by C. P. Rider
It was neither.
"Where are you? Your Mini is here, the Rezvani is across the street. The bakery was locked up tight until I got here, and there's blood on a table and on the café floor. What the hell, Neely?"
"Hi, Chandra. Don't worry, it's not my blood."
"I know it's not your blood. It's wolf shifter blood."
"You've got a great nose." I sounded a little too cheery, so I dropped it down a notch. "Is Lucas with you?"
"Alpha is occupied with the new shifters and asked me to stop by with some food. Imagine my surprise when I found you gone. And by surprise, I mean I completely fucking anticipated this. What are you up to now?"
"New shifters?" I deliberately focused on the first part of her statement. "Other than Tellis?"
"A tiger shifter family. Couple of others."
"The Berry family? Estie, Leah, Milton, and their parents? They're staying in Sundance?"
"Yeah. Temporarily, at least. Alpha, Dan, Amir, and I are setting things up, bringing in trailers, that kind of thing."
"They need a place to heal," I said.
"Yeah, that was my thought, too. Now exactly what are you—"
"So, have you heard from Cynthia at all? I know you were worried about it."
"No. My ex-girlfriend hasn't called or anything, I hope she leaves me the hell—Damn it, stop trying to divert me. What's going on?" There was worry in her voice. "Talk to me."
I sighed. "Julio stopped by the bakery today."
"Is he with you? I will remove his ears with a can opener for this."
"Gross." I grimaced at the phone as I changed lanes, moving out from behind a slow-moving semi-truck. "But thank you for the sentiment."
"Neely, are you with Roso? Is it his blood on your floor?"
"He hit his head on one of the café tables when he fell." I blurted out the rest. "Julio would have never left me alone. Me, or Lucas. He would have lain in wait, looking for any opportunity to kill him and grab me, because he's too much of a coward to face Lucas honorably. He knows he'd lose a direct challenge."
"Hey, I have no problem with what you did. I'm just saying you might have called Alpha or me to help dispose of the corpse."
"I didn't kill Julio. I spiked him unconscious."
"Oh." Chandra cleared her throat. "So, what are you doing now?"
"What every girl does when she gets into trouble," I replied sardonically.
"And that is?"
"Going to my dad for help."
We ended the call after that, and I turned off the phone. Lucas would be calling next and I wasn't ready to talk to him. I needed to come to terms with my new self, and as much as I loved the man, I needed to do it alone.
My imprisonment at the sanctuary had changed me, there was little doubt about that. No longer was I that hesitant, fearful fool with high-horse moral rules about what I would and would not use my ability for. I was hardening. It was coming from within me, spreading like armor around my heart, protecting me and waking me up, reminding me who and what I was.
A short time later, I drove into Yuma and headed east, past the Foothills, and turned onto a rutted dirt road that I would have missed if I hadn't been looking for it. A few minutes after that, my dad met me in front of the safehouse with two people he referred to as Agent White and Agent Gray. I was pretty sure those weren't their real names, but it hardly mattered.
The agents—gray wolf shifters, this I could tell because they were both in hybrid form—accompanied me to the trunk of the LTD. Before I opened it, I did a telepathic read on Julio, making sure he was still unconscious. He was.
My dad watched me pop the trunk. "How did you get him in there? Shifters are heavy."
"I rolled his body onto a canvas dropcloth I had in the supply closet and scooted him to the door. Then I backed his car as close I could get it, lugged him onto the top step and sort of roll-nudged-shoved him in."
One of the agents snickered.
"That's one mystery solved. Now, what did you do to him?" My dad leaned close, sniffed Julio's face as the shifters reached into the trunk. "Not drugs. A spell?"
"I spiked him unconscious. Deeper than sleep, lighter than a coma."
His eyes widened. "I hadn't realized there were so many … nuances to your ability."
