Page 26

TWENTY-SIX

Fiona

“Y ep, looks like it’s about half the size it was before.” I squinted at the barrier, holding up a hand to shield my eyes from the waning sunset light.

When I looked back over at Shay, she was grinning ear to ear.

“That’s awesome. I have a little more juice. I’m going to try again. Can you just stand there and yell when it starts to shrink? I think I might be able to direct the power a little better with you to tell me when it starts working. Otherwise, I’m shooting in the dark.”

“Sure, no problem.”

Shay jogged over to the imposing stone wall, placed her hand on a blackened stone, and closed her eyes. “Okay, here goes nothing.”

I looked back up, nibbling my bottom lip with nerves. Everyone seemed to be going back about their business as if the little fiasco earlier with Brielle’s power spike never happened, but it still made me antsy. What if one of the female wolves was holding a grudge that I had gotten the only eligible male? They were all wicked fit, whereas I spent most of my time editing photographs at my computer and eating noodles from a cup on low-energy days when I couldn’t be assed to make a proper meal.

“Anything yet?” Shay called, and I jerked my attention back to the task at hand.

“Umm, no?”

“Shit. Okay, what if I just…” She screwed up her face in concentration, and I saw the barrier start knitting back together, one painfully slow stitch at a time. Her signature sparkle was mesmerizing.

“That’s it, it’s working!” I bounced on the balls of my feet with excitement. I was already invested in the pack’s safety on a level that was probably abnormal for a newcomer. But, as someone who accidentally endangered them all recently—and who they’d still accepted anyway—I had a vested interest in helping them in any way I could.

Penance.

I was never much for my mother’s devout Catholic faith; it didn’t sit well with me, no matter how hard I tried to be the perfect, saintly daughter. I could never measure up. Now, as an adult, I’d made my peace with that. Or at least I had on good days.

But penance? That I always understood.

The sparkle overhead stopped, and a grinning Shay stepped up to my side.

“It’s so cool that you can see the barrier and the magic. I wish I could.”

“I would argue that it’s cooler to be able to fix things with your magic than it is to watch other people fix things with their magic.”

She snorted and slung an arm over my shoulders. “You’ll figure it out. Besides, if we’re right and you’re a mermaid, you might be able to grow a tail and breathe underwater. That would be freaking awesome.”

I rolled my eyes but let her drag me back inside without putting up a fight.

The idea of being a mermaid didn’t quite fit, any more than my mother’s faith. I don’t know how I knew, only that the more they talked about it, the more it rankled.

I wasn’t mer.

I was something… darker. Not that I’d been able to figure out how to read the book yet to prove my suspicions.

Another thing to add to the pile of my deficiencies.

Shay dropped me back off at Reed’s door with a wave and a grin, and when I stepped inside—thinking of finding that stupid blank book and trying again—his back was to me, his slim cell phone pressed to his ear.

“Yes. The eight-seater jet will do. I also need you to put in a wardrobe refresh. No, not the Sheppard this time. Let’s go with Armani. I’m meeting an Italian dignitary. It’s best to show we support local brands. Matching pocket squares as well. Thank you, Quinn. No, that’s all for now. Tell the crew we’d like to leave in two hours.”

I stood quietly, a fly on the wall as he finished his business with whoever Quinn was. When he hung up, he spun on his heel, pinning me with a sultry look that said he knew I’d been there the entire time.

“Eavesdropping, Stormy girl?”

I could feel the blush creeping into my cheeks at the accusation, but I lifted my chin and ignored it. “Not at all. Politely waiting for your call to end. Who’s Quinn?”

“My assistant.” He looped his arms around my waist and pressed his lips to my neck for a slow, torturously chaste kiss. “How did things go with Shay?”

“Great. She’s repairing the barrier. The crack is nearly gone.”

“That’s excellent news. It’ll buy us a little more time to find the omega stone.”

He looked troubled, quietly, like he didn’t want to worry me, even though he was worried.

