“We’ll see how brave you are at the end,” he sneered.
I took another deep breath. The old me would have already lost it, thrown off Kael’s grip on my arm, and knocked the crap out of this guy. There was magic I could try, too—the thought of setting Eamon and his cynicism on fire was sorely tempting.
But there was that army I mentioned to think about, now. That army that I was supposed to be in charge of. When they all finished arriving and gathering here, they would be looking toward me to point them in the direction of our enemy. To lead them to said enemy’s weakness. So I had to figure out the way to go, and it didn’t look like I was going to be able to force it out of Eamon by throwing punches or fire.
So instead, I unclenched my teeth, and I said, “Please.”
“…Please what?”
“What he said before,” I said, nodding to Joseph. “Help us. You have that connection, so you must know where the source of your kind’s power is, right? You must know where they all are.”
He looked uncomfortable. He glanced around, as if looking for some clue that my suddenly beseeching tone was a trick. “Why should I help?” he asked flatly.
“If we get rid them, then this torturous connection you have to them ends too, right? So you win as well.”
“No one really “wins” wars, you know.” He wandered a few steps toward the window. Doubled-back. Crossed his arms only to uncross them again. “And not this one, especially…I told you.”
“But you could at least give us a fighting chance. Point us in the right direction. You have to know that we need your help here— why else would you have followed me?”
“Because I wanted to find him,” he said with a nod at Joseph, “so I could hit him.”
“I don’t think that’s the only reason.” I sounded so convincing that I almost believed myself. “You think it was a coincidence that you saw us earlier today? I don’t. And I don’t think you do either. I think you know there’s a bigger part you’re supposed to play in all this.”
He didn’t answer right away.
Joseph cleared his throat and said, “She’s right. Our fates seem intertwined, for better or worse.” His voice hardened a bit as he added, “And if you are really so torn about the monstrous things you’ve done and sensed without being able to stop any of it, then make up for it, how about?”
Eamon’s eyes narrowed at the challenge, but he didn’t object. He just looked thoughtful for a moment, his eyes drifting to the rain-fogged window, and then he looked back to me and said, “An army?”
I nodded. My throat was suddenly so dry that I couldn’t speak.
“Well,” he said, “I hope you fully understand what we will be leading them into.”
I only have constant nightmares about it, I thought.
But I just nodded again, the drought in my throat clearing up a bit as I realized: he’d said we.
“So you’ll help us?” I asked.
“My memories of this power source you’re concerned with are fuzzy at best, but I know most of the feral have concentrated toward the west. I’ll go with you as far as I can. I don’t know how close I’ll be able to get to them without becoming a danger to you all myself—you know, I’m assuming, about the sort of magic influence they can have over people?”
I started to absently reach for the scars on my face. I stopped myself, but I think Eamon still noticed it. Because he was suddenly staring at the marks as intently as he had in the pub. He glanced around at my friends, and I could tell he was curious about which one of them had done it.
He didn’t ask, though. He just said, “Some people are more susceptible to it than others. It’s no accident, for example, that others like me are being drawn back into their ranks. We have our obvious ties already, after all. And there is always a chance of them using anybody, really.…” His eyes swept over the others again.
“They have protection,” I said, my gaze determined not to look at anyone except him. “We’ve already been through this. Joseph and I undid the feral’s control once, and the magic we used...they won’t be able to take them again, because of it. So I’m not afraid of that.”
That last part was a lie. I was terrified that I hadn’t really done enough, that the protection I’d given my friends would eventually fail, as would the same protection that Joseph had given me against the feral’s soulwalking powers.
And I think Eamon probably guessed all of of this, but he just said, “Well then what are we waiting for?” He flashed me a smile. A grim smile, but still—it was a victory, a huge first step on our quest. And I should have been excited about it. Should have been thanking him and rallying everyone around me, maybe.
But I just untucked my hair from behind my ear and let it fall over my scars, and then I left to go pack before that fear in my eyes became any more obvious.
Five
seconds
My bag sat forgotten on the bed, half-packed, clothes and unopened crackers spilling out of it.
Vanessa had already knocked on my door twice and told me to hurry up. And I’d made a valiant effort to. Seriously, I had. But somehow every time I got close to picking up my stuff and heading for the door, I found some stupid reason to go through that stuff again. To rearrange it. To double-check and make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything….
It was an impressive bit of professional stalling, to be honest.
Because apparently even more of what I’d said to Eamon was a complete and total lie: I was, in fact, a gigantic, hesitating coward.
There was another knock on the door. Sighing, I braced my hands against the little table in the entry hall and stared into the mirror above it. The person who looked back at me was nearly unrecognizable.
Almost a year now, since this had all started, and nothing about my face seemed to look like mine anymore. It wasn’t just because of the scars, either; a year ago, I would have been able to put on a recklessly brave smile, grab my stuff and be gone, just like that. But when I tried that now, my grin looked so painfully fake that it made me sick to my stomach.
The door creaked open. I expected to see Vanessa again, but it wasn’t her.
