by Abigail Owen
The woman he loved. The woman he’d claimed with his heart, his body, and his soul—had faded from all existence before his very eyes.
He’d fallen to the ground, knowing the injuries he sustained from that damn wolf were fatal. But warmth had lit inside his chest, and he’d opened his eyes to discover a bright glow hovering above him, and the breathtaking image of Rowan’s face in the darkness beyond.
And now she was gone.
He jumped to his feet and sprinted for the house. Grey had no fucking clue what was going one, but no way in hell was he losing Rowan. Not now. Not when he’d finally found her. The burning sigil on his chest told him this story couldn’t be over yet.
Grey burst into the house and ran for his office. Like the rest of the place, the room was in a shambles—shattered windows littering the floor and most of the furniture turned over. He scrambled through the papers and books littering the floor and found his cellphone. Dialing as fast as his shaking fingers would allow, he waited impatiently for Delilah to answer the phone.
He blew out a breath when she picked up and sucked in just as fast at her first words. “I already know.”
How? He shook his head. Didn’t matter how. “Can you help her?”
“I’m not sure. But I have someone here who can try. Can you come get her? My office.”
“The wind—”
“Don’t worry about the impact your teleporting has on my office. Time is critical here.”
Didn’t have to tell him twice. Grey didn’t even bother going outside. He whispered the words which would take him to Delilah and whatever help she had waiting.
When the wind died down around him, he grimaced at the shards of broken glass everywhere, the room now resembling his house. Delilah’s office was in a high rise in Denver with a view of the mountains. Apparently, he’d blown out the windows with his arrival. Delilah appeared frustratingly unruffled and sleekly professional in a black pantsuit, her midnight-dark hair coiled at her nape. Beside her stood a young woman sporting jeans and a fleece pullover, her deep red curls, like Rowan’s, pulled up into a ponytail.
“This is Josie,” Delilah performed a cursory introduction. “She’s a ghost whisperer. Take us both with you. Now.”
He didn’t bother to ask. With an arm for each lady, they stepped in close and grasped his hands. Again, the whispered word had them shooting back toward his home. In an instant, they arrived in his office. He released both women. Immediately, Josie moved forward, her eyes scanning the room. Slowly, she walked through the house, her concentration total. Without a word, he and Delilah followed behind.
As soon as she rounded the corner to the family room, Josie skidded to a halt. “My name is Josie. I’m here to help a woman named Rowan. Do you know her?”
She kept her eyes trained on the corner of the room off to the side of the stone fireplace, appearing to listen.
“There’s a woman here.” Josie angled her head to say over her shoulder to him, even as she kept her gaze locked on whatever she saw. “She claims she’s your grandmother.”
“Is Rowan there too?”
Josie gave a small shake of her head. But she stopped mid-shake, her shoulders stiffening. “Is that possible?”
Grey’s heart thundered inside him. Was what possible?
Josie spun on her heel to face him. “Your grandmother says Rowan isn’t completely gone. Not yet. She says she can save her with your help.”
“How?” Anything.
“Do exactly as I say. Okay?”
He nodded.
“Stand in that corner.” She pointed at the spot to which she’d been talking.
Grey rushed to do her bidding, shivering as a draft of chilly air brushed over his skin. “The cold you feel is your grandmother, Essie.”
Essie had been the first of his grandparents to go. Had she been here the entire time?
Josie listened for a moment. “Gather your magic inside you,” she passed on the instructions. “Be ready, because this is a big spell.”
Grey closed his eyes, drawing on every reserve inside him, allowing the magic to tingle through his blood, pooling into his chest and causing warmth on the edge of too hot. “Now repeat these words… Satu Arammu Ina Etu Mitu Adi Nuru.”
He could be repeating the recipe to end every life in the world for all he understood. The words must be ancient. As soon as he spoke them, the warmth of the energy inside him drained, leaving a cold, dark void in its wake.
