to hear a werewolf like Bowen talking about attacking the sanctuary so casually. He was the same breed as Rylie, after all.
“It’s like Christmas is coming,” Niamh said with a grin.
Deirdre sat in the driver’s seat and tried not to listen too closely. She’d volunteered to do the first leg of the trip so that she could avoid the pre-fight chatter. She just wasn’t sure that she could feign excitement for the fight to come. There were too many possibilities and too many unknowns.
Would she have to keep pretending to be on Stark’s side once they arrived at the sanctuary? Would Rylie expect her to continue acting like she was vulnerable to his compulsion? What happened if someone at the sanctuary attacked her?
And how was she going to warn Rylie about the onslaught in time?
“How’s this going to fall out?” Gage asked. He was seated in back with everyone else, and he put on a pretty good show of acting normal. So good that Deirdre wouldn’t believe he’d just tried to kill himself if he hadn’t confessed it himself. “Are we going to all go in with the visitors, or are we going to sneak around back, or…?”
“I bet we’ll just join the crowd. It should be huge. Nobody’ll be able to tell we’re in there,” Bowen said.
“I wish Stark were in this van,” Colette said wistfully. “We could ask him all the questions ourselves.”
Deirdre was relieved that she had been assigned a different van from Stark. He was in one of the other vehicles—she wasn’t sure which. They’d been deliberately obscure about assignments. Probably because Stark didn’t want anyone to know where he was as a safety measure.
Stark had assigned Jacek to the same van as Deirdre, though. She almost thought it was because he wanted to see what would happen if he stuck the two of them together. Like some kind of science experiment. Waiting to see how long it would take for the two to explode and one to die.
The other shifters kept talking on the long drive for the evening. Deirdre only half listened.
She kept one eye on the road behind them. She kept seeing a beaten old Tacoma in the mirrors, its hood white and the rest of it dark green, all of it dented and rusted.
Deirdre didn’t recognize the car, but it had been following her at a distance for three hours.
That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Lots of people took long trips down the highway. That’s what highways were for, after all. But the Tacoma never got close enough that she could see the driver, nor did it try to pass.
Deirdre caught Niamh saying her name, and her attention returned to the conversation in the back of the van. Talk had devolved from guessing at Stark’s plans to personal lives.
Niamh was going on about all the time she’d spent moving through the system, all the boys she’d dated, the friends she’d made. “Deirdre’s the best of them, of course,” she said. “She’s the best at everything.”
“Can we not start a Deirdre fan club while I’m in the van?” Jacek asked.
“Too late,” Niamh said. “She’s amazing.”
Deirdre’s cheeks heated. She focused harder on the road.
“I don’t think I ever told you about the beauty pageant, Gage,” Niamh said. “It was this inter-house thing they started doing annually about…oh, when was that? Five years ago, Dee?”
“This is so interesting,” Jacek said.
“Do you have a better story?” Bowen asked. “Now, about this pageant—were bikinis involved?”
“Oh yes,” Niamh said. “Tiny bikinis.”
Deirdre watched them in the rearview mirror. Gage wasn’t even listening. He was staring at the floor of the van like it was the most interesting thing in the world, hands moving automatically as he loaded a gun.
Niamh went on. “All of the group homes in the state participated in the pageant, like as a morale thing. Dee was staying at Grigori South, while I was at her rival, Grigori North—not far from Marut University, up on the coast. I didn’t realize she was an enemy, so I helped tape a dress to her boobs so that she wouldn’t flash too much cleavage, and—”
“Don’t rush the story,” Bowen said. “What’s this about Deirdre’s boobs?”
Deirdre couldn’t keep to herself anymore. “Okay, this isn’t as pornographic as Niamh makes it sound,” she said, loudly enough for them to hear her over the road noises. “We had to sew our own dresses out of scrap cloth. I was on the brink of a costume malfunction because I’m really, really bad at sewing. I looked like black Raggedy Ann.”
“You’re not as bad at sewing as you were at makeup,” Niamh said.
“Good thing I had you around to teach me.”
“You could have shown some gratitude for it. By, you know, trying to lose.” She fluffed her voluminous curls, preening through the feathers with her fingertips. “I got third place. Deirdre got second. And first place was taken by—”
“Krista Sullivan,” Deirdre said, dredging the name out of the murky depths of memory. �
�Gods, I hated her.”
“Me too. And when Deirdre got in a fistfight with Krista Sullivan over the first place crown, she had to be moved to a new house—my house. We were united in our hatred and became best friends forever.”
Niamh grinned at her in the mirror. Deirdre made herself smile back.
The truth was that Deirdre had made a lot of “best friends forever” throughout her years in the system, but none who stuck around. She’d lived in the same house as Niamh for less than a year. They’d kept in touch, but at the next house, Deirdre had been best friends with a guy named Dave Parsons. And at the foster home after that, she’d met Jolene.
They all kind of blurred together over the years. Niamh’s fond memories of Deirdre were little more than blips to her. Brief flashes of brightness among years of misery.
“You’re much better at makeup now,” Niamh said, leaning up to rub Deirdre’s shoulder.
It was a nice gesture. Deirdre patted her hand.
“So go back a few steps,” Bowen said. “These dressing rooms were communal, right? Just a whole bunch of gaean girls hanging out together, totally naked?”
Niamh laughed and slapped him playfully. They kept bantering, for all appearances immune to the tension rising in the van. Jacek had noticed Gage’s silence. Now the men were staring at each other, and it seemed likely that the intensity of their glares might make something catch fire.
Deirdre was grateful when the CB radio crackled after sundown. She’d been starting to wonder if they would ever get off the long, relentless highway.
“We’re stopping to pick up supplies,” Niamh announced after a brief conversation with the guy on the other end of the line. “Get off at the exit ten miles down, the one for Trappersville.”
That busted Tacoma was still behind them.
“Happily,” Deirdre said.
The vans had been traveling while widely spaced out, with minimal communication between them, so she was surprised when she pulled off the road to find that only one other van was waiting for them.
Stark stood beside it, watching Deirdre through the windshield as she parked alongside him.
Her heart sank.
