by May Dawson
"Wraiths," Ryker said conversationally, "used to be human, but they definitely aren't anymore."
"How?" I asked.
The wraith who had buzzed us flapped down to land in front of us, just beyond the shadows of the trees.
"They didn't want to go where they belonged," Ryker said. "They felt they were destined for Hell, so they stayed here instead. And the Far twisted them into something else...something that belongs here. Humans don't."
Another wraith landed beside it, and then another. The three wraiths looked toward us with curious, human faces, which were terrifying in their gray and twisted bodies. Then the three of them hissed at once, barring sharp fangs at us.
"I think it's time to practice exiting the Far," Jacob said. "We know we can make it back in now. We'll take what we need from Turner, do some studying, regroup--"
The wraiths began to stalk toward us. Their enormous, razor-sharp claws curled into the grass, yanking it up in clumps.
"Sounds like a plan." Ryker said. He reached out to touch my leg, the gesture fond.
Levi slid his hand from my shoulder to the back of my waist, his hand resting there possessively as if we were on a date, and Jacob put his hand on my shoulder. When the four of us were touching in roughly the same way we'd been in Turner's attic, we all muttered together quickly in Latin to bring ourselves home.
The world shifted.
As the trees moved, I thought I saw Ash standing just beyond in the trees, watching us. Her lips were puckered, as if she had been in the act of whistling. Her eyes met mine, evenly, and I couldn’t read the expression on her face.
Before I could make sense of it, the world kept shifting, and Ash was gone.
Between my sister and me was a blur of darkness, and my stomach shifted as if I riding a roller coaster. There was nothing under my feet.
Then everything accelerated, and I slammed into my body.. It felt like someone had picked me up and thrown me into a brick wall.
But I was just sitting in the dust of Turner's attic.
Around me, the boys opened their eyes too.
Turner was gibbering. The noise was high-pitched and constant, full of terror.
At the top of the stairs stood two men with swords in their hands and black armor hanging from their broad shoulders.
Chapter 4
The two men stepped to either side of the stairs, their swords at the ready. They were burly with muscle, wider and heavier than my guys like a pair of tanks, and the effect was only stronger because of the black armor they wore. Was it leather? Or Kevlar? I couldn't tell. It almost seemed to shift under my gaze, as if it were enchanted with some spell. Their dark hair was pulled back into ponytails at the nape of their necks.
They shifted aside as a series of men and a woman could spread out across the front of the room. They wore ordinary Hunter clothes, jeans or leather, and carried swords.. They were all lean and grizzled, with deep frown lines and sun-damaged, dark skin. Their bodies were muscular, as if they could still draw those sheathed swords and fight. So much for what Jacob said about there being no old Hunters.
Ryker shifted slightly to one side, blocking the pendant from their view. As soon as I realized what he was trying to do, my attention was pulled away from these scary new visitors. I leaned back on my hands, stretching my legs out in front of me. I caught the pendant under my heel.
The woman's eyes met mine. Her brown hair was touched with gray, drawn back severely from her face. Her eyes were such a deep brown they almost looked black. She nodded, just faintly, her jaw set.
As the boys scrambled to their feet, covering me, I drew my heels back in. I slipped the pendant into my pocket and then I scrambled to my feet myself.
"What's going on here?" A Hunter on the left asked. "We came for Turner. We did not expect to find you."
"Oh, so you know us," Ryker said. "Well, that's comforting."
"Yes, and we have business with you too." The woman pointed over our shoulders to Turner. "Take the traitor to the car."
The two guards walked past us, their footfalls heavy, and picked up Turner's chair. They carried him back to the stairs, ignoring his screams and pleading.
"What are you going to do with him?" I asked.
The woman's eyes snapped to mine. "You should worry about what we're going to do with you."
"We just wanted information from Turner," Jacob said smoothly. "We're not going to fight you for him."
"Of course not," she said, her tone rich with humor, as if Jacob were an idiot. "And I assume if you were on his side, you might not have taped him to a chair."
