by Neill, Chloe
I helped Tanya sit down on a fallen tree, Connor now crying fitfully. Other shifters who’d taken shelter in the woods turned back into their human forms and looked out on the battle with horror.
I knelt down in front of Tanya, who tried to calm her son.
“What’s this about?” I asked, when her gaze met mine.
She shook her head, her eyes still wide with shock. “I don’t know. I don’t even—what are they?”
“Harpies, I think. Is this a fight with the Pack? Did the Pack piss someone off?” Perhaps by inviting vampires to his woods? I silently wondered, hoping this wasn’t because of us.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know. This is so horrible, Merit. So awful.”
The bare limbs above us shook as harpies circled overhead, looking for a place to dive into the undergrowth. I pulled the dagger from my boot and stood up again.
“You’re going back.”
I nodded. “The Pack still needs help, and Ethan’s still out there. I don’t quit until he’s safe.”
There was bravado in my voice—the kind of bluffing I actually could manage—and it masked the fear. My allies were engaged in battles of their own, and I had only a slim and slender dagger to take down a woman-bird with an attitude problem.
But Tanya smiled at me like I’d seen Gabriel smile before. Knowingly. Wisely. And with utter calm. “You can do this, Merit of House Cadogan. Go save your man.”
I nodded, somehow buoyed by the sentiment, and left Tanya and her subjects in the trees. Flipping the dagger nervously in my hand, I walked back to the tree line and peered into the darkness.
She dropped to the ground in front of me, torchlight flickering across her naked body.
She seemed, somehow, even larger on the ground. At least six feet tall, with a twenty-foot wingspan. Her eyes were solidly black, hair blowing wildly in the wind, revealing small breasts and a web of battle scars across her abdomen.
She tucked her wings behind her and moved forward, knees bent, the motion bouncy and unnatural. Harpies clearly weren’t meant to run; they were meant to fly.
She opened her mouth and screamed. I winced at the aural assault and resorted to my standard defense mechanism. Sarcasm.
“You are not going to Hollywood with pitch like that,” I advised her.
Her dark eyes flicked back and forth like a bird’s, but it didn’t appear she actually understood what I’d said. Maybe she didn’t understand English. Or finely grained sarcasm.
Regardless, she understood battle. She attacked, vaulting forward, teeth bared.
For a moment, I was too transfixed to move. She looked like a creature from an ancient time, a warrior from an era when gods and goddesses reigned in gauzy robes and gold laurel crowns. If The Ride of the Valkyries had begun to play, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I kicked, trying like I had before to get her off her feet. She avoided the shot by taking to the air, then gave back better than I had, kicking forward and hitting me square in the chest, sending me flying.
I hit the ground on my back, knocking the wind out of me. I clutched at the grass at my sides, gasping for air, as the ground rumbled beneath my feet.
“Up, Merit!” yelled Tanya behind me, and I reared back, then hopped to my feet, as if her words had been an order instead of a frightened suggestion. I was tiring, still healing and dizzy from my last round, adrenaline beginning to fade, and I was beginning to react on autopilot. Fortunately, I’d been trained to fight beyond fear, beyond exhaustion.
Standing again, I bounced on my feet. The harpy’s eyes narrowed and she moved forward again. I looked for a target, recalled how ineffective my dagger had been against the other harpy’s abdomen, and picked a new target.
If I couldn’t beat the human, I’d go for the bird.
I beckoned her forward, and she windmilled her claws as she moved toward me again, looking for purchase and a soft bit of flesh to tear. I swerved to the left, and she followed. Her legs moved awkwardly, and her wings provided just enough drag to make me faster than her. I dodged back to the right, and she moved back again, but slower this time . . . giving me just enough time to make my move.
Her wing brushed me as she sought to move again, and I grabbed the top of it, a long rib beneath a covering of slick and oily feathers, and stuck with my dagger.
She screamed in distress, reared back, and swung at me, but I leaped backward, flipping to avoid the shot. Her wing hung limply on one side, and I was struck with pity. I’d winged my enemy but hadn’t brought her down.
