by Lan Chan
“C’mon, Soph!”
“No can do.”
That was how I ended up getting ready two hours before Sophie and teleporting myself to the Reserve all by my lonesome. Not without more pleading that fell on deaf ears.
Shifters didn’t tend to go for formalwear most of the time, so I had chosen a simple pair of dark jeans and a midnight-blue top with a plunging back made modest with black lace. I braided my hair as best I could and let the braid fall over my shoulder.
My teleports using Gabriel’s Key weren’t as smooth as a Nephilim teleport. It couldn’t be because all the power came from the ring. As the artefact dragged me through the dimensional barriers, I felt the brush of coolness on my cheek from the fissures that surrounded the Reserve. I catalogued the ones I encountered just from this sector. The grip on my backpack became strained. There were more than a dozen on this side alone. Reappearing on the other side, I turned in a circle and gabbed at the Ley sight using my own power. There was a fissure nearby. But when I tried to move towards it, a ward threw up a barrier in my face. I huffed. At least I knew the Council were being true to their word. It still didn’t make me feel better.
The apprehension amplified by a factor of a thousand as I went to reach for the handle of the Thompsons’ front door and was assaulted by a full-body awareness of the guest already inside. A sliver each of heat and cold ran down my spine and collided in a puff of steam that I was sure made my cheeks red hot when the door opened for me.
“Hey, Lex,” Alistair Thompson said. Even in the presence of the world’s sexiest dad, I couldn’t shake the primeval awareness of Kai from my blood. “The boys are in the pool house.”
It was a line straight out of a teen drama, but I couldn’t quite reconcile it. “It’s around back and through the gate. Do you need an escort?”
Under different circumstances, I would have jumped at the chance to be escorted by Alistair. But the saccharine smile on his face said he knew exactly why my feet were suddenly cemented to the floor. “I’ll be fine.”
I was not.
Getting through the gate was as far as I got. Dani’s delighted laughter rang out over the back lawn. The gate smacked me in the back as I watched Kai tossing Dani into the air. She sailed higher than the tallest tip of the fifteen-foot magnolia. All the way down she screamed in sheer child-like joy. Kai’s wings burst from his back and he shot up, catching her halfway down so that the impact wouldn’t hurt her. They landed with a soft thud. She threw her arms around his neck. “Again!”
He would have obliged if Shayla hadn’t called out from the kitchen. “No, miss. It’s time for a bath and for you to get ready.”
“But I don’t want to!”
“Now, young lady!”
A defiant scowl crinkled on her face. Kai leaned in and whispered something in her ear. She giggled and nodded before he set her down. “The point of a door is to walk through it,” Charles informed me from behind. Too enamoured with Kai, I hadn’t noticed him sneaking up on me.
“Thanks, genius. I’ll try to remember that.”
“It’s too late to pretend to be cool, Lex.”
Thankfully, he was reading a paperback with a starship on the cover and didn’t wait around to give me shit. Pretending that I had only just arrived, I made my way across the grass, onto the tiled wet area around the pool, and into the pool house itself.
“Hi,” I said as I passed Kai. He watched me with an unreadable expression as I made every attempt to block out the bond.
Max was sprawled on the big leather couch to the left of the door. Supernaturals didn’t have televisions to point their furniture towards. Frankly, I didn’t know how they occupied most of their time.
“Well, look what the demons dragged in,” Max drawled. His colour was almost back to normal. I glanced at him and then back at Kai. Both of them were in jeans and shirts with their sleeves rolled up to their forearms. Kai’s shirt with an eggshell blue while Max’s was white.
“Cute,” I said. “You both dress the same. Maybe you can announce your undying bromance at the ascension.”
Charles snickered as he entered. “What did I say about coming in here?” Max snapped. Charles just shrugged at him.
“You think I’m going to miss it if Lex blows you up?”
I balked. “I’m not going to blow him up!”
Three pairs of eyes watched me speculatively. It was Max who finally spoke. “That’s why I needed the insurance.” He nodded in Kai’s direction.
