by Lan Chan
“You don’t even know if there’s a causal relationship.”
“If there’s even just the slightest link, I won’t risk it. There’s too much at stake.”
The softness in her voice rubbed me up the wrong way. “Since when have you given in to fear?”
There was no challenge in it, but the sentiment was the match that lit a raging inferno inside me. In the early hours of the morning, half the circle had advocated to cut us off from supernatural society. Chief amongst that contingent was Jeremiah.
“They keep meddling in sinister magic even though they know the malachim are drawn to it,” he’d said. “If we don’t allow it in the Reserve, we’d give ourselves a chance. Maybe some time to rebuild.” I knew he thought of Lizzie when he made his decisions. Just like I should have been thinking of Dani. And Charles. And my parents.
What I’d been thinking of instead was the brown-eyed woman in front of me. If we cut off high magic—any magic at all, in fact—it meant Sophie would petition the Council to stay in the fens. Now that Andrei wasn’t likely to leave Seraphina until Astrid was well, she had no reason to be here.
“I’ll take it on advisement.”
“But–”
The needling that her presence created reached fever pitch. It was like all day the lion was actually trapped in some kind of cage, and it was scratching and clawing, but it couldn’t be freed. All I could think of was a lion inside a circus, forced to perform. So broken it didn’t remember what it was like to have agency. I saw red.
Bitterness coated my words. “If you want to have a say, join the inner circle. Until then, my decision is final.”
Her jaw dropped. I regretted the harshness when her cheeks flushed, but I was too raw at the moment to take the words back.
She stood, knowing I wasn’t in the mood to be bargained with. At the door, she turned back. “I never asked for any of this,” she said.
An echo of Anastasia’s words piggybacked on the statement. I couldn’t bring myself to couch it in any softness, even if it was the truth.
“Nobody could fault your perfect handling of this whole thing,” I told her. “You would make a perfectly submissive shifter female.”
Except the thing looking out at me behind those richly dark eyes of hers was anything but submissive. It made me think that if the circumstances had been different, I would have claws at my throat right now.
Instead, she opened the door. “You’re wrong about one thing,” she said. “If I were a shifter, I wouldn’t let the most vulnerable members of my pack flounder while I holed up in a room with a bunch of stubborn jerks having a big sook about how nothing is fair and everyone else is mean. You can shut yourselves off as much as you like. It just means you’ll die alone. There’s no shame in accepting help.”
It wasn’t until after I’d run myself into exhaustion in the jungle sector that the meaning of those words slammed into me. The Reserve was a vast landscape of open ranges and territories. We didn’t often run into each other when we roamed. If we did, it was easy enough to avoid each other physically, if not through scent. For months now, even scent was scarce. The civilian population had given up anything but living in close quarters. They were too worried about the malachim appearing.
Today, I crossed paths with two other shifters. But it was when I looped around the accommodation sector that the change became apparent. People were leaving their homes again. Despite the news last night, they were socialising. Remembering what it was like to take strength from each other.
My mind was already made up before I made the mirror call to Angus. “I want to start talking about exchanging guards.”
He raised a brow. “I thought outsiders were off the table.”
“Well, it’s back on now.” I cleared my throat. “I’m going to tell you something about Sophie now. But you don’t get to make her leave or interrogate her.”
He frowned when I was done. “You realise we are at war with the Hell dimension, don’t you? Whatever is in her head might be critical.”
“What exactly do you think you’ll be able to do besides monitor her like an animal in a cage?” When he said nothing, I went on. “She’ll be safer here.”
“Her presence could put your pack in danger. You do realise that, don’t you?
Oh, I knew exactly what it was I was doing. The problem was that I didn’t care. Because in my heart, I knew she would do more good for the pack than any of them would ever know.
22
Sophie
Two days after my discussion with Max, he sent Gwen to let me know that he’d informed the Council of my nightmare.
“Angus says that a few others with the Sight experienced the same thing,” she said.
I doubted it. “Did they see Kai as well?”
Gwen chewed on her bottom lip. “They saw an iteration of somebody they knew. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. Angus says to monitor the situation. They’ve got too much happening to be able to spare resources for this.”
In the back of my mind, an unpleasant thought reared its head. If it had been Lex, they would have dropped everything and listened. Charles’s lament rang in my ears: she doesn’t always come first.
Proof however that Angus wasn’t just playing favourites appeared in the cancellation of my classes with Agatha for the week.
“Why?” I asked Jacqueline when she informed me.
Her features darkened. “The elite guard have commandeered the Trinity to help secure Seraphina.”
“I can’t even understand that sentence right now.”
The way she gripped her pen said she felt the same but was tired of bashing her head against a brick wall with these people.
Finding myself with more free time than I cared for at the moment, I busied myself making health elixir and helping in the infirmary. Every evening for a week, Noah dragged me back to the Reserve in a stupor.
“You can’t keep doing both,” he said.
“I’m fine! I just need to sleep it off.”
