Cord took position behind Cam while I covered Isaac’s back. Theo was the only one who stood alone, and something about that made me ache.
A familiar scent teased the breeze blowing in off the water, and Zed stepped up behind Theo.
Not gonna lie. My eyes misted over with gratitude that Zed dismissed with a casual wink.
“He’s family, right?” Zed crossed his arms over his chest. “Pack or not, he’s doing this for Isaac, and for you. And that means he’s doing it for us too.”
“I love you, sourpuss.”
“Love you too, Delly.”
“I love you most,” I told Isaac. “Don’t be a hero.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured me. “And I love you more than open roads and endless sky. You’re my everything, Dell. Remember that.”
Tears blossomed in my eyes, but I didn’t let them fall. We hadn’t lost yet. This was scary, not impossible.
Cord unsheathed his dagger and pressed it into Thierry’s hand. “This blade was baptized in the blood of the pack. It has power.”
Magic zinged through the air after that announcement. Foresight and preparedness wasn’t what made them alphas, but it was part of the reason why they were great ones.
“Here goes nothing.” Thierry tested the weight of the blade in her hand before she slashed open her palm so wide I expected fingers to plink into the water below. She offered each of the Geminis flanking her that open wound, and their spurs dug deep. “Drink up.”
A blink, that was all. One blink, and Theo became Thierry. I was so distracted by the runes lighting up his left arm and palm that I almost missed the same intricate patterns sparking to life on Isaac’s arm. He didn’t go with flash this time, opting to conserve energy. All he shifted was the necessary part, the arm wielding the power. Cam’s transformation was slowest, and her runes glowed dimmer than the others, but after her first pull on the pack bond, testing the effect, her and Isaac luminesced.
I bit my lip and trained my gaze on the empty skies. These four would light up the night. Literally.
Anyone flying overhead would notice us soon, and someone was bound to investigate. Waiting until daylight would have been smartest, but Rilla might stage her miraculous return overnight, and we couldn’t allow her to rally her troops. Or worse, for some new contender to smell blood in the water and attack while Tiberius was absent.
Thierry hissed when she cut her palm again, allowing more blood to coat the rock under her boots and a few drips to plop into the lake, a concession to the origin of the spell. She made a fist, punched outward, and magic exploded from between her glowing fingers. With her right hand, Thierry passed the dagger to Isaac, who mimicked her and then passed the blade to Cam. Cam joined the first two, three distinct beams of magic shooting straight into the hungry mouth of the rift. Theo raised his hand without making a cut, and the earth shook when his power mingled with theirs.
Thierry gasped and whipped her head toward him, but he stared ahead.
Foreign words poured over Thierry’s lips. Some familiar, some not. I wouldn’t bet on it, but I believed she was speaking Gaelic. Each word pumped up the juice. Each syllable caused the earth to groan and tremble. An unnatural breeze stirred the leaves overhead, and they rustled a panicked warning that a storm was coming. Bright lights flashed on my periphery, whirling past us in a torrent of kaleidoscope colors, twisting as they spun out of control.
Fae, a distant part of my brain realized. Those were fae fleeing toward home in the face of the unknown. Or so I thought until one passed by screaming obscenities I had no trouble comprehending. That was when I got it. The magic was working. The rift was contracting, creating a vacuum, and it was hoovering anyone close back where they came from.
Shit.
I opened my mouth in warning as a loud boom rocked me.
The rift splitting had caused an explosive magic surge that rolled across the land in an unstoppable wave of energy, but this—this was sucking all that power, that otherworldliness, back in with equal force.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Leandra walked toward the shore. The torrent of magic devoured her before her toes sank in the water, and she was flung aside, a doll tossed onto a high shelf out of our reach.
Terror glazed my spine, and I reached for Isaac, but that second of inattention cost me.
Suction popped my ears, the trees bent toward the lake, and the four fae on the rock were inhaled through the air, back through the rift and into Faerie.
