by S. M. Reine
“Gage,” Deirdre said.
As he drew closer, she realized that he wasn’t limping.
He was dragging the pallet jack behind him with all of the groceries on it.
Niamh and Deirdre rushed over to help him. As soon as Niamh took the handle of the jack away, he fell over. Only Deirdre managed to keep him from hitting the pavement.
Gage smiled weakly. “Did someone order groceries?”
“I don’t know why he left,” Gage said. “One minute everything was dark, and the next, it was fine.”
“The nightmare just left?” Deirdre asked.
“It ran away because it was scared of Stark,” Colette said, punctuating her statement with a guffaw, like that was just the funniest thing ever. But Deirdre wouldn’t have been surprised if that were true.
The grocery store, Gutterman, and the town with all its barred windows were hours behind them. Now they were seated around a campfire in the woods outside a town called Northgate. It was only one of several fires. When Stark and Deirdre’s vans caught up with the rest of the group, they had already been camping out in a large clearing with about two hundred people Deirdre had never seen before.
More than two hundred shapeshifters preparing to assassinate Rylie.
Deirdre had been shocked to see the numbers when they got there. Not because it was big, but because it was so small. Stark didn’t seem like the type to risk losing a battle with such unequal numbers.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t like she could ask him what was going on. Stark still hadn’t officially announced that they were crashing Rylie’s town hall, even though it wasn’t like they could be at Northgate for any other reason.
The town’s name was appropriate—it truly served as the gateway into the shifter sanctuary. Northgate was the nearest location to the sanctuary that non-shifters were allowed to visit. It also guarded the only road into the valley where Rylie had built her home.
At the moment, that small town was packed. Nobody had looked twice at the multitude of vans with out-of-state license plates because there were thousands of other visiting cars, too. Every single field, roadside shoulder, and parking lot was packed to the brim.
Everyone wanted a chance to go to Rylie’s forum.
And that meant everyone was going to experience Stark’s attack.
“I don’t believe you,” Niamh said, kicking Gage’s shin lightly. “I don’t think a nightmare let you go for no good reason.”
“Well, I wasn’t the one he wanted,” Gage said.
Deirdre felt like everyone around the fire was staring at her. She didn’t return their looks. She picked at the baked potato that she’d cooked in the campfire. Her appetite was slowly returning after that hit of lethe, but she still couldn’t manage more than a couple of bites.
“He was my boss, back in Montreal,” she said. “I messed up a repossession, he wanted to fire me, and I thwarted him. He’s still pissed about that, apparently.”
“Apparently.” Niamh snorted. “He followed you all the way here.” She leaned into Andrew’s shoulder, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “That bastard made me see spiders. If I run into him again, you better believe it’ll be the last time.” She punched at thin air.
It wasn’t an intimidating threat coming from a swanmay. Andrew laughed. Deirdre was polite enough to try not to do the same.
“So he just let you go, Gage?” Deirdre asked quietly while Niamh and Andrew kept talking loudly.
He ducked his head beside hers. “I’m not sure that’s the best way to describe what happened. It really was like he dissipated. I was still in the office when it happened.”
“An hour after I left you?”
Gage glared at the fire. “I didn’t want to leave.”
He’d been frozen by fear again, just as he had before Deirdre kissed him. She shouldn’t have left him alone. “And the call?” Deirdre asked, even more quietly. She almost couldn’t hear herself at this point.
“I reached her,” Gage said. “She knows. She’s planning.”
They couldn’t get more specific than that. Many shapeshifter breeds had supernatural hearing to go along with their strength, speed, and healing. They couldn’t whisper quietly enough to avoid being heard.
Gage was still just an inch away from Deirdre. She realized with a jolt that he was gazing at her lips.
Her cheeks got hot, and it wasn’t from the campfire.
“You know I kissed you to get you back for the training room thing, right?” she asked. “And to save your life and all.”
“Sure you did,” Gage said.
He dipped his head in and kissed her again.
Deirdre didn’t pull away, though she considered it. It was a bad idea to get involved with Gage on about a thousand different levels. He had so much emotional baggage that he practically needed a freight company to ship it wherever he went.
Plus, the whole berserker thing? Bad idea. Really bad idea.
But he tasted like campfire ash and seared, salty beef, and his skin was so warm. Her body reacted to him in much the way it had to lethe—with a pleasant rush of adrenaline and a heady buzz that made her feel like she was dreaming.
Niamh’s mocking smoochy noises broke through the haze.
Gage released her, and Deirdre tried to act like she wasn’t blushing furiously. “What?” she asked, folding her arms tightly over her chest.
“Look at the cute little lovebirds,” Niamh said. “I bet that’s what you are, Dee. A cutesy little snuggly lovebird shapeshifter.”
“Don’t bears eat birds?” Deirdre asked.
“I don’t think so, but I bet that one does.” Niamh’s grin was outright lewd.
Gage flicked the aluminum foil from his baked steak at her. “Don’t be jealous I took your girlfriend.” His fingers brushed Deirdre’s hand where it rested on her side, his knee bumping against hers. Had he been sitting that close for long? She didn’t even remember.
