by Hettie Ivers
“You mean if we’re still alive?” If the Alpha bitch didn’t kill him, I’d find a way to do it.
“Where’s your keeper, Raul?” Milena hollered in greeting to us, stepping forward. “I was counting on seeing Gabriel today.”
She looked every bit the waifish hippie she’d appeared to be in Wyatt’s photos, but her voice was far stronger—a lot more confident—than I’d imagined it would be. It rang with authority.
“Don’t worry, I got this,” Raul spoke quietly to me before shouting back to her in acknowledgement, “Miles!” He gave her a jubilant grin and threw up the shaka hand sign in classic surfer salute. “S’up, Sis?”
Oh. My. God.
“Milena’s your sister?” I hissed under my breath. “She’s your fucking sister?” I repeated, incredulous. All this while, I’d assumed he was an only child, given his relationship cluelessness. This could only prove to be a disastrous development.
He waved me off and took several steps forward, proceeding to project his voice conversationally across the barren desert that stretched between him and my daughter’s executioner, “Hey, so listen, I know it’s been a while, and this might not be the greatest timing, but I feel like we need to talk about some stuff. Like … Mom.” He paused. When there was no reaction from Milena, he added, “Probably Aunt Cely, too.” Another pause. “Maybe even … Mateus?”
My eyes rolled to the heavens, and I prayed for a miracle. He’d said the last one like it was a question—as if he was just tossing out family issues she might have with him to see which would stick—because he had no idea what his sister’s beef with him was.
I’d known our situation was grim when Milena’s mate, Alex, who was standing to the side a few paces behind her, had visibly cringed in reaction to Raul’s “S’up, Sis?” opener. But when Alex started making not-so-subtle throat-cutting gestures behind his own wife’s back to her clueless brother to get him to shut the hell up, it was a dire sign that I’d bet it all on the wrong horse.
I’d unknowingly pitted my daughter’s life against the mother of all supernatural sibling rivalries. Major parenting fail, Avery.
After what seemed like an interminable minute of awkward silence, Milena finally responded to her estranged brother. Her cold, glowing green eyes failed to mask the disgust that she managed to keep from her voice as she calmly told him, “Alcaeus was mistaken. You haven’t changed.”
The ground shook beneath my feet. I felt Sloane tug my hand as she took a step back. I stepped backward as well when I felt a great gust of wind and saw the dry, dusty earth kick up and circle around Raul’s feet.
“Aw, come on, Miles!” Raul shouted in complaint as the makings of a windstorm the size of a small tornado brewed to life around him—encircling and encapsulating him in its unnatural vortex. “This is over the top. We can work things out.”
Sloane tugged my hand again, and we both stole another step back—away from the supernatural ass-whooping about to take place.
I was desperate to pick Sloane up and hold her. But this was the longest she’d ever let me hold her hand before. My daughter never wanted me to pick her up. I couldn’t risk attempting it now and sparking a meltdown that might further betray her true Rogue nature that we’d come here in an attempt to deny.
“I know this one,” Sloane said, tugging my hand for a third time.
I glanced down and saw that her little forefinger was pointed at Milena and the gathering of Reinoso pack werelocks.
“Who?” I asked. “The Alpha? Milena?”
She shook her head.
I tried to follow the line of her finger, to see which one she was pointing to, but she kept redirecting it, as if she was following a moving target. An invisible moving target, I realized, when she said, “The one who’s coming.”
Shit. Raul had warned me that Gabriel was among the few werelocks capable of teleportation.
I scanned the group of Reinoso werelocks. If any of them had sensed the arrival of whoever it was that Sloane saw coming, it wasn’t apparent. They all seemed too engrossed in watching the spectacle of Raul, who’d just been launched at least two hundred feet into the air.
Milena’s face was tilted up to the clouds, along with everyone else’s, as Raul shouted down from his personal twister in the sky, “Is this about the time I kidnapped Bethany?”
