“When I say be careful, that means not smoking next to the Blooded Queen.”
A yip reached her ears, and the Were's features bled to human again. Julia could only watch as things that should never shift looked like small moles burrowing underneath the flesh of his face, realigning his bone, muscle, and arrangement of features within human norms once again.
Julia blinked, and he was a man again.
They'd been standing outside a freight car, only the roof’s lip visible to her from being held in arms rather than standing on her feet.
Suddenly, they were airborne, and she yelped.
They landed with a bouncing thud inside the car.
He laid her gently on something soft. Julia had never wanted to move as badly as she did right then.
She was now facing everyone with whom she'd been taken.
Jason, Truman, and Slash were badly beaten. Julia's eyes took in a bubble of bloody mucous trying to boil out Truman's nostril, and a deep, abiding rage welled up inside her.
It felt like something she could use.
When Lily came into sight, looking perfect, that anger burst from her like a star escaping her chest.
Lily's smug look of satisfaction changed instantly to terror.
It was a supernova of power. Julia's new powers were ever evolving. She knew this. As Rare One, they'd told her they'd come randomly.
Sometimes random worked.
Bright, searing light cut through the murky car. It illuminated things she didn't wish to see, the injuries of the males who'd tried to protect them, the new contingent of Were, a tightly bound Cyn and Adi.
The source of the energy was she. It threw off the paralysis like a snake shedding its skin, and Julia sat up. Awake, energized, and whole again.
Lily waded through the light, her face distorted in pain.
“Julia,” she began.
Julia thought she might be trying to plead her case. Julia would never listen. She was done negotiating with anyone who mistreated her people, herself and lied to do it.
She would not allow it.
Julia could control the light. She used it like a sword at Lily, who stopped looking black and began to glow. She screamed, high and tight. Lily's skin flaked into large chunks that floated like singed paper coming close to the mouth of the sliding train car door, they were sucked out like captured bugs.
Lily's mouth was the last thing to succumb to the combustion of her body in a yawning inferno of heat and molten consumption.
Her teeth made almost no noise as they fell on top of the pile of ash that had been her body.
Julia didn't pause over her remains but found her friends instead.
Her husband.
His eyes met hers. One was swollen shut but the fine, clear hazel of the other was sure.
Of her.
The light changed, becoming iridescent. It sparkled and fell like moving glitter on the wind. It cloaked the Red Were, healing Jason, Truman, Slash, and even Cyn and Adi of their minor injuries.
Unfortunately, it invigorated the Red Were who had taken Julia.
When he hit her from behind, the light seeped out of existence and the Were in charge of the reacquisition captured her as she fell.
The last thing she heard was Jason.
Howling.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I am Carell,” the Red Were told Slash and the others.
Slash looked around, taking stock of everyone. Tom Harriet, Ford, and a man named Tai Simon stood in the background behind ten other Reds.
They made his wolf’s hackles rise.
The lore had spoken of the Reds’ blood as legendary. Slash had listened to the stories but never put much merit in the validity of a sub-species of Were being any different, though he'd never pressed the secret knowledge he held. With this many Reds, their energy swam in the air, thick enough to reach out and touch. Slash felt like he could stick out his tongue and taste the difference.
Instead, he looked at ways to kill them all. Adrianna was unprotected in a den of Reds. At the end of the day, he was left with that.
The Reds were very aware of her Alpha female status, and Slash keenly aware of their interest.
“Carell?” Jason asked and distracted the leader.
The Were who had hit the Rare One, stopping her spectral light, inclined his head at the one whose smells mixed with hers but not in the way of mating.
“Let us go now, and we won't kill you all.”
Carell threw his head back and laughed from his belly. When his eye found Jason again, Slash noticed they'd washed to green.
The Were collectively shifted within the hurtling boxcar.
“She's too powerful for you to manipulate,” Slash added. Caldwell, a rash young wolf, needed the advice. He did not understand that telling the enemy the plan was akin to slitting one's own throat.
