by Leela Ash
But if they had, it would have been quite a feat. She had gone to the caves with them and had insisted on searching the caves herself. It was only after she came up empty that she had allowed them to come in to help with the search.
“I could really use Nabradia’s magic right now,” she muttered to herself, dragging a hand through her hair in acute frustration.
“Did you say something?” a deep, gravelly voice demanded and she jumped visibly.
She turned around and barely stifled a cry of alarm when she saw Jake Riley standing a scant two feet away from her. Had he heard her? He was astute; very little got past him. They all were. If he had heard what she’d said he could suspect anything and Lord knows the shifters could easily put it all together. She didn’t want anyone to know her secret until she had Krilce’s Sobriety in her hands.
She managed to keep her face carefully blank and she noticed as she did so that he was regarding her with masculine interest. A niggle of unease trickled down her spine. She’d noticed a few Archstone shifters who seemed to have a little too much interest in her beauty. It was a surprise, she would have expected that being disguised as Nabradia was the one thing guaranteed to fend off any unwanted male interest.
Instead the men of the Archstone Tribe seemed a little too interested in her. She dipped into Nabradia’s memories and her mind began to supply images of Nabradia with her head thrown back in the throes of passion as shifter after shifter either licked her pussy or sucked her breast.
She gasped as she refocused. Nabradia had obviously been involved in a dalliance or three with many of the shifters. That explained the lusty looks she had intercepted since she arrived here.
She looked now at Jake and he stared back hungrily. “What?” she spat.
An expression of surprised hurt crossed his features and she realized he and Nabradia must have been ‘dallying’ steady for a while.
“Uh, I want to retire for the night,” he offered uncertainly.
She drew herself up to her full height, adopting her most haughty expression as she demanded, “And you thought I would be interested in this news because…?”
He shifted, uncomfortable in the face of her dripping scorn. Wisely, he shuffled off, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
In the few days since she had been here, she had tried to come up with ways to create a deeper rift between the two most powerful shifter Tribes on earth. It was to her advantage for them to be so busy fighting each other that they failed to notice what she was doing.
She had to do something tonight; something truly horrible that would make the Archstone Tribe howl for blood.
Joshua Cox loved his sons and their new brides more than his own life. He would fight off a thousand enemies for them, so it was easy to figure out exactly what to do to get the Weirna shifters to hate the Archstone Tribe more than they already did. But she didn’t know what the Archstones, selfish shifters that they were, loved at all.
They were just a bunch of tall lazy guys who loved to eat, play poker, and fuck. There was nothing—
Oh but there was something, she thought excitedly. The Archstone Shifters were so passionate about growing their own food and they had acres and acres of livestock and crops. Maybe, if she burnt down their farms and made it seem like the Weirnas had done it…
A little girl scampered past, pigtails dancing as she ran and Nabradia grinned to herself. Of course. She had to do something truly evil; something as bad as harming innocents.
A slight movement from the corner of her eye caught her attention and she stilled. A woman dressed in witch’s attire was peering at her from beneath some hedges. She didn’t have to be a witch to know the woman was trying to cast a spell of some sort on her.
Her jaw clenched, the little girl forgotten, as she dug into Nabradia’s memory and retrieved the witch’s identity. Palma. So she hadn’t died? Palma had been Nabradia’s faithful follower, until the witch had tried to kill her and apparently failed. But Palma had stupidly remained instead of leaving town.
With a grin, Nabradia raised her voice to be heard, “Either the gates of Alabad opened when no one was looking or you were never dead in the first place, Palma. Welcome old friend,” she added.
Palma’s indrawn breath of fear was fitting reward.
Then Nabradia’s eyes hardened into ice, “You have two seconds to get out here.”
The witch made a small strangled sound low in her throat and rushed out trembling to fall at Nabradia’s feet.
Nabradia regarded her with cool hauteur, “Did you really think you could kill me?”
