There was a thought.
Either way, they had a connection. An inexplicable and frustrating one, but a bond Sylvia couldn’t deny.
Was he coming to meet her at all? Had that been a lie? Had he changed his mind?
Or was he in trouble? The possibility of Sebastian being in peril hadn’t occurred to Sylvia before and she didn’t like it at all. She thought of him as invincible—irksome but invincible—but there had been vampires killed at the coven just days before.
In daylight, Sebastian was vulnerable, whether she liked it or not.
What if something had happened to him? How would she ever know?
The book!
Sylvia was already wearing her coat and had what was left of Maeve’s book in her purse. She pulled it out and turned to the page about vampires. Sebastian’s name was still there—so he was alive but standing her up.
The sky was getting dark and the wind was blowing, as if a storm was coming. She looked out the window of her apartment over the street and saw Caleb leave, the wolf shifter sparing a glance back at the townhouse before briskly walking away. Sylvia pulled back from the window. He was headed uptown, in the direction of Bones. Did he know that she hadn’t left for the meeting yet?
She went to her terrace, the one that overlooked the courtyard behind the house, since that was where Sebastian tended to appear. There was no sign of him. She even went out and looked over the rooftops, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. No luck.
She looked down into the garden, wondering again whether she should move into Eithne’s apartment. The woman she’d believed was her aunt had died, leaving everything to her, but Sylvia hadn’t cleaned out Eithne’s belongings yet. She tended the garden in the courtyard, but hadn’t been able to bring herself to change anything. She liked her apartment in the attic of the townhouse. If she moved down to Eithne’s place, it would only make sense to rent out her own apartment to someone else. She just wasn’t ready for more change, so she delayed over the move. It was probably inevitable and definitely was practical but Sylvia couldn’t face it yet.
She missed Eithne. She’d been trying to figure out how to help the Others in their battle against Maeve, but every attempt she made at spell-casting had failed. The best she could do was produce a tiny red light, one that quickly fizzled out. She’d tried conjuring and she’d tried summoning the dead. She’d tried scrying and she’d tried fortune telling. She’d tried to cast protective spells and even had beckoned to the Fae, all without success. She’d taunted the magick and challenged it, daring it to play with her, but nothing. There was either some detail missing in Eithne’s journals or Sylvia had no magickal abilities at all. She suspected she needed a tutor, but didn’t know where to find one. A Google search wasn’t going to turn up a contender.
It was depressing to be so useless.
She looked again for Sebastian, but there was still no sign of him. She had to leave immediately to have any chance of making the meeting on time. Sylvia grabbed a pair of gloves and pulled out her subway fare, tucking it inside her right glove, then went to the door.
She’d just put her hand on the knob when she saw a shimmer in the periphery of her vision. She turned slowly to look and found a man in the middle of her apartment, a man who hadn’t been there before. He had a glow around him and seemed to be transparent—she could see through his figure to the table behind him. He had dark hair and the clearest blue eyes. She guessed he was about her age, maybe thirty or a little younger. He was dressed in ragged rough clothing. Was he poor or from another era? He smiled as he offered Sylvia something long and white.
She took it, amazed to see that it was a feather and it was real. It had to have come from a large bird, given its size, and it was radiantly white. It gleamed in her hand, so luminous that it could have come from another world. She looked back at him with wonder, uncertain what it meant.
His mouth moved and she heard a word echo in her thoughts, even though he made no audible sound.
Semyaza.
Sylvia pulled out her phone and made a note of it, just in case she forgot the word. It had to be important. It seemed familiar but not quite.
She looked up and his mouth moved again.
Sebastian.
Sylvia frowned at the echo in her thoughts. The man smiled. Then he waved and vanished, as if he’d never been there at all. He hadn’t been her imagination, though, because she still had the white feather.
Semyaza and Sebastian.
Had he been giving her a clue about Sebastian’s truth?