Carell cut his own growl short, swiveling his head to Slash. Slash tried to shrug his shoulders but was bound too tightly. The silver burned around his wrists. Seemed this group was a little smarter than the Were posing as Feds.
Carell shook his head. “No, her very proximity will give us what we need. If there be any blood quantum, her presence will see it rise to the surface like cream through milk.”
Truman sighed, scrubbing his face. “You guys don't get it. Julia Caldwell is not a pawn to be moved around your chessboard. There is no winner. The only 'win' in this whole snafu is letting her unite the species. And now there's fey involvement.”
“Was!” Cyn said loudly, holding a finger up.
“You bashed in her head, but she came alive again...”
“Like a zombie?” Cyn asked Adrianna.
Slash smiled despite the circumstance. Adi seemed to consider the absurd idea of reanimated humans. “Yup, but Jules cooked her, and now she's a lump of ash somewhere.”
“I like it.”
“Stop this,” Carell commanded, his eyes on fire at the two females.
Cyn grinned. Raising both hands, she flipped him off and Slash groaned. She was so newly turned that he didn't know if she was Alpha, but he would bet money she was. Because his luck ran that way.
Downhill.
Carell's eyes turned to slits as he strode to her. She was unarmed and unbound.
Cyn stood her ground. Slash felt the others tense.
“You defy me, female?” Carell asked.
Cyn blew a stray blonde hair out of her face. “Yeah.” That one word said much. All of it disparaging.
He raised his hand to strike her, and Slash realized he'd taken a step toward them.
“That's what it comes down to for you guys. You can't engage me verbally, so you have to result to violence. Pathetic.”
Carell stood still, his fist frozen in the air.
“She is right. We have too few females to abuse one, even with the mouth she has on her.”
Slash checked his fists that he couldn’t use. His frustration was its own demon.
“The voice of reason... fuck you very much,” Cyn said. The other Were grabbed her by the throat, hauling her up against the side of the rail car and punching her so hard against the wall it shuddered.
“Just because a female is rare doesn't mean we will not discipline ones who need it.”
Cyn's face was turning purple.
Truman and Caldwell inched closer.
Things were escalating inside the tight space. It wouldn't end well. Experience taught him that.
After confirming Adrianna's safety, he'd been so busy keeping the most aggressive Were within sight that he lost her.
She sprang at the Were who held Cyn. Talons burst out before she leapt.
Adrianna sunk five into his groin, and with a high-pitched keening, Carell’s right hand wolf toppled like a felled tree, clutching at his gonads as the floor rose to meet him.
The Were closed in around Adrianna, her arms in front of Cyn, shielding her from their approach. Her eyes had yielded to her wolf long ago. A stub snout caught their scents, a
prelude to their actions if she was Alpha enough to scent their intent.
One Alpha female against ten male Were. Unwinnable numbers.
If Slash had been unsure of his love for her before, nothing could have solidified it more than that moment.
Spinning gold eyes met the green of his. His scent triggers sharpened, talons sliding out of skin in a painful tear of suddenness.
She winked.
Slash's wolf decided for him. Slash ruptured his skin, revealing what he was and giving up his biggest secret in a moment of raw desperation.
He was not mixed, though it had been clever camouflage.
He was pure Red and one of the last. His position in Washington State had not been happenstance but providence.
Protection of his rarity.
His wolf shucked the silver binds, his vision bleeding to the many gray shades of transition. His sense of smell let him bring every last one of the males under his dominance.
Instantly. No Red of lesser than pure blood would stand against his call to their wolves.
Carell fell last, convulsing on the floor as Slash tore the wolf from his body, two weeks from the moon.
Shin deep in the gunk that had made them human, he trotted over to Adrianna, his paws sinking into the human castoffs.
She ran her gaze over his wolf, and even as deep as he was inside the wildness that made him Were, his spirit hesitated. It was a testimony to his deep-seated self-hate.
