Fighting angels was stupid in the first place, but when you were trying to make sure that stupid people didn’t get hurt because they were getting too close in order to capture the details? That was frelling ridiculous.
Paige had no doubts whatsoever that the President was going to use this stunt to tell the American people that paranormals were a danger. To them. To their nation.
So Paige did everything she could to protect the White House, the staff, the men in black, the reporters.
And to locate her daughter.
A ripple of red buzzed around the air as an invisible dome went down after the angel threw a pretty hefty punch her way.
With the dome down, she was able to do a lot more than just deflect.
She could sense where her daughter was.
And he was dangerously close to her.
She sent a command to her daughter to stay where she was and to obey this time.
Then she shifted into an elephant, charging the angel and bugling loudly, the earth shaking with each step as it rose in answer to her call. She normally couldn’t use her magick when she was in animal form, but when she was really, really angry, sometimes, it worked.
The angel smirked, his wings releasing? from his back. He took the air, hitting her with a wave of angel-smoke.
Not really smoke, but that’s what she was going to call it. It was just a massive wind generated from his wings that hit her like a wall.
Her elephant form withstood the blast, but it wasn’t enough. She shifted into something bigger, something stronger.
A t-rex.
Okay. That was probably a bad idea. She released a loud, chicken-like sound that wasn’t intimidating at all, running forward three steps before shifting into a massive gorilla.
He reached higher into the sky, climbing in altitude, closer to her daughter.
Now! Paige called.
Rai launched herself in the air as a small owl, flying toward Paige—well, falling toward her, really.
The angel reached out to swipe at her.
Paige changed shape in mid leap, calling on air and fire and throwing it at the angel’s hand.
He missed her daughter and spun on her.
Rai was falling fast. Too fast. Her little wings wouldn’t be able to brace her.
Paige shifted into owl form to push her through the air as fast as she could, but it wasn’t fast enough.
Another person came out of nowhere and caught the girl, tucking her in close and shielding her.
The angel blasted him with angel light.
The only thing Paige knew was that the newcomer was a demon. She didn’t know if he was good, bad, on her team, the wrong team. Whatever. He had her daughter and was protecting her for an angel asshole. She transformed into a hulking gorilla and shielded him, the light burning along her back.
She released a guttural roar, but refused to move out of the way. She rolled to her feet, wishing she’d been able to think of any other animal that would have worked better.
That was the best idea, Cawli said with a slight grunt.
Thank goodness for that.
The demon looked up at her, his eyes flashing black for a moment, then nodded once and ran toward the bank of reporters.
Then she turned back to the angel. It was time to end this.
Security people surrounded the area, guns drawn. People in black suits and people in riot gear.
Leah ran to stand beside her mom. “Open a door?”
Paige shifted to human. She didn’t like that idea, but it might be the best one they had. They hadn’t trained for this. They didn’t know where the door would even lead to. “You ready for that?”
The girl nodded and focused.
Paige didn’t wait. She attacked the angel as several men and women opened fire.
Of course, the bullets had no effect.
But it was enough to pull his attention for the briefest of time.
Leah held up her amulet, and gestured. A door opened behind him.
Paige formed a bubble of magick force and pushed with all the might she could muster.
He fell through and the door sealed shut behind him.
Silence.
Paige panted, catching her breath. The good news was that she wasn’t nearly as out of shape as she had been.
Leah raised her eyebrows and turned to the gathered crowd.
The guns were now pointed at them.
Paige went to the demon and picked Rai up. She cooed to her daughter. “Thank you.” As though if he was just anyone. “Talk later? There’s too many witnesses now.”
He nodded and blended into the crowd, disappearing.
Great. Time to put the zookeeper face on, but she wasn’t really feeling it. She still buzzed with adrenaline. “That, folks, was an angel.”
“What did he mean about your kids?” The reporter’s voice shook a little but he held the recorder rock steady.
She should keep the information to herself. She should, but she also needed to be transparent. She needed to get people to trust her. Everyday people. “The angels think they have the ability to overcome them. We don’t know how or why, but the angels are terrified of my kids. The babies, particularly.” She licked her lips. “They tried to kill them even before they were born.”
“They’re abominations?” the reporter asked, though the tone in her voice said she didn’t quite buy into it.
“Abomination implies evildoing. They’re babies,” Paige said bluntly. “And when they get scared, they shift into animals and fly to safety.”
“She could have died,” one reporter said, his tone heavy.
That thought hit Paige in the gut. She needed to get her kids home. “Yeah.” She moved back to the SUV.
“What other threats are out there, Ms. Whiskey?” one of the reporters demanded.
Paige stopped at the SUV, handing a quivering Rai to Naomi. The rest of the kids piled back in, talking quietly to one another. “Demons, angels others. Same as you had before, but you just didn’t realize they were there. Bad people with guns. Overreaching government with even more. Same as you had before, but you refuse to acknowledge they’re a problem. In reality, there aren’t any new threats. You’re just seeing them for the first time. Maybe now, you’ll see them all.”
