Rage Against the Devil (Wild Beasts Series Book 2)

by T. Birmingham

  What do we do with them? Eire asked. The gold stones felt off, different, but Eire also felt that they were not hers to fix, to mend, to undo. They were a creation, a result of her healing and Alexia’s power that had aided in the healing.

  You already know, my starlight.

  Yes, she did. She could do nothing about the burdens of others. She could only heal. She couldn’t solve the problem. Ina would have to grow those Stones and use them on her own. Well, not entirely alone. She’d have Alexia and Eire and the others. But they couldn’t make her happy. Ina had said as much just last night. Those small gold stones were just the mental embodiment of the burden her friend would have to bear, of the lessons she would have to learn.

  Alexia must have heard her thought because she silently whispered, that’s a lot of lessons.

  And Eire agreed.

  But she also used her gift to look into Alexia and herself and found just as many stones. Alexia’s red with tinges of brown, and her own a swirling mix of color with small bits of hunter green.

  Why the brown and green? Eire asked Morrigan.

  It was Alexia who answered, though. For our mates of course, she said, as though the answer were natural.

  Eire felt the answer to her soul now.

  But what had changed?

  Just last night, she’d felt the lack of connection, and she’d known even before that that her and Nicky were not fully mated. He couldn’t accept her Darkness, couldn’t accept all of her. So, what had—

  Something’s happened, Morrigan whispered into her mind, and Eire saw what Morrigan saw.

  Fields of green as far as the eye could see. Short trees popping up here and there that were great for climbing, great for hiding in. A swirling of lights overhead like the Northern lights of Earth’s plane only brighter and interspersed with shades of silver and gold and colors never seen by humans.

  And chained to the earth at the edge of a clearing, his body covered in blood and fluids and cuts, poison wracking his body in pain, Eire saw her mate, her Nicky, and shit—

  She knew.

  She knew now what the wolves meant.

  She knew now what this had all been about and she cursed her grandmother and her father for their part in this.

  And her father…he was going to die for what he’d done.

  She opened her eyes, but still felt her connection to Morrigan.

  Alexia stood from the couch where she’d been sitting by Ina, but Ina was no longer the small, frail woman.

  She was damaged, but Eire could see her color now.

  White.

  A blinding, white light of fallen angel glory that was going to prove her father’s undoing.

  “I’ll get the dagger,” Ina said as she rushed to her room.

  All along, it had been hidden there.

  Keeping a weapon close.

  Damon would have been so pissed.

  But Eire didn’t care.

  Ina was right.

  This was Ina’s kill.

  But really, this kill was all of theirs.

  Matt’s as well.

  Alexia had told Eire that when Matt had found out her grandmother was still alive, he’d shifted instantly. Then he’d come back to The Lodge, and Alexia had heard the pounding of fists and crunching of bone as Matt and Ben beat each other to a bloody mess.

  But then he’d demanded to be let in on the kill, and Alexia had of course allowed that he deserved vengeance as well.

  Ina didn’t know of Eire’s true connection to Lochlan, or Henry as Ina knew him, but Ina knew Eire’s job as an Enforcer had brought her this case.

  Yes, Eire’s father had caused more damage than what he’d done to her, to her mother, to Ina.

  And Eire planned on being there for his destruction.

  Because Eire might no longer be a frozen bitch, but the refreshing cold she had just offered up as healing for her friend also had bite. Had substance.

  And with that bite came two badass Skröm, a Luna, and a powerful Azima at its back.

  Winter was coming for her father, and he wouldn’t survive the destruction they would bring.

  The poison infected him and he spat on the ground like he could expel the pain.

  He couldn’t.

  The pain was so much a part of his every breath, his every movement.

  And the pain also let him know he was still alive.

  His vision wavered and he looked at the Clan woman lying next to him, huddled against a tree, tears streaming down her face. His gaze moved to the man in front of him. The man with the cold, detached, golden brown eyes.

  “Let her go, please. You don’t have to do this,” Nicky said, his voice ragged from the screams he’d let out in his pain.

  But the man’s look was blank, empty, apathetic to his plight.

