Page 7 of Exiled Heir
I knew from experience the best time to fight a shifting wolf was during their shift. It felt wrong and rotten, like cracking open an egg and pulling out the half-formed chick inside. But I had eleven years to tell me that the only chance I was going to get against JD was right now, while his body was busy changing and his mind was being ripped apart by two opposing forces.
I brought my leg back and kicked hard, slamming him into the car next to us. It was older, and no alarm went off, which was a relief. The last thing I needed was more of Declan’s people spilling out into the parking lot to add more cow manure to this shit sandwich.
JD turned, his human eyes shifting into wolf gold. He leapt at me, not going as far as he would when he’d finished his shift. I knew I had seconds left.
I turned my body just enough that JD slid by me, landing on the hood of another car. Then I was on him, a full-body tackle that sent us tumbling away from each other on the gravel. We both leapt to our feet, and I grabbed at him.
My shoulder screamed, but I locked my arm around JD’s neck. He’d completed shifting in midair, meaning that I was now lying on top of a wolf as large as I was.
He arched back, turning his head and snapping, but I locked my elbow, pulling back until I felt him stagger.
Lurching, he tried to throw me off, but I held fast, tightening my legs around his rib cage and holding on like my life depended on it, because it did.
JD collapsed, breathing unsteadily. The carotid artery in wolves wasn’t exactly the same as in humans, but if you kept your arm tight enough, it worked the same.
I loosened my body in increments. Every muscle hurt, whether from the fight with the Tweedles earlier, this new fight with JD, or any of the other injuries I had accumulated with four weeks on the run.
“Are you coming?” Cade’s question was quiet, a breath of sound. It was only because of my enhanced hearing that I even heard it.
Cade opened the driver’s door of the abandoned car. I spared one last look at JD. He was out cold.
As Cade got in, I walked up to the passenger side. The windows were too filthy for me to get a good look at myself. When I opened the door and threw myself into the passenger seat, it was a lot more luxurious than the exterior had implied.
Soft leather seats, glossy chrome accents, an enormous touchscreen in the center of the dashboard that came alive as Cade pressed a button, turning the car on.
“A disguise spell?” I glanced in the back seat, but the whole car was clean, as though it had just been detailed.
“A basic glamour.” Cade drove out of the parking lot slowly, his wheels grinding over the gravel. As he turned onto the main road, he pressed down on the accelerator, and we were flying.
“Well then, you need to start working for Hollywood. Why rent an expensive car when you can just glamour a Camry to look like one?”
“I’m sure the hours would be better than my current position,” Cade said. “Although you have to admit, it would be an extreme step down fromprincetoprop master.”
I swallowed. When I caught sight of my arm in the light of a passing streetlamp, I brought it up to my face. “What is this?”
“Magic,” Cade said shortly.
“Yeah, that’s pretty obvious. I’ve just never seen it up close before. Do I get to see behind the curtain, or does the great and powerful Wizard of Oz want to keep his toys secret?” I examined my arm, watching as the tattoos shifted and moved as though they were alive.
Cade glanced over at me, frowning, and then he snapped his fingers, and the magic crawled across my body, a millipede feeling of too many feet. The dark, twisting lines collected on my hand and leapt from my skin to his like an enormous, black static shock.
Of course. Mages were notoriously tight-lipped about their magic. If you had the power to raze a city to the ground, why would you tell people how you did it?
The hundred mage houses kept their people in line, as though breathing a word of how their magic worked would kill them. But even independent mages never explained magic, and those who talked to outsiders about it disappeared.
The internet was filled with conspiracy theories, and it was hard to pull real facts from what we did know: mage houses were powerful, wealthy, and secretive. Their kings ruled via wealth and influence, happy to let the rest of us pretend that Congress and the president had the real power of government.
“So it’s a secret,” I said, annoyed. On the other hand, I tried not to ask, what would happen if Cade did tell me? Would he have to kill me? “What about why you need a consort? Do I need to play twenty questions to figure out why you needed a werewolf so badly you decided pissing offDeclan Monroewas the best way to do it?”
Cade’s features twitched, but he didn’t say anything else until we were several miles out of Pineridge Springs. When we hit the open highway, the ocean on one side, tall redwoods on the other, he said, “We’ll tell everyone that we met in Los Santos. At a bar named Syndrome. We’ve been seeing each other for three weeks. I suggested you become my consort. You agreed.”
“I agreed to become your slave after three weeks.” I raised my eyes to the roof of the car, taking a long breath. Even inside the expensive vehicle, I smelled the forest. The conifer trees, the damp earth called to me.
“A consort is not a slave.” Cade’s words were clipped, and he turned on his blinker, slamming his foot down on the accelerator to speed past an eighteen-wheeler.
“Really. Are you sure about that?” The clock on the dashboard said it was midnight, and I did the math in my head. I’d gotten to the bar around nine, and I was pretty sure they had drugged me a half hour after that.
Whatever they had given me, I could still feel it. My senses felt muted. The familiarity of them was gone. Usually, I could sense everything. Now, it felt like I was listening and seeing things through a thick layer of glass.