But, somehow, he wasn’t tired. At first, nothing happened. Then a pinpoint of light came to life beside him. As he watched, an old woman materialized before his eyes. Grey recognized her from pictures. “Grandma Essie?”
She nodded. “I’ve been watching over you since the day I passed on,” she said. Her voice sounded like Rowan’s had earlier, as though she were speaking down a tunnel or on one of those old phonographs. “I knew I had work yet to be done. That you would need my help one day. I’m happy now, I stayed to do this for you.”
“Do what?”
“I am giving up my essence, my soul, to bring your Rowan back from the brink.”
Everything inside him locked up. “What does that mean?”
Already, however, her figure was fading, as Rowan’s had in the woods. “It’s all right. I’m going to be with your grandfather now.”
The moment too much to process, he could only nod. He stared at the face of a woman he hadn’t known in life, but whose love he could feel radiating throughout the room until the moment she disappeared.
But where was Rowan?
He glanced at Josie, who shook her head. They waited in silence for what felt like an interminable age. Then Josie gasped.
He couldn’t see anything, but he turned to find her staring now at a spot in front of the fireplace. “I can see her. Or at least her hair. Red hair? Curly?” She glanced to him for confirmation.
“Yes.”
A few long moments passed before Jose spoke. “Rowan? Can you hear me?”
A pause.
“Good. Can you get back to us?” Josie listened intently. Then her shoulders dropped.
He couldn’t see her face. “What’s happening?”
“Watch.” Josie nodded to the spot toward which she was talking.
As he watched, suddenly the blurry vision of a woman started to materialize. At first so faint he couldn’t see her features, the lines and edges of her face and body came into sharper and sharper focus. “Rowan,” he whispered.
He started forward, but Josie put a hand out to stop him. “Wait.”
It took every ounce of willpower not to rush across the space to Rowan’s side, but he waited. Sure enough, her figure started to solidify before his eyes. The process was agonizing to watch. If Rowan’s ragged breathing and pained expression were anything to go by, the process didn’t appear pleasant to experience either.
Finally, with a gut-wrenching moan, Rowan fell to her hands and knees, whole and with him.
Grey glanced at Josie, who smiled. “Go ahead.”
He didn’t even remember crossing the room. He just knew he was at Rowan’s side, pulling her shaking body into his arms. “You came back to me.”
She took a shuddering breath, her entire body quivering. “Your grandmother…”
Her voice was hardly a whisper, and he smoothed her hair back from her face. “Shhhh...Rest now. My grandmother helped you, but she’s passed on. With my grandfather now, she said.”
She sagged, her eyes fluttering closed, the lashes starkly dark against her too-pale skin. “You shouldn’t love me,” she mumbled just before her head lolled back, out cold.
CHAPTER 21
Soft sunlight filtered through Rowan’s closed eyes, but she had zero desire to wake up and face the world. Not yet.
“Sorry. But you must get up. Now.”
Rowan frowned at the female voice annoyingly trying to pull her out of her slumber. She knew that voice. “Delilah?”
“I’m here. And I’ve let you sleep as lon
g as I could. You need to get up and shower and dress. We have a meeting to attend.”
A meeting? What the hell was the woman on about?
“With the Mage High Council.” Right then, the sound of a feline growl had Delilah swearing. “And get this damn cat away from me.”
Memories came flooding back, and a lance of pain spiked through her head. Oh, my… The werewolves. Grey. She’d…died.
Adrenalin spiking through her veins, Rowan peeled her eyes open to find Delilah sitting beside her bed in Grey’s basement, appearing her usual elegant self in a cream-colored cashmere sweater over black slacks, her dark hair pulled up in a knot on top of her head, loose tendrils framing her face. “What happened?”
Delilah hitched her lips in a half-smile. “I happen to have a ghost whisperer on my payroll. She and Grey and someone named Essie pulled you out of there.”
Essie? Grey’s grandmother’s ghost? How was that possible?