Deirdre’s laugh faded when she realized that someone else was watching—someone who wasn’t around the campfire.
Stark was standing apart from everyone else, under the branches of the trees where the firelight could barely touch him. It only seemed to reflect off of his eyes. The gold irises glowed in the darkness.
Gods, he was creepy.
“Tombs,” Stark said, beckoning to her.
She rose from the fire. Gage’s hand only slipped from hers when she tugged it away.
He watched her walk away. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
Stark led Deirdre into the shadows underneath the trees, just out of sight of the rest of the team. His expression was strangely intent. Like he was expecting her to have something to say to him.
“What?” she asked uneasily.
There was another long, awkward moment of silence. The fact that he looked away first surprised her, but it was only so that he could produce a small wooden box from his pocket. There was a syringe and a glowing blue cube of lethe inside.
Deirdre lifted her hands in refusal. “I went all stupid last time. I don’t want to do that again.”
“It had an effect on you. I think you were going somewhere.”
“Yeah, off the deep end.” She shook her head. “I’m especially not getting high where everyone can see me. What if I do something really stupid, like start dancing on top of one of the vans? No thanks.”
“I’m not asking your opinion,” Stark said. “Do you know what today is?”
“The nineteenth,” Deirdre said.
“It’s one week since the full moon and one week until the new moon. It’s a time of neutral energy.” He pulled the contents of the case out and stuck the box back into his pocket. “A good time to try to coax your animal out again.”
Calling it “coaxing” when it was really more like “tripping balls” was cute.
Stark drew the fluid inside the lethe cube into the syringe.
She watched the blue glow fill the vial, surprised that the sight of it excited her
a little. The last time she’d taken lethe hadn’t been that bad, really. Just kind of embarrassing.
And if there was a chance that a second dose might bring her animal out…
Deirdre licked her lips. “Aren’t we going to attack the sanctuary in the morning?”
Stark didn’t look surprised that word had gotten around. “The worst of it will wear off by then. You’ll be cogent.”
She extended her arm toward him. “Promise you won’t let me dance on top of anything?”
“I have no interest what you do unless it’s shapeshifting into your animal, Tombs,” Stark said. “As long as you’re human, you can perform the entirety of the H.M.S. Pinafore while standing on your head for all I care.”
“What kind of crazy terrorist knows Gilbert and Sullivan?”
“You’d be shocked by what I know,” he said.
“Careful talking like that. You haven’t punched me in days and I’ll start to think you have an actual sense of humor.”
“Don’t tempt me,” he said.
Stark inserted the needle into her arm. The lethe entered her veins.
The night was warm and bright.
When dawn broke, Deirdre found herself submerged in a stream.
She groaned, trying to drag herself toward the shore. Her sodden clothes were heavy. The leather jacket was probably ruined. And even though she was soaking wet, she felt hot, like she was in a bath that had been filled with boiling water.
That was the healing fever.
Her palms were scraped, her elbows banged. It felt like she’d rolled all the way down the mountain, even though she seemed to be at the top of a ridge. Snow clung to the ground nearby.
How had she ended up at such a high elevation?
Deirdre’s hands touched dry ground. A pair of feet were standing just a few inches away.
She tracked the feet up to the tattered knees of his jeans and the gray t-shirt hugging his chest.
“Hey, Gage,” she said. “Can I get a hand up?”
He did better than that. He grabbed her under the arms and lifted her.
Deirdre grabbed the nearest tree for balance.
“You’re probably wondering why I went for an early morning swim in the stream wearing all my clothes,” she said.
He thumbed her eyelid back. “No, that’s not unusual behavior for someone on a lethe high.”
“Please don’t tell me that I danced on top of something last night.”
“Worse. You vanished completely. It took me hours to find you,” Gage said.
Deirdre pulled her over-shirt off and squeegeed it out over the ground. Her tank top clung to her back, and when the breeze blew, she shivered. “So I didn’t make a scene? Thank every dead god out there.” She wiggled out of her wet jeans. “How do you know what a lethe high looks like anyway?”
Gage didn’t turn away to let her undress in private. He watched her with a look that was a mixture of desire and worry, like he wasn’t certain if he wanted to shake her for being stupid or kiss the skin she exposed to the cold morning air.
“I’ve spent my entire life battling my inner bear,” he said. “If you think I’ve done that without the occasional escapism, you think better of me than I deserve.”
“What? It’s just lethe. Don’t be so dramatic.”
Gage’s brow furrowed. “You know people die from that stuff, right?”
“Whatever,” Deirdre said. Maybe weak people died from it, but she felt good. And she didn’t have the urge to take more of it, so obviously addiction wasn’t going to be a problem.
Wringing the water out of her clothing only helped a little. When she pulled everything back on, she was still cold, the wind felt bitter, and she would have been miserable at any other time. The lethe still hadn’t worn off completely, though. She was too content to be miserable.
Deirdre took a few steps in her soggy boots. Her legs were still wobbly and weak. She had to stop to grab another tree branch.
Gage pulled her arm over his shoulders. It was a gentlemanly touch. He was only supporting her, not trying to feel her up. “I’ll help you down to camp. Everyone else is already in line for the town hall.”
