Page 59

Grey

“See it?” Jase asks. “Sherry’s in there. So’s he.”

“I see,” I tell him. “I also smell.” I smell the faint scents of them both. They may have masked their scents yesterday when he abducted my mate, but that’s wearing off.

Jared’s RV, connected to Boyd’s truck, is parked outside a warehouse. An extension cord attached to the back is fed under the loading bay doors of the warehouse and the trailer is lit up inside, though the shades are all down. It’s still afternoon, but it’s overcast and I easily make out shadows of two forms in there. A male looming over a wolf shape. What the fuck?

“Sherry’s shifted. He’s not,” Jase says.

“Why do I smell your sister and Meadows but not Stacy?” I growl with frustration. “Not only can I not smell her, I can’t smell our baby.”

Jase’s eyes cut from straight ahead to my face and he winces.

They better fucking be okay. They have to be.

The rolling warehouse door slides up and an older woman with long, black hair comes out, dragging a wheeled dolly with a five-gallon water jug on it.

There’s a crash inside Jared’s RV and I can’t see shadows now.

A younger woman with ginger curls rushes out and takes the dolly, saying something to the older woman who gives the younger one a beaming smile. The younger woman has the distinct scent of a witch. She’s related to Halla Starling! The scent of that stuffed animal is imprinted in my memory.

“A Starling witch,” Jase says.

Suddenly, I’m hit with sensation in my chest. Panic.

I don’t smell my mate, but I feel her. She’s close. And she’s in a state of panic.

Do I suddenly sense her because that door opened? Is she in there? Is it fortified or spelled to mask scents within? I take a deep whiff of the air and it hits me - faint, barely there, but I’m sure of it. The faint scent trail of my child from the RV and truck to those doors. She’s in there.

The old woman steps back inside as the younger witch moves toward the door. The RV entry door is on the opposite side so I can’t see what’s happening there. But I don’t give a fuck. I need to get to Stacy.

I’m reaching for the car door handle.

“Should we mask again?” Jase asks, “Think he smells us from here?”

“I don’t give a flying fuck if he smells me. In fact, I think I’d like it if the last thing this fucker ever smells is me.”

As much as I want to get my hands on Meadows, I want more to know my mate is all right. Not want – need it with a voracious hunger that threatens to send me into a rage ready to rip everything apart.

“I got him, you go get Stacy,” Jase says.

“I want at that fucker,” I remind him.

“I do, too. But I’ll secure and hold. The pack decides.”

“Yeah?” I check.

But Jase is already on the move.

The young woman goes back inside, but she looks over her shoulder and waves at us, gesturing with a ‘come on’ motion.

I hesitate and check my gut. It’s telling me this witch isn’t an enemy. But even if she is, no matter. I need to get to my mate, so I move in toward the building.

Jase moves to the RV. I glance back and see the jug of water sitting on the dolly outside the door. The door is open and I see a pair of boots, toes pointing to the sky. Meadows is flat out.

As I move through the building’s open doorway I hear the sound of a relieved Sherry, exclaiming, “Jason! Ohmigod, Jason!”

My focus is on where I’m moving and what I’m smelling. But there’s strange sensations in my fingertips. I lift my hands and they’re orange, like there’s light under my skin. The light pulses and what feels like a spark bites at my thumbnail bed, so I shake my hand in reflex from the sting as I move forward, feeling like something is being pulled from my skin. Extracted from my very blood.

Now, in the dim space it’s plain to see all my fingers are lit. So are the veins in my forearms. What the fuck?

I hear my blood pumping through my veins loudly with a strong sense of dread as the horizon tilts ninety degrees.

I scramble to grip for something to steady myself and more sting bites under my fingernails. Red sparks fly from my shoulders. This isn’t me throwing sparks with my magic. This is something else. What the fuck is happening? I’m holding a support pillar halfway between the open rolling door and a set of double doors that leads to where Stacy is. I hear Sherry sounding distant and distorted, telling Jase that Wyatt opened the door and a woman blew some sparkles in his face, making him collapse. Her voice is fading, but she just said something about Stacy being in here, that something bad is happening to her.

I dig deep to push past the vertigo and force myself forward. I know I’m staggering, I’m nauseous. My vision distorts as echoes of multiple heartbeats fill my ears and sink into my own chest. I keep moving through the warehouse, staggering toward the scents.

The knowledge that I should’ve done the salt circle and taken the ampule resonates in every cell of my body.

I fucked up.

But it’s too late, I’m not turning back, not when Stacy is in there. With her .

