by Brianna Jean
I looked down at him. We were almost the same height, but I had both him and Quint beat by two inches. His eyes searched mine, trying to figure out what was going on with me.
“Lan, why are you so worked up?” He had those blue eyes trained on me, searching to find an answer for why I was acting so crazy.
When Quint’s father told us to find her, I wanted no part in it. I had nothing to lose if I said no, but I said yes because I was fucking bored and restless. I needed something to take my mind off the fact that I had no answers to my most important questions. But now…
I was worked up and so was my beast.
“Go and fucking find her,” he said slowly in my head, his voice otherworldly and full of warning.
“Lan?” my brother asked, calling me back to his attention.
“I don’t know, I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I said, feeling too vulnerable. I never would have admitted defeat if I wasn’t so fucking terrified of how my beast reacted to her. He wanted her. Bad. And because he’s a part of me…
“Your beast?” he asked, knowing too much. Being too damn smart.
That beast I’m talking about? All Nephilim have one, as we are half Angel and half Human. The dark spirit that lives within us is the source of our power, the very thing that makes a Neph what they are. When a Neph is in danger or needs assistance, the beast comes out in the form of white wings, showing off our Angelic side. Beasts can communicate with their Human counterpart after they’ve gone through the Transition, but mine has always kept relatively quiet. He had no reason to speak to me, not unless I was attacked or was about to walk into a trap. But I’d kept my head down for years, quietly searching for a way out—a way to change what I was and become one of the Fallen.
I couldn’t allow myself to become attached to my beast, not after seeing four Nephilim rip my father to shreds on the front lawn of our home.
Fuck being Nephilim.
I was going to become one of the Fallen.
In order to do that, I needed to find my mate, but the mating bonds between Nephilim stopped forming over twenty-one years ago, meaning that all of us who wanted to Fall were stuck until someone could find the reason they stopped in the first place. I’d been searching for years.
Done waiting, done pussy-footing around the higher powers of our world.
Cabe didn’t care about the mating bonds going missing, he wanted to lay low until he could find Annalise. He ignored his instincts entirely, never shifting into his Angel form unless absolutely necessary, never drawing attention to himself.
And Quint? He was the odd man out in our group. As a Warlock, he was half Demon, half Human, and his demonic side took over more than he liked. Cabe and I both knew he battled his instincts every day, though he never talked to us about it. He was fifty shades of fucked up after being alive for over three hundred years—spending most of it alone.
Unlike Cabe and me, he didn’t have a beast. He simply was the beast. When he shifted, when he let his beast out, he turned into a seven-foot-tall Bull with horns the size of my forearm and fangs bigger than my fingers.
“Lanier, is it your beast?” Cabe asked again, getting frustrated.
I felt dizzy, the whining in my head getting louder. My beast was fucking whimpering, looking around the alley, sniffing out her scent.
“Yes, he wants her,” I whispered, not wanting to admit it. “Why does he want her, Cabe?”
My brother visibly paled. Looking at me like I kicked his puppy or took his favorite toy.
He was realizing the same thing I was.
No…
“You two can’t really be thinking what I think you’re thinking…right?” Quint laughed like it was no big deal, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes.
“And how are you feeling?” I questioned, giving Quint a hard look. He thought I wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t address him, but I had to because if I was feeling this way and Cabe had come to the same conclusion, then I had very little doubt that Quint was in the same position as we were.
“I’m feeling,” he snapped, all humor gone, “like I need to drop an invitation off at Annalise’s house. Beyond that is none of your fucking business.”
Fuck.
I walked home quickly, trying not to stumble on the uneven ground that made up the streets of my neighborhood.
I had replayed the encounter with the three guys over and over in my head, filtering their words through as many avenues as I could think of.
I questioned everything.
“…what she is…”
What I am? What the fuck did that mean? I was…Annalise. I was a girl? A Human?
For some reason, I couldn’t help but link those few words with the realities of my life. My rapidly increasing strength, my ability to heal quicker than I’d been able to even a month before.
But what stood out the most was the animal that lived in my subconscious. Was she somehow connected to what they thought I was? Did she make me something other than Human? Was that even possible?
I first noticed her when I was a young girl, and at the time, her presence terrified me. I could see her in my mind as clear as I could see a person in front of me; I could run a mental finger down her body and feel it all the same. One day I’d been alone inside my head, the next I wasn’t.
It didn’t take me long to see that I had no reason to fear her.
I was nine when my foster father first came for me, dragging me by the arm from my room one afternoon after I got home from school. In the beginning, the beatings were tolerable. They hurt, of course—they hurt so bad I thought my frail body would crumble beneath his fists—but once I learned that he liked my screams, I stopped screaming.
And that’s when the beatings became intolerable.
They became almost unbearable.
After a year of enduring the same weekly hell, I felt something stir deep within myself, and Bestia showed up. Once I overcame my fear, I tried to study her, but I had no idea what sort of animal she was, so I named her “Beast” in Latin—Bestia. She seemed to like the name, so it stuck.