Sylvia decided to go to Reliquary and ask Sebastian herself, instead of attending the meeting at Bones. The Others argued so often that she doubted she’d miss much. She could stop in at the bar afterward. She hurried down the stairs, looking forward to seeing her vampire despite his likely mood.
Semyaza. That name sounded familiar, but Sylvia couldn’t quite place it.
Sara was glad to be home. There was something about being back in Michigan in the house she and Quinn shared outside of Traverse City that made her feel safer. She’d enjoyed the visit to Kristofer’s farm and that Quinn, the Smith of the Pyr, had been able to repair the scales of both Kristofer and Rhys, but she was always happiest when at home.
She could feel the icy tingle of Quinn’s dragonsmoke barrier around the house, thanks to her psychic sensitivities. She welcomed its familiarity, as well as that of their five sons arguing good-naturedly over the rules of the game they were playing in the family room. Quinn was in his studio, replicating the gloves he’d made for Donovan years before. She’d cleaned up after dinner—a chicken from a local organic farm, roasted with all the trimmings, which had disappeared with amazing speed—with the help of the older boys.
After the boys were in bed, Sara made herself a cup of herbal tea and carried it into the study. She planned to choose a book blindly from one of the shelves, which was a favorite game of hers. She ran a bookstore in town, but here at the house, all of the books were her keepers. She liked to rediscover her old favorites randomly like this.
She scanned the shelves before making her choice. There was one book that hadn’t been pushed in all the way. It stuck out a bit, reminding Sara of the way her Aunt Magda’s ghost had chosen reading materials for her during her firestorm with Quinn. She smiled and sipped her tea. Sometimes she missed Magda’s original store in Ann Arbor.
Sara took the hint and chose that book. It was a hardbound book without a dust jacket, bound in dark blue cloth. There was a title embossed on the spine in silver, a title she was certain hadn’t been there a moment before.
The Swan Maiden.
Sara frowned. She knew she’d never read this story. Was it a favorite of Quinn’s that he’d added to her collection? That seemed unlikely. She opened the book again, noticing a torn piece of paper that was obviously being used as a bookmark. Had that been there before? The hair prickled on the back of her neck and she wondered whether Magda’s ghost was back.
There was something written on it and she held it to the light, curious.
The ice dragon summons frost and cold,
His power is a force to behold.
He can thaw the ice of a frozen heart
To offer a lost soul a new start.
His firestorm burns fierce and white
Its radiance a beacon in the darkest night.
But can it bring hope to that doomed soul?
Or persuade his lost mate to become whole?
If the dragon wins the swan maiden’s trust
It will be Fae not Others who are turned to dust.
The future will be theirs, once allied
If the assassin joins the dragon’s side.
A prophecy!
Quinn had said one of the Pyr was having a firestorm on their drive home. He’d admitted to feeling it ignite when Sara noticed he was driving more quickly. He’d said it was distant, but he’d still wanted to get them home sooner.
He hadn’t mentioned it again, but she hadn’t asked.
She’d been hoping for a prophecy and here it was.
As usual, it didn’t make a lot of sense to her right away. She’d show it to Quinn when he came in from his studio. She didn’t want to interrupt his work, since it was urgent that he finish the gloves for his fellow Pyr as quickly as possible. She guessed that he’d work late and glanced down at the book again.
It looked like a fairy tale.
It had to be important, maybe relevant to the firestorm, since the prophecy had been within it.
She sat down, sipped her tea, and started to read.
Once upon a time, there was a king who dearly loved his wife. Their marriage had been arranged to further the fortunes of both families, but they had fallen in love immediately and, each day, their love grew only deeper. The king’s realm was in the distant north, an empire of ice and wind and stone, but his beloved wife filled his palace with light, joy and warmth. The queen loved swans and the king admired her gentleness with them. She fed the birds as they migrated and he would often awaken and look out the palace window to see his wife, the wind in her hair, feeding wild swans by hand in the courtyard. During their courtship, he had changed his standard to that of a white swan in flight. Once she’d become his wife, he delighted in adding swans to every corner of the palace. The canopy over their bed was crested with a carved swan in flight. There were swans carved in stone and in wood, woven in tapestries and created in tiles on the floor. The queen was surrounded by swans and this gave her tremendous joy...
