by Scott, Helen
“It is where my powers are concerned,” I retorted, but though I wanted to argue, I didn’t. I crawled on my knees, turning so the rays of the moon were in my line of sight as I shoved my fingers in the soil.
Gideon mimicked me and, crouching opposite me, his hands burrowed in the soil as we stared at one another. “I’ll charge the earth. Use it against them.”
“The Headmaster or Lee?”
He gnawed on his bottom lip a second, and it was at times like these I was grateful he was our de facto head. Making all the decisions was shitty. It definitely wasn't something I envied. The mantel of power was something I willingly handed over to him.
Cade seemed to have an issue with Gideon being in charge, but considering my brother was balls deep in our Sixth, his opinion wasn't important here.
Damn his fucking hide.
“Lee. He’s a pervert,” Raven called out.
“You already fucked with him once today,” Barclay retorted, nudging him in the side.
“So? The creep deserves it.”
Gideon pursed his lips. “I think you should visit Barbie.”
I cocked a brow at that. “Weaken her powers?”
“Yes. Exhaust her.”
I smirked. “Gladly.”
Closing my eyes as the moon’s rays washed over me, I allowed myself to fall into a light meditative trance. I focused on each of my limbs, concentrated on my breath, on the wax and wane of it, just as the moon, the source of my powers, waxed and waned.
As my brain disconnected, I felt myself walk. My spirit rising from the earthly connection I had, something that was compounded by the way I'd dug my hands into the loamy forest floor, as I moved into a whole other realm.
This one didn’t contain much color.
There wasn’t much of a landscape, either.
I saw spirits like most people saw cars on the road.
Around me, in a tight cluster, were my brothers. Not only did I recognize their spirits, I knew them, and I leapfrogged from the union we had and used that to find Cade.
When I did, though his spirit wasn’t asleep, I could reach out and touch him. Doing so enabled me to feel Marcella and a part of me was relieved to know they were together, even if Cade was, as Raven had predicted, popping some cherry, while we planned Marcella’s safe-keeping.
In this realm where I walked, there were no walls.
There was no furniture. There was only energy.
It wasn’t gaseous or viscous, it was just a source of light, each one with a trace that led me to their identity. This only worked if I’d met them in real life, and my abilities allowed me to discern a stranger from someone known to me by the color. The light of someone I knew was golden, while a stranger glowed white.
My brothers glowed silver.
And Marcella?
She was a ruby red.
Seeing that bright effervescence startled me, almost enough to jerk me out of my trance. Whatever I’d expected to see on this plane, it hadn’t been that. I wanted to study it more, wanted to roll around in it like Barclay would roll around in a pile of freshly raked leaves in his other form. But I couldn’t.
I had a purpose.
I was protecting that scarlet energy for future study.
A shiver racked my spine as I forced myself away from her, forced myself to ignore that dazzling glow that so enticed me, and headed out among the crowds of spirits who lived in Westbrook.
Some lights were denser than others, which represented age. They’d had more time for those glows to mature, which meant I was looking for less dense, wispier entities.
As I traipsed from spiritual body to spiritual body, I eventually found the one I was looking for.
She was deep in sleep, and when I pressed my energy to hers, I slipped into the depths of the female’s subconscious.
That part of the mind was where I peddled my trade and where I could fuck with someone’s identity. Make them deliriously happy or deviously enraged.
Here was where the power of suggestion also came into play.
I could drop a few words into their mind, which would mess with their day. Mess with their fucking year if I so chose.
But with Lily Addams, deeper urges were encouraging me to act.
I hadn’t connected with Marcella like the others had, not without her accidentally triggering the union between us, but I’d been there both times Lily had cheated during her public challenges.
The knowledge that the Academy could have dumped her on us had the power to fill me with rage, because I’d known that would be the case. My acceptance of their duplicity, my expectation that we would be treated this way, just pissed me off. And yet, through all that, it was both a relief to know Marcella was ours, but also a major source of concern.
