by Dean Murray
I dialed the last number and let it ring. She sent me to voicemail after only two rings, but that wasn't a surprise.
"Hi, it's me. I just wanted to apologize. I know that I've handled pretty much everything wrong and I'm sorry. I've been thinking a lot for the last several days and I realized that I've been lying to myself.
"I thought that I just wanted what was best for you, but really I wanted what was best for me. You're an adult, you know what you want, and that's what is important. I'll respect that from here on out.
"The truth is that I've been pretty critical of the way that Alec fell apart after Adri left him, but I haven't been doing any better. It's not an excuse, just a realization that I need to be better, that I need to let you go be whoever you want to be.
"I hope that you and Wyatt are happy together. I know that you're not my Jess anymore, but that doesn't mean I don't want you to be happy. I do. Sometimes I just have a hard time separating what's best for you from whatever I want.
"I won't bother you anymore."
Chapter 22
Isaac Nazir
The Lamia Enclave
I turned my phone off and then sank down next to the rock I'd been sitting on.
Somewhere along the way I lost some time. It seemed like I blinked and it was dark outside. Part of me wanted to just stay there hugging that rock all night, but I knew that would be stupid. It wouldn't make any difference to Jessica or Andrew, all it would do was guarantee that I'd be tired and weak the next time that I ended up inside the challenge circle.
That practical part of me refused to be silenced no matter how hard I tried to shut him up. It felt like a betrayal of everything I'd felt for the old Jess, but finally, about an hour after dark, I pulled myself up and stumbled back towards our cave.
It turned out I'd been mourning Jess for months now. I just hadn't admitted it to myself because I'd been so busy trying to convince Jessica to take Jess' place. Now that everything was out in the open and I'd started to accept the fact that Jessica wasn't going to fill the hole inside of my chest, I'd realized something else.
By focusing on Jessica rather than on Jess, I'd missed out on my own grieving process. The wild, crazy extreme of emotion that the death of someone you loved deserved wasn't the kind of thing that could be sustained for very long. Eventually you ran out of emotional energy and settled into an exhausted state where you still missed the person you lost and you felt guilty for not being able to sustain the same depth of grief.
I'd missed that surge of emotion, or more accurately I'd sublimated it into pursuing Jessica. Now that it was gone I didn't seem to have much left inside of me with which to grieve. All the guilt in the world wasn't enough to fill back up the internal reservoirs that had been emptied over the last few months.
Celeste tried to talk to me when I arrived back at our quarters, but I just stepped around her and went into my room. I thought for a moment that she was going to come into my room and confront me, but she didn't. I fell asleep as soon as I climbed into bed.
I woke to more noise than usual the next morning and for a few seconds I worried that I was going to have to go back into the ring again. It was the sound of Celeste singing to herself that convinced me Set wasn't out there waiting for me. The entire time that we'd been at the enclave I hadn't seen her relax at all around any of the lamias.
The knowledge that I didn't have another fight waiting for me gave me the strength to roll out of bed and stumble into the bathroom. Celeste said something as I dropped the curtain, but I couldn't make it out.
As the warm water from the gravity-fed shower ran down my body I realized that I couldn't quite remember my dreams from the night before. I thought that they had involved Jessica, or maybe Jess, but I wasn't sure. Everything was a distorted blur, like I was looking back at the dreams through dirty, bubbly glass.
It was hardly a surprise that I would dream about Jess after everything that had just happened, but I was surprised at just how calm I was about everything now that I had a full night's sleep behind me. There was still a sense of loss there inside of me and I still felt a little guilty that I wasn't sadder, but there was enough distance between me and all of those negative feelings that I felt like I could function again.
Once I was dry, I pulled on my last set of clean clothes and made a mental note that I needed to hand-wash the rest of my clothes again. I steeled myself with a deep breath and then walked out of the bathroom ready to face the music. Only Celeste wasn't mad.