Adi bent down, but not much. She ran her finger along the scar that tore up his snout and bisected the brow ridge of his wolf. He did not flinch, though it was an effort not to.
Adi looked around at the partially changed Reds, many only half bloods. Her gaze returned to his.
“You did this.”
He gave an awkward nod, and a smile lit her face, her talons retracting.
Slash could not bring females. They were immune to the summons. There would be no whelps if the female changed to their wolf during pregnancy.
He licked her hand and she wrapped her arms around his neck.
“You sure know how to impress a girl,” she said.
Slash's chest tightened, his humanness, what little remained, strung so taut it could have broken from the merest pluck.
Slash forced himself into calmness. It was the only way to change back so he could tell her.
So he could break every last rule he'd vowed to uphold. Including the one about no mates from their sister dens.
He'd fucked that six ways to Sunday.
Adrianna let him go when his energy changed.
And there, in the middle of human blood, skin and sinew, Slash rose from the remnants.
Tall, steady and scarred. She brought him low. A slip of a girl barely now a woman.
Adrianna's eyes grew round and Slash cocked an eyebrow. He had everything under control. The enemy Reds were under his command and he'd brought a volatile situation to heel, as it were.
Why, for moon's sake, is Adrianna looking at me like that?
Then he became aware of where she was looking. And it wasn't his eyes, but someplace lower.
Slash had forgotten his nudity.
CHAPTER NINE
Tharell remained impassive while the Combatant dropped the renegade Were like a sack of potatoes.
Anthony Laurent grinned up at Scott. Thin red lines made his teeth look like peppermint candy inside his leering mouth, but no sweetness filled it.
He spit the blood out on the floor. “She was a good lay, fought the entire time.”
Scott slammed Tony's head into the wood floor with the flat of his palm.
Tony rolled over, chortling. “You cannot kill me, Singer.”
His wolf’s eyes swam to black, obsidian holes that darkened his gaze while he looked at Scott.
“How could you... rape her and get her with child?” Scott asked incredulously.
Tharell let things play out a little longer.
“Why do you give a ripe shit? The real question is: why do you care?” Tony stood, and they squared off. “I can't hammer sense into you, because they'll beat the shit outta me.” He jerked his thumb behind him where Victor and the others of the Combatant lay in wait. “But keep this in mind, chump. This is your bio-mom. Y'know, the one who poisoned Julia? The reason I was in that fey prison. She wanted all that I gave her...”
Tharell made a disgusted noise when the repugnant Were grabbed his crotch.
Tony's gaze fell on Lacey Greene. His smile morphed into a grin. Shark like teeth gleamed white in his red mouth. He wiped the blood away with his shirtsleeve. The smear remained like a partially erased wound on the white sleeve.
She gave a small smile back, and Tony's faltered.
“It cannot be his,” Lacey stated, lifting her chin in defiance. Tharell looked at the small female Were. Her light gray eyes dilated with excitement if one was noticing.
Tony tensed. “Of course it's mine, you numb cunt.”
Scott backhanded Tony so fast that it was a flash of skin in the air, Tony’s cheek opening like a split peach.
“Fuck!” Tony howled, and the Combatant circled him.
Michael and Brendan held Alan. “Let Scott clean his engine, man. Chill.”
Alan growled low in his throat.
Tharell shifted his weight.
“Tell the Were, Lacey.” Everyone's eyes were on Tharell. Tony's narrowed to inky slits.
“What the hell is going on? She”—Tony gestured at Lacey—“is not part of dick. She got knocked up when I put my package where it belonged.”
Alan met this pronouncement with another low growl.
Tony ignored him, his gaze landing on Jacqueline, awake and sitting up against the back of a bona fide fainting couch.
He pointed his finger at the monarch of Region Two. “She's going to pop out my whelp and there's not a damn thing you or anyone can do about it.” His smug gaze, defiant and arrogant, swung out over the crowd.
Tharell gazed at the Were and almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
“Domiatri,” Tharell prompted quietly.