Even though he’d pretty well screamed the question, his tone had still managed to sound surfer-boy blasé somehow. I had to hand it to him: He was something else, the big idiot.
My intuition was that Raul’s comment about the Bethany kidnapping hadn’t been the smartest one to make when I saw Remy cover his face with his hand.
“I know this one,” Sloane said again.
I tried to pay attention to where her moving finger was pointing, but a crack of thunder rolled through the sky above, and I watched in horror as a bolt of lightning struck Raul. Followed by another one. And then a third!
This was bad.
Worse yet, Raul seemed to be trying to antagonize his sister now, as he burst out laughing and taunted from his cyclone in the sky, “I’m telling Aunt Cely that you hit me first!”
When the earth rocked beneath us a second time and Sloane actually grabbed onto my leg momentarily in order to keep her little body upright, I could no longer suppress my maternal instincts. I picked her up.
Bad call. “It’s just so you don’t fall, okay?” I told her when she immediately protested and flailed her limbs, struggling against me, wanting to be put down.
She growled and tossed her head from side to side, looking like she was on the verge of screaming bloody murder.
Please don’t do this now.
Please not now.
“Sloane, honey, it’s okay,” I tried to calm her. “I’ll put you down in a minute … just as soon as the ground is steadier.”
My daughter wasn’t having it, though, and she started screaming. Loudly.
“Put her down,” an arrogant, cultured voice demanded as Alpha Gabriel materialized next to me, bringing the offensive scent of furniture polish, gold bullion, and stinky cheese with him.
Oh, fuck.
I squeezed Sloane’s squirming, kicking, screaming little body closer to mine, hanging onto her for dear life as the sadistic, chlorine-shock-eyed werelock proceeded to lecture me on my own child.
“You don’t even understand her,” he spat with disdain. “She doesn’t need you—doesn’t want to be held or coddled by you. Can’t you see that?”
My claws came out before I could stop them. My canines did too. And I growled like the devil in his direction.
“This child is the true Rogue of rogues,” he proclaimed. “She’s the future of our species—the deliverer of our race. You were never anything but a host to her, and she has no use for you anymore.”
Somewhere deep down, I recognized that he was baiting me. Using his special brand of emotional rapey skills to yank on my darkest, most insidious parenting fears—and trigger my greatest handicap. But knowing it was intentional didn’t make it any easier for me to ignore.
Because it still felt true.
“You’re nothing but a common werewolf—a defective one at that. There’s nothing you can teach her. You can’t even protect her.”
Sloane was screaming louder and thrashing about in my arms. I saw the earth catch fire around us, felt flames lick my feet and legs. But it was nothing compared to the fire that raged within me as I set my daughter down behind me.
You can’t even protect her.
I remembered Chaos’s words of advice to me about shutting my human mind off when I shifted, and I gave in to my wolf’s instincts completely this time: the instinct to protect, to defend, to kill.
“Avery, don’t!”
I heard Raul’s order. But it didn’t stop me. My body was already shifting—morphing with brilliant speed into the form of my wolf in the smoothest, most graceful transformation I’d ever accomplished.
And I attacked—going straight for Alpha Gabriel’s throat.
I didn’t get far, though. Not even close.
I was knocked on my ass with a blast of magic before I’d so much as gotten a claw swipe at him.
That had never deterred me before. And it didn’t now.
I went back for more.
Raul teleported in between me and my target just in time to take the blast that Gabriel had intended for me next.
Sloane was still screaming—and setting the desert earth ablaze around us.
All hell broke loose as more werelocks rushed to the scene and Sloane reacted by lighting them on fire whenever they got too close.
Soon there were blasts of magic flying right and left. I circled around my daughter, guarding her like the mad mama boar I was inside.
The sky opened up and torrential rains descended. I heard Alpha Milena shouting orders as more werelocks encroached upon us from all sides of the desert—seemingly from different packs.
Another ambush?
I heard Milena yell, “Alex, get Avery out of there.”