Herding cats had nothing on trying to build consensus amongst Others. Caleb, leader of the New York wolf shifters was nearly at his wits’ end. The bar, Bones, where the Others met was closed for the night, but it was packed with furious shape shifters, each one determined to have his or her say. Pandemonium reigned, no matter what Caleb said or did.
He understood that the sudden slaughter of so many of their fellows had spooked even those shifters most determined to fight against Maeve—and those who had their doubts were ready to surrender.
Caleb had to wonder whether any of them had tried to make a deal with the Dark Queen already.
The Pyr were comparatively quiet, even though a large group of them were in attendance. Caleb had met Arach, Drake, Theo and Rhys before, and on this night, he’d also been introduced to Thorolf and Niall. Rhys’ mate, Lila, was with them, as well, and Caleb could smell that she was expecting a child. More of her sister selkies had come with Nyssa, and at least two of them were pregnant as was Nyssa herself. The scent of hormones was a distraction Caleb didn’t particularly need. The soft femininity of the selkies provoked his protectiveness and he hoped he didn’t lose his temper as a result. At least the selkies and Pyr sat together, watching instead of arguing.
Caleb was becoming a fan of those who kept quiet and listened.
The bartender, Mel, was back, much to Murray’s obvious relief, and bossing the owner of the bar as if she’d never been gone. Caleb knew he hadn’t imagined the way she’d turned immediately when the Pyr arrived, or how her gaze had clung to Theo. That Pyr nodded once in her direction, a brief acknowledgement considering that they’d been trapped in Fae together, but she’d turned away so quickly that she spilled a beer. Caleb didn’t like that Mel still had a red string on her wrist. It suggested to him that she might be drawn back into Fae again, and to his thinking, the fewer times anyone visited that realm, the better.
“Let’s call this meeting to order!” Murray shouted, but the din only diminished a little. The dwarf got up to stand on the bar and shouted from there. “Order, already! Let’s talk, not argue!”
“I need another beer,” a bear-shifter said. “With a shooter.”
“Make that two,” another bear-shifter said beside him. “It’s just wrong what happened to Ivan and Natasha. I never want to see anything like that again.”
“I can’t stop seeing it,” the first bear-shifter agreed and they threw back their shooters in unison.
“Booze isn’t going to help a single thing,” said a woman from the doorway. Caleb winced in recognition of those cold tones and turned slowly, dreading who he would see.
Sure enough, it was Wynter Olson, the younger sister of Kirk, the alpha of the Alaskan wolf shifters who’d been slaughtered along with the rest of his pack the previous Saturday.
“Wynter Olson,” he said, wishing it could have been anyone else, and she glared at him.
“Don’t tell me that you thought I’d stay home and catch up on my knitting,” she said, moving with purpose toward the bar. The crowd had fallen silent to stare at her. “You know I’m not interested in traditional gender roles, Caleb, and this is war.”
Wynter was tall and slender, with black hair cut very short. Her eyes were a grey-blue, while her lashes were dark and long. Her skin was so fair that her lips looked red, even without make-up. Her movements were decisive and tinged with impatience, and she braced her hands on the bar to eye Mel. Animosity rolled off her in waves, just as it always had, and Caleb wished she had stayed home—whether she’d knit or not.
There was something about Wynter Olson that riled up males everywhere she went. Most hated her. Some wanted her. She challenged and defied them all and seemed to enjoy every moment of it.
“How many of you saw the battle up close and personal?” Wynter said as she walked into the bar, hips swinging. Caleb saw a veritable army of women behind her. They were wary but determined and most led small children by the hand.
The children were mostly boys.