“Everyone’s waiting for you,” Kael said.
“Sorry I…I lost track of time, I guess.”
He hesitated, then stepped the rest of the way inside, pressing the door closed behind him and moving toward the corner of the bed where my unpacked bag sat.
Without really meaning to, I looked back into the mirror. Thinking, maybe, that I could mold my expression into something that resembled brave if I could just watch myself working through the motions.
“What are you doing?” Kael asked softly.
“Nothing. Just about to get my coat—” He was closer to the rack it hung on, so he grabbed it. But he didn’t give it to me right away. And when I reached for it, he just held it tighter.
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
“So you’re holding my coat hostage in response?”
He frowned, but unfolded it and held it open so I could slip my arms into the sleeves. I hastily zipped it up and tried to turn and grab my bag. But he still had a hand on me, and he spun me around to face him instead.
“Everyone’s waiting,” I reminded him, refusing to meet his eyes.
“Let them wait,” he said. “What’s a few more minutes?” He let go of me and started to finish my packing job while I just watched, still feeling like a useless coward. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”
“…I can’t go back.” My voice was quiet. So quiet that, even with his excellent hearing, I was still kind of surprised when he glanced back at me.
“Back to where?”
“To before. To who I was back then. And I think I already knew that, but last night…. Last night was weird. I don’t think I was expecting things to happen so quickly once we landed, for us to be already moving forward like this and it’s just…it’s quick. Which is good. But still.”
He closed the last of the bag’s zippered pouches an
d turned fully back to me. He took a few steps closer, but he still looked like he didn’t know what to say. But it was fine, because now that I’d started, the words were rushing out of me to fill the silence, anyway.
“You know, when I was walking to that pub yesterday, I had this moment—I thought this is a cool city. I’ve always wanted to come here. Like I was the old me on vacation or something. Like I forgot, for a second, about everything. I just wanted to blend in and be another tourist. But I can’t blend in. Not just because of random werewolves hunting me down like Eamon, either. People were staring before him. In the hotel lobby, on the streets, in the pub…God, it’s like no one has ever seen an ugly face before.” I motioned, frustrated, to the scars around my eye before I could stop myself.
I instantly regretted it.
It wasn’t even what I’d meant to say. And now Kael looked like I’d slapped him, and then forced him to watch the scene of that night—of our fight and that knife in his hand— all over again.
I took a deep breath. “I’m sor—”
“Don’t you dare.” I started to look away again, but he closed the rest of the distance between us, and he took my face in his hands and tilted it back toward his. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.”
“I shouldn’t have brought that up—”
“And you’re wrong about that last part, anyway.”.
“Wrong?”
His fingers traced my skin, the smoothness and the scars and the places in between, and he said, “Nothing about you is ugly.”
I wanted to argue. But there was something about the way the sunrise was slipping in through the blinds— something about the way its light wrapped around him— that made the moment feel too warm, too perfect to disagree with. I thought of the first night he’d shown up at my house. The way the moonlight had caught in his eyes and left me feeling mesmerized. Mesmerized like I was right now.
Except now I was happy about it.
So not everything had changed for the worse, at least.
Because now I had his touch to go with that mesmerizing light. I had his hands, which were fearless, familiar with my body by this point, and he knew exactly where to put them to make me forget whatever ugliness we were facing. I had his lips, soft and sure as he kissed my forehead, my cheeks, and then a trail down to the hollow of my throat. I had that easy way he lifted me, his strong arms carrying me over to the edge of the bed, and the way he hesitated there for a gentle moment.
He was holding himself back. Maybe because he was afraid I might have been a little too breakable just then, or maybe just because we didn’t have time to do this.
The problem with time, though, was that you never knew how much of it you’d end up having.
Which is why I wrapped myself around him and pulled him—us—down to the mattress, and I kissed him like I wouldn’t have another chance to. It’s why we kept tangling, pressing closer and closer together until there wasn’t even room for the sunlight to force its way between us, even as that sun rose higher and brighter and flooded the whole room.
It all felt like something from a movie. A dream. And I actually did lose track of time, at least until he finally pulled away from me.
“Nothing about you is ugly,” he repeated, softly pressing his lips to mine one more time.
And then I became painfully aware of every second ticking by. And every one of them made me angrier, because every one was a knife poking against that wound, against that realization that I couldn’t be sure of how much time we had left.
I sighed. “I really need to stop feeling sorry for myself. I know. We should be gone already.”
“You’re just scared,” Kael replied, sitting up and fixing the collar of his jacket.
“I’m a coward,” I agreed, nodding.
“That’s not what I said.”
I sat up too, my gaze darting toward the closed door. I still didn’t want to open it, to face anything outside of it. See? hissed my thoughts. Total coward.
“Just because you’re afraid,” Kael said, sliding off the bed and offering me his hand, “doesn’t mean you’re a coward.”
I stared at his hand suspiciously. “First you don’t make fun of me for being scared to get on that plane, and now you’re missing this opportunity to tease me, too? Who are you? Where is the real Kael?”
