by Jaya Moon
Under their blue light, I felt exposed and took a step back as I sought out Tallow again. His face was cast to the sky, his eyes bright, like his soul had been illuminated and shone through.
My attention drew away from him and back to Dore. A single soul began to drop from the mass above him. It twisted and turned in the air, moving like a leaf falling from a tree, and came to land on Dore’s outstretched hand. He looked down at his palm as more souls began to drift down onto him.
“I’ve heard they talk,” Mox whispered.
“And say what?” I murmured, mesmerized.
“Things only the dead see.”
I didn’t know what that meant and wondered how Mox knew, but I stayed silent, watching as Dore became cloaked in souls until only his glowing brown eyes remained. They narrowed as though he listened intently to whatever they told him.
The souls that didn’t fall on Dore were clustering into a massive ball. They rose higher and higher, their light intensifying until they became like a blue sun. The closer they drew together, the brighter the light became until they were as tight as a clenched fist. Then, like a firework, they exploded apart.
The souls rained down onto the kin who still had their heads lifted and their mouths now open. I thought it was in awe of the spectacle—I knew I had my mouth open too—only to realize they had done it on purpose as the souls snaked into the kins’ mouths, turning their eyes an iridescent blue.
Pulling off their robes, they transformed into their animal forms and started running in a circle around the glade while those who could fly began to circle in the sky above. The souls that hadn’t entered the kin spun at the top.
Their speed grew until they moved impossibly fast and became a blur, and when I thought they couldn’t go any quicker, their speed increased. Those on the ground came closer together while those in the air fanned out. They created a vacuum like a tornado. Like a—
“Mox!” I didn’t have time to tell him what I’d realized. A soul right in front of us—in front of me—flew into my mouth when I gasped his name.
11
Images of all the kin in their human form flashed through my mind. The pictures came fast and faster. There were so many, my mind so full of them and the images so bright, I clasped my head, squeezed my eyes shut, and howled in pain.
“Mox! Make it stop! Make them stop!”
But Mox wasn’t with me anymore. I stood in the heart of a vortex created by the kin and I had no idea how to escape it. I wasn’t holding anyone’s hand that I could let go of and break the connection. The soul, deep inside me somewhere, had drawn me in and I didn’t know how to get it out.
“Please! Stop!”
Something drew slowly, gently across my forehead and hair, like a parent’s soothing stroke after a nightmare, and with it the pain disappeared.
I opened my eyes to daylight. I no longer stood on the fringe of the forest. I was in the center of the glade. The sun hung high and bright above me, and the sky was a brilliant blue echoing the color of the souls. Surrounding me the forest stood, but it was in motion, streaming in greens and browns—the edge of the vortex spinning.
From it stepped a form lined in blue. It struggled against the pull of the vortex, wisps of it pulled back into the swirl. It fought, determined to move toward me, and as it made headway, what I saw became clearer.
It was human.
A man.
Dad.
In a burst of tears, I ran and dove at him, wanting to wrap my arms around, hold him and never let go, but I fell through him like he wasn’t there at all. He was comprised of millions of small bright blue particles, like motes of dust. Even though I couldn’t hold him, there was no mistaking him. His scent surrounded me. I’d forgotten it. Earth mixed with his nightly glass of red wine and a hint of fire smoke.
“Megsy. You’ve found your way here.” He said it with happiness and relief as though he’d been waiting for me. “You’ve found your way here,” he said again, concern clouding his tone.
“Why are you here?” A place where only the kin came.
“I come here as all the souls of the kin do. To speak of things only the dead see to those who they loved and left behind.”
I didn’t know what he meant and didn’t have time to think about it. Memories of the last moment I’d seen him flooded back, before the bear had taken him—all three of them—from me. “I didn’t know what to do. I shouldn’t have run.” Sobs choked my throat. “I miss you, Dad.”
“You couldn’t have done anything to save us. That fate was ours. This is yours.”
Fate? This? “What do you mean?” I had a thousand questions and they came out in a rush. “Did you know the kin? This place? Did Mom? This strange thing happens when I hold a shifter’s hand, and Tallow said maybe I—”
“Time,” he interrupted. “We don’t have much time.” He stepped back from me, and only then I saw that every second that passed wisps of him were being pulled back into the vortex. He was disappearing before my very eyes. “There are important things you need to know. You are destined to be part of this world.”
“The world of the kin?”
More of him pulled back into the vortex. “Yes.” His voice sounded strange. Thin. He glanced over his shoulder as though he’d heard something or searched for someone as more of him fell away.
“What’s your connection to them, Dad? What’s Mom’s?”
“As a soul, I can’t tell you what the world still wants you to discover, but you’ll get your answers soon.”
No. I wasn’t going to accept that answer because it wasn’t one. I needed to know.
“Too little time. I have to show you something much more important. I’m sorry, Megsy. I love you. I wish I could hold you one more time.”
He fell apart before me, his blue particles dropping in the final rain of his existence before they were swept up and away into the vortex.
“Dad. Dad.”
His voice was all around me. “Remember one thing. Just like allies can be found in unlikely places so, too, can foes.”