Without glancing back, Shaw leapt for the swirling void, embracing it. The cold fury in his eyes told me he would have fought me off and followed Thierry, even into hell. He vanished too, leaving three dumbstruck wargs gaping after them. Cord lunged as well, and I followed, but the draw wasn’t strong enough. The magic didn’t want us. We were Earth, we were alien, and it didn’t like the way we tasted.
Cord’s head swung toward me, the wolf in his eyes, and I read the blame simmering there.
I had done this. This had been my idea. In saving the world, I had damned us both.
Impact knocked us to the sand, Zed protecting his alpha and beta. Cord came up swinging, and I was right behind him. Zed ducked the blows, dancing away from Cord’s wild punches, but he was no match for an alpha. And ours… He was broken, snapped clean in two in an instant.
One punch landed, and it shattered Zed’s jaw. The wolf howled in my middle, the instinct to protect pack kicking in before despair strangled us both. Zed hit the ground and didn’t move. Out cold. That wasn’t enough to satisfy Cord, who whirled around until his mad eyes settled on me. I didn’t make the same mistake as Zed. I circled behind him using every ounce of speed I possessed and leapt onto his back. I punched him in the side of the head, and we landed in the sand hard enough to jar my teeth. Cord bellowed with rage and flung me off him.
“This is not the way,” I snarled. “Cam’s in Faerie. She’s not dead. We can get her back.” The bruised organ thudding against my ribs squeezed tighter. “We can get them all back.”
“How?” Cord rasped as the battle between base instinct and higher reasoning played out in the muscles rippling across his body. The wolf wanted free, and the last thing we needed was a slavering beast mourning its mate and taking its pain out on the rest of us. “Thierry is gone.”
“Yes, she is,” I agreed. “But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
And there was more than one Black Dog out there.
Chapter 21
Leaving Butler in search of Macsen Sullivan wasn’t an option. Lorimar needed me, and so did my alpha. I was still not a fan of delegation, but I gave it one last try. At dawn, I cornered Enzo and pleaded my case. He had magic, and a locater spell might be the ticket to discovering the Black Dog’s whereabouts, assuming the ancient fae had been sealed on this side of the threshold. The alternative, that he had holed up in Faerie until this all blew over, that he was even now enjoying a reunion with his daughter…
No.
Until Enzo himself told me otherwise, the Black Dog was our only lead, our only hope.
All we needed to be sure were a few drops of Thierry’s blood so Enzo could track the Black Dog through their familial link. Fresh blood, the strongest medium, was out. The best we could do was scrape the rock where she had worked her magic and hope for the best.
I let my gaze sweep across the lake as I approached the site where it all went so very wrong, wishing it were a bathtub I could yank the plug from and drain, and hating, absolutely loathing, the blue sky above me. Give me storm clouds and a churning void over this miserable perfection any day.
Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t notice the rock was occupied at first. “Hey.”
Cord perched on the edge, his legs dangling, ankles deep in water.
“Hi,” he rasped in a voice barely recognizable as human. “I owe you an apology.”
“No, you owe Zed an apology.” Tough love, that was me. “He was trying to do the right thing. He was trying to salvage his
alpha and his beta for the sake of the pack, and you punished him.”
“We spoke earlier.” He patted the stone beside him. “Now it’s your turn.”
Ominous wasn’t the right word for the sensation of prickles coasting over my skin. Flying down the highway at eighty-five miles per hour and watching as a car merged in front of you going forty, leaving you no choice but to slam on the brakes and pray—that was how this felt.
My whole world was about to get rocked, and I was all out of sway. I sank down beside him and braced for the bad news. To keep my fidgety hands busy, I started collecting blood samples while I waited on him to get to the point of this impromptu meeting.
“Half the pack followed me from Villanow to escape rule under Bessemer’s thumb. He was broken when his mate died, and he shattered the pack. Bit by bit. Until even his strongest wolves cracked. They came here, with me, to escape that.”