Palma shook her head trying to form words past the fear in her throat. She should have listened to the Weirna shifters and gone out of town. She had been shocked when she had seen Nabradia once more leading the Archstones and she had followed them to make certain it was her old mistress. How had this cruel witch survived the magic of the Dragon’s Pits, she wondered fearfully. Was Nabradia immortal?
Nabradia jerked Palma’s chin upwards, “You traitorous witch! You followed me here hoping to kill me, didn’t you?”
Palma was white as a sheet with fear.
“Well, now that you’re here, I’m going to put you to work. And if you dare disobey me, I’ll be more than happy to send you to Alabad. Luferia must be lonely over there.”
Palma licked dry lips, trembling all over with fear. “What- What do you want me to do, my queen?”
Nabradia grinned, exulting in her victory. Even the real Nabradia’s assistant witch had not been able to tell that the woman standing in front of her was a shifter and not a witch.
She jerked her head in the direction of the sprawling fields of corn and wheat, “Torch it. And make sure it doesn’t look like magic.”
Palma nodded obediently and rose to her feet to do as she was told. But a pensive frown formed between her eyes as she wondered why Nabradia had given her the task rather than do it herself. Nabradia had always loved to show off.
“Rekarza,” Palma muttered, waving her hands in the air and then she pointed both hands at the fields. The fire leaped from the first row of crops to the last, decimating the entire field in less than a minute.
Palma turned to Nabradia and she was rewarded with an amused look and a condescending, “Good girl. Now make a can of gasoline appear by the side.”
“Lechala ga,” Palma whispered and an empty can of gasoline appeared, lying by its side in front of the burnt field.
Nabradia grinned. “Come on Palma, let’s go to bed. We don’t want to miss the fireworks when the Archstones learn the Weirnas have done this.”
Palma nodded and head bent, followed in Nabradia’s wake.
The Silent Watcher grinned to herself as she walked. She had several gifts, thanks to her ability to shape-shift into anyone she wanted. If she maintained any appearance for long enough, then along with the disguise she was able to absorb some of the person’s powers. She was going to use her gift of illusion to get at least three shifters to swear they saw Luke Summers skulking around the farms tonight. They wouldn’t be lying; they would be seeing what she wanted them to see.
It would have been easier to just turn into Luke and let someone catch a glimpse of her, she admitted to herself. But with Palma so close, she was afraid to dare. Witches could sense shape-shifters, especially when they shifted form when the witches were close by. She wasn’t ready to give up her Nabradia disguise just yet, especially not when the compass was still missing.
But thankfully, she had a witch under her thumb now, she thought with a wicked giggle.
Her smile drained a little as she recalled how Luke Summers had headed a pack of shifters hunting her kind one time in Detroit. He had almost gotten her too, thankfully she had managed to escape. But they had killed her child and the only man she had ever loved.
Shifters, supercilious bastards that they were, believed that her kind of shape-shifters were too dangerous to live. They believed that the only good kind of shifters were their own; they pref
erred to look down their noses at shape-shifters. According to shifter-lore, shape-shifters became too bloodthirsty and evil if they were allowed to grow up to the age of 25. Well, she was 30 now and she had managed to survive all these years. But she was also the last of her kind which was all the more reason she needed Krilce’s Sobriety. That diamond created the first shifter; it could help her turn humans into shifters too. But they wouldn’t just be shifters, they would be shape-shifters exactly like her. They would be able to take on the appearance of anybody on earth.
Then when she had all of that, she wanted to rub it in the face of Luke Summers and all the other shifters who thought they were better than her just because they turned into one boring animal or the other.
Luke would pay for killing her child, she thought dry-eyed. They would all pay; but he would pay very specially.
Ronan Veer was icily furious when he awoke the next morning. He had wanted beyond anything to strangle Nabradia last night but Sam and Robin had kept urging him not to try anything so foolhardy. In the end, Nabradia had destroyed entire acres of farmland in a single night.
