by May Dawson
“Really?” Rafe asked me skeptically, cross his arms over his chest. “Already?”
“We have lost time to make up for,” I said.
“I just wanted to talk about Blake and Skyla,” Lex said. “The argument you guys had…”
Chase ran his hand through his hair. “You heard that, huh?”
“Yeah,” Lex said, and I had a feeling anyone who was in the house had heard it.
“Do you think Silas’s spell failed?” Rafe demanded. “Because he can’t know about the supernatural.”
“Well, sorry, I never meant to turn in front of him,” Chase said tartly. Ugh, he’d been finally relaxing, and now he was back to tense and guilt-stricken. I glared at Rafe, and he ignored me, but I knew he hadn’t missed it.
“I’m not blaming you,” Rafe said, his voice conciliatory. “We all had our moments when our powers first started to manifest.”
“Rafe almost turned in the produce section of a grocery story,” Lex supplied, and Rafe glared as if he weren’t being helpful at all, but I saw Chase relax, just a little. “Apparently he has intense emotional reactions to kale.”
“Are you done?” Rafe asked him. Shaking his head, he said to Chase, “Do you think he’ll be okay on his own for a few days?”
“I don’t know,” Chase exploded.
Well, this was the most relaxing bubble bath ever, that was for sure. Just floating in the tub while three guys stood around arguing. I should light some candles.
“But I have to go, right?” Chase spread his arms. “If I don’t, I let the whole team down. Clearborn will notice—he won’t keep us together.”
“Let us worry about Clearborn,” Lex said.
“You’re trying to make this seem simple,” Chase said. “Like I can be part of the team and still be here for Blake and Skyla. But what if I can’t?”
“That’s the problem we’re all trying to solve,” I reminded Chase, reaching out to touch a hand to his leg. So that was why he’d seemed so troubled earlier.
“That’s great, but it’s my problem to solve,” Chase said.
“I’m not going to pretend you don’t have a point,” Rafe said. “If we want to stay together, then we have to be successful in bringing home that shield. The stakes are high.”
“Keenly aware,” Chase said.
“Blake’s sixteen,” Rafe said. “He should be able to handle things around here for a few days. Right?”
Chase shrugged. “I know what answer you want. I know it all sounds stupid, because you shifters are living on your own in the forest at that age—”
“That doesn’t last long,” I said, thinking of the day I’d woken to find my sister and her men had packed up around me in the night and left me in the forest by myself. Cute pack traditions. “And they’re…human. We know they’re different.”
“No,” Chase said. “You try to remember they’re different. But it’s not the same—you know, I can tell you think I’m coddling them.”
“We never said that.”
“You don’t have to,” Chase interrupted. He shook his head. “You know, maybe for me, it’s better without the damned shield. I can go back to being human—I can go back to my real life.”
Those words seemed to shock all of us, including him.
Rafe started to say something, and I cut him off. “Give us a few, okay? You really ruined my bath, Rafael Hunt.”
“So sorry,” Rafe said dismissively, but he and Lex headed out.
For a few long seconds, there was silence between us.
Chase shook his head as if to clear it. “I didn’t mean that, Maddie. I want to be with you and the team. I just don’t know how…”
“I know,” I told him, and I couldn’t take it anymore, watching him hurt in front of me. I climbed out of the bath and sat on his lap as he sat on the side of the tub. He wrapped me tightly in his arms, as if he were oblivious I was soaking through his clothes.
“Chase,” I said, “I understand. If you have to choose between the team and your family, you have to choose Blake and Skyla.”
His eyes widened, as if he was startled to hear me voice what he was thinking. Then he admitted, “But you’re my family now, too. I just… I can’t be selfish. I can’t put what I want over what they need.”
“I know,” I said.
I kissed him, and he kissed me back tenderly.
I hoped our first mission wouldn’t be our last mission together.
Chapter Fourteen
Lex
In the morning, I woke up hours before the alarm would go off. I couldn’t sleep, so I rolled over and pulled Maddie against my body. She snuggled her head onto my shoulder without waking, her arm sliding across my waist. In the daytime, that girl of mine was all fire. She was endless energy burning bright, warmth and danger and a mesmerizing glow.
But in the early morning light, her face was still and beautiful. Long, light lashes rested above her high cheekbones, and her pink lips were pressed together sweetly. Part of me wanted to kiss her awake.
But she would need her rest for what lay ahead of us.
When I couldn’t fall back asleep, I brushed my lips across her forehead then eased carefully out of bed. Penn rolled into the place I’d just vacated, his body forming against Maddie’s in his sleep. Penn, Jensen, Silas, Chase and I all slept in the same room, the same giant bed, and we took turns sleeping next to her, although we never voiced that we kept track.
It might not have been normal, but it worked for us.
I heard stirring behind me as I grabbed my sweatshirt from the long bench at the end of the bed and headed out the door. Sure enough, Silas padded out of the bedroom behind me, wearing nothing but sleep pants that hung low on his hips. He was tall but narrower than the rest of us, his body slender, and sometimes I didn’t know how I hadn’t noticed that he was no wolf long before.