Thankfully, my dreams were no longer full of death. Instead, when I lay my head down at night, I was tormented by light grey eyes bleeding to bright gold and that deep voice telling me that I couldn’t run forever. I woke with the sheets tangled in my legs, Max’s T-shirt bunched at my waist, and my hairline damp with sweat.
The only bright side was that Max seemed to be avoiding me altogether. So was Anastasia. She didn’t even look at me once in Weaponry and Combat, even though I spent two classes just sitting there staring at the Angelical without so much as attempting to trace the words.
At dinnertime, more and more members of the pack joined us on the conference field. It got to a point where I was becoming worried.
“What do you think about the correlation between population density and malachim attacks?” I asked Noah one night when Charles was busy on a guard shift. We sat in the dirt around the Thompsons’ while I planted seeds in the garden beds.
He paused, his lips moving silently, which was something he tended to do when he was thinking. “I doubt there’s any veracity to it.”
“So, I shouldn’t be worried that there are too many people gathered at dinner time?”
He eyed the seeds that I was planting. Lines appeared on his brow, because as soon as I watered, they sprouted. “Are you worried—what the heck kind of plant is that?”
I grinned. “Lex created them for my birthday.”
“Created?”
I held the seeds in my palm out so he could see. “Yeah. She didn’t have any money, so she worked with Peter and Thalia to create a flower for me.”
He scratched at the skin under his eye. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Anything is possible with Lex.”
He searched my face. “Dorian says it’s likely that she’s still alive.” I thought he meant to be comforting but his voice had become robotic again. “He says that if anybody can survive the wrath of Lucifer, it’s Alessia.”
My heart twisted
at the same time the smile appeared on my face. “Dorian says a lot of stuff.”
“You’re still angry at him?”
Angry wasn’t the word. Deep down I suspected a part of me was terrified of a world where Dorian Abara didn’t know the answer. “What do you care anyway whether I’m upset at Dorian?”
He scowled in a way that said he cared a great deal what anyone thought of Dorian. “You know he’s not dating anyone at the moment, right?”
I remembered that time Lex had lied to Andrei about Dorian wanting to take Astrid out, without knowing that Dorian wasn’t into women. It had been the funniest thing to listen to her curse and try to come up with another lie to tell to get under Andrei’s skin.
Noah stared at the ground. “I don’t think we should be discussing this.”
It was progress that he didn’t tell me to shut up and be done with it. There were definitely complications there. Dorian was a bit older than Noah and there was the issue of Dorian being part of the crew who rescued Noah from my great-grandfather. Come to think of it, I already had my own issues to deal with in that department.
I let it ride and concentrated on planting flowers. When I had done the Thompsons’, I decided that the rest of the Reserve could use some brightening up as well. We were four days into it when I took a chance and sank alchemy into the earth around the garden beds. Noah caught on right away. I sighed inwardly as he latched onto my wrist.
“What else are you doing right now?” he said. The wolf was in his voice. We’d been kneeling in the dirt, but he pushed up into a crouch, his ears suddenly hairy and flat against his head. The wrist he had shackled went limp. I didn’t know why I thought I could pull a fast one on him. Even with the invisibility circle. His senses were just too attuned to magic.
“Nothin–”
He shook me. “Sophie!”
“It really is nothing.”
Pulling me close, his nose shifted, and he sniffed. “Don’t lie to me.”
I stared into the yellow eyes of a predator and saw inside them an echo of the trauma he had gone through. My tongue was too big for my mouth.
“I’m sinking blood wards into the Reserve,” I squeaked.
Time stood still as brownish-red dots appeared in his eyes. The black of his pupils dilated until there was only a sliver of yellow left to be seen. In my head, I thought I heard the sound of howling, of flesh tearing, and screams blanketing the night.
Inside me, the blood barrier flared. Alchemy raced to reinforce it. I knew from the way Noah’s nose twitched that the scent of death must have been potent. The pressure on my wrist increased.
“Ow!” I said. His head snapped up. When he opened his mouth, his teeth were sharpened at the points.
“Why?”
I was more than a little tired of being questioned about every little thing. But the way his vision became drenched in nightmares made me open my mouth. “I’m worried that the Reserve doesn’t have enough defences,” I said. His hold made me wince.
“Why would we need more defences?”
“Seraphina has everything, and they were still attacked.”
“Seraphina is a bigger target.”
“So?”
“So why would the malachim pick this place? Does it have something to do with that thing inside you that is cloaked in darkness?”
My struggling became frantic. “No.”
“Sophie!”
“No!” I screamed in his face. “I’m getting really sick of being accused of stuff I haven’t done. So either decide that you’re going to trust me or lock me up!”
He grabbed me by the shoulders, his gaze shackling me to the spot. “I’m not going to ask again. What’s that thing inside you that smells like necromantic magic?”
“It’s necromantic magic! Duh!”
He really shook me this time, the tether holding him to a civilised mindset completely gone. Coarse hairs began to grow along the length of his arms, the grey T-shirt stretching to almost bursting as he fought to keep hold of his wolf.
“Why do you have necromantic magic inside you?”