And she was pissed.
Faster than she’d moved before, she bent her knees and jumped forward. She was on me before I could move, heavy and awkward, her mouth wide and pointed teeth aimed for my face, apparently intent on taking a bite.
“Ethan will not like that,” I muttered, humor my last weapon against fear and exhaustion. I watched for the right moment and, when her head darted up to strike, pushed the dagger through her neck.
She arched back, screaming, hands at her throat, and pulled out the dagger, which hit the ground some feet away. I watched it roll, afraid she’d come back for a second round and I’d have no recourse, no protection. But blood and worse gushed from her wound, and she staggered and fell, shaking the earth beneath.
I wiped fresh traces of blood from my face, thinking, just as I’d promised Ethan, that I’d heal. The harpy, unfortunately, would have no such luck.
• • •
When I’d gotten to my feet again, grabbed up my dagger, and scrubbed off blood and dirt, I took a look at the rest of the battle. Harpies still circled the sky—a dozen maybe—but the attack was clearly on the wane. And it would leave death and destruction in its wake.
Some shifters fought; others lay on the ground, unmoving, the scents of untimely deaths moving across the field, thrown into the air by the flap of wings. Shifters could heal themselves, but only if they shifted, and they had to be awake and conscious to do that. For some of them, it was clearly too late.
So much death, I thought, staring blankly at the carnage, trying to process it. I’d fought battles before, and seen death. But rarely this much, and never all at once.
“Merit.”
I looked over, found Ethan a few feet away. He was dirty and blood smeared, but all limbs were intact. I nearly sagged with relief.
“Tanya and Connor?” he asked, moving quickly nearer and looking me over.
“The woods,” I said. “I got them to the woods, then dealt with her.” I gestured to the harpy, who looked scrawny and pitiful there on the ground, her wings folded in death.
“This is a miserable thing,” he said, no little pity in his voice. “Let’s get back in there.”
We walked back into the clearing as Gabriel finished off a harpy with a vicious bite to the neck, and we ran to his position at the edge of the battle.
Light exploded, and Gabriel burst back into human form, naked as the day he was born. There were a few scratches on his body, a result of the weird magic of shape-shifting. Although changing from human to shifter would heal injuries received as a human, it didn’t work in reverse.
“Everyone is tiring,” Ethan said.
Gabriel nodded. Jeff ran up, hastily clothed, pointing at Catcher and Mallory.
“They think this is a magical attack,” he said, “and they think they know how to finish it with the magic they have left. But it will be big magic.”
Catcher and Mallory knelt together on the ground in the center of the meadow, near the fallen totem. They held their left hands together, palms flat, and their right hands flat against the earth, as if testing it for weakness, or pulling strength from it.
“Mallory won’t do it without your go-ahead.”
Gabriel looked at her for a moment. “Will it hurt the Pack?”
Jeff shook his head. “It will be targeted at the magic itself. It shoul
dn’t touch anyone else.”
Gabriel wet his lips, nodded. “If they think they can end it, they should. Just tell us what to do.”
“Get down,” he said, then cupped his hands around his mouth. “Go!” he yelled across the clearing.
As Catcher nodded at Mallory, Ethan grabbed my hand and pulled me down into a crouch.
I couldn’t see the magic around Catcher and Mallory, not with my eyes, but I could feel it ramping up, like the supercharged atmosphere before a storm, the air suddenly heavy and smelling of ozone.
A bubble of magic emerged from the earth, quickly encompassing the two of them, growing until it was ten feet tall, and then suddenly exploding, pulsing, like a wave through the sky.
The magic hit the birds like a bomb. They exploded into swirls of acrid black smoke. Like it was a living thing, the smoke rose into a giant, swirling column over the clearing, a cyclone of magic. It screamed with noise—like the squeals of a thousand harpies together—and blew tents and leaves and the rest of the bonfire to the ground in an explosion of noise.
