by Lan Chan
I would love him and hate him at the same time. And because of that, I would be miserable. And so would he. But the misery would be so coated in feral toxicity that we wouldn’t even notice it until those quiet nights when all was still and well, and yet, at the back of our minds, something still nagged at us. A little seed of poison that would begin to throw out vines, infecting everything around us including the other shifters linked to us. Eventually it would leach out into the pack link and we’d become like the rogue shifters and the packless roaming shifters who gave up all honour for their own self-serving goals.
The sentiment was so laced with bitterness, I could barely stand it when I said, “If Kai was here, he would kill you for doing this to me.”
In the blink of an eye, a shadow descended over him. The amber ring around his eyes winked out. All there was now was black. “What the hell did you say?”
“I’m not repeating myself. And I won’t argue with you. Just know that if you force this on me, if you make me do this, when Kai and Lex return, you’ll have to answer to them.”
He took a single step forward, the muscles in his neck straining. He was fighting a battle inside himself. Every shifter in the room was tense to the point of snapping. They would throw themselves at him if he lost it. But even that wouldn’t be enough.
Anastasia’s claws sank into my thigh. I gasped and bit my lip thinking that she was using the moment to finally attack me, when I felt her hand trembling. She was frightened.
In my mind, I saw an image of Kai’s fiery green eyes crinkling at me from a place of endless quiet. In the depths of the mating link, I heard a voice that made me repeat a single sentence.
“Is this who you want to be when the demons come for us, Max?” I said.
His head reeled back like I’d slapped him. Gold rolled over his eyes, eating away at the darkness that had tormented him a second ago. Without saying a word or looking back, he marched out of the conference room and disappeared.
32
Anastasia helped me to my feet. Her hands still trembled but she was no longer sweating. “Shit!” she said. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”
She kept repeating it as the other shifters shook the dominance off themselves and came back to life.
Amy clutched at her chest as though she was having a heart attack. “We can never, ever do that again.”
“I hope not,” I said, hugging myself. She shook her head.
“No,” she said, “you don’t get it. That wave of pressure, that intensity. That wasn’t just normal dominance. It was a territorial link. There hasn’t been an alpha who could command it since before Durin.”
She swiped a hand over her face. A territorial link. The connection between a rightful alpha and the land in which they lived. It meant when he came to power, if they were ever attacked again, Max could command the very earth to come to their aid. The link was something gifted to a warrior by the old gods that had ruled over the shifter dimension.
I swallowed. My tongue felt like a limp muscle.
“That means...”
“Yep,” Jeremiah said. “We just defied the old gods. As if this could possibly get any bloody worse!” The ending was more of a growl than it was words.
I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you.” It seemed meaningless.
Gwen approached. There was blood caked to her nostril. As Max’s beta, she would have taken the brunt of his displeasure. It was a wonder she was on her feet at all.
“You’ll leave his house immediately,” she said. “Any and all contact will cease. You won’t make a sound if he decides he wants to get into bed with every female in supernatural society.”
My will was too weak not to wander over to Anastasia. “Screw that,” she said. “I’m not living with that kind of crazy for the rest of my life. I’m not somebody’s consolation prize.” She scraped a hand nervously through her hair. It was only with the tresses slid across her face that I saw there was blood smeared inside her ears.
Gwen snatched my arms to draw my attention back to her. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” I nodded. “It would be better if you left the Reserve altogether.”
I had thought the same thing. I’d even prepared for it. But Cassie’s words rang in my ear, and I couldn’t get the image of Charles lying in a bed in the elite guard facility out of my head. What would it do to him when he woke to find that I’d left too? I thought of Luther dousing himself with potion to stay awake because he was afraid of missing something again. And finally, I thought of the weeping, wailing child that I had locked away in the depths of my mind when Lex had left. A logical part of me understood why she had to go, but the selfish core of me was angry at her. Furious that she would leave me behind to pick up the pieces of myself. Missing her like I had lost a part of my soul.
“I’m staying,” I said. “If I can survive what’s to come, then I’ll know once and for all that I’m strong enough to walk away.”
They were shifters. They understood the need to find their balance. “I’m taking the guard off you,” Gwen went on. “But I will do up a roster with all the females in the pack to protect you if you need it.”
I understood why they had to be females. Right now, Max was so volatile it was impossible to say what he would do if he caught the scent of a male around me.
“I’ll be fine without a guard.”
She nodded. “We need to move, people,” she said. “Make preparations. Slot yourselves into any sentry shifts to take the burden off him...” She snapped out orders, one after the other, with the calm competency of somebody who was completely comfortable with the world around her. Sometimes it made me wonder whether the shifters should get over their obsession with dominance and let the most cerebral amongst them lead for a bit.
When Noah tried to sneak out of the conference room with the rest of the shifters who leaped out to make preparations, I drew a circle around him and held him in place.
“I need you to talk,” I said.
“No.”
Not feeling like playing more dominance games after what had just happened, I called on the other dangerous emotion: guilt.