"What did you tell Set to get him to bring all of these clothes over?"
It took me a couple of seconds to understand what she was talking about. That was mostly because I had to tear my eyes away from her in order to take in the rest of the room. She was gorgeous. In fairness she was always gorgeous, but right then she was even more beautiful than normal.
The jeans, t-shirt and black tube dress that she'd been cycling through had been discarded for a white sun dress that looked like it was made out of layers of Egyptian cotton, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail that caressed her neck and shoulders with every movement of her body.
She pointed at the couch and I finally turned and looked at the mammoth pile of clothes that had taken over the couch and both easy chairs. Shorts, jeans, skirts, dresses, every article of clothing I could think of was there and while most of it was white or black, there was a scattering of other colors mixed in, enough that I figured Celeste could probably go for at least a couple months without having to wear the same outfit twice.
"Set brought that over?"
"Yes, he and a small army of workers. I'm amazed that you were able to sleep through all of the noise. He said he'd be back later today with a load of clothes for you. Seriously, did you sell your soul or something to get your hands on all of this?"
I'd asked Set for some clothes for Celeste, but we hadn't actually stipulated how much 'some' was. I'd been expecting him to stop by with a couple of pairs of jeans and three or four t-shirts. This was way more than anything I would have considered necessary to balance out the fact that I was going to leave my phone powered down whenever I wasn't using it.
I was so shell-shocked that I said the first thing that came to mind. "I told him that you've been difficult and that giving you some clothes would make you easier to live with."
Celeste looked at me in amazement for a couple of seconds. I half expected her good humor to evaporate, but instead she burst out into laughter.
"I guess I deserved that."
I shrugged. "Not really. I just needed a reason to not have my phone on all the time without offending the requirements of his honor. He was obviously worried that it was going to lead one of the Consumed—or the Consumed—to the enclave, but once I asked for it he was set on me having it on all of the time.
"You disappearing into your room gave me an idea so I told him that I'd only wanted to call home because I felt so isolated here. He agreed to get some clothes so that you'd be less unhappy."
"The idea being that if I was less…unhappy, then you'd have a friend here or at least not be quite so miserable?"
I was suddenly uncomfortable. I'd had to tell Set the truth—mostly—about my situation, which meant that I was now telling Celeste more than I really wanted to.
"Yeah, I guess. The important thing being that I managed to convince him to not be offended if I kept my phone off most of the time."
"Well, thanks for thinking of me in your moment of need. I don't mind taking the fall if it means I can finally change into something else. I'm surprised though that you were able to convince him to alter the original terms. He seems to be a real stickler about his honor."
"I'm not sure that I would have managed it if not for the fact that he's super worried about the Consumed. There is so much about them that I still don't know. Have you noticed that our rooms are getting smaller?"
She looked at me like she thought I was pulling her leg for a few seconds before shaking her head. "I hadn't noticed. Are you sure about that?"
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"Yeah, I put my bag exactly one cubit from the wall a few days ago and the wall is closer than that now. Set mentioned it the other day when he told me about the Consumed. It sounds like they can only hide the enclave as long as it stays under a certain size, but now that we are here something about our presence makes it harder to hide."
"So they are shrinking it down to stay hidden."
I nodded. "It seems that way, but it isn't just a one-time thing, the enclave seems to be shrinking on a consistent basis."
"That is pretty interesting in a so-terrifying-I'd-rather-not-think-about-it way. These Consumed must be really dangerous if the lamias are hiding from it. They are pretty scary all by themselves."
"Yeah, you're not wrong. Still, setting aside the fact that we are in mortal danger, I wish I could stay here for years. I don't know how you managed to keep their existence a secret for so long. I wouldn't have been able to stay away. You've got an incredible amount of willpower to have never come looking for them until now."
Celeste actually started to fidget. After several seconds she sighed. "This isn't the first time that I've had a brush with the lamia. I actually went out into the swamp looking for them right after Ash left home."