Now I had someone we wanted, someone who wasn’t being forced on us by the pursangs, and I wanted to safeguard her even more and hurt this bitch who had cheated, so bluntly and blatantly, to force a merger with us.
Her dream, when I found it, was a nice one.
I saw her on a beach, of all places, riding a horse.
It was like something from a perfume commercial. The wind was in her hair, the horse’s mane flew back with each stride the beast took, and the spray of the surf churned around the creature’s legs.
It was majestic, it was beautiful, and it was time to destroy it.
I’d never questioned my powers. Never sought the source of them or why I could do what I did, and now was no different.
I eyed the scene before me, studied it minutely, and began to tweak it. I didn’t automatically know the source of someone’s fears, only experimenting enabled me to discern that.
Firstly, I started with the sky. A hurricane quickly appeared on the horizon, and Lily found herself being pelted by rain, which quickly morphed into hailstones. She dragged on the reins, hauling the beast to a halt as she stood in the stirrups, staring blindly at the storm with bewilderment. Her face paled when it came closer, closer still. She dropped into the saddle, silently urging the horse into movement, but the beast was stuck fast.
If anything, that was an understatement, for his hooves were caught in quicksand.
With each struggling movement, the horse tumbled deeper into the non-existent pit that was a figment of our twisted imaginations.
As she leaped off the back of the beast, without even a backward glance at the screaming creature—a sight that sealed her fate in my eyes alone because she didn’t even have compassion in a dream to help the animal—she began to pound up the sand toward a promenade which had appeared from nowhere. As she moved, ants began to crawl up her legs. She slapped and jerked with each loping step she took, and then the sand began to pull at her again, just as it had the horse.
Her yell was more outraged than scared, however. And that wasn’t what I wanted.
I wanted her terrified.
I needed to find the source of her fears.
Releasing the call of the sand, I watched her scurry onto the decking. A telephone box popped into appearance and she ran to it, but when she did, the phone disintegrated in her hand. I watched as she stared at it, then back at the storm. She freed herself from the box then headed out onto the deck once more. Another telephone box appeared, she went inside, screamed again as the phone disintegrated. She left again, swifter now, and another box appeared, but she didn’t go inside this one, instead, she carried on running. Except, this time, there was no deck.
A scream escaped her as she tumbled over an edge, slamming into the side of the cliff as she dangled high above the rocks below. Though she was naturally fearful for her life, there was another note to it.
I heard it, and a part of me reveled.
I freely admitted that though I wasn’t as dark as Raven, that didn’t mean I was totally innocent. I truly identified more with the light, but I found a deep satisfaction in knowing she was scared, and prayed that her terror was greater than the fear she’d engendered in Marcella over the course of their Sixth’s time at
Westbrook.
Allowing her to find a foothold, I watched, utterly satisfied, as she saved herself. The minute her feet were under her, the minute she felt secure, I let the rockface start to crumble once more. With another scream, she sank, plunging dozens of feet in seconds.
But I didn’t allow the end to near.
She didn’t fear death, she feared falling. Being out of control.
Well, little did she know, she had a whole handful of that coming her way.
The fall was endless. I lengthened it even as, every fifty or so feet, I allowed her to find a way to save herself. Each time, she plunged faster, harder. And I smiled as her fear engulfed her like flames.
Leaving her to fall, to constantly and endlessly tumble down toward the ocean, saving herself even as she began to fear for her life, I slid from the dream and meandered through the part of her energy that encompassed her subconscious. I sensed the crumbling of her reserves as her inability to control her fate and her own safety fucked with her head.
“A door is a cliff. One foot over a doorjamb is the start of this drop into the unknown,” I whispered the words into her mind, watching as the fear was born and then cemented into place as she continued tumbling over into nothing, down, down, further putting pressure on the old fear, making it newer, fresher. More powerful. Until she'd dream this dream every night, for an eternity if I so wished it.