It spun faster and faster, debris winding around and around like a children’s toy, narrowing and rising farther and farther into the sky until, with a final scream of sound that made me clap my hands over my ears, the column broke apart, sending black tentacles of smoke into the sky.
The night went silent, and the smoke began to dissipate, revealing the stars once again.
We all rose again. Gabriel looked at Ethan. “Get back to the house. And Catcher and Mallory, as well.”
“Back to the house?” Ethan asked, his magic and body suddenly tense, making all my spidey senses tingle uncomfortably.
“We were just attacked, and you’re the odd ones out.”
We weren’t shifters, he meant.
We were different.
We were suspects.
Chapter Five
BLOOD WILL TELL
They’d undoubtedly been attacked before. They’d had intra-Pack struggles, and they’d overcome them. But tonight they’d been attacked, without warning, by creatures that weren’t supposed to exist.
This had shocked them. Unfortunately, we were on the wrong side of that shock.
We followed Gabriel silently back to the house, where Finn directed us to the kitchen.
It was large, with white cabinets and sleek black countertops, and a large kitchen island with an expensive stove and several stools for casual meals. The Breckenridges’ kitchen staff, dressed in their formal black-and-white uniforms, watched us from one corner as Mallory, Catcher, Ethan, and I were directed to the center island.
“Sit,” Finn said, then disappeared from the room. The house staff, also shifters, but apparently on duty during the festival, stood together, arms crossed, whispering and regarding us with obvious hostility.
Ethan sat beside me, his hand protectively at my back. Catcher and Mallory took seats across from us, and the strain in her face was clear. They’d interned us in the house while they grieved together, reminding us just how separate our worlds still were.
“What will they do now?” Mallory asked.
“Clean up. Mourn. Heal,” Catcher said, running a hand over his shorn scalp.
Mallory looked worried and guilty, and she nibbled nervously on the edge of her thumb. I could read the fear in her face: She was the witch, the woman who’d used black magic, the one they’d taken in.
She’d come here, and she’d brought death with her.
As if reading my mind, she looked up at me and met my gaze, and the weight of her emotions made my chest clench.
I knew her again. As well as I’d known her before, but now as a sorceress, tested by magic and come through the other side. I might not ever forget the past, what she’d done. I wasn’t a child, or naive. But I could forgive her, and we could move on and try to build something better, something stronger, than what had been before.
But still, no one spoke. I could deal with comfortable silence, but this silence was not comfortable. I broke through it, clearing my throat. Ethan, Mallory, and Catcher frankly looked relieved by the intrusion.
“Harpies don’t exist,” Mallory said. “They aren’t supposed to exist.”
“I’m not certain they do exist,” Ethan said, glancing at Catcher. “I presume from their disappearing act they were magic?”
“A manifestation of some kind,” Catcher agreed. “They weren’t real.”
“They killed,” I said. “They fought and wounded. They were real.”
“They were tangible,” Catcher said. “But they weren’t real. Not real harpies, anyway,” he added at my questioning look. “They were magic—power shaped and molded into something three-dimensional and solid.”
Ethan glanced warily at the kitchen staff, then leaned forward. “That’s how you thought to use magic to destroy them at the end.”
Catcher nodded, glancing at Mallory. “She figured it out. They fought like real animals, fiercely, drawing blood, killing when they could. But their magical signature was wrong. The look in their eyes was wrong.”
“Blank,” I offered.
Mallory looked at me and nodded. “Exactly. More automaton than actual monster. So we unwound them.”
“You unwound them?” I asked. “What does that mean? And use nongeeky, layman’s terms.”
“There’s a formulaic element to magic,” Catcher said. “It can be a chant. A charm. A spell. Some start with that but deepen it. They layer it. Charms atop charms atop charms.” He glanced at me. “We took those layers, unfolded them, stripped them back to their elemental magic, and dispersed them. That spell wouldn’t have worked if they’d been real.”