Something moved at the edge of the vortex. For a moment I thought he had found a way to come back, but it was low and small. As it pulled itself out of the spinning, it became solid and wasn’t blue. It appeared real—a mountain lion cub.
“Savannah?”
The cub ran straight toward me at the sound of her name.
This is what I needed to see? What was my father telling me? That I needed to save Savannah? Just like I thought my mother wanted me to.
The cub reached my feet and stared up at me with her soul-blue eyes. I hesitated, wondering what I should do before I reached down to pick her up. As my finger touched a single strand of her fur, the entire forest erupted into a fireball that blew the trees apart, and with it, me.
12
“Megs? Megs, can you hear me?” A hand squeezed my arm while another brushed hair away from my face. “Megs? Open your eyes.”
Mox?
My eyelids were so heavy. I half opened them before they shut again.
“Come on, Megs.” Mox stroked my face with the backs of his fingers. “Open your eyes, beautiful.”
I forced them open. The glade had gone. It was nighttime, and above me I could make out the shape of a massive tree with a platform high up and deep within the branches and leaves. Tallow’s nest?
“Thank Christ.” Mox leaned over me. I couldn’t see his expression, but the relief in his voice was clear. “Are you all right?”
All right? I’d been blown apart by fire. I’d found my father and lost him again.
“One minute you were standing next to me, then suddenly your eyes turned blue and you dropped to the ground like a sack of stones.” He said the words fast, his voice edged with panic. “What happened to you?”
Happened? How would I explain what had happened when I didn’t understand it myself? “I was dragged into the kin’s vortex. I saw… I spoke…”
Mox made soothing sounds, a “shhh” like th
e sea, as though I’d woken from a bad dream and he wanted to make everything better. But it hadn’t been a dream. What had happened to me? How could my father have been there? What had he said? He came to the glade as all souls of the kin did. What did that mean? He was kin? That couldn’t be true, could it? Maybe I’d misheard him. A shifter? My dad? Did that mean my mom was too, and if she was, why wasn’t she at the glade with him?
“I’m so sorry, Megs,” Mox said interrupting my thoughts. “Every time I’ve watched them I’ve walked away. Nothing like this has ever happened. I’m a moron. I should have thought it through. I hadn’t been thinking about what Tallow told you, that you might be a Guardian—”
“I don’t know what I am,” I snapped as I realized that’s what I should have asked my father. What was I? If he was a shifter, did that mean I was a shifter too? I’d know, wouldn’t I? I’d never changed into anything, and shifters couldn’t enter the minds of kin like I could. So what was I?
And why did he show me Savannah? Was I supposed to help her? Why had everything burst into flames when I’d gone to pick her up?
“Megs?” Mox had been talking, but I hadn’t been listening.
“I’m sorry. I…” I had too many unanswered questions and I didn’t know who would answer them for me. I knew I wasn’t going to come up with solutions on my own. I would wait until morning, seek out Tareese. Perhaps she would be a good person to start with because I didn’t know how Tallow would react if I told him. How would he feel if it turned out I was kin? Would that make him happy or would he think his father could use that fact against me if I didn’t agree to help rescue Savannah? Would the arguments between us start all over again?
“Don’t tell Tallow.” I meant about us going to the glade, but I also meant the things Mox didn’t know.
“I’m not telling Tallow anything,” Mox laughed nervously.
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see Mox’s features. He leaned over me, his brow as furrowed as Tallow’s often was. He wanted answers, but I had none, my mind a fog of all the things I didn’t understand.
“How did we get here?” I asked to change the subject. “The last thing I remember was the glade.”
“I carried you.”
“All that way? In the dark?”
“Chivalrous of me, I know.” He chuckled, but I heard the concern behind his laugh. “I didn’t know how long you were going to be unconscious for, and I couldn’t risk them stopping their spinning and discovering us. Had no way to get you into the nest though. Now you’re conscious, do you think you can climb?”
I took the hand Mox extended and let him help me off the ground. As I came to my feet, all I could think was I didn’t want to be stuck up in Tallow’s nest with silence and darkness and too many thoughts, and it wasn’t as though I’d be able to sleep. “Do shifters drink?”
“Drink?”
“Like, alcohol.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Some do, but if you’re looking for a stash of booze, I’m not sure you’d be in luck. However,” he announced loudly and triumphantly, “I happen to have brought something with me. It’s in the lodge.”
“Let’s have a drink instead.”
He put an arm over my shoulder, drew me in toward him, and kissed my head, reminding me that there were more things than just what had happened at the glade weighing heavily in my mind and heart.
We sat out on the lodge balcony in pools of the green light from the lanterns, gazing at the stars. Mox made me eat something before he let me anywhere near the bottle of whiskey he’d brought with him.
“Give it to me,” I said as he held the bottle high over my head. I had to jump to get it.
The alcohol warmed me from the inside out and slowly I relaxed. It was what I needed—a way to escape all the things swirling in my head. Mox and I talked about inconsequential things and the world of shifters, and the Fallen drifted from my thoughts the more we drank. I unbraided my hair and combed my fingers through it as we spoke. We laughed like old friends—was that what we were now? Friends? I drank more to get rid of that thought.