Nuances. That was one way to put it. "This type of spike isn't straightforward or easy. To be honest, it's far easier to spike someone dead than it is to spike them for information or spike them into a coma."
The wolf shifter agents frowned at each other. After that, they did their best to keep their distance from me. Even my dad was quieter, more contemplative.
The wolves hauled Julio into the house and down the stairs. My dad informed me that there was another entrance via a house a mile down the road, this one with an elevator instead of stairs for more troublesome visitors—that's how he put it, too, visitors—but the shifters had Julio under control. Once we were inside the base, he had nowhere to go even if he did wake up and cause trouble.
The weight of what I had to do next sat heavy on my shoulders and my head throbbed from my non-lethal spike on Julio. The pain and heaviness of it all stayed with me as we navigated the fake reception area and entered the room with the wall of monitors. It felt strangely like grief, but without the urge to cry.
I trailed my dad, the shifters, and Julio through the halls of the base, passing Warden Harris's cell with barely a look. I had nothing to say to him.
"So," he called out as I passed, "looks like you're the warden now, huh? Warden Neely." Then he laughed, a deep, booming howl, as if it was all a big, hilarious joke. Everything I'd been through, everything he'd put me and so many other paranormals through, was a stupid punchline to him.
I halted. Glanced back at him over my shoulder. Smiled without using my eyes.
"Yes, Garrett. It looks like I am. So, you'd better behave yourself or I'll take another trip inside that head of yours. And this time, I won't be so gentle."
He stopped laughing. I slowly pivoted back around and continued down the corridor to wherever my dad and his agents were taking my unconscious ex-fiancé.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I waited until he woke up to do it.
The agents had strapped Julio into a chair, not unlike one you might find in a dental office, but, according to my dad, with specially engineered restraints made from a strong canvas material shot through with pure silver. The underside of the chair was silver, as were the moving parts. The shifters had been careful not to let any silver touch his skin, which was frankly more care than he deserved.
Julio let out a yawn. "Neels?"
That stupid nickname. It set my back teeth on edge and worsened my headache, but I didn't call him on it. In a few minutes, it wouldn't matter.
"I'm here." I stood, walked around his chair.
I'd been perched on a stool in the tiny room, out of his line of sight, drawing energy as I waited for him to wake up. After what I'd done to his brain, a human would have been out for a week, a beta shifter a day, but an alpha like Julio would only stay down for a couple hours. Long enough to transport him here.
"It's over." I reached into my pocket, pulled out the engagement ring he'd given me, set it on a stainless-steel medical tray. I'd made a point of grabbing it from my jewelry box after loading him into the trunk. "Here's your ring back."
"Keep it. I'm going to show you the truth about Blacke and that whole town. When you see it, when you realize that I'm the only person you can trust, you're going to know that you really do belong with me."
I stepped away from the ring. "I was never more important to you than you were, Julio. You told your brother I was a spiker because you could leverage the information, use it to make a man who had ridiculed you, had made you feel helpless and scared your whole life, finally respect you. You put my uncle and me in terrible danger because you were afraid. You chased us away."
"I never meant for you or José to leave. That's the last thing I wanted, you have to be
lieve—"
"Then, you showed up to wreck my life again. When you couldn't get me to agree to go away with you and be your crossbreed, you sold the last bit of trust I had in you to Garrett Harris. Because even though your garbage can of a brother was dead, you were still afraid of him. You were so afraid of feeling helpless that you would turn a woman you once loved into a monster to protect yourself."
"No. No, Neels, it's not like that. You don't understand. I was protecting us. If you were my crossbreed, no one else could hurt you, either."
Through clenched teeth I said, "I told you I never wanted to become a crossbreed. You didn't listen. You couldn't, because your fear was so much bigger than your love for me."
"I did listen, but changing is for your own good. You won't be a monster. How could you be?" Sweat slicked his forehead, dribbled down the sides of his face. "If I don't do it, Blacke will. And trust me, you don't want to be his crossbreed."