Her presence is what made me start to think deeper and open my mind to the possibility that she was a product of a mental illness—a form of protection that my innocent mind made up in order to help me cope with my situation.
Since there wasn’t anything I could do about her being there, I began to spend time with her, and in that time, I found her soul. When I looked deep into her eyes, I saw that she was, in fact, separate from me. Her essence was detached from mine even though we seemed to be linked mentally.
It was when I located her soul that I found comfort in the murky white depths of it. I knew in my heart that she was good despite her dark dragon-like appearance. She was mean looking—her fur made up of a million tiny black needles, her body three times my size, her face dangerous and terrifying.
She may have been dark and lethal on the surface, but on the inside, she seemed to shine with the brightest white light. She was comforting and warm. When I was scared, she would lick my face with a rough tongue and rub her snout against my cheek.
It was because of her that I first became obsessed with souls.
The idea of someone’s soul showing who they truly are. The idea that what you saw on the outside might not show what actually lay beneath the surface.
When you can’t speak for one reason or another, you find other ways to communicate…other ways to get answers. And I couldn’t speak to that man, my foster father.
I never found the courage.
But I learned quickly that looking into a person’s eyes showed everything you needed to know if you knew what you were looking for. And when I searched his eyes, at the raw age of ten, I didn’t like what I found.
This was the man who was supposed to give me love after my real parents decided that I wasn’t worthy of it, but instead, he kept me around to satiate the sickening evil within himself.
His soul was pitch black and thorny. It radiated with its need to inflict pain on the inno
cent.
So, once I saw beneath the surface of him, I knew that if it wasn’t me that he beat…it would be someone else in the foster home.
So I let him brutalize me to save the other kids I lived with.
He and I had an unspoken arrangement. As long as I didn’t fight back, as long as I let him do whatever he wanted to me, he would leave the other children alone. It was only me that he came for, week after week, and I forced myself to be okay with that. I reminded myself that it could be any of the other kids—it could have been my sister.
Over the years, Bestia seemed to grow stronger and more protective, and I became more and more submissive to her presence. I would zone out in class and just watch her. It was then that I noticed she was growing white wings. She didn’t have them when I first found her in my head, but over time, they began to grow until finally, after about a year, a set of deadly wings protruded from the fur on her back.
By then, I guessed that she wasn’t a creature of this world, but she certainly lived up to the name I gave her.
She was a beast made of something else.
Year three of the beatings, I began to use her as a shield.
I clung to her.
Instead of enduring my foster father with open eyes, I mentally escaped by searching deep within myself and holding on to Bestia’s lethal presence. She protected me even though she wasn’t a physical being.
After a while though, she got restless. During the beatings, she would roar and snarl and frantically fight to get out of my mental block. Every time he raised his hand to me, her eyes begged me—pleaded with me—to be let out, but I could never figure out how.
She did the protecting during those hours, shielding me from seeing what was happening to my body. I let her watch him—let her endure the sight of him while I hid my face in her neck. To this day, I wasn’t sure how I managed to do that, but I just chalked it all up to PTSD. She was a product of my imagination, a defense mechanism, a coping technique. I couldn’t look at him as the years went on, and I found a home in Bestia. The tough fur that covered her body acted as a blanket of midnight peace.
And when it was over, I lived with the pain.
Now, all these years later, I was beginning to question my assumption that she was just a product of my own brain.
After the encounter in the alley, the words those guys said, after thinking about my abilities…I could say with one hundred percent certainty that I could be something else—something other.
And Bestia had something to do with it.
Something I had yet to understand.
“But I will figure it out,” I promised myself out loud.
With new purpose, I walked up the three steps to my apartment. Pausing before I entered, I reached for her. She was there, sitting patiently while I worked through the memories that swirled inside my head.
A sick feeling was lodged in the walls of my stomach—those guys weren’t done with me yet.
I felt her shudder in anticipation at my thoughts, her cobalt blue eyes hard as she watched me. I mentally ran my hand along her fanged jaw. I kissed her big nose.
Pulling away from her body, I faced the front door of my apartment once again. Turning the knob, I stepped through the threshold.
“She’s got no fucking idea what she is.”
I realized then how wrong those guys were…it was they who had no fucking idea what I was, who I was.
But I’d show them. The next time they showed up, I’d show them exactly what lived within me.
And we’d face them together.
It was midnight by the time we got home. I was sitting on the couch in our penthouse, looking out into the city, the night sky a dark shade of blue.
“You can’t possibly tell me that you don’t think that’s a bit—oh, I don’t know—fucking obvious?” Lanier asked me, looking over to Quint, who sat upside down on the black leather couch—his feet in the air, his head near the floor. Weird fucking guy. “No mating bonds have formed, none even mentioned in the last twenty-one years, and all of a sudden this girl shows up and my beast freaks out? How’s yours doing? You’re telling me that you’ve been seeing her fucking face for eleven years, but you don’t want to claim her?”