He refused to believe the fire had been a normal one because there had been no smoke, no flickering lights in the night sky to alert anyone, no burning smell either. Just piles and piles of ashes.
“She did this, I know she did!” he spat.
Chirhiss, Jake, Sam and Robin all wore uniform expressions of sorrow on their faces.
“This doesn’t seem like magic to me,” one of the women muttered audibly right behind them. “There’s a can of gasoline, Ronan. Plus, Mérida swore she saw one the Damaged Pack boys near the field last night.”
Ronan paused in disbelief and turned around to look questioningly at her. She nodded earnestly, her eyes wide with sincerity.
“Two other people have said the same thing Ronan,” Chirhiss offered.
Stunned silence reigned for a bit then Ronan roared, “Those cowards dared to attack in the dead of the night? We will pay them back,” he vowed.
Standing few feet away, Nabradia felt triumph spurt through her as she watched the show. Yes, it would be interesting to see what happened next. Ronan didn’t know it now, but before he had a chance to ‘retaliate’ against the Weirna shifters, those bad boys would strike again at the very heart of the Archstone.
She had many nasty surprises in store for them. And if they had indeed found and hidden that compass, by the time she was through with them, they would be begging her to take the compass from them.
9.
“Luke Summers is a dangerous man. I’m just worried about what he will do when he finds out that Caily is his daughter and she survived,” Sara Stanley muttered as she stabbed at her knitting. “You should never have allowed him to set eyes on the girl.”
Marissa faltered in stacking her daughter’s toys back into their basket. Caily was a handful. Whenever she decided to play, which was almost every minute, she brought out every single toy from her toy chest as though to examine it. Which meant that, half the time, toys were strewn all across the floor.
“Mother, why would you say that?” Marissa whispered now.
Sara Stanley looked up, her eyes bright with unshed tears, “It’s the truth. Since you took up with that boy, I have been running myself ragged trying to save you from your own foolishness. And now look, he’s back in town. Heaven knows what he’s going to do when he finds out that Caily is his. Is he going to try to hurt her again? Or take her for himself?”
Marissa lapsed into silence, her veiled eyes hiding her feelings. Her mother had never liked Luke and she had made that abundantly clear from the beginning. But right now, her words echoed her own secret fear: what if Luke tried to get custody of Caily?
“Mother—”
“Marissa,” Sara interrupted firmly. “You went to that bus-stop to wait for him because you thought he would come as soon as he listened to your voice message and tried to call you. He came alright and what happened? He attacked you because he didn’t want the baby and because he didn’t want the responsibility of being a father.”
The words hit with the force of a whiplash and catapulted Marissa, against her will, to that night almost nine years ago. It had been stormy and windy and very lonely at the bus terminal. She had called Luke to tell him about her pregnancy and in her nervousness, she’d targeted a time when she knew he would be in class. She had left a voicemail asking him to come home to Weirna that night because the tests showed that she was pregnant. The connection had been very bad, but he’d tried calling her back and left a garbled message she’d barely managed to pick out. He told her he was coming home by bus that same day. She’d driven to the bus-stop to wait and pick him up.
Minutes had rolled into hours, but he hadn’t shown up. Finally, a bus had pulled up and she jumped excitedly from her car to rush to meet it. Everyone disembarked but Luke wasn’t on it. Shattering disappointment had almost rendered her immobile but finally she’d started towards her car and that was when the attack had happened. A large masculine hand had covered her mouth and she had struggled, until her alarmed gaze rested on the sleeve cuffs. That was Luke’s shirt, she’d thought. She’d relaxed in his arms and waited for him to remove his hand from her mouth, so she could turn around and give him an earful for pranking her.
The moment she’d relaxed, he’d flung her against her car and given her a very solid blow to the head. As she started to pass out, she felt him slam a blow into her stomach right at her fetus. The excruciating pain was the last thing she’d remembered before she passed out.