“Is it really that bad? I know I’m new to all this, but I’ve kind of been dropped into the middle of a lot of dynamics that I don’t really understand. Brielle is a lovely person. Why would anybody think she’s a threat?”

Reed sighed and kissed me on the forehead.

“Ah, Stormy. It’s not about who she is as a person. It’s about what she represents to the community. Most omegas are killed as infants, by the time they’re three days old.”

Nausea roiled in my gut and tears pricked at my eyes. “Are you fucking kidding me? That’s awful! Barbaric! How can anyone think it’s okay to kill an innocent child?”

He tried to hold me, but I snatched myself away, putting a few feet of distance between us as I tried to get my pounding heart and rolling stomach to calm down. Olivia had told me omegas were hunted, but not as babies . Just the idea of someone out there killing babies made me want to set things on fire.

No, fuck fire.

It made me want to unleash a fucking hurricane. My fingertips tingled with anticipation at the thought.

“Your eyes just turned amber. Are you okay?”

I focused on my breathing, long and slow, trying to regain a little bit of composure so I didn’t actually loose another hurricane on the enclave full of women trying to protect the omegas everyone else wanted to hunt down. “Explain it to me, please. Make me understand why I shouldn’t hate… all the supernaturals who think this is reasonable. Acceptable .”

“At this point, I’m not sure I can make you not hate them. I do, a lot of the time. But the root of it all is fear.”

“The root of most evil is fear, so I get that. But how can they look at a healer and be afraid? A newborn?”

He tugged on the wrist of his button-up shirt, and the action seemed to settle him somehow. “Because not all omegas were healers. Their gifts varied, and while most were gentle, beautiful talents, they weren’t all. One had the gift of war, and she nearly wiped several other magical races off the map. Pixies, for one. Vampires took a major blow too, but they can turn new vampires relatively easily, so they’ve recovered and grown since. They turned whole armies to survive, which in turn impacted humankind.”

I blinked, trying to follow what he was saying. “So one bitch goes bad and everybody’s running scared?”

He smirked at my low-rent summary. “In a manner of speaking.”

“And this mark on my hand…” I stared down at it now, after having essentially ignored it since I found out I wasn’t human. It was an eventually issue, whereas my turning blue and flooding the place was more of a right-now problem.

“Means that your future child— our child—will be born omega.”

“And they’re going to hunt her?” Olivia had also filled me in that all omegas were female.

“No, they’re not going to lay a finger on her. Because for whatever Goddess-cursed reason, our pack has been chosen to fix this, to right the wrong that was done against wolfkind. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

I stared into his eyes, could feel the conviction of his words. But when the air around him started to shimmer, shake, and that old, familiar shuddery feeling started in my limbs…

Between one heartbeat and the next, the Reed in front of me was gone, and I saw a different Reed, standing on a battlefield, claws replacing his fingertips in the early morning light.

His chest was soaked in blood and bare, his eyes alight with his wolf. When he looked at me, I knew then that I was in my other form because I could feel the storm inside my chest, brimming from my fingertips, as I looked out over a blood-drenched field of fallen bodies.

They were creatures I’d never seen before. Gnarled faces and green skin on some, tusks protruding from other’s mouths. Short, red-haired men with great hammers and pale, fanged vampires all clashed at the center. All the while, more wolves than I’d ever seen before flowed like water, deadly and snarling, throughout the melee.

Many fell, crushed under the wheels of war, while others triumphed in bloodstained victory. But it wasn’t until she appeared, the raven-haired beauty with a warrior of old at her side, radiating an evil like I’d never seen before, that I unleashed the storm.

“Fiona! Fiona!” The vision disappeared under Reed’s hands, shaking my shoulders.

I broke out in a cold sweat as his face came back into focus, my whole body shaking with the intensity of what I just experienced, as if I’d had a partial seizure.

“Goddess bless—what the heck happened? Are you okay? Do you want me to get Brielle or Olivia?”