"It's not how we usually treat our friends." Ryker stepped forward, holding out his hand. "Ryker Alexander."
"I'm not your friend either," she told him, her eyes cold. "You have made some grave missteps, Ryker Alexander."
"Well, that's probably true," he admitted, before offering his most handsome and winning smile. It always melted me, anyway, even though she seemed unmoved.
"And this must be Jacob," she said, her eyes flickering to him. He stared back at her, and her eyes widened slightly. "Don't look at me."
Jacob crossed his arms over his chest, ducking his head slightly to hide both his hypnotizing eyes and the sudden small smile that had bloomed across his lips.
"And Levi." She looked at him, cocking her head slightly. "I've heard you're the greatest warrior of your generation."
"One of three, I'd say," Levi said coolly. Although I knew Ryker and Jacob would never hear the end of that one. No matter how they fought and competed in private, my boys would never betray any weakness in their bond in front of strangers.
"Maybe you'll join us one day," she said lightly. "Certainly, for now, you'll join us for trial."
"Trial?" Levi exploded. "For what?"
"Harboring demons. A demon, specifically, who harmed a fellow Hunter."
One of the men stepped up to hand Ryker an envelope.
"Your invitation to the trial," she said.
The sound of Turner's screaming faded away as the doors out to the alley slammed behind her henchmen.
"Is this your typical invitation?" Ryker asked, slapping the envelope against his open palm.
"Yes," she said. "So I suggest you do not lose it."
Ryker nodded.
She turned and swept toward the stairs. The men followed behind her.
"Typical invitation?" I repeated.
"If you don't show up, they assume guilt and put out the death order." He slid the envelope into his jacket pocket. "No worries, Firestarter. We'll be fine. We're the good guys."
"But are they?" I demanded.
Ryker shrugged. "Close enough."
It did not fill me with confidence.
Levi threw his arm over my shoulders, hugging me against his lean waist. "It'll be all right," he said, although his worried deep blue eyes gave him away.
Jacob moved to the top of the stairs, looking down to make sure they had gone. He turned back, a troubled look on his face. "If Nimshi were here, they'd burn us all."
"We'd fight them," Ryker said.
"The Council? All of the Hunters?" Jacob asked skeptically. "I want to make sure Nim's all right, too, but our best bet to save us all is to wait until we've dealt with whatever's made them so feisty, and then go after him."
"It won't be long," Levi promised me.
"And what if they do decide to burn us all, as you put it?" I asked.
"We're Heaven's favorites, remember?" Ryker asked me lightly. "We always make it out of whatever trouble we find ourselves in."
"And we should definitely push our luck." Jacob nodded.
"Well, in this case, luck is pushing us," Levi said. He half-shrugged, a quick movement of one of those broad shoulders. "Let's get home."
"Yeah, let's," Ryker said. "If we might die tomorrow, I'm eating pie tonight."
"Pie sounds good," Jacob agreed.
Ryker, Levi and I all froze, staring at him. Jacob crossed his arms over his chest,
staring back at us. He was the one who always lectured us about eating warrior food. The man ate arugula at breakfast.
"Now I feel like shit really is dire," Ryker muttered. "Pie."
Chapter 5
Ryker cut the engine as the garage doors rumbled shut behind us. Levi was already out of the car and moving quickly up the stairs and into the main house, gun in his hand. As if we'd never have any peace, even when we came back to this house we loved.
Levi stood in the doorway and nodded. The house was clear.
I got out of the car and slipped past him in the doorway. My hip brushed his, his fingers briefly trailing over my hips. Down the hall, I could hear the noise and clatter in the kitchen of busy cooking. The scent of spicy red sauce and baking bread and vanilla hung in the air, even from here.
"Mom?" I called as I headed down the hall. For a second, even knowing that Levi had cleared the house, my heart froze in my chest. It still felt like a miraculous, tenuous thing to have my mother here. To have my mother care.
