by Bella Jacobs
I had safety and stability, creativity and magic. I had unparalleled sword and weaponry training, and art and fairy music to enjoy when the long hours of drills were through. I had walks in enchanted gardens and skinny-dipping in a river that never runs too cold. I’ve had mid-summer celebrations with friends who have become my second family and winter nights around the fire listening to the luna wolves sing in the forest beyond the castle walls.
And I had a best friend, the sweetest, funniest fuck-buddy the world has ever known. It wasn’t romantic love for either me or Garrett, but we loved each other. We practiced fighting and fucking like they were equally important to the fate of our two worlds, and we had so much damned fun together.
Had…
That’s all past tense now.
Garrett can’t fuck me or spar with me or keep me awake for hours discussing random shit he finds fascinating because he finds everything fascinating.
Because Garrett is dead.
Bane saw it all—saw Garrett gored to death by monsters as he fought to keep them at bay long enough for the queen to escape into the woods. And she did escape, but Garrett shouldn’t have had to die for it. He wouldn’t have died if someone hadn’t opened the portal and then the gates to the city, giving the creatures who killed him and dozens of other warriors an engraved invitation.
Someone let them in. Someone in Fairy is a fucking traitor. And all I want to do is turn around, run back to the castle, and interrogate every noble left alive until I find out which one of them did this, which one of them risked fairy lives for a chance at the throne.
But I can’t go back. Because the monsters came here for me.
A Fairy let them in, but Atlas sent them. I can feel his sick, twisted energy seething from the castle, carried on the wind, though most of his creatures are dead or gone, running back to wherever they came from. I thought I had time—at least a couple days to pack and decide where to go next—but I was wrong.
And now Garrett is dead because of it. Because of me.
I stand at the top of the waterfall that shoots out from under the castle, waiting for Bane to open the portal, watching the water tumble thousands of feet to empty into a river in another dimension, and I hate myself for what I’ve done.
“It’s open. We’ve got to go. Now.” Bane, head of the queen’s guard, Garrett’s best friend since they were kids, bounds down the rocks leading from the castle.
I shake my head. “No. I’m going alone. They need you here.”
The determination in his dark green eyes doesn’t waver. “The queen would want me to go with you. To protect you. So would Garrett.”
The mention of his name is a knife shoved between my ribs, making my voice catch. “Garrett is dead. What he wants doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Shut up.” Bane cups my face firmly in one enormous hand, sending tears springing to my eyes. “It’s not your fault. And I’m not leaving you.”
Jaw clenched tight, I nod, too thrown by his kindness to speak. If I try, I’ll start sobbing and I’m not sure when I’ll stop.
I killed our best friend, and Bane’s already forgiven me for it, even though I don’t deserve forgiveness.
I wonder if he knows how much I don’t…
“I was warned,” I say, the words thick with guilt and regret. “The griffin queen sent a message that I was in danger, that I should run. If I’d left yesterday, Garrett would still be alive.”
“I don’t play games like that,” he says. “And you should know better. Garrett did.”
Before I can respond, Bane wraps an arm around my waist, lifting me off my feet as he steps to the edge of the overlook. “Take three long breaths and then hold it. We’ll hit the water on the other side right after.”
“You should stay here,” I say. “I can take care of myself.”
“No one can take care of themselves, Scarlett. You should know that by now.” And then he jumps, and we fall, me clinging to Bane’s shoulders as we tumble into the roar, into another dimension, into a world where my sister and I are both in mortal danger.
Wren…
As soon as we plunge into the cold river, into that window between one world and the next, I feel my sister. And instantly, I know I might be too late. Atlas doesn’t have her yet, but he’s close, the fingers of his giant hand are closing around her, ready to crush her to bits.
Pulling out of Bane’s arms, I swim hard for the surface.
I can’t go back in time and save Garrett, but I can save my sister. I will or I’ll die trying.
Chapter 12
Dust
My father never forgave me for allowing myself to be kidnapped.
Yes, I was only a child—eight years old and small for my age—but when he was a boy, he’d fought alongside his brothers in the War for the North.
The griffins had sided with the fire dragons, losing nearly half of our men, women, and children in the conflict before the ice and fire dragons made peace. When he was eight, he’d been decapitating dragons in their sleep and running supply missions through the dangerous streets of seventeenth-century London.
The fact that I couldn’t squirm free from a few lousy humans—preferably separating their heads from their bodies before I flew home—was a source of shame for the entire family.
But he always loved me, and I know if I ever need something that only he can give, all I have to do is ask.
Kite hasn’t been that lucky. Not by half.
“I should have made sure he was dead.” His hands curl into fists on his knees as we trundle down the road in the back of the enemy’s well-padded van. The walls, the seats, even the floor are all covered by thickly stuffed upholstery, making it clear from the moment we were loaded into the back that calling for help on the way out of the city would be pointless. “I should have killed him the night he almost killed Mom, made sure he never left the reservation.”
“Stop,” I murmur. “This isn’t your fault.”
“He’s my father. I lived with him, on and off, for almost ten years. I knew what a piece of shit he was. I knew he was never going to change.”
