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“Will you look at that,” the magic-user murmurs, and tilts so she can better see Grayson behind Gideon. “Something new for the ages, I expect.” She has no regard for Gideon’s narrowed eyes or that he’s exceeded the scent blocker patch enough that even the very human Emmy sneezes twice.

“Where to?” Finn asks, as he picks up the books he’d dropped on the floor and places them on the table, while Nix helps to roll up the silk scroll. It pains Grayson to see his art hidden away again for another millennium, and he wonders if there might be more; in other scrolls, in other libraries.

And if he’d embedded magic in them for his other selves to find.

He has a mind to try to remove it from the library, but doubts the library’s magic hasn’t accounted for that in a very bad, very public manner.

“Like I said, I’m here to help.” She rubs her hands with subdued excitement and bows. “I am Nimue Wyrd. You remember my daughter, Emmy? If we are to be allies, I would know your names…Warrior, King, Scholar, and Lunarch.”

A Warrior’s Heart (Gideon)

“What are we doing? Following a magic user to their home? Taking Finn and Nix?” Grayson asks, banging the back of Finn’s seat gently in frustration. “This is dangerous.”

“She prefers Luminary, Baby, and I can take care of myself,” Nix mutters but doesn’t open his eyes from his position on Grayson’s shoulder. And he certainly can take care of himself–and the rest of them, too.

Gideon’s wolf isn’t happy about their mates in the stranger’s home, either. Or that their other mates are on a revised route to intercept them at Nimue’s residence.

The past week and a half has been an exercise in anxiety and patience. Neither of which is Gideon’s natural state of being.

But what choice do they have?

Grayson is accessing what looks to be an incredible amount of magic, of all things, and he’s doing it willy-nilly with no regard for himself or Nix. If Nimue can help, then they have to see what she can offer.

Nix was an impeccable judge of character, with one glaring, disastrous exception, and Emmy hadn’t set off alarm bells for anyone, but when Nix asked to ride in the Luminary’s vehicle, Gideon put his foot down. Even Finn had looked like he was ready to throw hands if there had been so much as a hint of someone trying to take Nix away—voluntarily or not.

Perhaps it was that Finn was still unsettled about leaving the rare books on the library table (unshelved) and the scroll jammed unceremoniously in a nook, incorrectly sorted.

Nimue had suggested not making it easy for whoever came after themto find this link to the pack, so she’d stuck in the aisle behind a series of manuscripts from Mesopotamia that even Gideon could smell were made of human skin. It hadn’t been hard to walk away from it, at least for him.

Nix dragged Grayson away, lured with promises that they’d be back or, at the very least, that they’d visit other scholarly archives to hunt for more easter eggs his magical selves might have left behind.

Frankly, Gideon could not be less interested in his past self…not when his current and future selves had too much to fucking do.

It wasn’t lost on him that they had all accepted this reality without so much as a blip. Gideon, who had always had faith in the spiritual also focused on dealing with what he could control—or making it something he could control—or moving the fuck on. Wasting time gnashing teeth or wringing hands when they could just get on with it made no sense.

Which was why he needed to get on with solving their immediate problem as soon as fucking possible.

“Grayson, we need advice on your newfound talent to float above the ground, use air and fire, and…fucking teleport. You blew up a three-million-dollar MRI machine today, and I saw my goddamned face in a thousand-year-old scroll. We need answers.”

“More like fifteen hundred years old? Maybe eighteen?” Finn murmurs absently as he makes notes on his phone—probably shit his eidetic memory gleaned from the books he’d read before the magical face-off.

“Fuck off, Finn. You’re not helping,” Grayson mutters, basil scent almost entirely eclipsed by the mystical patchouli.

Putting the phone down, he turns to face his mate. “Sorry, but Gideon is right. You almost hurt yourself and Nix today. And apparently, not for the first time. What if you’ve been doing this on a smaller scale since last fall? We—I need to know what we’re dealing with so I can help you. Help him,” Finn insists, nodding toward Nix, but softens his tone. “Grayson, don’t you want to know what this is all about?”

“I do,” Nix says and meets Gideon’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “We agreed to speak with Nimue and Emmy. They’re nice. Emmy smells a little like my lawyer, Erin, and patchouli. Although I think that’s perfume, andmostly because of her Mom.”

Gideon raises an eyebrow at the benign sentiment in the face of almost getting your souls drained dry, and his mate shrugs. Sighing, he asks, “If Kitten says they’re nice, what can go wrong?”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Grayson groans. “Something always goes wrong. I feel fine. We’re fine.”

Fine? Gideon is entirely not fine. He’s so far from fine, he couldn’t find it on a map. If he could find a map. His mind is whirling, and today, like any other day he can count since landing in Clearwater has been…less than fine.

Gideon prides himself on being flexible when it comes to major life events. Sure, he doesn’t crave adventure outside of his sex life; he likes things to be predictable and expected, but when life throws you lemons…you ask how high.

So right now he’s jumping high and hoping these unexpected allies can at least help them get a grip on this wildly out-of-control major life event.

Ninety minutes after they leave the library parking lot, they pull up in front of a 1920s bungalow on Adalee Street in the suburb of Tampa Heights.