"No, I don't. I've told him so, and he listened. That's why he's never asked me to become one. Has, in fact, done everything in his power to prevent another alpha from forcing me to become one."
"It's a game he's playing, don't you see?" The dribbles of sweat turned to rivulets that pooled in his ears and the indents above his collarbone. "You don't see it. Why don't you see it?"
"He's had so many chances, Julio. And he's never even tried. In the same circumstances, you would have killed me ten times over."
"You think making you a crossbreed would kill you, but it wouldn't. It would make you so powerful no one could ever hurt you."
"Or you, right?"
"Yes. Both of us would be safe." He blinked sweat out of his eyes. "Don't you want to be safe?"
He was too weak, too much of a coward to face his own truth. He wielded resistance like a shield, a barrier against his own culpability. A barrier similar to the one I had erected around my heart so that I could do this one last thing.
I rolled my head from side to side, loosening the bandage on my neck. I'd almost forgotten the wound was still there, so intent was I on what I needed to do next.
"This won't hurt." A lie. It would hurt, but he wouldn't remember it afterward. "Don't be afraid."
"What are you doing?" The dreamy, crazed quality left Julio's eyes. He tried to lift his head, but it was strapped to the back of the chair. In his delusional state, he hadn't noticed he was restrained until now.
"You'll never stop, so I have two choices. Kill you or cure you. I have to admit, when you showed up in my bakery today, I nearly chose the first. But I think spiking you dead on the heels of the other deaths I've caused would do something irrevocable to my soul. So, I'm going to cure you."
"Cure me of what? Loving you? Impossible. This is … Neels, come on. Let me go."
I had more than enough power. I was locked on. I was ready.
"Stay calm." I inhaled, a slow, lung-expanding breath, and gently pushed into his brain. As cautious as I was, he felt it, and fought back the smartest way he could. His eyes glowed and fur sprouted on his face and neck. His hands grew, fingernails lengthening to claws. He let out a howl that shook the single window in the room.
I was out of time.
"Goodbye, Julio Roso."
Slowly, I lowered myself to the floor in front of him. I sat cross-legged, hands open, palms facing upward. The energy bottled in me broke free and flowed into him. I routed every last drop to his brain, working to temper the force, honing the energy into a fine-edged scalpel. Precision was key. Done hastily, this sort of spike would kill him.
Done carefully, it would, in theory, cure him. A cure of sorts, at least.
Julio screamed, and the throaty half-human, half-wolf sound echoed off the walls of the tiny room, off the walls of my skull. I drew and pushed and did my level best to hold on, to not give in to the euphoria that always tried so hard to pull me under.
Six hours later, I withdrew from his head for the last time. I had taken breaks during the process, to drink water, eat some fruit, draw more energy, but this was the final withdrawal. I released the remaining energy I held, let it flow gently back into his slack body.
Beyond that, there was nothing more I could do.
Using Julio's chair as a handhold, I pulled myself to my feet, snagged the engagement ring off the tray, and trudged to the doorway, where my dad waited for me. I held out the ring, and he took it into his hand, shifting only that body part to wolf.
Henry MacLeod was not only an alpha, he was an immensely powerful one to have that level of control over his animal. The only shifter I'd seen who could do something similar had been Alpha Gold. Was my dad a prehistoric? Would he tell me if he was?
I wondered if I'd ever know all his secrets.
"Are you sure you want me to do this?"
I nodded.
He squeezed his massive hand into a fist, and then opened his fingers as he shifted the hand to human again. The diamond had been reduced to dust, and the gold had been flattened into an unrecognizable shape. He dropped the remains of the ring into a trash can by the door.
"Thank you for this." I shuffled toward the door.
"You're welcome. I'll call you soon, Cornelia. We'll talk."
"Okay."
As I walked toward the strange little office that led to the stairs, the closet, and finally, the exit, I heard my dad speak.