I’d known that I was in way over my head before Milena said it. I’d known it the moment that Raul and Gabriel had stopped trying to kill one another and had started fighting as a team against the new wolves attacking.
I should’ve kept my head down and backed off then. Still, I didn’t stop when I should have. Not even when a blast took my left hind leg out and I felt jaws sink through my shoulder.
Because this was the story of my life.
It was a lesson I’d failed to accept on the playground, and I’d carried it too far into adulthood. Some kids went down from a single hit and stayed down. And some of us never learned when to stop getting back up again.
Until the choice was made for us—because we couldn’t.
Alcaeus
I felt the blast that stopped Avery’s heart as Lessa and I teleported into the melee at Round Rock. My senses absorbed a million critically unimportant things at once then as the world that I had always known ceased to hold any further significance.
In an instant.
As I surveyed the chaotic desert landscape before me, I saw my family. I saw the pack that I’d helped to build with my father, and with Lessa, Kai, Remy, and Alex. I saw packs from around the globe that I had known over my four centuries—some of them allies, some foes—all fighting. Attacking one another over the Rogue prophecy.
Fighting over a foretelling that I had spent a lifetime preaching about—of propagating fear of throughout our supernatural world.
And I knew in that moment that none of it had ever mattered at all.
Nothing that was happening around me now mattered anymore either. It was all over.
This world held nothing for me.
Even the anger that had so fueled and propelled me moments ago was gone. Evaporated. That, too, was pointless.
Everything that had once seemed so important was reduced to scattered white noise—extraneous background static.
Yet I still took it in—absorbed it all: The look of realization on Alex’s face as he lifted Avery’s lifeless wolf in his arms and our eyes met. Lessa’s howl of agony next to me. The horror in Kai’s wolf’s eyes as he, too, understood in that moment that I had arrived at my end. The sight of Raul as he sank to his knees next to Sloane—his glassy eyes wild with pain and disbelief—as Alex teleported my mate away from the daughter she had lived and died for.
I was cognizant of Remy comforting a wailing Jussara, of Milena’s tears prompting a sudden downpour that promised to flood the desert.
I sensed my family’s devastation, their regret, their incomparable sorrow—even as they channeled their misguided righteous fury into felling the “enemies” they still battled.
But I didn’t feel any of it. Didn’t claim it as my own.
My father had survived his true mate—Alex and Remy’s mother, Renata—by a little more than a week. I remembered how I had prayed for more time with him. And only now did I realize how cruel and selfish a prayer it had been.
Already, I had no more desire to be here. But for whatever time I was forced to remain, I would spend it with Sloane. I would spend it protecting Avery’s daughter and doing whatever was in my power to secure her future safety after I was gone.
“I was hoping Avery would stop coming back. I knew that she’d die when they came for me.”
There was no emotion in Sloane’s violet eyes as she said it. But neither was there confusion. She knew what death was. She knew her mother was gone.
“I can’t have fun. I can only do bad things. The voices know.” Sloane repeated her mantra that I’d become familiar with in the brief time I’d spent with her.
The fighting had subsided after Milena’s tears from heaven had turned the desert landscape into a muddy pond that was too inconvenient of a battleground. The end of physical fighting had given way to arguing over the Rogue as representatives from various packs deliberated over what Sloane’s continued existence might mean for our species—for our world, and the future of humankind.
I sat sprawled in a heap on the ground, holding my mate’s lifeless human body in my arms, with little Sloane seated at my side, as strangers debated whether Avery’s daughter could connect. Whether or not she could ever love, ever learn to feel empathy.
As if it wasn’t obvious that she already had.
The irony of a bunch of supernatural predators arguing over the great risk they might all be taking in allowing a super-cute little girl with wicked-cool pyrokinesis skills to live—it pretty well topped the charts. I was prepared to speak my piece, but Raul had been busy speaking it for me—saying nearly everything I would have said in defense of Avery and Sloane’s strong mother-daughter connection.
And I was already feeling far too weak. Thirty minutes after Avery’s passing, and I felt like a dead man walking—an empty shell of the man that I’d been. I wasn’t sure if I’d survive the night.