“Maybe this is a bad idea.” Now that they had gotten it into my head, I was starting to have doubts too.
“No way,” Max said. “No guts, no glory.”
“Or possibly no guts because they’ll be splattered on the wall,” Charles said.
“Get out!” Max roared. Charles grinned and left the pool house only to pull up a deck chair outside and lounge on it. The glass walls gave Max no privacy. “I’m going to throttle him.”
“Can you leave it until after I’m done?” I asked, biting my lip. “I don’t want to be accused of starting a Thompson family feud on top of everything else. Where do you want the tattoo?”
Grunting, Max started unbuttoning his shirt. A spike of heart crawled up my neck. Wow. I really didn’t think things through. At least he didn’t want it on his butt, I supposed.
Turning away to give myself a second for composure, I found Kai’s gaze locked on me. It was impossible to dampen the turbulent flux of the bond entirely, but the circle I had drawn around it allowed me to think. If this was another shifter’s ascension and I had offered to give them such an intimate present, their head would be separated from their body already. But Kai would jump in front of a demon blade for Max, and through the bond, he felt my contained terror about what might be coming.
Stepping closer, I tried to whisper so Max wouldn’t hear. “If something goes wrong, can you please take me out so I don’t hurt him?”
“I won’t let anything go wrong.”
“Just in cas –”
He settled his palms on my shoulders, eyes boring into mine. “You’ll be fine. You’ve got the steadiest hands I’ve ever seen. Don’t let doubt get in your head.”
How could it when it was so full of how much I loved him?
But I took the advice. No matter how worried I had been, my preparation was efficient. Like Potions, I followed the instructions for filling the script pen with the enchanted ink to the letter. It occurred to me that I had picked up a touch of obsessive compulsiveness somewhere along the way. Inspecting Max’s skin, I clucked my tongue. He was unnaturally tan. The kind of healthy glow that humans were desperate to replicate with bottles and machines. “This colour is going to look washed out,” I commented.
“Leave it,” Max said immediately.
I shook my head. “It’s not going to look the same once it’s saturated into your skin.”
Working on a hunch, I stabbed the sharpened point of the script pen into my finger. A blazing warmth buzzed up my arm as the pen drew a couple of drops of blood. It wasn’t much but the addition of the ruby red of my blood turned the pink into a deeper shade.
“Ummm...” Max said. Kai scowled.
I flicked my injured finger to dispel the lick of pain. “Now we’re talking.”
Max chose his left pec muscle, right above his heart. I should have anticipated it. Kai had, and I could tell it was taking every inch of willpower not to react as I settled myself on an ottoman in front of Max. His legs stretched out on either side of me. The compromising position gave very little room to move. Lucky I was small and didn’t take up much space.
“Ready?” I asked. “They tell me this might sting a little.” I waved the lollipop in front of Max’s face. Kai smirked.
“What are you trying to say?” Max growled.
I pressed the pen to his skin so I didn’t have to justify my remark. His sharp inhale made my point for me. As soon as I began to draw, it was as though the pen took on a life of its own. Kai had been right. Insti
nctively, I knew how to do this. My mind drifted and I used every meditation technique to keep it focused. For some reason, I slipped into the Ley dimension. My hands became enveloped in lines of midnight and black lights. I concentrated on this feeling of apprehension that lingered whenever I thought of Max and Sophie. I poured every bit of love I could muster into the rune to keep him safe wherever he was posted. In the back of my mind, I suppressed the urgent clamouring that kept telling me I was running out of time. That Lucifer’s containment was only temporary. And that the only thing I ever had that was strong enough to stop him, the Angelical, was also the thing that might kill me.
I went into an almost trance-like state as I completed the outline of the tattoo and then proceeded to fill it in. I was no longer sitting in an intimate position with Max but in front of a canvas of my own art.