A whimper escaped her, and I realized it wasn’t from dream Lily, but the real one.
The sound disconcerted me because I didn’t hear on this realm. Didn't see, couldn’t touch, didn’t hear, and couldn’t really taste or smell.
My senses were different here. Augmented in some ways, but weak in others.
The whimper jerked me from my trance like nothing else could. When I did, I sucked down a sharp breath and realized I was back in the forest with my brothers.
“What is it?” Gideon demanded, and I remembered his powers had given mine an extra edge. That was why I’d been able to twist the knife by giving her more and more footholds in the cliff face, and had managed to urge the ants and insects from the sand.
“I heard a noise come from Lily.”
“What the fuck? You can’t hear when you’re walking,” Raven stated, his tone both calm and riled. Calm, because he didn’t believe in stressing until he knew the facts, but riled enough to know he wasn’t going to like whatever I had to say.
“We can’t hear when we’re walking,” I corrected gruffly, knowing it to be true. With his talents, his senses weren’t in control, just like mine weren’t.
“Yeah, we can’t,” he confirmed. “So, why did you?”
“Because of our bond with Marcella?” I hazarded a guess. “My abilities were a thousand times stronger than before. Even with your help, Gideon. She’s uniting our powers.”
Gideon blinked. “Interesting.”
Barclay snorted. “No shit, Sherlock.”
I ignored them both and sank back onto my heels, resting even as I watched the moon’s rays begin to die as a new day was born.
“We should go back to the Academy,” I murmured softly, aware they’d fallen into an uneasy silence to allow me to acclimate to this realm once more.
“We should,” Gideon confirmed.
“What did you do to her?” Raven asked as he helped me to my feet. I wasn’t weak, wasn’t decrepit, but if anyone knew what it felt like to be returned to this realm, especially forcibly, it was him and Cade.
I leaned on him, grateful for the support, and together, we began to walk through the forest toward the Range Rover. As it appeared in the distance, I was relieved to notice its presence. All around me the forest was starting to stir.
Night was coming to an end and with it, the waking world was beginning to come into power. I was the weakest of my brethren in that sense. Though in contrast to a human, I was strong and powerful whatever the time, but in comparison to my brothers, I was weakest during the day.
The night was my kingdom, and I reigned here.
The animals began to waken, and I could sense them, felt their tension as we meandered through their territory. This was not our place, and I felt it keenly.
A part of me wondered if Marcella would be able to shield us from the animals’ knowledge, and if she was capable of that by weaving shadows, what kind of gifts would she be bringing to the battlefield when we were an Alpha unit?
But, the truth was, I wasn’t capable of thinking about anything other than putting one foot in front of the other. Because even that was incredibly difficult.
Underfoot, the loam of the Earth, which had enabled me to take charge of Lily’s subconscious with the ease of a knife through butter on a summer’s day, now seemed to pull at me as the sand had pulled at Lily’s every step.
I wasn’t experiencing the same impediments I’d put on her, but I was badly fatigued, and more than ready to collapse into my bed.
I’d expended more energy in that one nightmare than I had in the past weeks of being in the Academy.
Being dragged awake because of Lily’s whimper had only made it worse, it was like having the coldest of water dumped on your face while in a deep sleep. Only now that our vehicle was in my line of sight, did I have the energy to murmur, “She fears the loss of control.”
“So?” Raven demanded. “That comes as no surprise. Those mean girls always fucking do.”
My lips curved at that, because he wasn’t exactly wrong. “So, I’ve given her something to fear. In a dream,” I explained, “our fears manifest in ways that don’t exactly make sense on this realm.”
“You’re telling someone who already knows this shit,” he grumbled. “Get to the good stuff.”
I had to laugh, even as Barclay retorted, “You’re so fucking bloodthirsty, Rav.”
My walker brother grinned at the shifter, but he just shrugged. “Comes from watching you tear into a hare.”
Barclay wrinkled his nose. “I don’t do that. My wolf does.”
