by Callie Rose
For a long moment, all I can do is try to catch my breath and listen to my mates do the same. There’s plenty more work to be done today, but just for right now, I want to enjoy this moment.
I still can’t believe this life is mine. That these men are mine.
And that I get to keep them. Forever.
8
Sable
The four of us doze for a little while, not really sleeping but too lazy to get up.
As I lie tangled up with my men on the bed, gazing languidly around the room, I realize we left the curtains open. Luckily, Archer’s cabin sits at the end of a cul-de-sac with a bit more privacy than most, so I don’t think we gave the rest of the neighborhood a show.
But I love the way the sunlight reflects through the glass and casts diamonds of glittering light on the ceiling and walls. The large oak tree in Archer’s side yard breaks up the display with its thick branches, and the breeze outside makes the shadows of the branches dance on the walls.
This might be paradise.
There’s that whole cliche that “if I died now, I’d die happy,” which always seemed like such a morbid declaration to me. Now I think I kind of understand it. I’m sated, content, and the only thing missing right now is Ridge. Otherwise, this is my own personal version of heaven.
Not to mention, this is the first moment since the battle with the witches that I’ve felt almost normal. It feels like a glimpse into our possible future together, and all I see is golden sunlight and warmth.
I want it. I want this to be our everyday. And I’ll fight like hell to make that happen.
“Dude, I saw them before you kicked them under the bed,” Trystan’s saying to Archer. “They had little red hearts on them.”
“You saw nothing,” Archer replies, his eyes still closed and a grin flashing across his handsome face. His arm is under my cheek, and Trystan’s head is resting on his other shoulder comfortably, like two bros propped against the headboard. I can see Trystan’s profile across the muscles of Archer’s chest.
Dare’s curled against my back, his hand idly rubbing my bare hip. His voice rumbles through me as he says, “I saw it, too. Black. Red hearts. Some Valentine's Day shit or something.”
Archer’s grin widens. “You guys are hallucinating. Too much testosterone.”
I laugh. “Why does it matter if Archer has hearts on his boxer shorts?”
“You know, we could easily solve this.” Trystan sat up and leaned over the edge of the bed, reaching beneath to where Archer’s boxers had supposedly disappeared in the heat of the moment.
Archer laughs, jostling me off his arm as he lunges after Trystan to head him off before discovery. Dare chuckles behind me, his strong arms pulling me away from the now-grappling duo. With amusement, I catch a glimpse of decidedly black-and-heartsy boxer shorts between their hands.
And then my head explodes with pain.
I’m flying through pitch blackness without any control over my body. The barrier I’ve so carefully erected against Cleo is decimated, nothing but broken bits of magic that evaporate even as my spirit barrels through the connection between us. I can’t fight her grip. She’s ripped me right out of my own head and into the place between us without me ever knowing it was coming.
I come to a sudden halt and stumble over slick stones, almost losing my balance in the process. But I manage to straighten and face Cleo with as much dignity as I can muster, even as I feel like my metaphysical heart is going to stop beating out of sheer terror.
At least I’m not naked in my own head. I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt, though I’m still barefoot. Small mercies, I guess.
Cleo wrinkles her nose. “Even in your own mind, you stink of wolf.”
I cross my arms, trying to hide my fear behind anger. “What the hell do you want, you bitch?”
The coven leader is just as terrifying as I remember her. She’s got startling good looks—midnight black hair that hangs with perfect symmetry around her face and over her shoulders, a face as beautiful and perfect as a cover girl, and angular features. I know this is all happening outside of the physical realm, like a spirit projection, but somehow I know this is the real Cleo. This is what she looks like in life.
I have to buy time. I knew this day was coming. I knew Cleo would be back, and this time, she’ll kill me if given half the chance. So I have to get my mental barriers back into place before she turns her claws on me, and I have to break free of our connection to escape.
Otherwise, I’m dead.
“What does any girl want?” Cleo purrs, answering my prior question with a syrupy sweet smile. “A good friend and a glass of wine. Maybe a side of shifter extinction as an appetizer.”
My heart aches, and it strikes me how real my body feels here, even though I know it’s not real at all. I’m digging inside my mind, searching for the barriers so I can get them back up and hoping Cleo can’t sense it.
“Why do you hate wolves so much?” I demand, trying to stall her as adrenaline floods me. “What did they ever do to you?”
“Don’t you know wolves can’t be trusted?” Cleo puts a hand on her hip, and her lower lip pouts. “Haven’t you heard the tale of Little Red Riding Hood?”
I roll my eyes, still attempting to distract her from my internal struggle. I try to guess what Gwen would do in this situation, still digging for the tunnel that I once visualized connecting me to Cleo. “I somehow don’t think the shifters I know are interested in eating people.”
“They’re going to betray you,” the dark-haired witch goes on personably, ignoring the fact that I’ve even spoken. “You should prepare yourself for that. Get out while you can. You could join me.”
“Ha, right.” I curl my lips in anger, then smile as I latch on to the familiar connection between us. Not so shabby—I found it in mere seconds. Maybe I really will get better at this. “Fuck you, Cleo.”