My mom leaned back from the stove, into sight, her honey blond hair swinging back from her shoulders. Her wide smile crinkled the corners of her eyes. "Hey, sweetie. How did it go at Turner's?"
"Not so great for him," I said. I'd carried my sheathed sword on its stiff leather shoulder harness into the house with me, and I laid it on the table now. "He got taken in by the Council."
"What kind of barbarian are you?" Jacob grumbled, picking up my sword. "We don't leave weapons on dining surfaces. People bleed on these blades, you know."
I cocked my head back, resting my hair against his broad chest. Despite his complaining, his broad arm automatically closed around my waist. "I do know. What will happen to Turner, do you think?"
"You shouldn't worry about it," he said. "That's what I think."
"You don't need to protect me from the truth."
His lips quirked slightly to one side. "I'm not. There's nothing we can about Turner's truth right now, which is that he'll probably be executed for betraying Hunters to demons."
I thought of how Turner had gassed us, and then watched a demon and his minions roll our unconscious bodies into a trunk, knowing we would be tortured and murdered. My tone was light when I answered, "Nothing we could do even if we wanted to."
"Savage." He smiled slightly. "I like it."
My mother still held a wooden spoon in one hand. It dripped a steady series of droplets of spaghetti sauce across the wood floors of the kitchen as she stared at us in horror.
"He sold us to be killed, Mom," I said. The way she looked at me hurt my heart.
She shook her head slightly, sticking her spoon back in her sauce as if it took effort to stop looking at me that way. "Dinner will be ready in an hour. I made cookies too, they're in the jar if you want a snack before dinner."
Jacob patted my hip and turned away, carrying our weapons downstairs to hang in the dojo.
"Are you going full Betty Crocker as a way to deal with all the weird and crazy in our lives?" I made my way over to the cookie jar on the counter and took out a stack of crisp-brown-on-the-outside, soft-in-the-middle chocolate chip cookies out of the jar. "Nuts or no nuts?"
"I'm only answering one of those questions," my mother said. "Go say hi to your sister. I think she missed you today."
"Okay," I said, even though my sister was in a coma. I wasn't going to argue that one with my mama. I took a bite of the cookie and crunched into the dry, slightly bitter taste of a walnut. "Ugh, nuts. You made these for the boys, not me. Where's Olivia?"
Mom's eyes flickered to me as if to say, you have to ask? Olivia was almost always on her computers, in the office downstairs that was really her office.
"Thanks for the cookies," I said. "Even if they do tell me that you love the guys more than me already."
"Just trying to win over my... three...future sons-in-law."
"Don't go there." I hugged her shoulders quickly, breathing in the scent of her signature perfume, Chanel No. 5. "It gets weird if you think about it too much."
"It's just weird anyway," she promised me. She let the spoon fall into the sauce and turned around to squeeze me back, betraying just how much she had missed me. "But I can't blame you. I wouldn't choose either."
"They're all pretty great, aren't they?" I said. "When they aren't driving me mad."
"Even then." She squeezed me back and then stepped back. "After dinner, let's go for a walk and catch up. I miss you."
"We could go now. You aren't going to babysit that sauce all day, are you?"
She wrinkled her nose. "I'm not. But later. You need a shower."
"Magic's dirty work." I said defensively. I yanked at the front of my tank top, which I'd worn with Wendy's hand-me-down leather jacket and a pair of leather pants for another day in the Hunter life. We hadn't known what kind of danger we would find in Turner's house. I headed for the door and called over my shoulder, "I'm going to go talk to Ash. She won't complain about how I smell."
"That doesn't mean she wouldn't prefer you showered first," Mom called. "Don't push your magical destiny with those boys by not being ladylike."
Levi pushed the front door shut with his foot down the hall and turned to me. His arms were filled with a stack of wood.
"Don't be ladylike," he mouthed at me, so that my mother wouldn't see. "We like you just the way you are."
"You just don't want me to be ladylike in bed," I whispered back.