“Semantics,” Raven countered, and Barclay flipped him the bird.
“Children,” Gideon inserted as he unlocked the Range Rover’s doors. “Let’s behave. I’m curious as to what Keiran did to the bitch.”
“In dreams, when we fall, it’s because we feel like we’re out of control in our real lives. I just exacerbated that.”
“How?” Gideon asked, jumping behind the wheel, leaving Raven to help me clamber into the backseat like I was two centuries old.
“I had her falling down a cliff, over and over again. She managed to save herself, grasp control back, only to fall once more. Then I programmed her to believe that every time she goes through a door, it’s like flinging herself off a cliff.”
In the middle of my statement, Gideon had started the ignition. But as I finished speaking, the silence in the car was absolute.
Raven was the first to break it, and when he did, he laughed. “Keir, I swear. You say I’m dark? That’s one twisted motherfucking thing to do.”
Gideon slid his hand behind the passenger seat’s headrest and tilted back to stare at me. “He’s not wrong. She won’t be able to leave her bedroom for a few days.”
I smirked at him. “At least.” Cocking my brow, I murmured, “Isn't that what we wanted?”
His grin, when it came, was slow. But that was all the confirmation I needed.
Phase one of keeping Marcella safe was underway, and our Sixth didn't even know it.
9
Gideon
The ride back to Westbrook had been largely silent as we all processed what had happened, not just with Marcella, but what she and Cade had been up to, as well as what I had helped Keiran with.
Barbie deserved every millisecond of terror, I knew that down to the tips of my toes, but my brain had already moved on to how to deal with Master Lee and Headmaster Winterborn, not that we'd seen that old bastard since we first met him.
I helped drag a mostly unconscious Keiran upstairs and into our suite of rooms. The guy had overdone it with
his walk through Barbie's dreams. I couldn't blame him, though, at this point, the need to ensure Marcella’s safety was riding us all hard. It was an integral part of a newly formed Alpha team. One of the urges that we all got, no matter our heritage or skill level, was to keep her safe. It happened with every team in the beginning, and was usually why the joining ceremonies were so closely monitored. If something triggered these instincts in the next couple weeks, then whatever it was would have hell to pay.
A darker side of me wished we hadn't messed with Barbie's dreams just so we would have an excuse for taking her down, permanently, for attacking Marcella.
The rational part of my brain, the part not twisted by the bond, reminded me that if that happened then the bond would be exposed and, most likely, we would all be executed. Unsanctioned unions were not tolerated, not when you had centuries-old vampires who specialized in long-term politics manipulating things behind the scenes like master puppeteers.
I sighed as I relaxed on my almost too small bed for a moment before we needed to make an appearance in the training halls. There was no testing today, but we had to appear like we were keeping our options open. The amount of power Marcella had to be wielding to accidentally trigger the bond was staggering, and now that she was connected to us, her power would only grow.
Part of me couldn't wait to see how she would develop, but the rest of me wanted to run away as far and as fast as possible with her and my brotherhood, so we didn't have to fight everyone. I knew even if we did run, they would find us., They always did. The Council even had a special brotherhood that was dedicated to that purpose alone, bringing in deserters and culling lone wolves, so to speak.
Salsangs were not tolerated outside the bounds of our positions within brotherhoods, and if we, or our brotherhood, strayed too far from the path, then another brotherhood was sent to deal with us. All it took was a single command, a flick of the wrist, and lives would be wiped out.
The door to our suites banged open, and I could sense Cade as he walked in, dripping with the scent of sex. The asshole hadn't even had the courtesy to shower after his seduction of our Sixth, even after Barclay had taken clothes over to him. Just the scent of her coming off of him made my dick hard, never mind the images of her naked in the moonlight, which still haunted my mind. I wanted nothing more than to bury myself between those lush pale thighs of hers, to watch her tight red curls part for me. Maker, I needed to get my mind under control, or I wasn't going to be able to leave my room at all, never mind going down to the training halls.