Caleb inhaled deeply and recognized that the children were wolf shifters. These were the mates, then, the women whose wolf shifters had been killed. Judging by their expressions, they weren’t in the frame of mind to forgive that easily—or to stand aside and let others take vengeance.
Just what they needed in this war: two dozen well-intentioned but vulnerable women, each one with at least one young child. Caleb rubbed his brow.
Wynter Olson was making even more trouble than could have been expected. She’d brought these women from Alaska to New York, and they weren’t going to return home without a fight. He hoped at least some of them managed to return home at all.
Meanwhile, there was a rumble of assent to Wynter’s question.
“I saw Kirk’s murder,” Wynter said. “I saw that Fae warrior cut out his heart and eat it. My alpha, my brother, my leader! I’m not going to stand by and let anything like this happen again! Are you?”
Fists were pounded on tables and Murray glanced to Caleb.
Caleb didn’t like that the leadership of the meeting had been effectively stolen from himself and Murray. He raised his voice. “For those of you who don’t know, Wynter Olson is the sole surviving wolf shifter of the Alaskan pack.”
“I prefer to be called alpha of the Alaskan pack,” Wynter countered, her voice hard.
Caleb was startled. “But you’re the only wolf shifter left.”
“Which means there’s no one to remind me that I’m female and thus unqualified to be alpha,” she replied with a snarl. “No other wolf shifter left standing means I win.” She gestured to the women whose features were set with resolve. “And I have a pack already, the one you all insisted I didn’t deserve to lead.” The women gathered behind Wynter looked even more resolute than they had on arrival.
Whispers passed through the group gathered at the bar.
Caleb didn’t know what to say, so he shared the news with the Others. “Twenty-three of our kind were lost in Alaska,” he said. “And seven here in Manhattan.”
“They weren’t lost,” Wynter said. “We didn’t forget them in our shopping cart at Walmart.” She gave Caleb a hard stare as her words elicited a few chuckles. “They were slaughtered in our lair by the Fae.”
Caleb wondered whether Wynter meant to challenge him for authority over the New York wolf shifters, too. He glared at her and she took a step closer, shimmering slightly blue as their gazes locked.
“Fighting between ourselves is just what she wants,” Mel said, appea
ring between them and holding up her hands. “I think we should take a closer look at Wynter’s suggestion.”
“What suggestion?” Caleb asked.
“It’s shifters that the Dark Queen is hunting,” Mel said. “And those with some skill with magick.” She gestured to the women. “What about the mortals who have a stake in this battle, too? What about the mothers and mates? What about the allies you all have, the ones who aren’t listed in the Dark Queen’s inventory?”
“It’s too dangerous,” protested someone and an argument began again.
“While we’re all safe?” Micah asked suddenly, appearing suddenly in the shadows. Several Others in his vicinity jumped in surprise. The other vampires in his coven hovered behind him, shadows against the darkness—but shadows with glittering eyes. “We lost five vampires in that attack,” he said. “That never happens. We are the predators. It’s only when we hunt each other that there’s such carnage. No one is safe.”
“I’m now the last medusa,” the hostess of the bar said bitterly. “My cousin Hypatia is gone.” Many Others murmured their sympathy and several touched her shoulder.
“Plus four bear-shifters,” said the one who had ordered a beer. “It makes me sick to think of how our numbers have dwindled.” He drained the beer, and then another shooter, pushing the glasses across the bar in a silent request for refills. His companion did the same.
“One selkie,” Nyssa contributed.
“Three djinns,” said one djinn, who was rotating between his human form and that of a wisp of smoke in his agitation. Another djinn waved a sheet of paper, one that must have come from Maeve’s book.
“Another two demons,” Rosanne said, also holding up a sheet of paper. “I found this in my trailer after the attack at the Circus of Wonders.”
“Ivan, Natasha and their twin sons,” the bar shifter said, shaking his head. His companion slapped a sheet of paper on the bar and Caleb could see that there were names crossed out of a list. The bear shifters ordered another round.
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