The ink flowed from the pen in a wash of Sophie’s magic and my own bone magic because of the blood I had given. It brushed Max’s skin and sank into his cells, binding with them in a way that no other ink could. Something tapped on the glass behind me and I heard Kai grunt, but I didn’t break my concentration.
Max tensed, his arm suddenly coming down beside me on the ottoman. Claws sliced into the foam. “Hold it,” Kai warned. To me, he said: “Keep going, Blue. You’re almost there.”
The final dot of ink sank into Max’s skin. I pulled back, sweat crowning my forehead for some reason. My eyes were too filled with colour. I blinked to dispel the Ley sight.
“Shit,” Charles spat from the doorway, his golden eyes fixed on the tattoo. Frowning, I went to inspect my work and my heart stopped. The tattoo was beautiful in a technical sense. It came out blood red with an edge of pink to denote Sophie’s influence. Each line was perfectly symmetrical, every dot of ink in its place. It contrasted stunningly with Max’s skin. At any other time, it might have been a point of pride. Except, I had stuffed up cosmically. Instead of drawing the rune for protection, I had somehow written an Angelical word: Mawatah. Death.
37
The pen dropped out of my hand as I covered my mouth with the other. “Max,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Distraught, I turned to Kai. “Can you remove it?”
When I went to try myself, Max snatched my wrist. His grey eyes were like a gathering storm with shards of sunlight breaking through it. “No,” he said. “It feels...right.”
“What are you talking about?” I hissed. “It’s not a rune! It’s...” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. He shook me gently. “Lex. It’s alright.”
My mind kept shoving that prophecy where I had killed him with Morning Star at me. I’d come here thinking that I could arrogantly forestall disaster, and instead, I had coveted it. A warm hand cupped my cheek. Angelfire filled my vision.
Kai was suddenly kneeling beside me. “Blue,” he said. I turned to him, my own eyes stinging. “It’s okay. It’s just a word.”
But we all knew my words were never throwaway. He wrapped one arm around me, and I allowed my head to lean on his shoulder. “You weren’t thinking of death when you wrote it,” Kai murmured. “Intent is everything with dead languages.”
“Angelical isn’t a dead language!”
“Well, you and the seraphim are the only ones who can speak it, so it might as well be,” Max said. His nonchalance didn’t seem put on. He prodded the skin with a finger to make sure the ink wouldn’t run and then started to put his shirt on. With a wicked smile, he raised a brow at me.
“Do you two want to get a room?”
It was only then that I realised I was still clinging to Kai. “Yeah,” Kai said smoothly, his palm on the small of my back. “Do you mind if we use your bed?”
Max’s brow creased. He stalked off muttering something about not getting any slack even though it was his ascension. I jumped off the ottoman and away from Kai. “I think Shayla might need some help in the house.”
I ran away before I could get myself into more trouble. Thankfully, Shayla did need my help. “Danielle!” Shayla barked. “Get back here right now.”
There were wet footprints on the floor. “Need a kid wrangler?” I asked.
“I’m going to strangle her when I get my hands on her.”
Though Dani hadn’t inherited any of her father’s shifter gifts, she was already showing promising signs of sorcery. Like her brothers, she could be a handful. Enclosing sections of the house in circles until I narrowed her down in the laundry, I scooped up the naked, soapy child in a towel and returned her to the upstairs bathroom.
“Lex!” she squealed. “Can I have a cake?”
She slapped the palm of her hand on the surface of the water. It sprayed all over the place including my hair and top.
“The last thing you need is sugar,” I said. Then I dumped a bucket of water over her head to clean away the soap. When she stopped sputtering, she pouted. “But Maxy is having cake!”
“Yes, but it’s his special day.”
Her lower lip trembled. I thought she was going to throw a tantrum about the cake until she grabbed my hand and held it to her cheek. “I don’t want him to go!” she wailed. My heart broke for her. Pulling the plug, I held her in a towel as the water drained.
“I know, baby. I don’t want him to go either. But sometimes we have to do things we don’t like to keep the people we love safe.”