  Nicky’s body felt the lashes, but they were almost like an echo now of the pain he’d been feeling since his capture. Nessa had laughed when she’d told him yesterday that his torture had only been a day’s worth of torment. Only a day?

  His Eire hadn’t been lying when she’d confided in him a few weeks earlier that time in the Veil moved differently. He truly felt like he’d been there for months. Every part of him felt weighed down, insignificant, incomplete. Except, he’d had one thing to live for, and in the Darkness he’d felt, he had realized that he and Eire were more similar than even he’d been able to admit.

  He’d felt their bond snap into place, and he’d realized the truth of his ancestry. He would survive this. Because of Eire.

  There was a Darkness in his soul. He knew that now. He was the result of Darkness, and looking the powerful man in front of him in the eye, he was fucking okay with his Darkness. He felt his wolf flex under his skin, so much a part of him.

  But the man in front of him wasn’t just Darkness. The man was shadowed by Evil, an infection to everything around him.

  The man tilted his head to the side as the lash he held in his hand reached once more for Nicky’s chest, slicing into his skin and introducing more poison into his wounds. Rivulets of sweat and blood and poison dripped into the open wounds that stretched across his chest, but those weren’t the only areas where his skin had been flayed by the Fae’s weapon. His back, his legs, his feet…he’d been ripped to shreds while the golden-eyed monster stared at him, his eyes blank and emotionless and his Fae body moving as though guided by an unseen hand.

  He knew who the unseen hand was.

  He looked behind the man, saw his companion and he gritted his teeth in anger – no, in rage, at what the other man had done. The two looked so similar, it was a wonder that they were actually father and son and not twins.

  But while the green-eyed Lochlan Trappe stood, a puppeteer behind his son, the golden brown-eyed Loch, the younger of the Fae sliced into Nicky. Nicky saw that it was not Loch’s choice, though. The anger that sat in his gaze, probably the only part of himself he could control, spoke volumes.

  And still, right before Nicky’s eyes…

  The puppeteer transformed from the twin visage of his son to the beautiful but cold image of Nessa Trappe.

  “Oh, wolf,” the woman said, a secret smile taking over her stone cold face, which looked so much like Eire’s, but that also looked more frail. Of course, he wasn’t fooled. Fae were anything but frail. “Of course he has to do this.” She looked toward the other woman lying on the ground. “And her? Well, that Taryn woman won’t survive without him. Your friend Carrie is Fae touched, and that is an addiction that doesn’t go away.”

  His fury rolled through him. Addicted as Eire’s mother had been addicted. Loch may be a victim as well, but he’d done this to Carrie, he’d brought her into this world, into this fight. He’d used her, and that made him as bad as his father in Nicky’s opinion.

  Nessa moved toward Nicky and Loch stepped away, subservient and submissive to the older Fae’s power. A puppet on a string. A victim of the naming that his Eire used only as protection.

  “He’s in there somewhere
still,” the Fae said, noticing Nicky’s eyes as they moved to Loch.

  Nessa’s back bowed as she moved closer to Nicky and before she had taken another step, the Fae was once again the man who had been Eire’s childhood terror.

  Lochlan Trappe.

  And as quickly as she had become Lochlan, she shifted into a man with chin-length brown hair and a strong, square jaw.

  Henry Jones.

  Switch.

  Back to Lochlan Trappe.

  Lochlan now stood directly in front him, his pompous aura a clinging bit of suffocating falseness that made Nicky sick.

  “Did you feel that?” the Fae asked looking out at the edge of the field, and Nicky spat at the man. No sooner had he completed the action than he felt the slash of the Fae’s hand and his nails digging into Nicky’s face.

  Head to toe covered in poison and blood. Jesus, he didn’t know how he was going to get out of this mess. He always found a way. Of course, he’d never dealt with a crazy as fuck shapechanging Fae before. Blood and fucking Bone. It figured that Nessa Trappe had not only the gift of Swords, and the ability to devour, but was also a Fae of Blood and Bone.

  He was going to have to do something he really hated to do. He was going to have to talk his way out of this shit. At least to get more intel.