"I don't understand. I thought that Ash said they were your trump card, the thing that you were saving until you didn't have any other choice but to use them."
"Yeah, that sounds like Ash. He was always pushing for me to be more aggressive, for me to lead some kind of glorious charge against Onyx. Back then Nicolas hadn't arrived yet, but it still would have been suicide to try and stand up to Onyx. I told Ash no, told him that I wasn't going to use the lamias until we'd exhausted every other option.
"He didn't like that answer so he faked his own death and disappeared, leaving me wondering whether he was really dead for an entire decade, and he never even looked back."
"So you went looking for the lamia."
"Yeah, I went looking for the lamia. I thought it was my fault that Ashley—that Ash—had died. I thought that he'd given up hope of things ever getting better because I told him that I wouldn't go to the lamia queen and ask her for an army of lamia to come out of the swamp and kill Onyx and his men. It seemed like going to the lamia was the only way to honor Ash's memory."
"But you couldn't go to the lamia without a champion…"
"Yeah, back in the day Ash wanted to be my champion. Ash might be able to take on a lamia if they let him use his weapons and gave him plenty of room, but the old Ash—Ashley—wouldn't have lasted three seconds against someone like Set."
"So what did you do?"
"I had a guy, Bennet was his name. He was on my payroll, a dispossessed my people found and offered a ridiculous amount of money to join the pack and pretend to be working for Onyx. He was pretty good in a fight so I thought we had a chance of getting in to see the queen."
Everything about her from her posture to her tone of voice told me that the story didn't have a happy ending.
"So what happened?"
"Ash hated Bennet. Onyx figured that Ash was the weak link in the family. He was just a wolf, and a weak one at that, so Onyx ordered his guys to rough Ash up every chance they got. I tried to protect him, but I couldn't be there all of the time and Ash made things harder than they needed to be."
"He resented the fact that he had to rely on you for protection."
"Yeah, you could say that. He used to run off by himself, but every so often they would catch him and bring him back to the house half dead. That last time Bennet was with one of Onyx's other guys when they found Ash. Bennet kicked his ribs in—he nearly killed him. The other times had been bad, but it wasn't anything like what Bennet did to him."
"So Ash faked his own death."
"Yeah, but he didn't just fake his death, he used Bennet as his patsy. I don't know what he was thinking. Maybe he just wanted to get back at me for hiring Bennet, for bringing one more person into the pack to beat up on him."
Celeste was silent for several heartbeats while she tried to regain control of herself. "Bennet and I had been dating—very quietly—for a few months before that. I think out of everything, that was the one thing that Ash couldn't forgive. He thought I was dating the enemy, but it wasn't like that. Initially I thought it would be one more thing to tie Bennet to me, but as time went on I started to feel things for him.
"It…well, it was nice to have someone else to back me up. With Bennet, I didn't have to always be on. Having him around meant that if things went south I'd have at least one other person around who I could count on to help me fight my way out of New Orleans. It wouldn't have mattered against Onyx, but it would have made all of the difference against his guys if Onyx wasn't around."
Celeste put the palms of her hands against her forehead and closed her eyes. "Ash and I had a deal. With every generation our family has fallen a little further from power so we decided that there weren't going to be any more kids. I stuck to our deal, but Ash didn't believe me. He said such horrible things."
She opened her eyes and stood so that she could start pacing. "Whatever his reasons, Ash screwed things up. Bennet didn't have any proof that Ash wasn't dead, but we didn't have a body and Ash had been acting weird all day."
"He went to Onyx with his suspicions."
Celeste shook her head. "No, although it would have been easier in some ways if he had. He didn't tell Onyx, but he was getting sloppy. He was going off of script a lot. I had bugs in the house back then that Onyx hadn't found yet. I heard Bennet trying to set Onyx up for some kind of long con. It was dangerous. I'd tried to tell him half a dozen times that he needed to get back to the plan that we'd agreed on, but I couldn't just come right out and say it, not without revealing that I had bugs all over the house."