Domi stepped forward. His deep blue hair shone like suspended water, waves held by his scalp instead of a shore.
Jacqueline flicked nervous eyes to him and Tharell nodded toward his pure-blood Sidhe companion.
“What is that expression?” Tharell asked to no one in particular. He made a show of snapping his fingers. “Ah, yes, Domiatri has the floor.” Tharell swept his hand toward the fey.
“I am the father,” Domi said without preamble.
The silence was heavy.
Jacqueline closed her eyes.
“Bullshit,” Tony erupted. “I humped her into the ground every chance I got. I brought that bitch to heel.” Tony’s low voice resonated, his open fingers clenched with certainty.
Scott's hands became fists of punishment.
“You cannot breed, Anthony Laurent,” Lacey announced. “Have you looked at your own body lately?”
“There are deeper magicks then even you are aware,” Domi said. “If you had been an intellect, you would have thought before you abused one of your own kind. But therein lays the crux of the problem. You are not an intellect; you do not think but react. So you assaulted a rare female Alpha Were. She begat a Moon Warrior offspring. Those taken in violence leave a mark of retribution behind.”
Reagan, Tony and Lacey’s daughter, moved forward. “Yes, Dad,” she said, and he swiveled his head to her, scowling.
“Check it out,” Reagan said.
Tony's murderous eyes found Jacqueline, and she gave a tired smirk. “I have done what I was bid. I exchanged the horror of being with you for something I want more.”
Cyrus retreated into the background. “I assumed”—he looked from Tony to Jacqueline—“that the Were was the father. She is with child.”
Lacey continued, “He should have a mark on his hip that tells of his sterility. It can't keep him from assaulting women, but his seed will never take shape or live
. He is destined to die out eventually. Reagan is the sole offspring.”
Tony’s terrible expression of realization silenced them. Sentenced to many centuries' existence, knowing you had a forever end, was an awful thing in the supernatural realm. To understand that end resulted because of horrible, irrevocable choices made was somehow much worse.
Tony lunged toward Jacqueline, and she shrank back against the couch.
Domi met him with his broad sword half the length of the Sidhe's legs. He brought it in a swiveling arc, turning it into Tony’s deepest part. His guts evacuated the hole in his body like a fire hose.
Tony fell, gathering the parts of him that sat around like wet worms in the throes of death.
“Domi,” Tharell chided as though Domiatri had slapped him instead of gutted.
His silver eyes glittered with his anger. “Let me have some recompense for allowing that brute to hurt her.”
The group looked at Jacqueline. She glanced away.
“Wait a second.” Jen stepped over Tony's guts with a lip lift of distaste. “You had sex with this... viper? Then you let him brutalize her? I'm sort of confused.”
Domi nodded and shrugged. “We are the fey. We don't look at sex as a terrible thing unless it is not consensual.”
Jen made a noise in her throat. “I bet.” She looked at Jacqueline. “I don't like Jacqueline. She went after Jules, she's slept with the world to further her power base...”
Domi held his hand up. “A moot point. Who she has sex with is not relevant to this discussion.”
“It so is,” Michael said with a snort, popping his sucker out and pointing it at the tall emerald Sidhe.
Singers. Tharell shook his head. “A human point of morality. It is not one the fey ascribe to.”
“But she didn't have consensual sex with Tony. Clearly.” Jen pointed at the rainbow of healing bruises on Jacqueline's body.
“In the beginning, Jacqueline thought to go along with his plan to mate with her and drive us crazy with their disgusting antics,” Tharell said.
“Bad plan,” Brendan stated.
Tharell puzzled that out, finally nodding. “Yes, as ideas go, it was not a good one.”
“We used a simple slumber spell on the Were, and while he slept, we outlined Jacqueline's options.” Domi shrugged his shoulders. The light from the window reflected against the bright green of his skin, as though the grass from outside had leapt onto his flesh.
Blood Reign (#4): Alpha Warriors of the Blood (The Blood Series) Page 5