“No time to explain now, I have to get you to this meeting. Your fight’s not over, Rowan. Time to confess all to your people.”
Rowan allowed Delilah to tug her out of bed. In a whirlwind of movement, she was handed clothes and shoved into the bathroom.
“Wait.”
Delilah paused in the act of closing the door and raised her eyebrows?
“Where’s Grey?”
Delilah’s lips thinned, her expression grim. “Already there.”
Rowan clenched her hands against the shaking, which wouldn’t stop. She wasn’t entirely sure if the tremors were part of recovering from being mostly dead for a while there or confronting the truth of who she was, particularly without having had a chance to talk to Grey in private first.
Couldn’t be helped now.
She’d teleported them to the location Delilah provided, and now walked the halls of the crazy modern building where the Mage High Council apparently held their meetings. She’d gone from mountain cabin to alien spaceship, though in the Sierra Nevadas now. Maybe she was still a ghost, and this was all a weird vision?
Delilah stopped at a mahogany door and rapped her knuckles sharply against it. Before Rowan could catch her breath, a deep male voice called to come in, and Delilah dragged her inside.
A group of witches and warlocks sat at a long metal and glass table facing the doorway; behind them a glass wall showed the mountains in all their splendor. But she couldn’t appreciate the view over the treetops when her life hung in the balance. She sought and found Grey, seated off to her left beside a man with black hair and eerily piercing blue eyes so pale they appeared almost white. Her heart shriveled at the hard stare Grey directed her way.
Okay. This wasn’t going to go well then.
“Ms. McAuliffe?” the man beside Grey spoke, his deep tones almost bored.
Rowan nodded. His unusual gaze shifted to the woman at her side. “And you must be Ms…?.”
Rowan glanced over to see Delilah give him a cool smile. “Delilah.”
“First or last?”
Delilah said nothing, merely held her polite smile and the man’s stare. There was someone in a position of power who didn’t know her? Interesting.
After a long, intense moment, he let it go, turning back to Rowan. “I’m Alasdair Blakesley, current head of this Council. Greyson has filled us in on the situation and…” He flicked a glance at Delilah. “Supplied us information provided by various witnesses.”
Okay. She chanced a glance at Grey, who regarded her with zero expression.
“Now we’d like to hear from you.”
Right.
She took a big breath and tipped up her chin. “My name is Rowan McAuliffe, but as a child I took on the last name of Tanya McAuliffe, the woman who raised me after my parents died. My birth parents were Cormac and Evelyn Balfour.”
A ripple of movement shifted through the group before her. No surprise there. Balfour was one of the oldest names among their people.
“That’s not possible. Your file lists a low-level magical couple named the Campbells.”
Rowan turned her attention to an older woman in a deep red dress, her grey hair coiled in an elegant chignon. “Then your files are wrong.” She glanced at Delilah, who smiled serenely, not fooling Rowan. The woman had somehow managed to alter the files.
“Cormac and Evelyn Balfour…and their daughter…were killed in a car crash.”
Rowan shrugged a slim shoulder. “The woman who raised me found the wreck. She used a unique brand of magic to fake my death and took me away, passing me off as her own.”
“This is Tanya McAuliffe? A common witch with limited powers.”
Rowan’s mouth kicked up in a smile. “Tanya McAuliffe, a demon posing as a witch.”
Even Delilah sucked in a breath, though Rowan doubted the Council members caught the sound.
Before anyone could jump on that one, Rowan continued. “Tanya believed the crash that killed my parents wasn’t an accident. She claimed someone was after me, but she wasn’t sure who. She hid me in plain sight as a…” She glanced at the elegant woman. “…common witch with limited powers. In secret, she taught me magic. A different kind from what you know. More powerful, using ancient words to power the spells.”
“Impossible,” an older gentleman hissed from the other end of the table.
Rowan ignored him. “We discovered too late that the people after me weren’t witches in some power play, but werewolves.” She took a deep breath, closing her eyes. She could still hear Tanya’s screams as they hauled her away, followed by a silence which hurt even worse.