I was shaking. The hairs on the back of my neck were pointed straight up. My gut bottomed out as though I were riding the world’s worst roller coaster. If he lost control now, he’d snap my neck and I’d be dead. And yet, my mouth clamped shut.
“Tell me!” he roared in my face.
Balling my hands so hard my nails pierced my palms, I held firm. It was one thing to tell Andrei about the mating link, but there was no way I would breathe a word about it to Max’s inner circle. They would be obligated to tell him and worse, he would feel the knowledge through his alpha link with them. I would take the secret to my grave if I had to rather than watch Max die.
Noah’s eyes went fully red. I knew I was in trouble. Crying out as he flexed and crushed my shoulder, I grabbed for the blood alchemy and forced it into my palm. Pink light flared as it raced down my wrist to materialise into the dull blood blade. He saw it the moment I made the decision to stab him and suddenly threw me away.
Falling onto my ass, I scrambled to disperse the blade and funnelled the magic into a glowing red protection circle. Unlike my usual circle, this one was bound in blood. Transmutation wasn’t the only thing I could do with blood. And unlike the transformation of an essence, I could use demon blood to reinforce the strength of a circle. Of course, it would do nothing besides keep Noah out.
Right now, he was keeled over, his back arching as he fought the urge to shift. In hindsight, I probably should have just told him what I was doing. Performing blood magic in the presence of somebody whose life had been destroyed by it was a monumental error. I just...for a moment there I thought he would trust me. But I supposed some things would never change.
It was why I opened my mouth and said, “This blade is all the protection I have against the malachim. If I can disperse the magic into blood circles, if the Reserve gets attacked, the circles will create a barrier. They will make the malachim corporeal for long enough that we might stand a chance to either fight back or run.”
For a long moment, I didn’t think he could hear me. He was making a terrible gnashing sound like somebody was actually ripping his claws out. Rather than push him, I sat within the circle, ready to strike if need be.
His smashed the grass with a hairy fist. “Why?”
Speech. Good. Talking was good. Talking meant he was still being rational. “Why what?”
He took a shuddering breath. If I weren’t still poised to run, I would have been impressed with his self-control. Very few shifters could hold on once the urge to shift began. “Why do this?”
“Because I don’t particularly want to die.”
“Liar! Try again.”
“What do you want me to say?”
He lumbered over. His clawed hands carved grooves into the grass. “All of it,” he grunted. “I want to know why.”
By all of it, I suspected he meant the necromantic magic too. He stood on a precipice. Either I jumped or I faced the wolf. There was no alternative. At the very core of everything I did in the Reserve, there was only one answer: “Max.”
He regarded me with insanity in his eyes. But little by little, the crazy receded, until finally, all that was left in front of me was a man with shredded clothing hanging to his muscled form. Even then I didn’t let go of the circle.
“Why don’t you just mate with him?”
For goodness’ sake! They were all one-track minded. “Because I can’t. That’s all I’m telling you, so don’t make that face at me please. I’m exhausted from trying to be non-threatening all the time. At some point, you have to trust me or not.”
He had gone through so much. So, so much that I was asking a lot. The strength in him to claw himself back from the nightmare of his childhood should have been enough. And now here I was, the physical embodiment of that nightmare, and I was asking him to trust me.
Tentatively, he reached out. Swallowing hard, I dispersed the circle.
> “You’re the same as you were as a child,” he said. I almost groaned. “When we found out you were able to transmute essences, I wanted to hate you so badly. I watched you all the time. Waited around thinking one day you would turn. It was a relief when your parents decided to send you to the Academy. I thought there you would be presented with too much temptation to hide who you really were. And then finally, you said you killed people to save your friend and I thought for sure I’d been right. But you didn’t, did you? You couldn’t. You lied to cover something else up. I can’t tell if that’s a strength or a weakness.”
I bit my lip and thought about the task that Lex had left me. For the first time, I allowed myself to really contemplate what it meant. I was too weak. Even by stealing a hundred essences, there was every chance I wouldn’t be able to control her blood.
Feeling deflated, I let myself sink to the grass.
“Do you really think these blood circles will help us?” Noah asked.
“I know they will. But the pack circle will have a heart attack if they know I’m setting them. Just like they have a big cry at the idea of using other guards or reaching out for help from the other species.”
“That’s not our way.”
“Screw your way! This isn’t the old dimension. We have to think differently or we die!”
His laugh was a hollow thing. “You sound exactly like Max. He keeps saying we need to evolve or we’ll be left behind.”
I breathed through my nose. “Why doesn’t he make the decision then?”
“The others are afraid. They won’t admit it, but they’re concerned about what it might mean for the hierarchy.”
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “Right,” I said. “Because asking for a little bit of help during a world-ending event makes them weak.”
He pinned me with a glare. “We’re shifters!”
“Believe me, I never forget!”
Whatever else he might think personally, Noah allowed me to continue with my mission. By the end of the week, I’d covered the inside perimeter of the Reserve in enough wards that it should act as a warning at least. I could only hope that when the time came, it would be enough.