“You were meant to guard me,” I said. “Instead, you let Agatha abduct me and throw me into a pit to die. You owe me.”
“I sacrificed myself!” he snarled.
“So what? If I’d given in, you would have died. But I would be the one carrying that burden around with me for the rest of my life. I’m still carrying around my great-grandfather’s burden even though it had nothing to do with me.”
He turned his head away. I stepped closer. “You’re asking too much,” he said quietly.
“But I’m still asking. Please. I need to know how he did it.”
He shook his head. “Why? So you can throw your life away as well?”
“If I do, it’ll be my choice. I’m so sick of everyone trying to decide things for me like I’m not capable of handling it myself. What about what I want?”
“Sophie...”
“I’m tired of living in a cage, Noah. If my family had been shifter, they would have killed us rather than force us into captivity. It would have been a mercy. Everywhere I turn, there is a wall slamming down on me. Please don’t make me go back.”
He took in a shuddering breath. His eyes closed.
“Please.”
When his lids peeled open, his eyes were glassy. “I’m only ever going to say this once,” he said. I didn’t answer, too afraid of spooking him. “He summoned a demon before he did the rituals.”
“Why would he do that?”
His hands clenched and unclenched. He looked down at them like they were foreign objects. “The rituals he performed, they were set up to entice a demon.”
“Entice?”
He nodded. “There were sacrifices. Goblets of blood and fresh animals to devour. There were...humans...” His voice trailed off as nausea fluttered through my gut. “He wanted supernatural power, but he needed the humans to draw the demons forward. Apart from
the summoning circle, he made no attempt to contain the demons if they showed up. He did everything he could to make the demon think it was going to have an easy time possessing him.”
The reality of it hit me so hard, my legs felt unsteady. I sat down on a chair and massaged my chest. “He summoned a demon and let it possess him while he performed the rituals,” I guessed.
“Yep. I blanked out for a bit at the start, but when I came to, he was possessed. He let the demon steer during the sacrifice and the stealing of the essence, but somehow, when it was over, he managed to exorcise the demon and retain himself.”
“Did he make an offering to anyone, to anything before?”
Noah frowned. Without thinking, I reached out and took his hand, knowing that I was asking a lot of him. Asking him to relive a nightmare so that I could learn how to replicate it.
He massaged his brow. “He made the sacrifices to Apollyon.”
Oh, dear Gaia.
Apollyon. The fallen angel of the Abyss. The being who now enslaved the malachim. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Why was I surprised? Lucifer was the heart and soul of the Hell dimension. Why wouldn’t my great-grandfather offer up sacrifices to one of Lucifer’s lieutenants?
And in the back of my mind, that voice chuckled. You can’t escape your destiny, Sophie. We will meet soon enough.
33
Max
The glow of the transportation circle pierced my sight as it flared. How I’d gotten here was beyond me. Beyond anything I could latch on to for purchase right now while this caustic poison was running through my veins.
Gritting my teeth, I shut my eyes as the rippling of the portal sucked me down into the cells. Something in my gut coiled tight as the pack link snapped back into place. My knees gave way on the other side. The link to Durin became a solid thread again. In the far corner, he raised himself from his huddle and stared at me with unseeing eyes. He knew only that I was strong and that my soul was now furnishing him with energy to survive. The longer I stayed down here, the frailer I would become.
That was what I had counted on.
All of my presence of mind was focused on not tearing back out into the Reserve and snatching Sophie regardless of the consequences. This thing, this darkness that had invaded my soul, it didn’t care about right and wrong. Didn’t give a damn about pack or honour. It wanted her with a hunger that was tearing through my resolve inch by inch.
Closer. I had to get closer to Durin before I lost my mind completely.
One of the doors opened as I stalked past. “Max?”
Her voice made me hesitate for a moment. “Mum.”
A tiny part of my mind locked down on the rage as I stared into grey eyes exactly like my own. Despite her ravaged body, her soul still burned bright in those eyes that looked at me with sudden concern.
“What’s the matter, baby?”
She barely had enough strength to raise her hand. I gripped it, holding it to my chest as though my heartbeat might be the thing that breathed life back into her. The lion inside me had gone utterly silent when Sophie had cut me to the quick with those words that Kai had used on me years ago. Never mind what I would be when the demons came for me. The person I was now filled me with shame.
As a kid, I’d never allowed myself to back down from anything. I was Max Thompson. That half-breed shifter with dark magic in his blood. They had taunted me mercilessly. Called Mum all kinds of names knowing that I wouldn’t hesitate to defend her. Every day I’d come home with blood on my hands and a lecture ringing in my head. But she never told me off. Never did anything but look at me like I was the most precious thing in the world. And now here I was, my self-control in tatters. I was supposed to be strong for her. And instead, I was allowing her to slowly die.