I feel her. I feel them .

Four scents assault me hardest as I stumble into a room with people in it.

She’s here. She’s breathing. More sparks are pulled from my skin, from my chest now and fuck, it hurts, feels like they’re being yanked out of me, they’re like splinters with roots attached to them.

I ignore the sting and zone in on the two forms on the couch, one of them, my woman, the other… the woman who birthed me. The sparks that are leaving me are flying toward her, sinking into her skin, but she’s welcoming them, they don’t seem like they’re burning her.

Soleil weeps, clasping her throat with both hands, having what looks like some sort of mental breakdown as the sparks keep landing on her skin.

“I loved them both so m-much,” she croaks. “So, so much. I never wanted to do what I did. I never wanted to lose them. Never, never, never. But I… I… I just couldn’t help it. Obviously, I still can’t. I…” She sobs loudly, looking manic.

“Couldn’t help what?” Stacy asks, then turns her head and spots me as I wobble, trying to clear my double vision.

Three other women zoom into my focus. They’re staring at me, standing against a wall. I struggle to take in my mate with my eyes and my nose to assess her wellbeing.

Strength suffuses my veins, heat pulsing in my face and I straighten as my birth mother gasps. “It’s you! I suspected it wouldn’t take too long. You’d be gallant, like your father.”

“Get…the fuck… away from my mate,” I demand, summoning strength, feeling way the fuck off . I need to feel a hundred per cent, so I rip the t-shirt off my back, grab the fly of my jeans and undo it, shifting as I drop them.

The women in the room all gasp at the sight of my wolf.

I feel unsteady as wolf, too, though don’t feel it as much as I did in human form.

I shift back, then shift to wolf again before shifting back again while sparks have continued to fly from both my fur and my skin.

The energy in the room is beyond amped and the other women other than the young one who waved us in are scattering out of the room, leaving the curly-haired witch, me, Stacy, and Soleil. The curly-haired one waits, arms crossed as she watches us.

I pull my jeans back up and do them up, vision back to normal as I get my feet into my shoes deciding I’ll pull magic from every member of my coven, as much magic as it takes to ensure my mate is safe from this woman.

I take one step forward, feeling the pulsing heat not only behind my eyes, under the skin of my entire face.

“Greyson,” Soleil says, still sobbing. She rushes toward me and collides with me, grabbing my face with both hands.

Jaw clenched, I stare into eyes like Mimi’s. Like some of my cousins, and mine too, I guess.

I’m about to demand answers while simultaneously shoving her the fuck away when I’m assaulted by images, memories, emotions because of the fact she’s touching me.

Flash cards and movie snippets move fast, too fast, fusing with my mind and it feels different from the last time I pulled Ronnie’s gifts. Maybe because it’s so personal. Maybe because I’m pulling so hard.

My father’s face. He’s younger. No lines around his eyes. No gray around his temples. He’s smiling. Reaching. Emotions well up in me that I know come from this woman’s memories. Memories of warmth, love, connection. Longing. I see my face when I was an infant. Giggling. Happy. Warmth within my father’s embrace because he’s holding her with one arm, me in the other. A unit. The feel of the strong bond shatters as color drains from my infant face, as that small face morphs from giggling to gasping for breath with lips turning blue, eyes morphing between brown and silver while the baby cries a blood curdling cry that weakens until it’s faint whimpering. Everything around the images shatter and splinter into curling and melting shards of blood-slicked glass and pain. So much pain. Aching, throbbing agony. Grief. The most immense grief-stricken and agonized screaming fills my mind while everything in the visage shrivels to floating flakes of ash.

Her voice cuts through the distorted images, which continue to strobe in my field of vision.

“I couldn’t stop,” she whimpers. “I couldn’t stop and I’m so, so sorry. It was like a drug. A drug that felt so, so damn good, but it got me into a stranglehold until it was all I wanted. All I thirsted for. And eventually all I had because it took your father’s love. It took motherhood away. I never got to watch you grow. I never got to be the object of your adoration. Even as a newborn you cried so much when it was just us two. A happy baby when it was us three but when it was us two? It’s like you knew I didn’t know how to be your mother. You only felt safe with him.” She sniffles. “The pain at realizing what I was doing, Greyson? Leaching from you… because I felt it growing day by day and it called to me. Called to be taken and that’s what I did. I kept taking and taking and taking until you were barely with us. I almost took all your light in order to leach your bright, beautiful magic and feed the hungry mouth with the gnashing teeth, the darkness in me. And all your magic wanted to infuse with mine. And he despised me. Your father? He despises me. My actions nearly cost him you. And they cost him me – the woman he adored. Because he couldn’t bear his emotions for me. They hurt too much. Because I wasn’t worthy. So he took himself away, you away, and shackled my magic, leaving me an aching void.”