"Hello, young man. Are you feeling all right?"
"Yes, sir. I think so," Julio replied, his voice veined with confusion and panic. "But, where am I? Who are you? Who am I?"
Lucas was seated at the kitchen table when I emerged from the closet.
He didn't speak. Instead, he stood, came around the table, and held out his hand. I took it and we walked out of the house into the orange-streaked early desert morning.
We were a half hour into the drive home in Lucas's old truck when he said, "Us."
"Huh?" I'd been dozing—half-watching Arizona dunes fade into California desert scrub through the passenger side window of the Toyota.
"When you overheard my call to Chandra on your birthday, remember? I said, 'Things aren't… they aren't set yet, but I think we're close. I don't want him coming in and fucking everything up.'"
"Yes, I remember."
"Well, when I said him, I meant Julio Roso, when I said things weren't set yet, I meant us."
"We weren't set?"
He rubbed the back of his neck. "No. You'd saved my life and I'd saved yours. We were sleeping together, but you kept saying we weren't serious, that it was just sex between us. I had this feeling that if Roso showed up, it would wreck everything we were building together. That he'd come in and destroy it all."
"You weren't wrong to worry. Julio meant us harm. Although I'm not sure even you saw all this coming."
"No, I didn't." He stopped rubbing his neck and reached across the seat for my hand. I gave it to him, twining my fingers with his. "I don't understand what this is between us, Neely. It's new and it's strong, and if I act like a jackass, just call me on it, okay? Don't leave."
"I'm not going anywhere. Today wasn't about me leaving you behind. It was about me taking care of this part of my past, once and for all."
He nodded as he changed lanes to avoid a chunk of Russian thistle on the road. "Chandra thinks you did it to protect me."
I grinned at his satisfied tone. "I took care of Julio to protect everyone I care about. That includes you."
He glanced at me, then back at the road, smiled.
We drove the rest of the way home holding hands. Lucas turned on the radio and we listened to the oldies station. Annoyed when they didn't play our sex theme, he took to rolling his eyes at the beginning of every new song.
"Have you spoken with Alpha Juan?"
He scowled. "Why are you asking about him?"
"I'd like to know what it is he's going to ask me to do. The favor."
"Whatever it is, I'll be there with you. I already told him no doing anything that goes against your moral code."
"My mor
al code." I drummed my fingers on the seat. "After what I've done these past couple of weeks, especially today, my morality shouldn't be a hindrance to anything he'd ask of me."
Lucas frowned but said nothing, and we spent the rest of the trip in silence except for the hits of the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
"Bakery or my place?" He pulled into the lot behind my bakery before I could respond. The man knew me well.
"You're sure you're not a telepath?"
"If I am, it's only for you. I've never been in anyone else's head. Not like that. You already know that it works differently with my shifters."
"Chandra told me that you guys use an emotional sort of telepathy, rather than a verbal one. She said it was easier for your animals to understand."
"That's a good way to put it."
"I'm glad we got that ability back," I said. "At the risk of inflating your already blimp-sized ego, I missed you in there."
He parked beside the back door, then turned in the seat to face me. "I completely understand. I'm addicting—and charming."
"You are. In an annoying way."
"I can accept that." He reached for the door handle, but I stopped him with a hand on his forearm.
"Why haven't you asked me exactly what I did to Julio? Did one of the agents tell you?"
"No." He relaxed against the seat. "Bunch of tight-lipped, bureaucratic jerks. The agents weren't even going to let me in until I punched one of them to sleep and the others decided it wasn't worth it to fight me. Your dad finally came in and asked me to wait for you. He told me that you'd called him and that you were safe."
"You didn't stop the agent's heart, did you?" I recalled the bear shifter who'd tried to kidnap me.
"No. I was careful. I just knocked out a tooth. It was an alpha wolf shifter. He's probably already grown it back."
That was likely true.
"Don't you want to know what happened with Julio?"