With those parting words, I wrench myself away from the connection.
As my soul is sucked back out of the black cave, relief fills me. I did it—I broke the connection and got the hell out of there before she could drain my essence dry of all life. But a small part of me stays tense, expecting Cleo’s sharp, magical grasp to wrap back around me and pull me into her clutches. It doesn’t happen though. Maybe I surprised her. Maybe I really did get the upper hand, God willing.
Wind seems to rush around me as I’m whipped through the ether. But I don’t emerge back in the place I left. I don’t wake up in Archer’s bed with my mates.
Instead, I wake up strapped to the table in my uncle’s basement.
Clint looms over me, haloed by the halogen lamp that floods down from overhead. It casts harsh shadows on his craggy face, and now more than ever before, he looks like a villain. He’s sober—I can tell because the whites of his eyes aren’t spiderwebbed with veins, and his large, protruding nose isn’t bright red.
Which makes it even worse that he’s looming over me with a knife. This cruelty isn’t even fueled by alcohol. It’s all him. What kind of man carves up a teenage girl for fun?
I know this isn’t real because Clint’s stone cold dead. Trystan ripped out his throat, and we buried the sociopath in a shallow grave in the woods.
Looking back now, it’s obvious that this man wasn’t my uncle. We look nothing alike, really. Clint had dark, sun-ripened skin from his work in the Montana sun, and coarse hair a shade short of black. I was so naïve to believe that I had to remain with him since he was my only surviving family.
He was no family to me at all.
I struggle against my bonds as Clint bends over my torso, reaching out with his free hand to redirect the lamp so he has better lighting.
Then he digs his knife into my skin, and I scream.
The pain is intense. It’s so blinding that it’s impossible to think, and I can’t get a grip on what’s happening or how this is possible. Could this be real? Have I somehow traveled back in time? Or is this a nightmare, a memory dredged up by…
/> Cleo.
With horror, I realize we aren’t alone. The dark-haired witch stands in the corner, just out of sight beyond the harsh light. I wouldn’t have noticed her if I wasn’t looking for her, and even now, all I can really see is the glittering of her eyes.
This is a memory, I realize. When I tried to pull myself out of her hold and return to my body, she redirected me here instead.
And she followed me.
This isn’t real. It’s not really happening. But that hardly matters—the pain feels worse than it ever did in my nightmares. Almost worse than it did when it happened in real life. Clint carves deep into my stomach, mumbling to himself while I scream and cry. My throat is hoarse, and hot tears mark paths down my cheeks and into my hair.
All the times I experienced this over and over in my dreams, I never felt this kind of agony. It’s like I’m really here, this time, not just remembering it in my subconscious, but lying on this table, reliving it while Cleo watches.
“How intriguing,” she murmurs, stepping sideways a few inches as Clint readjusts and blocks her view. “This is how we’re connected, then. The sigils.”
Clint shows no indication that he hears the witch, but I shut up immediately, my head whipping sideways to glare daggers at her in the shadows. “You witch,” I seethe. “You did this. You brought us here.”
Clint keeps carving as if I haven’t spoken at all. I feel like I’m in the middle of a horror movie, unable to get away, caught between the two most dangerous people in my life.
“Sigils,” Cleo muses as she comes closer. Her shoes click on the basement floor, and it sounds so fucking real that goosebumps break out over my skin. “But why, hmm?”
Then she lifts a single hand, holding it out toward me, and the pain of Clint’s carving grows exponentially. The pain grows until I’m filled with red-hot agony, and Cleo’s magic is everywhere, all around me, inside me, tearing me apart from the inside.
She’s attacking me, like she did the first time she dragged me into the connection. This is it, this is what I was afraid of.
I scream, harder and longer than when Clint’s knife first dug into my skin. I know nothing but blinding pain, and my vision explodes in white flashes until I can’t see the basement. Not even the harsh halogen lamp can shine through the haze of fear and agony.
Like a coward, Cleo decided to use this vulnerable moment against me. She knew that while I was trapped in this nightmare with the man who carved the sigils into my body, I’d be weak enough to hurt.
But what she doesn’t know is that I’m not the weak little girl I used to be.
I reach deep inside myself and grasp wildly for the magic inside me—that roiling, black and smoky darkness that sometimes feels as if it has nefarious intentions for me. During the battle against the whole coven, I wrangled it into submission and made it do my bidding.
I intend to do the same thing here.
Plunging both my arms into the metaphorical darkness, I latch my fingers into the magic and yank.
Power explodes around me. Even with my vision hazy from Cleo’s attack, I can still sense the tendrils of power whipping around me and reacting to my command. Then the connection between me and the coven leader is snapped in two, and I fall away—away from the pain, away from the memory, away from the in-between place where she can hurt me.
I jerk awake, back in the golden daylight that spills into Archer’s room, arms and legs flailing as I try to breach the line between fantasy and reality. Several strong hands reach out, catching my limbs and holding me down with aching gentleness.
Ridge looms over me, cupping my face in his hands. “Sable. Breathe. You’re okay.”