This gut-wrenching pain I’m feeling of hers is wracking my body, rattling my bones. The agony she feels is acute.

Stacy shouts my name and I know it’s because my body is bucking, convulsing.

This woman has tormented herself over how she lost everything, how she ruined her family. In the hospital parking lot, Dad told me… wolf shifter blood mixed with witch blood is a potent combination.

She was practicing dark magic and she used it too, to keep my father blind to it while she played a part, much like the part an addict plays – lying to their loved ones about their addiction that they indulge in secret – only my father was so smitten with his bride and so under her spell that he missed the signs until it was almost too late. I’d become so sickly that he could have lost me.

Her memories show me whimpering in my cradle while she rides my oblivious father’s knot.

Aunt Lyrica, Aunt Mimi’s older sister – she sensed something was amiss with her niece, showed up without an invitation and removed Dad’s blinders with her own magic, using a coven leader’s ability to veto Soleil’s spell on him. Dad immediately saw his mate for what she was. An addict who was forsaking their child for more power, leading him around by his dick and making it so he didn’t see what was happening directly under his nose.

I see the betrayal on Dad’s face, see the pain he was in as it brought him to his knees with my limp, whimpering, small body in his arms.

The trust was broken and he said he tried to forgive her, let her coven help her, but he caught her practicing dark magic again. He couldn’t trust her alone with me and said I’d do nothing but scream every time he left my presence, and he finally put a stop to it after she pleaded with him to not leave us alone together because she couldn’t stop.

Dad told me some of this in the hospital parking lot, the rest of it.. I see right now. What I got from him came out in a flurry because he knew I had to leave to find my mate, save her from her brother, but he spat it all out and I left with him doubled over in that parking lot, his hands clasping his knees, looking absolutely wrecked, looking like he was reliving it.

My father reported her to the SCC and they put her on trial. Lyrica used magic to sever the bond, as requested by my father and approved by the SCC. My father told the Young coven he wanted them to have nothing to do with me. They agreed to leave me be until I mated unless I came to them myself. They knew mating would show me who I am. Who I’m supposed to be.

“I love you both to this day,” she says to me, hauling me out of what feels like a prison in my head as I see and feel her memories. I grab her wrists and pry them off my face. But I don’t let go of them.

“What have you done to my mate?” I demand.

“I’m okay, Grey,” Stacy says. She’s standing up.

“Stay there,” I demand gutturally and see my mate freeze where she stands.

“Grey. What do you need?” Jase is in the space now.

“Where’s Meadows?” I demand.

“Secured. What do you need, brother?”

My eyes hit my mate and I need her safe so I pull and pull and she’s moving through the space, several inches off the ground.

She gasps and hollers my name, looking panicked, but I set her behind Jase. Jase has her now. I’ve set her behind him.

“What the fuck did you do to my mate?” I repeat, glaring at Soleil.

“I’m okay, Grey,” Stacy insists.

Soleil answers brokenly, “Your mate is unharmed. I’ll explain. She removed the necklace. The SCC sentenced me to a twenty-five-years to life ban with my coven head being able to lift it if they chose to. I contacted Aunt Lyrica at the twenty-five-year mark and she refused me. I knew Aunt Mimi would be the same when Aunt Lyrica died. I may be disconnected from my magic, but know you’re now the head of the coven. I know you were granted my magic. I hoped we would get acquainted.”

“And I’d lift the ban,” I surmise.

“Your mate is pregnant so carrying your blood, Young coven blood. I hoped it would work. It has. When I reached out to you on the phone I knew I couldn’t wait for you to come around, if you even would…” Her chin juts toward the silver chain on a table. “And now–”

“That necklace was put on you because you’re dangerous,” I state through gritted teeth. “You took this off her?” I ask my mate.

“I had to,” Stacy whispers.

“My fault,” Soleil admits. “I leveraged her maternal instincts and her love for you to my advantage. That necklace was worse than death, my son. I don’t want to live any longer without at least one of the two core pieces of me that were taken. My family. My magic.”

She wrenches one of her hands free of my grip and puts it to my face again. More images surge into my brain.