He raised both eyebrows at me in a way that was entirely lascivious and simultaneously quite adorable. "Guilty."
"What's the wood for?"
"It's supposed to storm tonight. I thought it might be nice to have a fire in the fireplace." He jerked his chin toward the living room at the back of the house. There was an enormous fireplace in there, but I hadn't seen it lit yet.
"That sounds nice." I rested my hand on his shoulder as I slipped behind him. I opened the French doors that led to my sister's room off the hall.
There were several pillows piled behind her, making it look almost as if she were sitting up. Her dark hair looked thin, but my mom had obviously just brushed it. The IV might keep her alive, but it wasn't keeping her healthy.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. "Well, we had a day today, Ash. You want to hear about it?"
The question hung in the quiet room. The first patter of rain fell against the roof.
Asking my sister questions made me feel lonely.
"So apparently, the Council wants to see the guys tomorrow. And me? Do I count as a Hunter now? I have so many questions. Is there a special Hunter ceremony or something?"
Ash did not have an opinion.
"I think the guys are worried. But it's always hard to tell. They operate at about twenty-percent of my emotional intensity most of the time, except for when they're in angry-protective mode."
I wished I could really talk to my sister. I wondered what she would make of the guys and their quirks. Each one seemed to fill in a different piece of me. Levi soothed my soul and always seemed to know what I was thinking. Ryker encouraged me and made me laugh and filled me with life. Jacob challenged me to be my best, sometimes infuriating me because his expectations were so damn much to live up to, and yet, he always knew how to help me find my own strength.
"I wonder what it would have been like if I'd really gotten to know Nimshi," I said. I missed his voice and the teasing light in his eyes and the devilish way he smiled. And I missed the way he’d kissed me during our few stolen minutes on the porch of a haunted house.
I took her hand in mine, twisting the turquoise ring she'd always worn around her finger; it slipped off easily now because her fingers were thinner. "The boys came around to their brother, once we'd lost him. Once he died trying to protect us. I wonder what you'd think about our half-demon."
Her fingers flexed slightly in mine.
I jumped from the bed, but the room was still quiet around me. The machines still hummed keeping her alive, and the rain still droned against the roof, an
d my sister's eyes were still closed.
It was probably all my imagination.
"Ash?" I said softly. "Are you coming back to me? Were you there, in the Far? Looking for me?"
My sister's face was as still and distant as ever. The room was lonely.
I should have kept my rule of not asking her any questions.
It was my imagination. It had to be. I wanted so badly for her to be alive again. I took a step back, my heart still pounding in my chest even though I knew I was being ridiculous. "I'll come back later and check on you," I promised.
I turned and headed down the hall, jogging down the stairs to the basement. In the big open space we used as an office, Olivia was working, swiveling between two laptops. On the monitors that spanned the wall, she was watching the feeds that came in from the cameras on the property. They showed rain drizzling through the trees and puddling across the gravel road that ran past our property. I could hear the noise of the guys in the dojo next door, the sound of bodies slapping against mats and the sharp clasp of blade against blade as they practiced.
I stopped and looked at the feeds, crossing my arms over my chest, trying to be normal. My version of normal, anyway. "Are you worried about something happening out there?"
"Always," she said. "No more than usual. Hello to you too, E."
"Hey." I pulled the rolling desk chair out beside her and threw myself into it. It rolled back further than I expected, and I dragged myself back across the slick wooden floor with my heels. "Did the guys tell you about the Council?"
"They did," she said. "You want my research?"
Right. I needed to put aside my worries about my sister for now. We had to survive the next day if we were ever going to find Ash and Nim in the Far.
"Desperately," I said.
She quirked one exquisitely shaped red eyebrow at me. "I feel like you're mocking me."
"No, no," I said. "We have a situation here. I want to know everything I can.”
“Does the Council want to see you too?"
"That's what Ryker said. And. I'm so glad, really. I hate when everyone else is invited somewhere and I'm not."