And now their new dream, their new alpha, teetered on a similar precipice.
“I need to say this, and you need to listen.” A thread of steel twined through his voice, an alpha’s decree. “I won’t become another Bessemer. I will stand with Lorimar for as long as I can, but if we can’t find a back door into Faerie, if we can’t get them back, then I will step down for the good of the pack.”
“I don’t want to be alpha,” I blurted, heart stopping up my throat.
“You’re good for the pack. You’re smart, driven, and you did this.” He tipped back his chin, indicating the healed skies. “You saved them all.”
Saved them, because I hadn’t spared him. Or me.
“I don’t want the job.” Being alpha had never been my dream.
“They need you. They’ll listen to you.” A faint smile almost made it onto his lips before it fell off his face into the lake. “You and Zed make a formidable team. You always have.”
“I can barely keep myself from coming unglued,” I said, reminding him I had lost a mate too, “and you’re handing me a box filled with puzzle pieces and a bottle of Elmer’s.”
“Promise you’ll think about it.”
“I won’t promise I’ll say yes.” But deep down, we both knew I would accept if it meant holding Lorimar together. We had fought too hard to let the pack disband, to have all our sacrifices be for nothing. “What would that mean for you?”
Alphas stepped down for two reasons. A usurper challenged for the title, and they lost. Or old age forced them to relinquish their power. Defeated alphas were forced out to cement the new leader’s control while the retirees stayed within their own pack, acting as elders or advisors to their successors.
Neither applied to Cord, and his presence—alpha but not—would confuse other wargs. Confused wolves was a very bad thing.
“I don’t know.”
At least he was honest. “Don’t leave without telling me.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” he said softly, but we both heard the lie, and that water… He was staring down between his feet like the secrets of the universe could be found at the bottom of the lake and all he had to do was dive deep enough to find them.
“Did Cord talk to you?” Zed didn’t wait for me to get back to camp before tackling me. “He sure as hell chatted me up.”
“I don’t want to be alpha, but I told him I’d think about it.” That was what he really wanted to know. “How about you? Ready for a promotion?”
“No.” He shook his head. “This isn’t what I want. It’s not what I ever wanted.”
That about summed up my life right now, and I had trouble scrounging up enough pity even for my best friend. “What else can we do?”
“Uh, Dell?” Zed jerked his chin toward a small gathering. “Any idea what’s up with that?”
“Oh hell.” She was the last person I wanted to see with my own wounds so raw.
A petite woman of Japanese descent stomped up to me, planted her hands on her hips and glared. “Where is Thierry?”
“Faerie, as far as we know.” Sugarcoating things wouldn’t help, even if the truth meant facing imminent death by rabid kitsune. “They didn’t exactly leave us a map to follow.”
A smidgen of the fight drained out of her. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.” I shoved past her only to pull up short in front of a gathering of mostly Japanese men and women who all smelled like fur and concern. “Who are your friends?”
“These are my skulk.” She crossed to the tallest man and wrapped her arms around him, trapping his down by his sides. “This is their reynard, my mate, Ryuu Tanabe.”
“Great.” More mouths to feed when food was already scarce. “You’re here why?”
“Thierry is my best friend. When she didn’t come home, I came after her.” She stated these things like facts, like they were fixed points in her universe. Thierry was her friend. She would always come for her. “We would have been here sooner, but I promised Thierry I would hold Wink together while she was away. The town is…stabilized, so here I am.”
That was good news at least. Isaac would have been happy to hear things had settled.
Isaac.
Agony ricocheted through my chest from even thinking his name.
“I don’t know what to tell you.” I stared at her. “I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got.”
Mai opened her mouth, and Zed stepped in front of me, a human shield to deflect whatever hurtful words she’d been about to hurl at me.
“Our alpha female was lost to Faerie too.” Reaching behind him, he took my hand to give me strength. “Dell’s mate and his twin were also taken.”