“You were ten years old. He was a grown man. And even if you’d had a fighting chance, that’s not the way justice works. Not in the human world and not in ours.” I rub my hands back and forth on my thighs, scanning the van for what feels like the hundredth time. But there’s still no obvious flaw in design. Maybe, if Kite or I could shift, we’d be able to kick the door off the hinges, but we can’t shift in captivity.
I’m not sure I have the strength to hold onto my griffin form for long, anyway. My head still aches from being knocked unconscious, and I missed two meals I could have used to help repair the damage from the attack on the compound.
But if we get out of here somehow, I can run, though not as fast as Kite.
“If you see an opening when they’re unloading us, take it,” I say. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll get away on my own, or I won’t. But someone needs to find Wren.”
Kite sighs, hesitating for a beat before he nods. “So you don’t think he has her already? Atlas? Even after what my father said?”
I shake my head. “No, I don’t. If he had her, why would he need us alive? If it’s possible to break a mate bond, then he should be able to do it from either side, right? If he has Wren and the power to break us apart, he would have already done it. But we’re still tied together. I can feel it.”
“Me, too,” Kite says. “But she’s hurt. Sick, maybe. Something bad. Creedence, too. He’s in deep shit, Dust. They both need us.” He growls softly beneath his breath. “It makes me want to kill my father even more. Kill every fuck in this caravan.”
“I know.” I lean back against the padded wall behind me, running psychic fingers along the strings binding me to Wren and, to a lesser extent, to Creedence. But they’re so thin I’m afraid to pluck them, terrified they’ll snap under the pressure.
I’m about to ask Kite if he can tell if Wren and Creedence are close to each other�
��my sense of them is definitely more metaphysical than spatial—when we hit a pothole with a boom that knocks us both out of our seats. I land with a heavy thud and a grunt as the boom sounds again, followed by the sharp tat-tat-tat of machine gun fire.
Kite and I lock eyes, but before either of us can speak, the loudest boom yet rocks the floor, and the back of the van shoots up in to the air, sending the world into a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin.
I jump into the air, managing to stay upright as the van flips ass over nose the first time. But by the time it starts its second revolution, I’m crashing into the ceiling, headfirst, making me grateful for all the fucking padding. My nerves shout in protest as my knees hit next, but I’m not injured, not even bruised.
The van finally rolls to a stop, leaving Kite and I wedged in a corner but whole, unscathed, and ready to run through the now-open back door.
“Stay behind me,” Kite says, crawling across the dented ceiling. “Let me find cover before you—”
“I’ve got your cover, baby brother.” Leda’s face appears in the bent frame of the door, along with the tip of a serious-looking machine gun. “Just get your asses out here before these shits are fit to fight again.”
“Leda.” Kite’s breath rushes out as he hurries faster. I follow, emerging into a gray afternoon filled with smoke and the smell of burning rubber.
All along the wide shoulder of the highway, SUVs, large passenger vans, and a few heavily armored trucks lie overturned. There are a few Kin Born bodies lying motionless on the ground, but there are others, alive and well, crawling from shattered windows and dented doors.
We have to run. Now.
I see Kite start toward the front of the caravan, but I grab him by the arm and pull, “Wren. She comes first.”
“This way,” Leda shouts, taking off down a set of train tracks running perpendicular to the highway.
After the barest beat of hesitation, Kite takes off at a sprint, following his sister into the woods.
Chapter 13
Kite
We leave the train tracks as soon as we cross the river, cutting north into the woods with Leda leading the way.
None of us speak.
Atlas could have spies in the area—pieces of himself he’s sent flying out into the forest to keep watch on the routes to his door—but that’s not why my tongue has turned to a lead weight in my mouth.
I’m ashamed of myself. I haven’t been this ashamed since the night I showed up drunk at my nephew’s birthday party, years ago. I was deep in my self-destructive phase; almost every night, I’d get lit on violence fighting cage matches, then wasted on cheap beer after.
I’d drunk nearly a case of Beast before rolling over to my sister Vera’s house for the celebration, and apparently blacked out somewhere between cake and pin the tail on the donkey. I didn’t remember much about the night, but Leda showed me a video the next morning. She sat me down, forced a cup of black coffee into my hand, and played footage of a selfish asshole knocking over a table of presents, wailing on a panda piñata like a punching bag, and giving my mother the finger—repeatedly—when he was asked to leave.
When the show was over, she didn’t yell or preach. She simply stood up, pointed to the screen, and said “fix it,” then left me alone with my shame and the world’s nastiest hangover.
I quit fighting the next day, quit drinking for a long time, too, until I got my act together enough to know I could handle grabbing a beer with friends after work without making an ass of myself.
I wasn’t an alcoholic, I realized. I was a hate-aholic. Once I stopped hating myself, I didn’t need the liquid equivalent of a sledgehammer to knock the voices in my head unconscious for the night.
I learned to forgive myself for the things I couldn’t change and to work harder on the things I could. For the first time in my life, I embraced my Kin Gift—opening my heart to all the pain flowing through the world like a storm-swollen river. Instead of fighting to moor myself in the current, I let it carry me away and found that it wouldn’t kill me, after all.