"What happened?"
"I decided to get my money's worth out of him before it became too late. I decided that I would take him to the lamia and have him fight so that I could get the help I needed from their queen. Then we could go back and kick Onyx out of the city. As long as Onyx was out of the picture it wouldn't matter that Bennet had been disobeying orders. I knew I could depend on him to fight when things got rough, and that was the most important thing."
My shock must have made it onto my face. Celeste mistook it for disbelief.
"Don't give me that look. There are plenty of alphas who keep control of their pack through financial means. You just need to find people who remain bought once you buy them off. Once you hit a certain size things become self-sustaining. The upper-tier hybrids who initially joined you for the money realize that they like the security of being towards the top of a pack a lot better than being one of the dispossessed. Ulrich has reformed half a dozen hybrids just in the last couple of decades who everyone else said couldn't function inside of a healthy pack. Raynor has done the same thing, just on a smaller scale."
"Your plan didn't work though? I mean Onyx is still around, right?"
"I never carried it out. We were headed here, but I stopped to make sure that nobody was following us. That was when Bennet told me his suspicions about Ash. It was like having my brain jammed inside of a blender. On the one hand, I was overjoyed to find out that my brother might still be alive. On the other hand, it meant that I'd been abandoned by my own flesh and blood. Ash left me in New Orleans to rot, and he used Bennet to do it."
"I'm sorry, Celeste, but I don't understand. Why did it matter that he used Bennet as his witness when he staged his death?"
"Because it meant that Bennet was even more compromised than I'd thought. Bennet was already taking chances that he shouldn't have been taking, and now there was one more piece of information that I had to worry about him letting slip if Onyx strapped him to a table and started torturing him."
I didn't want to believe it, didn't want to think that Celeste was capable of doing what I thought she'd done, but all of the signs were pointing to one conclusion.
"You killed him, didn't you?"
"I…I injected him with a tr
anquilizer and left him at the edge of the lamias' hunting ground. It was just a matter of time before he got himself into trouble and I kept thinking that my plan was all well and good if the lamia queen sent us back with an army, but everything would fall apart if she sent us back empty-handed. I couldn't risk it, not when Ash's life was on the line."
Celeste looked away from me. "If Onyx had known that Ash was alive he would have never stopped looking for him. I had to control the situation, had to tie up the loose ends before Onyx used them to strangle me."
Part of me knew that I wasn't holding Celeste to the same standard I was using for myself, but I couldn't help the wave of horror that crashed through me. I'd killed, but only people who'd been able to defend themselves.
"Why, Celeste? You could have sent him away. Your family had surely been in situations that were just as dangerous over the years. Why didn't you regroup and give yourself time to think?"
"Because the money was starting to run out! We were starting to run out of money and I'm the only thing that stands between Onyx and a dozen good men and women whose only crime is that they aren't strong enough to stand up for themselves. They're only wolves, just like Ash. Among humans they're practically demigods, but inside of a pack run by someone like Onyx they're just bargaining chips."
Celeste had started out yelling, but by the end she was whispering.
"We weren't out of money yet, but I could see the day coming. Before Onyx arrived the bribes my family paid out mostly just came out of the interest payments from our investments. Onyx has changed all of that. At the time that Ash disappeared I figured that we had another twenty years before Onyx bled us dry."
"I thought Kristin said that Ash made off with a huge chunk of your working capital."
"He did. Half of the money that I had under management disappeared overnight."
"Didn't that cut into how long you were able to make it before you ran out of cash?"
"Yeah. It turns out that necessity really is the mother of invention. Over the last few years I've come up with some creative ways to keep Onyx's take from growing as fast as it otherwise would have, but I'm still essentially out. If you scraped together everything left in all of the numbered accounts you might have enough left to buy a summer house in a nice part of Arizona, but there wouldn't be enough left over to furnish it.