When we’d consumed all the whiskey, I weaved my way back to Tallow’s tree, Mox trying his best to guide me.
“I can walk on my own,” I objected several times as I stumbled and swayed. “I’m not that drunk.”
“You are,” he kept laughing at me.
“We’re climbing that?” I giggled as I reached the tree, staggering around as I tried to get my eyes to cooperate and focus on the rope ladder that didn’t look anywhere near as sturdy as it had the last time I’d climbed it.
“Yep, up you go.” Mox spanked my backside and my core panged. “Come on, beautiful. Get a move on.”
I grabbed a wrung of the rope ladder with both hands and looked up. It swung. “That’s a looooooong way,” I said far too loudly. “What’d you get me so drunk for?”
I didn’t wait for his answer and started to climb, giggling, half because I was stupidly drunk, and half because I expected at any moment I’d fall off the ladder and break my neck, and somehow that seemed funny to me. Mox stayed at the base of the tree holding the ladder still. Even then, I moved at a snail’s pace.
“Keep climbing slow like that,” Mox called in encouraging tones. “Slower you climb, the longer I can look at your panties.”
“You’re such a creep,” I called back, but heat swelled between my legs.
When I eventually eased myself up through the opening in the floor, I turned and peered down to make sure Mox was behind me. My head spun with vertigo, or maybe from inebriation. I crawled on all fours until I was safely away from the hole before I got up. “Bed,” I stated, staring at the bed and then laughing. Yes, Meghan. It’s a bed.
I intended to get into it and pass out, but then I got it into my head I needed to get undressed first. It took me a long time and a lot of swearing and giggling to untie the knot in the sash of my robe. I let it fall and the robe slipped from my shoulders before unfastening my bra. When I tried to take off my panties, I almost fell over. I steadied myself on the wall, then looked up. At some stage during my disrobing Mox had come up into the treehouse. He watched me with a wide smile. My gaze fell toward his waist and I saw his pants were tented.
“Glad you’re happy to see me.” I giggled. “Sorry, I’m drunk,” I added in the way of apology because there was nothing funny about Mox’s cock. “And naked.” I giggled again.
“Yes. You are. Both.” He grinned. “And you’re also very, very beautiful.”
I wanted him. I wanted him as much as I wanted Tallow. I didn’t know if I should feel guilty for feeling that way. “Mox?”
“Hmmm?”
“I fucked Tallow.”
He laughed loudly but there wasn’t any meanness to it. “I know.”
“So are we just friends now?” At least being drunk had loosened my tongue and I’d asked the one question only he could give me an answer to, an answer I desperately needed right at that moment.
He closed the small gap between us with a couple of steps. “Do you want us to be?”
“No.” There. I’d said it.
“Good.”
His mouth crashed down onto mine and as he kissed me he untied the sash of his robe. After he shucked it off, I felt him pulling at his pants. I grabbed the fabric at his waist and lowered myself as I pulled them down, his cock springing free. Taking his shaft in my hand, I stood and said, “Come on,” pulling him gently like his cock was a leash. I guided him over to the bed and we both climbed on as I still held him.
Him on his knees, me on all fours, I looked up at him, his cock hovering near my mouth.
He raised his eyebrows. “I think I’m going to enjoy this.”
“I know you are.”
As I enveloped the head of his cock in my mouth, Mox hissed. When I twisted my tongue across him, he grabbed a fistful of my hair and knotted it as he groaned my name. I worked my mouth up and down him, keeping one hand around the base of his shaft at first
. He was big and I wasn’t sure I could take his entire length, but his groans and hisses encouraged me, and when I took my hand away and let his cock strain into the back of the throat, I almost gagged as he gasped.
“Jesus.”
Any thought I had that his exclamation was caused by what I was doing faded as he unexpectedly pulled his cock fast from my mouth.
I glanced up at him. He was staring at something, and it wasn’t me.
I turned my head.
Tallow.
Tallow stood naked near the hole in the floor of his nest. I didn’t know how long he’d been watching us, but the thought he’d been there for even a second sobered me right up.
I went to grab at something to cover me, but Mox knelt on the sheets and I couldn’t find anything else within reach, so I slumped onto my backside and drew my knees up to my chest so I was less exposed.
Mox had jumped off the bed and grabbed his robe and pulled it on, but without the sash a wedge of his skin remained exposed, including his rapidly fading erection.
“Tallow. I…” I was mortified.
His brow furrowed deeply and he stared at me wide-eyed in disbelief. When he turned his attention to Mox, his eyes narrowed.
“You prefer him to me?” he asked without looking at me.
“Tallow,” Mox started, obviously thinking he had to do something to come to my aid. “It’s one of those things. You and me, we’ve been down this road in the past.”
Before I could even begin to work out what that meant, Mox continued. “You know how beautiful she is. She’s—”
“She’s different,” Tallow stated, anger lacing his words.
“That’s the thing, you’re right. She is,” Mox said with a sigh. “I know how you feel about her. I know because I can’t stop thinking about her either.”
I tried to process what Mox was saying, but every thought fell away when Tallow returned his focus to me.