He shut the door behind him. “Worried about today’s mission?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Yeah, me either,” he muttered, “It’s just the Fae world.”
“What could go wrong?”
The two of us exchanged a look. When we headed downstairs, I started coffee while he began to make breakfast, then I wandered over to the pull-up bar mounted on the wall in the living room to crank out some pull-ups.
Our backpacks were lined up against the wall. Technology always went to shit in the Fae world, including guns; there was no good reason for it, but then, there was no good reason for much of anything in the Fae world. We had our swords, knives, water, rations for a few days, sleeping bags and ponchos. Everything we needed, in theory.
We needed to avoid the Fae, because no good would come from tangling with them. We’d stick to the shadows…as much as we could, without our wolves.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Silas admitted.
I paused for a second, at the bottom of my pull-up, then yanked myself up again, chin over the bar. “You know the world best. Is there anything you think we should do?”
He was silent long enough that I finally dropped off the bar and turned to him, dusting my hands against my athletic shorts.
He knit his arms across his chest, his face troubled. “I don’t have any special ability to see the future. It’s not like I know.”
He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself.
“No helpful prophecy this time?” I asked.
His lips curled up on one side. “Oh, there’s a big picture prophecy. But it’s not exactly helpful.”
“Do we win?” I asked lightly, not expecting him to answer.
“Yeah. We win. But.” He raked his hand through his hair. “Even though we win, that doesn’t mean we survive. That’s the thing about war.”
The air between us felt bleak.
“Do you think we should go into your world first?” I asked. “Get that half of the shield?”
He scoffed. “The Greyworld is worse.”
“Everything’s supposed to try to kill us in the Fae world.”
/> “Yeah, it’ll be a great warm-up for the real scares,” he said.
Echo the cat jumped up onto the countertop then and meowed at him.
“Get away from the bacon,” Silas told her, picking her up and cuddling her against his chest. He cooed to her, “You’re a fucking barbarian.”
Maddie had called him out once on how he used to never swear, before he took on a fake alter ego. Silas insisted that the f-word was so versatile, it was hard to resist now that he’d gotten into the habit.
I had a lot of questions about what happened between Silas and Maddie when they were both undercover in the Day. But Maddie didn’t want to talk about it, so I was biding my time.
We were a family, though. Sooner or later, all our secrets would come out.
“Just like the rest of my housemates,” Silas added to Echo, scooping to deposit the cat on the floor—and then tossing her a strip. The cat ran off, dragging the bacon.
I watched her go. “We’re trying so hard to stay together. Sometimes I wonder why. Sometimes I think it would be easier to go into a fight with people I wasn’t so…”
“Attached to?” Silas washed his hands in the sink, then leaned against the pass-through counter, still toweling his hands dry. “Yeah, I don’t know. The other half of my surrogate family, the other people I love, are rotting in a prison camp right now. It definitely would be easier if I weren’t attached.”
“We’re going to get them back, Silas,” I promised. After our mission was over, I planned to go with him into the Greyworld to rescue his friends.
“I know,” he said.
He looked as if he had more he wanted to say, but Skyla came down the stairs then, and his lips pressed closed.
“Morning, kid,” he said, ruffling her hair as she passed.
“It’s too fucking early, Silas,” she said.
The two of us exchanged a look as she flopped onto the couch.
“We are terrible examples,” I mouthed at him behind her back.
He shrugged. It was hard to deny. Then he frowned as she turned on the TV. “Hey! Hey! Don’t you dare watch the new season of Miraculous Ladybug without the rest of us.”
I laughed at him as I went to pour myself a cup of coffee.
It was a good life we had here together, if we could keep it.
An hour later, I stood by the door of the Suburban while Chase hugged Blake and Skyla goodbye, then climbed reluctantly into the car.
I was worried about him, but he needed to leave home here at home and focus on the mission, so I let it go for now. We could take care of the situation with his aunt when we came home.
Somehow.
There are problems that can’t be solved with a blade, and those are my least favorite kind of problems.
Then we headed back to the academy.
When we pulled into the gate, usually there would have been wolves who watched us from the shadows. Today, though, Hector and Roman greeted us.
“No rest for the wicked, hm?” Hector asked me.
“I think that should be the school’s real motto,” I said. I picked a coffee cup out of the cup holder and passed it to him, then held one up for Roman behind him. “Come on. Now you know we aren’t trying to bribe you anymore.”
Penn had tried gamely to bribe them quite a few times.
“You’re trouble, all of you,” Hector said, but he still took the cup. He raised his cup in a salute goodbye. “Good luck to you all.”
Something about that good luck felt foreboding—like a reminder we desperately needed luck—but I tried to let the feelings fall away as I waved goodbye.
We were the only car in the student parking lot. Jensen popped the trunk, and we tossed our camping packs over our shoulders and trudged toward the main quad.
Clearborn met us halfway down, trudging down from one of the guest houses, where he’d taken up residence. Apparently he couldn’t bear to be too far away from us all.
He wore the same thing he always did, what I’d decided was his version of a uniform: a white buttoned-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to just below his elbows, a pair of khakis. He was fit, but leanly so, and he waited for us with the wind blowing his sandy-brown hair back from the pronounced widow’s peaks at his temples.