“Maybe we could try to be a family again… maybe you could help me not succumb to the darkness. There’s so, so much light in you. Such beautiful light…”

The images she’s casting into my brain now are of my father. As he is now, embracing her as she is now instead of when she was young. Instead of Carrie. Everything around them is hazy. No. It’s coming into focus. Carrie is a blurred image to the side, in tears, looking on at me where I stand with a bundle in my arms that I know is one of my children. The images are suddenly upscaling and I see it all clearly. Metallic silver and copper sparks arc like fireworks around the bundle in my arms before lighting the baby up so his outline is the silver, copper, and red flames, shrapnel bits blasting in every direction, burning to layers of ash that look as intricate as lace as it floats to the ground. And there’s no baby. My arms are empty and Soleil is now copper and mercury colored as my father burns to the same floating ash. Stacy is there off to the side with another baby and that baby bursts into red flames and evaporates before Stacy melts into nothing and Soleil is red flames, silver and copper. I shake the visuals off and focus.

Two. Two babies.

I strain hard to listen and suddenly hear the sound of both heartbeats in addition to my mate’s own heart in this room, just four feet away. Stacy is carrying two babies. I now distinctly smell them both. Soleil would siphon magic from them both. She wouldn’t want to. But then she would want to because it would be all she could think of doing. And she’d scheme to have my father back. That’s what she’s obsessed with – dark magic and my father.

“You see the light in me? That same light you tried to take from me when I was a baby? That you’ll eventually try to take from my children?”

Her expression drops.

I growl and half shift, baring my teeth. Soleil snatches her hand back, face changing to fear. No. To remorse.

I pull my wolf back. “I see what you’re about,” I tell her. “I saw all those old memories but I see what you’re about. What you’ll always be about.”

She flinches. “Maybe you could fix me. You and Erica. Two powerful Young witches. You could extract the darkness. You could cast a protection spell over me.”

“It won’t work. Not for long.”

Her expression drops and I know she knows this is true. It devastates her.

I half shift again and grab her throat and hold it. And I feel. I feel, I register, and I fucking know . This isn’t me pulling with Ronnie’s gift to know what she’s done. This is more than that. It’s also Vivica’s gift to see things that might come. If she walks away, she’ll eventually plot to have my father back at the peril of Carrie, the only mother I recognize. The only mother I want. And to gain even more magic. From me. My coven. From my children. She’s even had visions of taking it from Halla Starling, who is witch and shifter as well.

“You’re full of remorse right now, now that you’re whole again. The second that necklace left your skin, you were overcome with decades of suppressed emotion.”

“Yes,” she whispers brokenly and I feel her swallow move down her throat against my hand.

“Deep in your core, you wish you could be the girl you were that wanted a family, that fell hard for Graydon. You want to believe with the naivety of that girl you once were that you’ll do better this time with a second chance.”

“Yes,” she repeats. Tears stream down her cheeks.

“The bond was severed for him, but not for you.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll try hard to resist the pull, the impossible to ignore tugging and whispering to you that you want to play. You need to play. You deserve it.”

She winces and tries to back up. But I don’t release her.

“It wants you Soleil. That magic wants you as much as a lover, as much as Graydon used to want you – which you think you crave more than magic itself – but it will never, fucking ever, release its grip on you. That’s what dark magic is.”

There’s a beat of honesty – as long as a heartbeat or maybe two – where her eyes register with knowledge that I’m speaking the truth. Her reaction lets me know with razor-sharp precision that she knows I’m absolutely right. She’ll do it again if she walks out of here with her magic. This is why I was feeling so off coming in. She took it back from me when I was walking in here. It was her first order of business, taking back what was hers. And I further know that in the three decades since she was able to practice magic, she has been no stranger to it. She’s studied it. She’s taught it to other witches. She’s become a full-time coach and scholar, gone to such lengths that she knew if she could get to the day after I mated when I’d come into her magic, she could set in motion several potential plans that might help her win it back. This woman is unscrupulous and beyond dangerous.

“You harmed my mom,” I accuse.

“She stepped in and got my life! Mine!” she defends.

“You threatened my wife. You are a threat to everything I care about, including my sons and daughters.”

She swallows again and I see emotion in her face, agony, bitterness. This woman’s emotions are a bitter, sour brew of regrets, self-loathing, envy, and addiction.

A new voice rings in my mind. Not the voice of the woman in front of me. The voice of the woman my father loved. The woman she was before dark magic burrowed into the nucleus of Soleil Young.