  “Who are you? What are you?” he asked trying to keep the conversation going. His whole body was in so much pain, he knew he’d be dead if he was human.

  “Eire will be here soon,” the Fae said instead and Nicky felt his chest constrict. But Nicky Arviso had been called Ghost for a reason. He wasn’t just a ghost in the field. His emotions barely touched his face. He felt a million things, but they rarely ghosted his features. Only with Eire, his Vanilla, and with his friends, did he open up. This Fae would not get his emotion. This Fae would neither get the satisfaction nor the power from those feelings he’d always been good at burying.

  “She’s going to kill you,” Nicky said, so sure of it in that moment that he felt a calm hit his body.

  “She’ll try,” the Fae said, once again bowing his back and changing forms.

  “Dear god, boy,” Nessa said, moving in closer. “My son doesn’t like you at all, does he?” The Fae woman touched the tattered skin on his face and chest before then making her way back up to his face and taking her own knives to the open wounds, slowly spreading more poison into the bone-deep lacerations.

  Nicky didn’t point out that she and her son were the same person. Jesus, she was crazy as fuck.

  He’d been at that crime scene, and he’d seen those wolf pictograms, and he’d known what he was dealing with in that moment. Graham, Mally, and Kai had given him exactly what he needed. He just hadn’t known it until that moment he’d had his head bashed in and then brought here.

  Nicky knew his Clan history, but he was also Navajo and he knew his grandfather’s history as well. His grandmother, Nivea, had married her bonded mate, Otero, and he’d been Navajo, and although Nicky had never met her, his mother, Clara, had always loved sharing the stories of her people.

  Shapechanger.

  What the Navajo called a Trickster.

  Or what the Fae referred to as the gift of Blood and Bone.

  “You’re the Other, the Fae woman from the Veil who traded with the Clans thousands of years ago when Titania and her bonded mate, Gaelan, created the Vuković… You have the gift of Blood and Bone. You also have the ability to devour.” Nicky saw Nessa’s face twitch as though she might shift again, but she held her form. He wondered if she forced the hold, because the shifts were happening so quickly, she was obviously not in full control of her gift. “You’re the Fae woman who raped young Vuković, and then devoured his power, which was why the Histories wrote that all that had been found of the teenaged Luna Hybrid, Vuković, were bits and pieces. Just like the murders that are happening.”

  “Well, now,” Nessa said, standing over him and directing Loch to give him three lashes, “I wouldn’t call it rape.” Loch walked forward, and Nicky noticed his step falter as though he were fighting the call. But Nessa repeated the command, and the whip hit Nicky’s chest, torso, and thighs in quick succession.

  Nessa smiled, but the maniacal nature of the facial expression made her look psychotic, and the smile did not reach her eyes of jade green glass shards. “Young Vuković didn’t become addicted like the others I’ve fed on…” She crouched near him. “And I realized then that for some reason the Luna cannot become addicted to a Fae. And because they cannot become addicted, their pain lasts longer. They don’t have the euphoria others feel… I’ve never had a high the way I did with that young Luna Hybrid, and I have loved my Luna ever since.”

  Nicky thought of Matt and how he’d shared that the Fae believed the Luna gave a better high. Well, now he knew where that rumor had started.

  “So, why the Others, why now?” Nicky asked and then met her gaze head on because it hit him suddenly. “Eire,” he said in a furious whisper. “You’re trying to draw Eire out.” Nicky saw Loch move out of the corner of his eye, but again Nessa shushed the younger Fae.

  “Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding,” Nessa said as she transformed into Lochlan Trappe. The man crouching in front of him looked Nicky up and down as he took one of his claws and dug into Nicky’s side. Nicky wanted to scream at the burning, but he wouldn’t. “My daughter…an Other Enforcer,” Lochlan said with disgust, his finger digging deeper. “She thought she’d be able to hide, but no one can hide forever, and it was time for her to, well…to meet her maker, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Why now?” Nicky asked because it didn’t make sense that Lochlan would wait so long for vengeance and to teach his daughter a lesson.

  Lochlan transformed into the man with the chin-length brown hair who Nicky had met several times over now.