I lifted a shaking hand and placed it on his cheek. “I’m fine. I swear.”

His eyes were wild, sparking back and forth between wolf and man, as if his control was nearly at its end.

“You just… One minute, you were here, the next, your eyes were amber, and a blue flush started around your eyes, and you were gone. Gone . Shaking like you were about to fall down. Was that a seizure? Do you need medication?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, making a snap decision on honesty. Lying to spare his feelings wouldn’t help in the long run. At some point, I had to trust that he could handle my disorder if he was truly meant to be my mate.

“Okay.” He shuddered, pulling me roughly against his chest for a hug that I thought he needed as much as I did. “I’m going to get Brielle. You sit here, and don’t move. No, lie on the bed.” There was a pause. “Please.”

He steered me toward the bed with gentle hands, waiting until I did as he asked and lay down. And then he was out the door so quickly, my eyes could barely track the movement.

It was less than a minute before Brielle darted in the door, eyes glowing frosty brown with her wolf, Reed hot on her heels.

“Reed says you might have had another seizure?” Her voice was calm, professional, even though the sparkly eyes on her still seemed strange to me.

“It didn’t feel… normal.”

“That’s okay. Sometimes intensity varies. Tell me what you felt, and we’ll go from there.” Her fingertips were cool on my wrist as she took my pulse, and then the comforting wash of her power flooded me, and the shaking stopped as quickly as it started.

“I had a little bit of an aura for a second, and I felt that shuddery feeling I sometimes get right before a seizure starts, but then everything… shifted.”

“She didn’t fall or have full-blown tremors like the last time,” Reed added from the foot of the bed, where he was gripping the footboard so hard, I was pretty sure it was going to leave indents of his fingertips. “Her eyes turned, and she stood there and shook, blanked out like she wasn’t here .”

Brielle nodded, then gestured for him to be quiet.

“It’s possible that unlocking and accessing your powers is affecting your seizure disorder. We won’t really know without more time to see how things shake out. Do you remember anything from when things shifted?”

“I had… a vision.” The words came out a barely audible whisper, a deep sense of shame filling me at the admission.

I could hear my mother’s voice like she was standing in the room with us, scolding me for trying to tell the doctor I’d seen something strange when I had my seizure.

“Fiona! Stop that! Do you want to get taken to a home, away from us? If you keep telling them you see things, they’re going to think you’re crazy. That’s our little secret.”

“Our little secret,” I parroted, shame filling me as I looked down at my shiny leather shoes, the ruffly socks sticking out from my ankles like miniature ballerina tutus.

“That’s right.” She patted me on the head like I was a prize poodle, not a six-year-old who wanted to be honest with the doctor.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good girl.”

“Fiona? It’s okay if you don’t feel up to talking about it.” Brielle squeezed my hand, her eyes fading back to normal.

I bit my bottom lip, as if that would keep the truth in. But I wasn’t six anymore, and my mother wasn’t here to scold me for my honesty. I looked down at my hands, relaxed the tension there, and told the truth.

“I saw a battlefield. Reed was there, bloody and half shifted. There were creatures I’ve never seen before, so many dead, and wolves dead too. And a woman. She had black hair and was really beautiful. It almost hurt your eyes to look at her. The man with her was wearing really old metal armor, and when they showed up, the battle shifted. I used my powers to bring a storm. That was it, and then Reed was shaking me, and I woke up.”

When I dared to glance up from my hands, Brielle and Reed both wore grim expressions.

“An interspecies war,” Reed murmured. “That’s not good.”

“You think it was real?” I was a little shocked that was his takeaway. I was used to people thinking the things I saw were fanciful, shameful, or crazy. Not taking them seriously.

“We don’t know that it’s not. It could be a premonition from your gift, or it could be a seizure hallucination.” Brielle’s voice was calm, back to doctor mode, as she fluffed a couple of pillows and scooched me up the bed so I was reclined instead of lying flat. “Right now, the most important thing is to make sure you’re comfortable and safe to travel.”