The voice says, “I can’t have my family back, and now that I have my magic back… it won’t be better. It won’t be enough. I no longer have to long for my magic but I’ll still long for more. More magic. More to be who I used to be. Young. Hopeful. Good. The woman who protectively cradled her belly while she grew the most beautiful being that she could fathom – a product of her love with Gray. Please know that I am so, so proud of you. Of the man you are. The leader. The mate. Of the father you’ll be, the coven leader and witch you’ll be. Everything I hoped for. More. But I hate myself. I loathe myself for what I became. It’s so ugly inside me…”

She cradles my face lovingly. “I’ll choose death before I allow you to fasten that chain again. I can’t. I won’t.”

I glare.

“Well,” she shrugs, “do what you must, then. But I will, too. It’s who I am now.”

Heat blazes behind my eyes as I stare into hers knowing if I don’t end this, she’ll hurt others. She’ll hurt me by coming for my power, Erica’s, the rest of my coven, for my children because they are part wolf shifter, part witch.

I have clarity. This might be why Fate bestowed telekinesis on me. Because the day would come when I’d need to pull the knife from Wyatt Meadows, yes, but it would also come that I’d have it to pull that poison from Mom… Carrie… and now to pull magic from Soleil in order to protect everything I love from the woman who grew me in her womb. The woman who made me can’t help what she has become because she’s so fucking weak against the call of dark magic.

“I wish,” she says brokenly, “I wish it were different. That I’d been stronger.”

She’s being truthful.

“Goodbye, Mother,” I grind out as my grip on her throat tightens. And her face crumbles with the word mother but only briefly before her expression hardens. She’ll fight to keep her magic. She’d kill me if necessary. She loves me.

Soleil Young is madness. Broken madness.

Something inside her grips my own windpipe from the inside and I choke on my own spit. I cough, feeling her strength rise, feeling how she’ll fight like anyone would to survive.

I half-shift to wolf which allows me to pull more air into my lungs and hold it there while red sparks arc between us in battle.

Her eyes light up with a red glow to them. I see ugly, greedy rage there as she physically struggles to fight me off. As she tries to siphon from me.

Fire bites my skin from her sparks, which also land everywhere, catching fire to the furniture. And it feels like I’m lighting up inside, too. I push through the pain and squeeze her throat tighter, pulling harder to haul the magic from her, aware Jase is physically pulling Stacy out of the space.

Stacy is frantic, calling my name, fretting, but finally Jase lifts her and carries her out. He’ll see to her through this.

The coppery orange lights are under my fingernails again, power trickling back into me as her pulse weakens. But she fights more, making it surge back and forth between our bodies.

The walls in the room begin to groan, the floor quaking before the walls around us show fissures and drywall begins crumbling.

Electrical sparks shoot out of the wall sockets. Glass shatters in the coffee table and in the bar-covered windows in front of us.

Now fire rapidly circles us before I do what I need to do.

Soleil Young, my father’s original fated mate and the other soul who made me who I am looks into my eyes, the bright silver light dimming in hers.

“My son,” she says.

I slow the pull from her while I wait for her to continue.

She moistens her lips and frowns with obvious pain. “I’m so sorry.”

I’ve pulled my magic back and right now I know I’m pulling the darkness from her.

She struggles but she’s losing. In my mind her voice sounds clear. “In the afterlife, I’d like it to be my job to make sure you don’t have to battle the darkness like I did. I’ll do my best to chase it away. To protect you, because that’s always been my job and I don’t intend to continue to fail.”

“Rest well, Mother,” I say. “I don’t need that from you. The darkness won’t win against me.”

She whimpers from her mouth, but in my mind I hear, “Please filter the magic you took back. In case it crept in. Tell your father I’m sorry. That I let them sever me from him but never severed him from my heart. I have thought of our love every day. Do that? Both things.”

“I will.”

Her expression goes to resignation, but then a glimmer of silver returns and I suspect it’s a grain of darkness hanging on, about to make a last-ditch effort, keeping her in that stranglehold until the very end, so I add my other hand to her neck and twist, ending it. Her mouth goes slack and that bright silver light blinks out.

Pain in my chest sharpens as I feel the rest of the magic she took back click back into place inside me. I search internally, sifting through it, feeling for anything that seems different.

It feels like it did before.

I press my palm to her face, soaking in the last of her warmth before it leaves her and her expression is one of peace.

I will honor her wishes and ask about filtering the magic. Just to be sure. But I already know, darkness can’t exist in the light. And I have my pregnant mate with my two sons to think of. There’s nothing but light in me. Light always has dominion over dark.