  “Well, my Melina is sort of sputtering out. She doesn’t give me the high she used to,” Henry Jones said as he stood. Nicky felt bile rise at the man’s tone. Like Melina was just a plaything. Like Henry was a child who had lost his favorite toy.

  Henry transformed back into Lochlan, and Nicky was getting whiplash from the changes. “But Eire had become a worthy fighter, hadn’t she? And I needed to give her a mystery to chase. I needed to give that girl a reason to come after me.” Lochlan’s smile turned deadly. “And leaving Melina’s body for Eire to find…” His voice trailed off in a tone that spoke of ecstasy.

  As Lochlan crouched at Nicky’s feet, Nicky was once again met with the face of Nessa Trappe. “Well, I haven’t had a high like that since Vuković. Her pain…gods, that pain was better than anything I’ve fed on or devoured in three thousand years.” Nessa smiled languidly as she stood and walked toward the edge of the field.

  “And the pictograms? The wolves? The barrier? What was that about?”

  “Well,” Nessa said from over her shoulder, “if you haven’t noticed, I’m a little…different than I used to be.” Ah, so she did know her control was not what it had been. “The barrier was to hold the power in. I used to be able to devour any creature in a matter of seconds, but sadly, it takes me a bit longer now.” She put her index finger over her mouth as though she were about to share a secret. “Not to mention,” she whispered, pointing to the sky, “we don’t want the other gods spying, do we?”

  She transformed into a wolf, but quickly shifted into the visage of Lochlan Trappe.

  “No, we definitely could not, mother.”

  Goddamn it all, a broken Fae, a fucking insane and mentally ill ex-god standing right in front of him and mentally controlling Eire’s youngest brother, who was standing at his side.

  Nicky’s head snapped up at the sound of Lochlan’s laughter exploding outward followed by what sounded like the crack of thunder. Fog rolled around the area at the edge of the field, and before he could blink, he felt the most welcome presence enter the clearing.

  He felt his mate before he saw her. Her swirls of color were so strong in his mind, he almost let his face of impassivity fall, almost
gave her away.

  It didn’t matter.

  She wasn’t the only power that entered the clearing, though.

  At Eire’s side were Alexia, Matt, and Melina.

  He let his true emotions show then, as Lochlan turned around, back bowing and shifting from the form of Lochlan.

  Nessa.

  Lochlan.

  Wolf.

  Henry.

  Lochlan.

  As a Vuković, Nicky sensed the instability there. He could smell the changes, the shifting of sense. Whereas Eire and her brothers had talked about the smell of rose blossoms and talc being attributed to their father, Lochlan, and the smell of rose blossoms and dust being the distinct smell of their grandmother, Nessa. Now, Nicky’s nose couldn’t tell the difference. The smell of rose blossoms, dust, and talc were Henry Jones. But that smell was also Lochlan and Nessa, and the wolf, with its added scent of peat moss.

  The younger Loch shifted at Nicky’s side when the shapechanging Fae became distracted by the entrance of Eire and the others, but the evil that surrounded Loch clung to him so strongly, Nicky didn’t know how the young Fae would survive this no matter that he had complete faith in those about to destroy the insane as fuck Blood and Bone Fae.

  The younger Loch’s eyes met his, though, and he didn’t care about the aura of evil, because his eyes pleaded with Nicky to end it, to end it for good. And Nicky wanted to give Loch that. Wanted to give him the freedom he sought.

  Nicky tried to stand, but his injuries were too great. He was sapped of all strength. What a pair he and Loch made. A Vuković wolf, all strength and brawn, left without his strength, and a Fae at the power of his father…who was really his grandmother.

  Carrie moved next to him, and he saw Loch flinch at the movement.

  “She is your fault. What she’s feeling, that addiction…that’s on you,” Nicky accused, but Loch didn’t reply. He probably couldn’t, but he apparently had enough strength to move his head in an almost imperceptible nod.

  Nicky looked to Carrie, who was sitting up slowly. And as much as he felt for her, Nicky was also angry beyond reason because he knew this would be the one thing that would finally break his friend, his partner, Danny.