I didn’t drown; I learned to swim and then to surf, and slowly came to consider my gift a blessing instead of a curse.
As time went on, I forgot what it had felt like to be broken. To be an angry teenager or a frightened kid, cowering in the closet while my dad screamed at my mother, his rage a wave that swamped me, pounding my face into the sand, stuffing handfuls of beach down my throat, making me think I’d never breathe easy again. My mother’s suffocating fear on the nights my father hurt her faded to the back of my mind, and I gradually forgot that there was ever a time when it felt like other people’s feelings might kill me.
But now, as we hurry north, pushing to reach cover before it gets dark, I am drowning all over again.
I should have stayed in the wreckage until I knew Killian would never walk free of it. Until he could never hurt anyone I love ever again.
“Here,” Leda whispers, pointing to a large cabin tucked into the trees in the valley below. “I’ve got provisions in the basement.” She turns to me. “Come up the rear and cover our tracks.”
I nod, still not speaking, still too lost in my own shame to ask why, when we reach the home, we descend a set of concrete steps beside it, disappearing into the cabin’s unfinished basement instead of entering the main part of the house.
Which is probably for the best. My sister isn’t a fan of questions, even when she hasn’t just blown up a convoy and mowed down a dozen Kin Born with a machine gun.
Leda closes the moisture-swollen door, shoving until it pops into place, then spinning the dead bolt and locking us into the basement of the deserted house. It’s warmer in here than the chilly summer night outside, but not by much, and soon my skin itches beneath the surface, eager to put fur on.
I start to shuck my shirt, but Leda shakes her head.
“Don’t shift. I’ll light a fire.” She moves toward the ancient fireplace along the far wall. “We need to talk with our human heads on. Dust, you want to grab something to eat from the middle of the paint shelf while Kite and I get the fire going? I have soup we can warm up.”
“On it.” Dust crosses to a floor-to-ceiling shelving unit loaded with paint cans, gas containers, and ice skates in at least a dozen different sizes. In the middle, one cleaner shelf is loaded with canned goods, boxes of crackers, and an eclectic collection of plates, bowls, and mugs.
“I think better in Kin Form,” I grumble, grabbing an armful of freshly chopped wood from near the door. “Did you cut this? Or do we need to worry that whoever lives here is coming back?”
“Bought it on my way in,” Leda says, her back turned to me as she arranges the kindling and lights a wad of newspaper at the center. “I didn’t know which way to go, so I picked a spot in the middle. This house hasn’t been occupied in at least a year, though, judging from the bug mess inside, and I haven’t seen any neighbors in the two days I’ve been here. It would probably be safe to sleep upstairs, but I’ve been staying down here. More easily accessible exits. Just in case.” She jabs a thumb at the fire. “And the smoke from this fireplace is almost invisible from the outside.”
I frown, my thoughts so snagged by the first part of what she said that the rest blows by half heard. “What do you mean you didn’t know which way to go?”
Leda is my cub mother, basically a godmother with magical tracking powers. From the time I was an infant, Leda has always known exactly where I am. It’s one of the reasons I could never get away with hitting the bars with my friends when I was a teenager. I had a fake I.D., but I also had a cub mother who was on the police force and committed to keeping me from getting a DUI or killed in an accident.
“Let’s get the fire started first,” Leda says. “This shit is too weird to parse with cold fingers. Or an empty stomach.”
“Speaking of weird,” I say, my stomach knotting. “Guess who’s working for the Kin Born these days?”
Leda turns, plucking the top log from the pile I�
��m holding without looking me in the eye. “Yeah, I know.”
I blink. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say about the fact that my father is a terrorist who helped capture his own son?”
“Killian was always a dick, Kite. Nothing he does surprises me.” Leda reaches for another log, but I step back, holding tight to my armful of wood until she looks up, meeting my gaze. As soon as our eyes connect, hers soften. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be insensitive. I know he’s your dad. If my dad kidnapped me, I’d be hurt, too.”
“I’m not hurt, I’m pissed,” I say, though that doesn’t feel right either. I’m somewhere between enraged and drowning in guilt, but the specifics don’t matter. “I thought he was dead. He should be dead.” I glance over my shoulder to where Dust is pretending to be very interested in the soup selection. “I should have stayed to make sure of it.”
Leda takes another log. “No, you shouldn’t have. That’s not your job, Kite. Your job is to live your life, not atone for the mess your father made of his.”
“Chicken Noodle or Homemade Pot Roast?” Dust asks.
I clench my jaw, fighting the urge to demand he turn around and tell me what he’s really thinking. Dust is like family in some ways, but in others, he’s still my superior officer. The Resistance may be decimated, but Dust and I are alive, and he outranks me.
Having your shitty excuse for a father show his evil side in front of a friend is bad enough. Having it happen in front of someone who’s entrusted you with top-secret information and the life of the only woman who can save the planet is something else altogether. But I have no idea if Dust regrets the decision to add the son of a Kin Born traitor to our mission. He’s gotten good at shielding. These days, I only know what he’s feeling when he wants me to know, and right now he’s locked up tight.
“Pot roast,” I say, handing over the last of the wood.