“Shaw’s with Thierry.” It wasn’t a question. Mai had no doubt. “Five missing in total.” A crease formed on her brow. “That might explain it. Tethers can take three at a time safely. The old ones could at least.” Dangerous, miserable hope writhed in my chest at the logical way she delivered the facts as she saw them. “Thierry wouldn’t risk leaving anyone behind in Faerie with conditions so volatile, but she has to travel back to Earth to anchor a tether in this world. That’s how it works. One fixed point in Faerie and one here.”
“You’re saying they could be fine—” Zed spoke slowly for my benefit, “—but they’re trapped until they figure out a solution for getting home.”
“Thierry has allies in Faerie, powerful ones. She can keep your people safe, and if she can’t…” Mai’s throat worked. “She will defend them with her life.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Zed said, proving he was the true diplomat between us.
“We’ll stay, if you’ll have us.” She glanced between us. “Our people can help hunt and secure supplies so we’re not a drain on your resources, but I want to be here when she comes back.”
When she comes back. Not if.
“You can stay.” I massaged my temples. “Zed, hook her up with Haden.” I started walking. “He can get the skulk settled.”
Zed rocked forward like he might follow me. “Dell?”
Of course he had noticed my tone, but I couldn’t stop. I had to escape before I contracted Mai’s infectious hope. Leaving Zed to make the arrangements, I found a quiet place to undress then unleashed my wolf into what remained of the wilds of her home.
Chapter 22
Two days later, after Enzo announced his tracking spell had failed, I was combing the woods for Arno, who I had started thinking of as Plan B. I had no reason to believe trees on Earth might still be linked to trees in Faerie, even if they were descended from that stock, but I wanted an expert’s opinion before moving on to my nonexistent Plan C. And, on the topic of expert opinions, I wanted to ask him about the trees’ wishes for the seeds, considering how the apocalypse had spluttered out there at the end.
Cascading goose bumps shivered down my arms as I stumbled across a middle-aged man with buzzed hair a few shades darker than the shadows and emerald-green eyes so rich they might as well have been black. Bloodless still roamed the forest, and I hadn’t met all of them. There were innocent and not-so-innocent fae li
ngering near the old rift site in hopes of catching a tether home one day too.
So I didn’t attack the man simply for trespassing, and I didn’t growl only because he was fae. I lunged because he was covered from head to toe in brutal runes that emitted the same emerald light as the ones covering Thierry. I had punched him, snapping back his head, before he got a word out edgewise.
Only when rivulets of blood started running down his jaw from his broken nose did I glance at my hands and wonder with distant horror what I had done. I was supposed to win him over, not deck him. And yet I couldn’t conjure any remorse for this being who had allowed our worlds to merge and done nothing to help rip them apart.
A spurt of magic, astringent and rich with the cloying scent of death, blasted across my senses, and the injury healed before my eyes. He tested the bridge of his nose then grunted. “Did that get it out of your system?”
Fingers curving into claws, I gave him the most honest answer I had left. “Probably not.”
He shrugged. “Fair enough.”
“What do you want? Why are you here?” He must have known we’d been searching for him, that Thierry would reach out to him, and he’d made himself impossible to find. “Your daughter stepped up and did your job for you. Now she’s stuck in Faerie. So is my mate, his twin and my alpha.”
“You’re too young to understand. This all must have felt so immediate to you, so dire.” His bland expression twisted a knife in my gut. “You don’t have enough perspective to appreciate the true stakes. All you see are charred trees and empty-eyed survivors. All you can think about is your sacrifice, the personal cost.”
“Don’t patronize me,” I snarled. “Don’t you dare.”
“Faerie is rotting from the inside out. All those years ago, I thought I could fix it. I thought I could save them, but I didn’t. I can’t. No one person can.” He rubbed a hand over his scalp. “Earth was getting sick by proximity. Fae were never meant to be here. We should never have stepped foot in your world, but we’ve left too many footprints to wipe them away now.”
Over the Moon (Gemini Book 6) Page 20