He rolled his eyes at me.
“You roll your eyes exactly like he does, but how can I be sure?”
“I guess you can’t,” he mused as I took his hand. He helped me up, and his other hand slid to the small of my back and pulled me against him again. “You’ll just have to trust me and hope for the best.”
“Well, that’s basically what I’ve been doing since I met you, anyway.”
He shook his head, but smiled as I lifted up on my tiptoes to kiss him. Then he spun me around to face the bag he’d finished packing for me. “Time to go,” he said.
I nodded, and I took the bag without hesitating for another second. But as I adjusted the straps over my shoulders, the light in the room shifted—the sun disappearing behind the clouds, probably—and I thought about what he’d said.
“I am scared,” I said without looking at him. “You’re right.” Admitting it out loud made me feel better, somehow. “I’m terrified.”
“I know.” His arms wrapped around me from behind and squeezed. “Me too.”
He let go and headed for the door, and I made it about two steps after him before the sound of music—the chorus of Kenny Roger’s The Gambler to be exact—started playing from my bag. It had been my dad’s favorite song; I’d made it my ringtone the week after he’d died.
“Will or Vanessa, probably…. Calling to tell us to stop making out and come on already.”
He nodded, but he didn’t look anymore convinced than I sounded, because we both knew they would probably just use thoughtspeech to reach me. Vanessa forgot to even turn her cell on most of the time.
I dug the phone out, but I only caught a flash of the number before it stopped ringing. It was enough to see that I didn’t recognize it, though. When I pulled up my missed calls, the screen said the call had originated from France, from some town that I couldn’t pronounce.
“Weird.” I waited and watched, but they didn’t leave a voicemail. And when I tried calling back, it rang only twice before a recorded voice told me to leave a message. “…Must have been a wrong number.” I clicked the screen back to black. But I kept staring at the quiet phone for a moment. And I didn’t really understand why, but chills erupted across my skin as that fear I carried rose a little closer to the surface.
Six
diversion
“I can’t believe you guys got thrown out of a bar,” Vanessa said.
“You’re just jealous that you weren’t there,” Will replied from behind the wheel of the SUV we’d rented. “That you didn’t get to check such a quintessentially Irish thing off your bucket list.”
“I assure you that is not one of the things on my bucket list.”
“Not all Irish people make a habit of getting thrown out of bars, you know,” Eamon interjected drily. “That’s a stereotype.”
“Still,” Will said with a shrug. “It was kind of fun.”
Vanessa shook her head at him, like a distraught mother ready to give up on raising her teenager, but he just glanced back at us and winked in response.
“Eyes on the road, fun guy,” Vanessa said.
“This vehicle is big enough to take out anything else we’re driving past, so I’m not really worried about it,” he said with a yawn, even though his attention pulled obediently back to said road.
He was right; the lady at the rental desk had seemed really confused when we’d asked her if they had anything bigger than the hatchback she’d shown us at first, because hardly anybody, it seemed, drove giant SUVs or trucks around here the way they did back in the states. We definitely stood out on these roads that seemed to be getting even more narrow as we went further west.
&n
bsp; We weren’t standing out as much as six giant wolves, or six “humans” running at the speed of a car would, though.
The plan was to ditch the vehicle once we got to a consistently more rural part of the country, but for now the roads felt safer. Even if my wolf side wasn’t particularly thrilled about how cramped we were in here, and it kept turning my head to look longingly at the woods in the distance.
“How much further until we reach the village you mentioned?” I asked Eamon. I tried to keep my voice as friendly as possible. He seemed the least thrilled of any of us about being cooped up in here as part of our little ragtag gang. Part of me still expected him to roll down the window and make a jump for it.
He just glanced out of that window for a moment, though, taking note of the landmarks we were passing and looking thoughtful for a second before saying, “Two hours, maybe.” He kept his eyes focused on that world outside as we sped down a lonely stretch of highway. It was raining again, and between the clouds and the trees that were growing thicker on either side of us, it seemed a lot later than three ‘o’ clock in the afternoon— which is what the dashboard claimed it was.
“Two hours,” I repeated, hoping Eamon was overestimating.
He nodded. “And when we get there—”
Something slammed into the side of the vehicle.
We lurched to the left, spinning halfway around before Will managed to regain control. He slowly straightened the wheels again, just barely balancing us away from the edge of a steep bank and back onto the road. My head kept spinning even after everything else went still.
“What in the world was that?”
“I didn’t see anything,” Will said, and Kael agreed from the passenger seat next to him.
I glanced out my window and used my sleeve to wipe the fogged glass clear. “Nothing…” I said, starting to reach for the handle.
And that’s when I saw them: Two, monstrous wolves emerging from the fog, yellow eyes glaring and fangs bared.
I felt trapped, human and vulnerable in this stupid vehicle, and that feeling made the two wolves seem impossibly huge as they crouched, ready to collide with us again.
Ascendant (The Shift Chronicles Book 4) Page 4