Sullen from her heartbreak, she was more pliable to dressing and putting on her shoes. When I carried her downstairs, Shayla beamed. “You’re a lifesaver,” she said. Something wistful flashed across her face but she brushed it off.
“Want to help me decorate the house?” Shayla asked her daughter.
I set Dani down and she immediately zipped to the back door. “Maxy!” she screamed, making a break for the pool house.
Shayla sighed. “She doesn’t really understand what’s happening, but she knows he’s not going to be around for much longer.” She brushed her hand over her lips as her eyes moistened. Dani wasn’t the only one emotional about Max growing up.
“What else can I help with?” I asked, knowing distraction was the only thing that would get her through this. She shook her shoulders.
“Right! This place is a mess. Let’s get it in order.”
Hard labour took my mind off everything that was happening until it was time to leave for the convention centre. As alpha of the shifters, Durin and Yolanda hosted all the ascensions. As I trudged along the maze of bridges that connected the enormous tree canopies, the trees themselves whispered to me. It was a phenomenon that seemed to only happen in the Reserve. Their primal natures and the close connection they had to their territories seemed to have leaked into the trees. What they told me was a mishmash of images of feline fur brushing up against their trunks, of clawed feet scratching at bark, and the occasional hoot of an owl in its nest.
The shifters were phenomenally paranoid. There were guards crawling in the treetops as well as around the perimeter. I decided not to let it slip that the trees were giving away their locations to me. Though the trees didn’t feel emotion, they had survival instincts just like every other living creature. Their essences vibrated against my hedge magic as I translated their shaking into concern about the fissures surrounding their home. At least I knew I wasn’t the only one who was apprehensive.
The convention centre was lit up like an airport with Fae lanterns, the space big enough to hold a football game. Since I’d last been here, they had made additions, expanding the space to include the wide canopy of another two trees. The forest in front of the centre had been converted into a clearing where enchanted bonfires had been set up in the middle of the field. Meat roasted on spits that sizzled and sent up flashes of blue flame. Dozens of big tables ringed the clearing, adding additional seating in case they ran out upstairs. Most of the population of the Reserve would be here tonight. It would be the biggest congregation of shifters in the year. It was surprising the number of humans also in attendance.
Detaching myself from the Thompsons, I s
kipped down the staircase to where I spotted Basil, Nanna, and Trey’s family.
“You made it here in one piece,” Basil noted, knowing about my bright idea to gift Max a tattoo.
“Don’t even go there. It didn’t turn out the way I had expected.”
“Does anything ever with you?”
“I unbound you, didn’t I?”
“Touché.”
Odette and Laila were chatting about the latest news on Emily. They stopped talking when I looked in their direction. “Don’t mind me,” I said.
Odette waved her hand apologetically. “Sorry, Lex. We’re just a bit worried about the implications.”
By sundown, the clearing and the convention centre began to fill up in earnest. Sophie arrived with her parents and Diana with hers. We regrouped to get away from the adults who were taking this as an opportunity to ear bash Jacqueline about all the things they thought might improve Bloodline. Like it was so easy to take care of their kids.
Sophie had made a point not to approach Max or even get within hearing distance of him where he was grouped around the bonfire with his friends. For fifteen minutes, Sophie gave distracted answers while she stole furtive glances at him.
“Phew,” Trey exclaimed. “You can cut the pheromones in this place with a demon blade.”
Most of it was concentrated around Max. It felt like every shifter female in supernaturaldom had come out to play. They congregated in groups around him, trying to steal a moment of his time. A good number of them had zero inhibitions. One long-limbed girl, a lion shifter herself, sidled up to Max’s side and suddenly grabbed him in his special place.
Max’s growl sliced through the clearing, but it was Gwen who clocked the girl in the face and dragged her away.
Gwen appeared like a ghost in our midst a moment later. “A little help would be nice,” she said, eyes darting at Sophie. “I can’t spend all night babysitting him. There are too many of them.”