“But this wasn’t just a monster,” Ethan said. “It was dozens of harpies, acting individually. Not just a walk and slap, but something with the look of a coordinated attack, and on shifter territory.”
“Walk and slap?” Mallory asked.
“An old European custom,” Ethan said. “Before the houses existed, certain feuding vampire covens engaged in petty slights, back and forth, to air their grievances.”
“Aristocratic vampire slap fights? With period costumes?” Mallory asked, looking at me with obvious delight. “I am all over that and the graphic novel it inspires.”
“Coordinated attacks,” Catcher said, returning to the point. “The magical layering is doable, but it would have required someone powerful and very talented.”
Ethan looked at Catcher for a minute. “You could have done it.”
Catcher’s jaw twitched at the insinuation. “With enough time, yes. Mallory, too.”
“There’s Paige, Simon, and Baumgartner,” Ethan said. “Could they do it?”
Paige was a magician formerly stationed in Nebraska and now in Chicago. She didn’t live in Cadogan House, but she was dating the House librarian, which was close enough. Baumgartner was head of the sorcerers’ union, which Catcher had been kicked out of, and Simon was Mallory’s former and utterly incompetent magical tutor.
Catcher drummed his fingers on the countertop, considering the question.
“Baumgartner has the magical capacity, but he wouldn’t have a reason to do it. It would upset his apple cart. Simon doesn’t have the mojo.”
“Paige?” Ethan asked.
“Maybe, but she doesn’t seem like the type. She’s interested in the mathematics of magic, the history. Not so much the execution, and certainly not wholesale destruction.”
Ethan sat back, drawing the attention of the kitchen staff, whose eyes narrowed suspiciously. Did they think he was plotting a revolt right here in the Brecks’ kitchen? I considered flashing my fangs but guessed it wouldn’t be easy to intimidate the staff of a shape-shifting family.
After a moment of silence, he glanced at Catcher. “If we’re going to tell the Pack we think this was a magical attack, we’re going to have to prove it,
one way or the other. Talk to the sorcerers, confirm their whereabouts. If they are, as we suspect, not involved, find out who they think might have done it.”
“We aren’t errand boys,” Catcher testily said, lip curled.
But Ethan wasn’t fazed. “No, you aren’t. But we’re in Pack territory, surrounded by shifters who are angry and grieving. And they have us separated and under guard. Until we prove otherwise, we’re their suspects.” He glanced at Mallory, and my stomach curled. “And I imagine Mallory is suspect number one.”
• • •
We were summoned an hour later, still filthy and scarred from the battle. A man in a trim suit sent us to Papa Breck’s study, which had been one of my favorite rooms in the house as a child. Nick and I had stolen several summer days there, poring over antique books, inspecting mementos of Papa Breck’s travels, and nabbing lemon drops from a crystal dish he kept on his desk.
Tonight, the room was dark, cigar smoke swirling in the air. Gabe sat in a leather armchair, the Keene and Breck brothers surrounding him like men at arms. Papa Breck, silver haired and barrel-chested, sat behind his desk, a cigar between his teeth.
“Three dead,” Papa Breck said, ashing his cigar and beginning the inquest. “Three dead. Two missing. Fourteen injured.”
Ethan clasped his hands in front of him, met Gabe’s eyes. “We’re sorry for your losses.”
Michael sniffed. “I notice you aren’t injured.”
Ethan slid his gaze to Michael but didn’t alter his tone. “We incurred our share of injuries, but we heal. We fought alongside you, and as you may recall, Catcher and Mallory destroyed what remained of the harpies.” He glanced at Gabriel. “We also took care of your queen.”
“You showed up at our house,” Papa Breck said, “and all hell broke loose.”
“Again, we are sorry about tonight’s tragedy. But you should look elsewhere for the blame, as we had nothing to do with it. Merit and I are your guests because of circumstances in Chicago. Mallory and Catcher are your guests because she is a student of Gabriel’s. We fought with you against the harpies. We did not create them, nor did we lure them here.”