After what seemed like hours, but had really just been minutes, she had woken up to see herself lying on the ground, bleeding heavily. She had tried to move but it had seemed as though she was paralyzed from the waist down. She never knew how she managed to reach her phone and call her mother but thank goodness she had, otherwise she and Caily would never have survived.
She looked up at her mother now, “You already know I don’t like talking about that night Mum.”
“Why? You may have lost the man you thought you loved that night, but remember, you gained insight into who he really is,” Sara said, blinking back tears. “You watched him blackmail me into giving him money to buy his silence that night; you watched him abandon Sarah Quinn with another pregnancy and you watched him stride off into the sunset without a care in the world.”
Silence.
“What exactly have you been holding on to about this guy?” Sara spat, seeing the wavering emotions on her daughter’s face.
Bitter regret twisted in Marissa’s heart. Sometimes it felt as if she would never stop mourning that loss of first love. She knew Luke was vile and despicable, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to believe that he would deliberately hurt her physically; she still wasn’t convinced he was the one in the park.
“I didn’t see the face of whoever attacked me in the park that night, Mum, so I’m not a hundred percent certain it was him. I mean I only saw his shirt-sleeves,” she said.
Sara gave her a disappointed look, “And I suppose it’s a coincidence that the shirt sleeves of your attacker were similar to the exact same shirt you got Luke for his birthday.”
Marissa rose to her feet, “I have to go see Joshua. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. And for the love of God, don’t talk about this to Caily.”
Sara looked offended. “Why I never! How could you even think I would expose my grandchild to that kind of information? She wouldn’t stop until she had met him and I sure as hell don’t want that.”
“Good,” Marissa said with a sniff and headed towards the door.
“Wait,” Sara called. Marissa stopped and turned around with barely contained patience. “Why do you have to see Joshua?”
Marissa sighed, “I have something to discuss with him, and no, it has nothing to do with Luke.”
With that totally un-edifying information, Marissa drove off. A tear slipped past her eyelashes and down her cheeks and she swiped it off. Another tear foll
owed and soon it was a veritable torrent. She was sobbing so hard she had to pull over to the shoulder of the road. She leaned her head on the steering wheel, allowing herself to indulge, as she rarely did, in self-pity.
Her mother had forced her to relieve those horrid memories which she had buried deep down and now it was like Pandora’s box. It all came back.
Luke had wounded her very soul that night and no matter how much she tried to pretend it didn’t hurt anymore, it did. She wasn’t complete; it felt as though a part of her heart had died that day. Caily had been the only light and joy in her life, the reason for her laughter, and the reason she hadn’t withdrawn into a cold immobile shell all these years. But every time she saw her little girl, she remembered the betrayal she’d suffered at the hands of the man she had loved.
She couldn’t help remembering how after her attack that night, her mother’s friend, Benson, had taken her home from the hospital. She’d heard raised voices later that night and rushed over to the windows. To her horror, she had watched Sara hand Luke a check and he had taken it.
A slight knocking sound now at the windshield made her jump and she looked up. Her eyes rounded when she saw who was standing outside her car. It was Luke and he was looking in at her with a puzzled expression on his handsome face.
Speak of the devil…
Marissa hastily wiped off her tears and wound down her glass a little. “Luke?”
His eyes roved, almost lovingly, down her face, “Are you alright? What’s wrong? Where’s Caily? Is she alright?”
He shot the questions at her in rapid-fire speed as his hand urgently came through the open window on her side of the car to grasp her shoulder. She should have felt safe but his nearness, his touch and most of all his questions about Caily terrified her.
She stared up at him out of wet eye lashes. Oh no, he had found out about Caily? There was a time when she was desperate for him to find out about Caily but now she wanted to hug that knowledge to herself. She wanted Caily to have nothing to do with him. And if she was completely honest, a part of her was afraid that he might decide on some crazy custody battle. From what she had heard, Luke had done very well for himself as a painter in London and he was a big-shot, which meant he would be leaving Weirna soon. What if he decided he could take better care of Caily?