“Ready?” he asked, in lieu of a normal-person greeting.
Silas and I exchanged a look as the team chorused that we were all ready. Of course, we were ready.
We’d been training for this for the past three months, following our own course of study on top of our classes. We’d learned all about the Fae world and Silas’ own universe, the Greyworld. We’d gone without sleep to keep training harder with weapons and with magic, to make sure we wouldn’t leave a friend behind in that world.
“Let’s find a discreet place for you two to open that rip,” Clearborn told Silas and Maddie, gesturing for them to take the lead. Silas nodded and they headed for the woods, with the rest of us following.
Clearborn paused, looking at me meaningfully, and I fell into step with him behind the others. Ahead of us, I saw Rafe reach out to adjust Penn’s shoulder strap. Even from here, I could tell Rafe was bitching to Penn, and Penn was bitching right back about how he hadn’t had enough coffee for Rafe’s fussing—even as he shifted so Rafe could adjust the strap.
Quietly, Clearborn said, “How’s Maddie doing?”
“She seems fine,” I said, then answered the question he was really asking. “She still feels guilty about what happened, no matter what anyone tells her.”
And Cain knew we’d all told her, over and over, that it wasn’t her fault we’d all lost our wolves. The chance for wolves to gain magic was a gift. It was just a messy one.
Clearborn nodded. “She’ll fix what she sees as her fault at any cost.”
He said the words so neutrally that I glanced at him, not sure if he saw that as a good thing or bad. I missed being able to shift, and I missed my big, white wolf himself and the way I felt when I was in that form.
But I’d throw any claim of being special away, if it kept Maddie safe. Nothing mattered to me as much as the woman and the men walking ahead of me right now.
“Protect her from herself, Lex,” he said. “Bring them all home.”
“I will,” I promised.
They came to a stop.
Silas watched as Maddie began to incant the spell, drawing a golden line in the air that turned into a shimmering rectangle, then solidified into a door.
Magic like that used to feel like a miracle, like something that made my heart beat fast, thrilled by the promise of the world.
Now I just felt dread.
I nodded goodbye to Clearborn and drew my sword.
One by one, we stepped through the door.
Chapter Fifteen
Maddie
I stepped through the portal, and time paused.
Cold washed over my skin, then sunk deeper, into my bones. Every muscle went taut, my bones aching, and then suddenly my foot touched earth on the other side and I stumbled, my legs coming back to life a second too late.
Jensen grabbed my shoulder to steady me, looking me over with golden eyes to make sure I was all right, then squeezed my shoulder. I nodded to him that I was fine, already moving past him to join the circle Rafe, Tyson and Penn had begun to form a security perimeter. Jensen looked to the shimmering door, waiting for the next one through.
I took my place between Penn and Ty, watching the forest that spread around us. They were both still and silent, almost eerily so except for the breeze that ruffled Penn’s dark blond hair, but I knew they were both listening, watching, smelling as best we could.
We all missed our wolves, and the wolfish senses that we used to have.
The last of the cold faded from my limbs as I waited with my sword held at the ready.
The breeze seemed to shake the trees around us, but there were low murmurings of animal sounds and louder scratches and shakings as animals darted through the growth. We were in the midst of a forest o
f massive trees that filtered out much of the sun, leaving us in a purple gloom. But there was animal life above, moving through the treetops, even though little grew across the leave-strewn earth.
White and purple flowering vines wrapped around the trees and dripped down from the trees above, tendrils sweeping the forest floor. It was all so beautiful and unearthly that it took my breath away.
“We’re all through,” Lex called, his voice low. “Where are we, Silas?”
We’d all studied the maps of the Fae world and learned all we could, but Silas had been here before. Ty and I had visited the Fae world only briefly—we hadn’t even managed to take a step before we’d been attacked.
By plants.
I had some concerns about the Fae world.
“We’re in the spring court,” Silas said. He pulled a compass out of his pocket, murmuring the words of his incantation. “There’s a city about eight miles east, Zairan. Turic’s capital.”
Lex rested his hand on his shoulder, watching the compass as it began to glow in Silas’s hands. Then he said, “Form up. We’re going south.”
Supposedly, the half of Cain’s shield we sought had last been seen in the temple of the spring court, before the temple was destroyed. Winter hadn’t managed to extract it, and soon we’d find out why.
“Where were you when you saved Winter?” I asked Silas.
“Echo saved Winter,” he corrected. He lowered his cupped hands, gripping the compass that would guide us toward the spring temple.
“I know you’re Echo too,” I whispered to Silas as he headed past me toward his spot at the front of our formation.
He winked at me. “Let’s talk about it tonight.”
Tyson raised his eyebrows at us. “Can you two stop flirting? I don’t know if you recall this, but last time we were here, we were attacked before we managed to move a step.”
“Oh, I can’t forget,” I said, knowing how much Ty wished he could. Because once Ty and I stumbled out of the Fae world, we’d stumbled into bed with each other.
Actually, we hadn’t even made it to the bed. We’d had wild sex on the concrete a few feet away from the mattress.