He was pacing now, angrier than I’d ever seen him. “Who fucking cares, Lanier? Even if she, somehow, was the reason the mating bonds no longer exist, at least you found your answer. Clearly, she must be your mate if you’re responding this way. Look, now they’re back.” I shrugged my shoulders. “You can figure out how to complete the ceremony, deny the bond, and Fall. I don’t understand why you’re throwing a fit right now.”
My voice didn’t betray me, it was strong and sounded bored. I, however, was having my own kind of fit.
I saw her tonight, the girl I’d been seeing for almost half my life.
At first, I tried to explain the visions away as daydreaming, but then the little girl pulled me in. I wasn’t much older than her at the time, but in my eyes, she was frail and tiny. She needed protection—my protection.
“Oh, and you’re so fucking cool and calm, yeah?” Lanier growled a dark animalistic sound. “You just saw your wet dream in the flesh, and apparently, she’s my mate. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’s Quint’s too, but he’s being too fucking stubborn to admit it. And you’re cool?”
I clamped down on my anger, my possessiveness. The idea of Lanier or Quint being mated to her made me want to tear the skin clean off my body. She was mine. She’d been mine for years.
And tonight, my beast claimed her.
I didn’t want to tell him that though, and I understood why Quint had yet to talk about it. No one even spoke about the mating bonds anymore. Everyone seemed to be ignoring that part of our history, thinking they’d never come back.
Now here we are, seemingly mated to the same girl?
My plan was to try and find her years ago, but something kept me off. Something told me it wasn’t time. The visions kept coming, and I was getting annoyed with myself. I could just go to her rather than hope and pray for just a minuscule glimpse into her life, but I never did.
And then tonight happened, and she has a body, a face, a person attached to the vision in my mind. She’s real.
“You don’t even know what you’re feeling, Lanier,” I bit out, hating what was going on inside my head. “She has a killer rack and ass for days; this could all be your dick talking to your brain. There is no bond.”
It was a lie; we all knew it. But I couldn’t force myself to face the facts: my girl was real, and she could be mated. To all of us.
I stood up. “She needs to get through the Transition. We won’t know anything for sure until then. Quint, I need you to bring this invitation to her house. Do you have her scent?”
He pulled his body off the couch, throwing the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. “Yeah, I got it.”
He said nothing else as he walked past us and out the front door.
“He’s a fucking Warlock,” Lanier barked at me. “How could he be mated to her too?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know anything,” I sighed. “But Warlocks have the same process as Nephilim, and their bonds have also disappeared. He could be going through the same thing as us and not saying anything because he doesn’t think it’s real. We won’t know until he says something. Let’s just get her here.”
Lanier laughed humorlessly before taking the same path Quint did to the front door. “Yeah, whatever.”
The door slammed, leaving me alone in our ridiculously large penthouse.
I walked toward the stairs to my left and climbed them slowly, completely exhausted. I wanted to get to my room, lie on my bed, and just fucking sleep, but that wasn’t going to happen. My mind was spinning, my heart aching.
Seeing her in the alley, then having her physically touch me…the pain she inflicted with a simple squeeze from her tiny hand…
A shiver snaked down my spine as I walked down the short hallway to my room.
Up unt
il a month ago, the visions came once a day at a minimum, sometimes upwards of three or four. They came in all shapes and sizes, giving me access to all parts of her life. I’d seen her go about every part of her day. Walking the halls at school, doing homework, eating dinner with her foster brothers and sisters, reading books, crying in her bed, coloring on the back of a piece of used paper. But I never saw her happy unless she was talking to her foster sister and best friend, Brinley.
The little girl that had the prettiest blonde hair and bright blue eyes. Her features stayed soft as she aged, making her look younger than Anna, but she was actually my age—three years older than Anna herself. Her personality was bright, her energy always leaked into my visions, giving me just a small glimpse of the joy she brought whenever she entered a room.
The two girls were close, almost always together. I rarely saw one without the other, but Annalise would disappear from both of us when her foster father came for her. I never got a vision during her time with him, I only saw the aftermath.
Each week, after he’d come for Anna, Brinley would simply wrap her arms around Anna’s waist. She would lay her head on her sister’s chest, and the two would cling tightly to each other.
Even when she was hurting, Annalise cared for her sister. I could tell that Brinley hated seeing the wounds, the battle scars she came back with. Swollen black eyes, cut lips, bruised jawlines. The girl would cry after every session, and Annalise would simply rub the girl’s back, her arms, anywhere she could reach. She would kiss her blonde hair and quietly let out her tears. It was as if Anna was just happy that her sister wasn’t hurt like she was. Like she was protecting her.
Until one day Annalise came back to her room, and Brinley wasn’t there. That was a vision I wished I could forget. Watching Annalise go through the aftermath, all alone, was something I hated remembering. I hoped that it was just one awful night, that the next week she would be back, but she was absent after the next session as well. To this day, it had been seven years since I’d last seen Brinley in any of my visions.
It had also been seven years since I’d seen Annalise cry.