She didn’t wait. She got into the car and shut the door.
Naomi was still shaken. “I’m so sorry.”
Paige shook her head and stared out the window. “Don’t be.” She checked her phone and saw she had a new message and four missed calls from Michelle.
The text message was very brief.
DoDO has Dexx. He’s working for them. He just took Rainbow.
What in the hell was going on?
14
Paige used the plane’s internet to get to the bottom of Dexx and DoDO on the flight back, but she didn’t learn much at all.
Until they made an unplanned stop in Kansas. “What’s going on?” She asked one of the attendants.
“Everything is fine, there’s nothing to worry over. Just an unplanned stop.”
Said every serial killer everywhere.
Well, no. Maybe not, but the statement didn’t give her the warm fuzzies.
The twins ran around in bear form, Paige absolutely forbidding Rai to fly… anywhere. She still had no idea how bad that stunt would affect everything they were trying to do. She had a magickal fight on the White House lawn. Frankly, She was surprised she’d been allowed to leave at all after she’d had a chance to think about it.
And crap her pants a little.
This shit was real. Really fucking real. The realest fucking crap she’d been in since her powers had been forced awake in St. Francisville.
She was scared.
When she got out, she was greeted by a single black SUV and a familiar face. FBI Director Stef Lovejoy. She was a fire fox spirit—uh… something. Honestly? Paige had no real idea what Lovejoy was. She was
n’t quite a shifter and she embodied a fox. Anything more than that and Paige was clueless.
But she was also a trusted and valued ally who kept her paranormal presence a secret at all costs.
“Where are those adorable babies?” Lovejoy demanded.
“On the plane. Am I in trouble?”
Lovejoy shook her head and headed to the plane with a tired smile. “Nice wheels.”
“Perks of making friends with Merry Eastwood.”
Lovejoy winced, pulling a subtle face that said she didn’t agree with releasing that murderer on the streets, even if it did mean they’d defeated Sven. Fact of the matter was, Sven was taken care of and Merry was still walking the streets.
Paige understood that. She did.
She also wasn’t in a hurry to put the woman behind bars.
And the tick around Lovejoy’s eyes said she recognized why as well.
“Let’s get inside. My ears are ringing.” It was loud even without any planes immediately around them with their engines going. As soon as the door was closed, though, Lovejoy sat down and cooed at the babies. “How are you going to handle DoDO when you get back? Are you dropping the wards?”
Paige sat in her seat and gave Leah a look that said she could listen and form opinions, but she couldn’t speak. She had no voice in this discussion.
The girl nodded, her lips clamped shut.
Lovejoy smiled at her.
“The wards are already down.”
Alarm crashed over Lovejoy’s expression. “Do they know that?”
Not like—wait. What the…fuck. “I hadn’t thought so, but Dexx was taken after I let the wards down.”
The FBI director shook her head with a frown, inviting details.
“I set up the wards so that all violence will be met with… well, an open door to, I think, North Korea.”
“You’re inviting a war with North Korea?”
She hadn’t thought of that. She had simply thing that they probably had some pretty cozy prison cells. However… “Well, if the President is busy fighting them, it might be harder to fight her own people.”
“Hmm. Pick another location.”
Paige added that to the rather long list of things she needed to handle.
“How was Dexx taken then?” Lovejoy picked Ember up who was now a beagle and cuddled his face to hers. As soon as her nose touched his, he shifted into a fox, fire lighting off his tail.
“No fire inside this plane.”
Lovejoy raised a blonde eyebrow at him with a grin.
The fire went out, but he remained a fox.
“I don’t know.” Paige chewed on her lips just now working out the details and how preposterous it all seemed. “If they’d come by force, then the wards would have shipped them all out. But if they came in and invited him to leave?”
“Invited by…” Lovejoy looked up at her with a look of confusion. “Drug?”
“How many things on this world can change a person’s mind?” There were a lot. Demons, djinn, angels, empaths. And that was the short list. Some of those things didn’t apply to Dexx, though. Demons couldn’t possess him, and angels set him off for the most part
Lovejoy tipped her head to the side and booped noses with a fox-shaped Rai. “I’ll look into it. You’ve got your hands full and we need you focused on this.” She waved one hand to encompass her new situation. “I’ll handle Dexx.”
That made Paige feel a little better. “Michelle is working the case, too.”
“I’ll coordinate.”
“Thank you.” But that wasn’t the reason the director of the Oregon branch of the FBI was meeting her in Kansas. “What are you here to really talk about?”
Lovejoy set Rai and Ember both on the floor and gave Paige her full but not undivided attention. “The world is following you. Whatever you do will set the precedent for everyone else.”
Nothing like a little pressure. “What’s going on everywhere else? We’ve heard nothing.”
“They’re repressing the news.” Lovejoy growled at Rai who must have nipped a little too hard.
Rai yipped and came back in for another leaping attack that wasn’t quite as vicious.
“They’re taking people,” Lovejoy said, battling Rai with one hand. “We don’t know where. But our people are disappearing. Mostly civilians right now, but no communities.”