Raul and Gabriel had stacked the votes in Sloane’s favor as far as the packs that were present—which was hardly an accident. The only pack representatives who were still lobbying hard for the Rogue’s destruction were those from the Alsace and Istanbul packs—the ones Milena had invited as backup for her cause. Lessa had been late in rescuing me because she had been helping Kai and Alex to teleport the two packs’ representatives here for the “negotiation” with Raul.
Given my imminent demise and the fact that Lessa’s mate’s life was on the line, I knew Milena and Alex wouldn’t openly vote against Raul and Gabriel on this. But that didn’t mean I trusted them not to hunt my daughter later.
Gabriel—the great sadist-empath that he was—had been lobbying hard that he should take Sloane with him and assimilate her into the Salvatella pack, arguing that he and he alone had the touchy-feely skills necessary to “reform” Sloane’s Rogue ways.
Yeah, right.
I knew Gabe saw Sloane’s potential to be an emotionless werelock killing machine as her greatest asset.
When I’d first carried Avery’s body over to sit next to Sloane, she had been in Raul’s arms. Raul had left Sloane with me shortly thereafter to go join Gabriel’s cause in arguing for the Salvatella pack to have custody of her. But before he’d done so, he’d leaned close to my ear and sworn on his life that he would kill Gabriel before daybreak, saying that he had already set such plans in motion and had no intention of allowing Gabriel any prolonged contact with Sloane.
I believed him. Raul was the only one present, besides Sloane and me, who mourned the loss of Avery. He was the only other person present who had any sense of the amazing woman and mother she’d been. And for whatever reason, Sloane trusted him.
I didn’t actually believe that Raul intended to harm Avery’s longtime friend Wyatt anymore, either, which reassured me greatly for Lessa’s sake. But there was no way I was letting my family know that and give away Raul’s best leverage with them where Sloane’s life was concerned—even if it meant distressing my sister for a little while longer.
Sloane was hum-talking
to herself when the compromise was reached that she would go with the Salvatella pack for now while the supernatural world waited for the next great seers to emerge and tell them what the future held for the Rogue.
Typical.
I felt Sloane’s little hand land on my forearm, and she whispered to me, “I know this one.” I followed the line of her sight to see her staring at Gabriel. Then she said, “I remember this one.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant—where she was saying that she remembered him from—but I got the sense she didn’t remember him in a positive way.
When Raul and Gabriel approached Sloane to take her from me, I felt my dying wolf stir—felt him attempt to rise just once more—to bite the head off that fucking Weenie Gabe. But he couldn’t. Because I didn’t have the strength to shift. Not even one last time.
My own family members, along with the heads of the other packs, surrounded me now as I held Avery.
Lessa had been keeping Alex and Milena, as well as Kai and Remy, away from me as best she could—for which I was grateful. Because if any of them said “sorry” to me one more time, I wasn’t sure what I’d do. I didn’t want their apologies. I didn’t need to feel their guilty consciences.
I wouldn’t make eye contact with any of them. I couldn’t forgive them for this corner they’d backed me into with Sloane—leaving me no choice but to endorse handing my mate’s only child over to Gabriel Salvatella because Sloane was safer with that evil bastard right now than she was with my own family.
When I heard Gabe talking to Sloane about her mother, expressing how sorry he was for her loss, and saying that he would do everything in his power to look after her now in Avery’s place, I couldn’t bear it.
I bent my head and pressed my lips again and again to Avery’s peaceful face, whispering that I was sorry, before pressing a kiss to her unmoving mouth.
“You would take the place of her?”
I raised my head as I heard Sloane’s impassive tone of voice ask the innocent question of Gabriel.
Weenie Gabe’s slight smile as he nodded down at Sloane—the conniving sense of triumph in his creepy blue eyes as he feigned a look of concern—was my undoing. Even knowing that it would be temporary and knowing what Raul had promised me, it killed me to let Gabriel take her.