I sank down to my knees in front of her. “Max,” her voice was wet. Her arms wrapped around me, so frail I could feel every bone in her body. “Maximus.” She brushed her fingers through my hair and held me there as I tried to get a grip on the thing that was tearing through me. As I raged inside about how unfair things were. How messed up everything had become. “You are the best thing that has ever happened to me,” she said, echoing the words that she used to soothe me all those years go.
“Better than Chuck?”
Her body wracked with laughter. “I love you so much, baby. And I know it hurts, but I also know you’ll do the right thing. You’re too good to let anything break you.”
With all my heart, I wished that was true. As a kid I had believed it wholeheartedly. As a man, with the Hell dimension breathing down our necks, with the Reserve broken, and with the woman I loved rejecting me, it felt like a beautiful lie.
Who knows how long we stayed that way. As I knelt there, Durin sapped my energy until I was too tired to stay awake. When I closed my eyes, it was to the soothing sound of Mum’s voice as she reminded me that I wasn’t alone.
34
Sophie
There was only one person I had known who had been possessed by a demon for an extended period of time and had come out the other side unscathed. Betty Hastings. The problem was getting to her. Having been out of contact for so long, I didn’t know where Basil might have moved them. Even though I had my MirrorNet privileges back, it wasn’t as though I could call him and just ask. So I had to use Andrei as an intermediary again.
“You know I don’t work for you, right?” he’d asked when I’d put through a call. “And I don’t want to be an accomplice to any of this in case Fur-face gets wind of it. He tore apart the entire east wing of the elite guard cells when he got out. I don’t think they even know how to rein him in.”
That was the last thing I needed to hear about right now. “Listen. Either pass on the message or give me back the ring so I can do it on my own!”
That went down like a lead balloon. Without Gabriel’s Key, he could kiss sneaking into Seraphina goodbye.
“Fine. I thought you were meant to be the nicer human!”
Three days after the incident in the conference room, Max emerged from the Cabin. As per my agreement with Gwen, I hadn’t made any attempt to contact him, nor had I made any inquiries about him. It meant everyone around me had to zip their lips. The only way I’d known was because the air in the Reserve became charged and thin, like it was holding its breath waiting for a reaction from him. When it didn’t come, I breathed a sigh of relief, even as something chipped at my soul. Just because he didn’t kill everyone on sight didn’t mean he was stable, though.
As a mercy, I went from Laila’s house to the Academy and back again. I didn’t spend evenings with the kids in the field. Then again, nobody else did either.
“Everyone is on eggshells,” Laila informed me. “At the moment he’s worse than a demon.”
I was a pariah again. It seemed that in their minds, the sin of rejecting their alpha was on par with sacrificing people and stealing their essences. Everyone was taking it as a personal insult.
“What?” one of the wolf girls snapped at me on my way to the Academy. “Is he not good enough?”
I knew her. She was the ground-beef-lasagne-and-toasted-herb-bread girl. I couldn’t remember their names, but the food stuck with me. I wanted so badly to tell her that Charles said her lasagne tasted like ass. What I did was increase my stride towards the portal field. It was strange not to have Noah with me when I entered the Potions classroom. When I spotted the person sitting at my usual table, my chest lightened for the first time in weeks.
“Hey, Soph,” Trey said. His smile was hesitant.
I dropped my backpack and almost strangled him with the force of my hug. Despite my joy, I kept it brief. It had become habit to count the seconds of physical contact so my scent wouldn’t rub off on anybody. That I had to be so cautious was one of the reasons my eyes teared up when I looked into Trey’s face.
“You’ve shot up again,” I said like it was an accusation.
“It’s been eight months.” His voice was tight. “I’ve only just decided to forgiv
e you for disappearing.”
He didn’t even pretend to pay attention while Professor Suleiman was going over the ingredients for our latest potion. It only caught his attention when the cart of blood was rolled into the room and his nose twitched. “What the hell?” he said.
“Things have changed around here.”
“I’ll say.” He eyed me where I was sitting there, not following the lesson plan either. “Shouldn’t you be jumping up and elbowing everybody for the best ingredients right about now?”
I only grimaced at him while I waited for the rest of the class to become distracted with their potions. “Does it not concern you that they’re working on a potion to knock out a rogue shifter?” I asked in an effort to try and distract him.
“How exactly are they going to get a shifter to drink a potion while they’re being attacked?” he asked.
“Did you forget everything you’ve learned while you’ve been away?” I asked. “See this?” I pointed to the silver tubular instrument that looked like a cross between a straw and a smoking pipe. “It’s used to disperse the potion into the air.”
He rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Uh huh. How easy is it to operate something that small and intricate in the middle of a fight? It’s hard enough with an actual weapon. Why do you think most mages don’t bother with potions unless they have time on their hands?”
He laughed at my scowl. “Face it, Soph. You’re the only one who might have a chance with using potions if there’s something coming at you, and that’s got nothing to do with the actual potion.”
He was lucky that there was a break in the number of students approaching the professor or I would have come back at him with something really insightful. The professor glanced up at me from where he sat behind the desk flipping through a Potions textbook.