“You think they don’t know about them?”
Lovejoy shook her head and pushed Rai to the ground again.
Rai bounced back up like she had a spring in her tail. Almost. It was a spring made of legs.
“DoDO has been studying us for a while,” Lovejoy continued. “The information you provided from Alaska was invaluable and sent us on a whole new search. From what we’ve been able to gather, their database on us is extensive.”
So extensive that they’d managed to capture Dexx. She needed to talk to him, to see what was going on with him, to make sure he was okay.
And to see if he could gain some inside information. “When you locate Dexx, see if you can get him a message.”
Lovejoy met her gaze with an expression that said she was thinking along the same lines and got up. “I just wanted to caution you on how things are handled in Troutdale. The world is watching and if you give, the paranormals across the nation are put in a worse situation.”
“Give me information on the areas that are being targeted. The Blackmans and I will coordinate efforts to retrieve them.”
Lovejoy narrowed her eyes in question.
“Door magick.”
The director shook her head, still not fully caught up.
“We can go pretty much anywhere.”
Lovejoy paused and turned toward Paige, fully facing her. “Do you think…” She tipped her head to the side, her gaze unfocused. A light dawned as she straightened. “That’s how they’re doing it.”
“Doing what?” Paige had no idea what was going on behind the director’s skull.
“DoDO has doors, too.”
Huh?
“It makes total sense now. We’ve had reports of their agents being in one location and then appearing on the other side of the world within an hour. And it would make sense as to how they were able to slip through your wards undetected.”
Well, that and the fact that there had to be listening devices everywhere. Someone heard how to get around the wards. They knew how to retrieve Dexx without tripping the failsafe.
Shit. She needed to figure out a way to get these wards—plus a few failsafes of their own—up around the other paranormal communities. Like Nederland. Shit.
She needed to call Billie Black again. She needed a small army of wood witches.
Lovejoy handed Paige a flip phone—probably a burner—and headed toward the door again. “I’ll send word.”
“I’ll keep you in my loop.”
The flight to Troutdale was then filled with a whole other kind of worry. The world was watching her. If she fucked up, she could make things worse for paranormals everywhere.
But Lovejoy didn’t mention that the stunt at the White House had made things worse, so maybe… maybe it hadn’t.
Yet. Give some analysts some time to spin it, and they would
Paige landed at the airport prepared to use another door to get home, but was met yet again by another motorcade. This time, it was DoDO. Mario greeted her with a smile and offered to help her get the kids into the SUV.
“I was really okay with Leslie coming to pick us up.” Paige wanted to go for the man’s throat. He had Dexx and he knew it, and she had to dance around him?
“Orders from the President,” he said in his slight English accent. “She wanted to make sure you got home.”
“Are we actually going home? Or are you shipping us off to some hidden cell?”
Mario gave her a tight smile and opened the back door. “I assure you, we’re only going home.”
Had he offered the same assur
ance to Dexx? She couldn’t tip her hand that she knew he had taken him—or that DoDO had. He knew how to play her entirely too well. She got the kids buckled in with Leah’s help—who didn’t like this situation—and got in the front seat.
Mario pulled away from the airport and got them into Portland traffic.
Leah and Ember were asleep within moments, before they’d even hit the highway. But little Rai was bright-eyed bushytailed. That girl hadn’t fallen asleep the entire way here.
“Your flight was delayed.”
That was an obvious question. Fine. She’d answer. “Mechanical issues? I don’t know. We weren’t down long.”
“Well, I’m glad you made it back safely.” Mario looked over at her and gave her a genuine smile. “I almost wanted to see the look on the President’s face as she was watching the news, though. You’re still trending.”
Okay. Now Paige was just confused. “You don’t like the President?”
“She’s a rather simpleminded woman. She lumps people into few buckets.”
“And you are simply not to be lumped in with the lot of us,” Paige said in her best English accent interpretation.
He chuckled. “To be blunt, no. We’re in a special bucket.”
Since she had him trapped in the same car as her, she wanted information. “So, do you feel you’re so much better than the rest of us? You royal witch blood or something?”
Mario frowned at her, taken a bit by surprise. “You really don’t know?”
Paige really didn’t want to admit that out loud. But she would. If there was one thing that could be said about Paige whiskey it was that she didn’t have an overinflated ego. “No, I don’t. Enlighten me.”
Mario blinked and merged onto the highway that would take them east and home. “Well, suffice it to say that there are various types of magick users and they’re not all witches. Honestly, witches are probably the least powerful of all.”
Paige had a really hard time believing that. “Well, you and your people weren’t a big help against Sven.”
“Indeed.” He grimaced and tapped his thumbs against the steering wheel. “You though, you are an exception to be sure. That causes some I know considerable stress.”
That was neat and it actually made her feel a little bit better about herself, but it wasn’t answering her questions. “So, what are you? You disdain witches. So, I’m guessing that you’re not?”
Whiskey Storm Page 12