That was a splash of cold clarity. She’d forgotten what they were in that forest to do.
“You seem pretty calm about this,” Deirdre said.
“I had to find unearthly calm or else I was going to go berserk. I was convinced that Stark had finally gotten around to murdering you. If Niamh hadn’t told me what you’ve been getting up to, then I might have—no, forget it. Gods, Deirdre, what were you thinking? Are you stupid?”
“I meant that you seem calm about the attack on the sanctuary.”
“That’s another ‘chill or go berserk’ scenario,” Gage said tightly. His calm was fraying. “The plan so far is that everyone gets into the town hall, and then we’ll get further instruction.”
“All of us? At once? How?” Deirdre asked.
“He didn’t say.”
If the town hall were anything like Rylie’s announcement at the White House, then she’d have video monitors to allow people in back to see her. Niamh was good with computers. She could probably hack into the feed and play a video Stark had given her.
“Why can’t I remember last night?” she asked, letting Gage guide both of them down the mountain toward camp. There were no trails that high up. He had to cut right through the underbrush. “Is memory loss a side effect of lethe I don’t know about?”
“It’s not a side effect of lethe, no,” Gage said. “But it’s a side effect of shapeshifting.”
Deirdre lost her footing and almost slipped. “What? That’s not true.”
“I told you I was a shifter before Genesis, right? I remember what it was like when all shifters were constantly moon-sick. Whenever my family changed, our consciousness would get taken over by the animal. We’d wake up the next day with no idea what we’d done. I’m still like that.”
“You think I changed? And that I’m moon-sick?”
“How’d you get to the top of the mountain while you were tripping balls?” Gage asked. “I walked up there and it took me hours, even while I was sober. You got up there while disoriented but still had time to flop around in the river and take a long nap.”
Was it possible that Deirdre could have shifted and had no idea of it? That wasn’t how she wanted to change. She wanted to be one with her animal, free and joyous. Not unconscious and unaware of what had happened.
“I wasn’t tripping balls,” she said sullenly, even though she’d used the same phrase.
“Okay,” Gage said.
They reached the empty camp an hour later. The only signs that hundreds of people had been there the night before were the smoldering remnants of campfires and the vans parked under the cover of trees.
The sight of everyone gone was almost as unsettling as the idea that Deirdre could have shifted and had no idea about it. All those people—followers of Stark, a violent radical—were among the general population, waiting for their orders to kill.
Deirdre went searching among the vans for the one she’d been driving in. She’d tossed a bag with clean clothes in back, which meant dry clothes.
She changed quickly. The only thing she hadn’t brought in duplicates was shoes, so her feet continued to squelch when she climbed out to meet Gage again. He was waiting for her at the edge of the clearing.
As she moved through the vans, she realized that they were missing one.
“Stark’s van is gone,” Deirdre said.
“How can you tell? There are a half a dozen gray vans that are identical.”
“Not completely. His van has a patch of lighter colored primer here. I noticed it when we stopped at the grocery store.” She touched the side of the nearest van above the wheel well. “I don’t see it anywhere.”
Gage took a minute to search for that patch. He returned to her frowning afterward. “You’re right. Does that mean he’s gone?”
Deirdre didn’t know what
it meant.
Nobody was allowed to take vehicles into the sanctuary for the town hall meeting.
So where could Stark have gone?
—XVIII—
The line to get into the sanctuary was so long that it reached all the way into Northgate, and Deirdre and Gage had to join the queue at the very end. Deirdre itched at being stuck so far away from the action, but when she’d tried to cut in with Niamh and Andrew, Niamh had acted like she didn’t know Deirdre at all.
The message was clear. Stark’s followers weren’t supposed to group together.
It was a good idea, since it meant that they’d be spread throughout the audience, capable of inflicting maximum impact. Deirdre wished, not for the first time, that Stark were slightly less clever.
Gage jogged back from Poppy’s Diner carrying a plate and two forks. “I got pie!” he announced, handing one of the forks to Deirdre.
“Pie? Really? It’s not even eight in the morning,” she said.
“It’s worth it,” said a man ahead of them in line. “Poppy’s has the best pie in the northeast. Literally, the very best. I heard that’s why the Alpha settled here in the first place.”
Gage laughed. “Because of the pie?”
“You’ll believe the rumors once you taste it,” he said. “I’m Franklin, by the way. Werewolf from Arizona. You guys?”
“I’m Gage and this is my girlfriend, Deirdre.” He called her his girlfriend a little too easily. It didn’t even sound like a lie anymore. “Arizona’s a long way from here. You guys made a heck of a trip for a two-hour event.”
One of Franklin’s friends gave an annoyed grunt. “I know. And now we don’t even get to see the Alpha.”
“Why’s that?” Deirdre asked.
“She got called to some important meeting with the ethereal coalition,” Franklin said. “They just announced it an hour ago. Summer Gresham’s going to handle the town hall instead. So lame.”
Deirdre’s tension eased a fraction.
There probably wasn’t any meeting with the ethereal coalition. Rylie had taken Gage’s call seriously and gone into hiding.