“Why would werewolves want you?”
“Because I’m an Aneval.”
Grey looked away, and she knew he was remembering the animals in the forest who saved their lives.
“And why would they care about that?” the elegant woman in red sneered.
“Werewolves…because of their own brand of magic and the way it’s tied to their animal form, can…call to me. The more powerful, ancient ones—” She shook her head and had to consciously force her jaw to unclench. “They can control me or any other Aneval. It’s how Kaios got me to work against Castor and Leia, but my powers didn’t work against the other werewolves. I think to his surprise.”
“Why did you not come to us in the first place? When Kaios was killed and you were released from his control?” Alasdair asked.
She raised her own haughty eyebrow. “After you killed the other warlock Kaios used without any understanding of why he did what he did?”
Alasdair glanced at Grey, then sat forward. “Are you saying we killed an innocent man?”
“If you’d bothered to find out more, you wouldn’t have to ask that question.”
Again, he slid his gaze to Grey, who clenched his jaw, but shrugged. Alasdair turned back to her. “You should know the warlock Greyson killed was the man who killed his wife.”
Oh my heavens. The story Grey had told her about his wife…that was the warlock involved? Pain, for Grey, for his wife, for their babies, oozed through her, and Rowan closed her eyes against the hard look in his eyes. “I see.”
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. I’m so sorry, she mouthed at Grey.
He didn’t respond.
Alasdair continued. “The warlock in question was being investigated by Greyson and Madeline. He attacked them, we assume to stop the investigation. Also, the Council ordered the warlock to be brought back for questioning, but Grey claims the man tried to escape and was killed in the ensuing struggle.”
If Rowan were Grey, she’d have killed the man first and covered it up later. She didn’t really care how it happened for Grey. She’d have done the same.
“Does that alleviate your concern about us?” Alasdair asked.
She blinked, pulling her focus back to him. “It helps.” Given her upbringing, full trust would take time.
He regarded her with a long, intent look before relaxing back in his seat. “So…why the deception, posing as Greyson’s nanny?”
Delilah put a hand on Rowan’s arm. “I’m afraid that was my idea. Rowan didn’t trust you, but I knew she needed the protection only her own people could offer. I know Greyson. I trust him. My plan was to introduce Rowan in a way that would allow her to gain his trust before revealing her identity. A Seer confirmed this to be the best course of action. Unfortunately, Kaios’s lover forced our hand.”
This was all news to Rowan. Delilah had told her the idea was to hide in plain sight, right under their noses, and thwart any attempts to find her until the Council gave up. “I should’ve known you had a bigger plan,” she muttered under her breath.
Delilah squeezed her arm before releasing her, her only acknowledgement.
“I see,” Alasdair said. “Anything else?”
Rowan considered telling them about the sigil on her wrist, but that was between her and Grey. And, should the Council decide to execute her, she didn’t want him to know. She couldn’t bear it if she hurt him that way. “No. Nothing else.”
Alasdair swiveled to Grey. “Anything to add?”
Rowan locked eyes with the man she loved, trying to plead with him, to communicate the truth—that she’d never hurt him or the girls. I’m sorry, she mouthed again.
He glanced away, moving his gaze to Alasdair. “You have all the information you need.”
Rowan looked down and bit the inside of her lip to keep the tears at bay. She wouldn’t forgive her either. But she’d hoped.
Silly really. To hope he’d fight for her.
Alasdair turned back to them. “Wait in one of our smaller conference rooms. Michael, who’s waiting outside the door, will show you where. One of us will meet you there with our decision.”
Rowan’s feet refused to move, and Delilah had to tug at her arm, practically pulling her out of the room.
CHAPTER 22
Grey blew out a long breath before he turned the knob and entered the room where Rowan waited with Delilah. The Council, with a big push from Alasdair, had sided with his recommendations. Now he had to see if Rowan would go along with it too.
Everything depended on her.