I gasp for air as both of my own hands go to the place on my abdomen where Clint was carving. The aftereffects of Cleo’s attack still sizzle through me, and even though I no longer feel pain, I can still feel her magic. Feel the effects of what she did to me.
“You’re—back,” I finally manage to gasp out, as if that’s the most surprising thing in the room right now.
Ridge nods, and his thumbs brush gently over my cheeks. “Just in time, it seems.”
All four of my mates are here. They hover uncertainly around me, like they’re not sure what to say or do. I sit up and reach for the sheet at the bottom of the bed to cover my naked body. Not because I feel uncomfortable in front of them, but because I need to feel safe again after what the psychopathic coven leader did.
Archer slides his warm hand into mine. “Was it Cleo?”
The sound of her name being said aloud slices through me no differently than Clint’s knife did as he carved a spell into my body.
I jerk my chin up and down, my stomach churning. “Yes.”
I take a few minutes to breathe and to rebuild my defenses against Cleo. My mates don’t pressure me to speak—I have a feeling they know exactly what I’m doing. When I feel like I’m protected to the best of my abilities, I give them a brief breakdown of what happened, from the moment she yanked me into the cave until I managed to snap her hold on me and get the hell out of Dodge.
The looks of concern on their faces grow darker as I speak. I’m already freaked out by how easily Cleo snatched me from right through my magical barrier, so the way they exchange worried glances sets my nerves even more on edge.
“But worse than her finding me is the question of how she pulled me into a memory,” I finish, staring down at my hands so I don’t have to see their expressions. “That shouldn’t even be possible, right? It’s like she had total access to everything in my mind. She could have pulled me into any memory, found out anything she wanted about me. About us.” A lump has grown in my throat as I speak, clogging my voice so that I have to pause and clear it away. Then I take a deep, steadying breath and add, “Her attack was so powerful. Too powerful.”
I finally glance up to find all four of them staring at me, unblinking. Through the mate bond, I can sense them processing this new development and attempting to piece together their thoughts about it. I can’t even make sense of my own thoughts, so if they can give me some insight, some answer as to what we do next, I’m all ears.
But then Archer says the one thing I don’t want to hear.
“It’s time that you embrace your witch power fully. If you don’t, next time you might not be able to fight her off.”
9
Dare
A moment of silence hangs in the air after Archer speaks.
Next time, you might not be able to fight her off.
The thought chills me through my fucking core. When that witch bitch pulls Sable into that mystical bond between them, I can’t reach her. I can’t help her. None of us have access to magic to be able to chase after our mate and save her when she’s inside the connection she shares with the coven leader.
So Archer’s right. It’s imperative Sable learn how to defend herself.
That means fully embracing the witch.
“No way,” Sable says, her tone hard as flint. She tugs her hand free of Archer’s fingers and crosses her arms. “That’s never going to happen. I’m already in too deep as it is. I can’t just throw myself into witch magic even more.”
“We don’t have another choice,” Archer says gently. “If there was one, we’d find it.”
“I’m already trying not to panic every single damn day that I might kill you,” Sable blurts, her gaze darting between the four of us. “Every night, I worry my magic is going to rise up and attack you. Or that Cleo won’t just drag me into the bond, but she’ll take over my body and use me to massacre the entire village. Strengthening the magic inside me feels like the very last thing I should ever do.”
I can see by the stubborn set of her jaw and the way her lower lip juts out that she’s adamant on this. I get her point, really. I’d give anything to go back and protect my pack the way she so stoically protects us, even at the risk of denying an inherent aspect of herself. But I’d die if something happened to Sable, and Archer’s right. The only way to keep
her safe—truly safe—is for her to master the witch and use that power to her advantage.
And I think maybe I can talk her into it.
I lift my chin, catching Archer’s gaze, then jerk my head at the door to indicate I want the others to leave. Luckily, he’s a smart guy, and he gets my sign language without me needing to explain.
He grabs Trystan’s arm as he slides off the bed, and the two of them gather their clothes off the floor.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” Archer says. “Ridge, you wanna help?”
Ridge raises an eyebrow at me, and I just give him a single, almost imperceptible nod. I know they’re all wondering what the fuck I’m doing taking point on this particular battle. I was the one who fought hardest against Sable’s transition to witch. I was the one who almost gave her up because I couldn’t handle the truth.
But that’s precisely why I’m the right man to convince her. When you almost make the worst mistake in your life, you’ve got the point of view necessary to prove how wrong you were in the first place.
Archer leans over and kisses Sable on the head, and Trystan does the same except on the lips and with more than a little passion behind it, because he’s a goddamn show off. Ridge simply touches her face and says, “I’ll have a mug waiting for you,” and then the three of them leave the room. Archer glances back once before he closes the door, his expression still worried.
No need for that, I think. I’ve got this.
If Sable thinks their sudden departure is weird or out of character, she doesn’t mention it. In fact, she doesn’t even lift her head. She’s staring down at her hands in her lap, and she’s got her fingers so intertwined they look like undoable knots. The last time I saw her look so dejected, her skin was racing with black marks against her will. I think it shows growth that she’s bleeding anxiety and the magic hasn’t appeared painted across her body.