“I feel a little tired, but otherwise, weirdly okay.”

Brielle nodded and smiled down at me. “That’s excellent. I still think you should rest for a bit and let one of us pack for you. If you still want to go?”

“Yes.” I said at the exact same time Reed said, “Absolutely not.”

“Reed, be reasonable.”

He shook his head. “No, Fiona. You should stay here, where you’re safe. I can go with Gael and Leigh, and you can stay here with Brielle. If you have a seizure while we’re gone?—”

“Reed!” I snapped, unable to take another second of his patronizing. “I’m an adult. A capable, independent woman. Yes, I have a seizure disorder. But that’s something I’ve learned to live with. If you think you’re going to keep me safely locked up while you go off and live a full life, then you’re going to find me gone when you come back. I’m not going to accept a partner who can’t see me as an equal. So, it’s up to you. I come with you, as planned, or this is over.”

My voice shook as I threw down the ultimatum, but I meant every word. I was starting to develop feelings for Reed—real, strong feelings. But I couldn’t be with a man who saw me as broken. It would kill me, piece by piece.

Better to end it than to live with someone who thought I could only have half a life.

“Fiona, no, I…” He cleared his throat, then shot a look at Brielle.

“I’ll give you two a few minutes. If you need me, I’ll be in our room.” She smiled tightly, then left.

“I’m not trying to lock you up. I’m trying to protect you. You’re my entire world, and we don’t know what Cysernaphus is going to want. It could be dangerous. If you got hurt trying to help my pack, I’d never forgive myself. Please tell me you understand.”

“I understand that you think I’m a liability, not strong enough to stand at your side as we help our pack.”

“Never. Never , I swear it.”

There was so much sincerity in his eyes, it smoothed some of my ruffled feathers. “So why do you want to leave me behind?”

“I don’t want to leave you behind. I want you to be safe. The idea of something happening to you?” He stopped and tugged at his collar, leaving it uncharacteristically askew. “I would abandon the mission in a heartbeat if you needed me. Me . I’d be the liability because there is nothing I’d prioritize above you. Not even for my Alpha or my best friends.”

My heart faltered in my chest, skipping a beat at his confession. Where a moment ago, I’d been hurt and furious at his dismissal of me, now I understood. Now I wanted to kiss him.

“Reed, you beautiful idiot. Are you going to be a hundred percent safe? Can you guarantee me that?”

“Well, not a hundred percent guarantee, but reasonably safe. I’m a good fighter but an even better negotiator, so I rarely have to fight.” He shrugged, not bragging, simply stating a fact.

I nodded. “So, I should accept that you’re capable, and even if there is some danger from whatever the dwarf king asks for, you’ll be able to handle it the way you handle every other obstacle in life and come back to me?”

“Yes, exactly.”

I stared at him, waiting for him to get it. It was like a lightbulb clicked on, realization dawning over him.

“You’re telling me you’re also a fully capable adult who knows how to handle her disease and doesn’t need me to babysit her, huh?”

“Bingo, hot stuff.”

He snorted, then came around to sit on the edge of the bed. There were, indeed, finger-shaped indents in the bedframe from his grip. But when those same fingers laced themselves with mine, they were only gentle.

“I don’t let seizures rule my life. I take precautions, I follow doctor’s orders, take my medication like it’s my religion, and then I go live my life. Everybody has something. This is my thing to deal with, and I know how to take care of myself.”

“I’m sorry. I know you’re more than capable. This mate bond… I knew it would be intense, but knowing something intellectually and experiencing it firsthand are entirely different beasts.”

“I forgive you. Now, how much time do we have before that fancy jet I heard you ordering gets here?”

He checked his watch, which looked like it cost more than my car back home and had Hublot daintily inscribed on the face. “Less than an hour, now.”

“Excellent.” Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I kissed him on the cheek and grabbed the magical book from his desk. “Can you get my toiletry bag from the bathroom? I can’t exactly go see the dwarf king with dandruff.”