Page 30

ARCHER

Every breath, since Marlowe had been taken, was sharp and painful, as though my lungs were coated with fiberglass. The bonds were thin and stretched so tightly I could barely dare to reach out, afraid the slightest pressure would cause them to snap.

The pack, the town… the whole shifter population around the world was in shambles, nothing but utter chaos left in the wake of the Conclave’s brutal execution.

Not that I was shedding any tears over those assholes, but General Roland Thorne was supposed to have been the strongest alpha in the world, and Ezra dominated him like he was no more than a beta pup. Shifters thrived on knowing the hierarchy, and Ezra just doused the whole thing in gasoline and lit it on fire.

We couldn’t even come together to discuss what had happened because the community had never been more divided, with fingers pointed in every direction.

Alphas versus alphas—those who had entered the Rite versus those who hadn’t out of loyalty to their partners or to us. Camden had decided he was going to personally beat every alpha involved in the Rite within an inch of their lives or beyond, and no one was stepping in to stop him.

Betas versus alphas—the Rite, combined with the Conclave’s strong-handed attempt to take whatever female they wanted, had brought old tensions to the surface between our two designations. Betas weren’t as naturally aggressive or violent as alphas, but they made up the majority of our population and were tired of having to deal with these barbaric displays.

Females versus males—females mad at how Marlowe had been treated, and females mad at their partners who had fought in the Rite. Relationships, marriages, and even families had been torn apart in the aftermath. The town’s Facebook page was flooded with requests from alphas kicked out of their homes who were looking for a place to stay.

Under it all was the fear of the magic they had seen at the temple hall. Someone had taken a video of Marlowe’s attack against Ezra, and it had spread like wildfire across shifter online groups. The Vampyric Council had even tried to get in touch, demanding to know what powers we were hiding from them.

But nothing, not a single Moon-damned thing, could have stopped me from my work to find Marlowe.

It had been three days since the Rite and her abduction, and after the initial shock, I’d committed myself fully to research of this fae world. I’d read the journal from the shifter soldier cover to cover at least three times a day, trying to match it to a timeline and map of the war that had been widely published. Everything correlated except the soldier’s accounts of the real cause and enemy.

The pack had first refused to entertain the theory I’d presented, that the Great War had actually been fought against the fae to lock them out of this world rather than due to an unexplained hostility between us and vampyrs. But now that Marlowe had well and truly been taken by her brother, and we’d witnessed the magic they were both now capable of, the pack was finally starting to take me seriously.

A loud scratching at the door had me getting up from the desk in the office, where I’d set up all my things. Julian could finally shift as well, so I’d sent them all into the woods in pairs to see if they could pick up a scent trail, but it was as though Ezra had truly disappeared straight from the temple hall.

“Find anything?”

I asked as Elias and Nolan padded inside, shaking their fur and shifting back to their human forms.

“Nothing concrete.”

Elias pulled on a pair of sweatpants he’d left by the door. “But there’s a strange energy to the south of us. I’d like us all to check it out tomorrow.”

Nolan picked a twig out of his hair and sighed, grabbing his own clothes. “I’m beginning to understand why Ezra is so averse to pants. This is annoying.”

We headed towards the kitchen and I turned on the electric kettle. “Tell me about this energy.”

Nolan took out the pour-over coffee maker and started grinding beans. Elias gave him a pointed look until the noise had stopped, then turned to me.

“I can’t explain it, but my wolf was getting nervous. My fur stood up on my skin, like there was a high amount of electricity or static in the air. I have a feeling that even as a pair, it wouldn’t be safe enough. We need to all go investigate together.”

Nolan carefully measured the grounds into coffee filters. “I agree. I don’t know how to describe it, but my wolf was extremely interested in that direction. I had to force him to turn back before it got too late. We can drive out to as far as we got today and then start from there tomorrow.”

Elias nodded, taking a sip of his coffee. “Did you learn anything new while we were out?”

I rubbed my hand down my face and shook my head. “No. I’m still operating off the theory that Ezra and the fae were able to find another doorway to this world close by, but there aren’t many records of those kinds of vortexes around here. The other battle sites, the places we found that correlated with earliest human myths about shifters, are all well-known locations of strange, mystical energies. The closest to here that I can find is down in the Dells, but it could just be another tourist trap.”

Nolan handed me my cup next. “Well, it is south of here, isn’t it?”

“Southeast,”

I corrected. “As wolves, it would take us days to get down there.”

I took a sip and closed my eyes. It felt wrong to enjoy anything while Marlowe was gone, but sometimes I appreciated Nolan’s fastidiousness when it came to coffee. The male certainly knew what he was doing.

Elias drained his mug quickly, apparently not as appreciative of Nolan’s skills as I, and then stretched. “I’m going to head outside and see if I can produce anything.”

“Get angry,”

I called out to him.

He raised his hand casually without turning around, walking back out the door.

There was no evidence I could find that indicated shifters had magic like Ezra and Marlowe, aside from our ancestral ability to transform into wolves. But we’d gained our Luminis from bonding with Marlowe and ingesting her blood. With Elias being the first to have bitten her, and the first to have shifted, it made sense that he’d also be the first among us to wield anything if the Luminis was the cause.

“Incoming,”

Elias called as Camden and Julian charged inside. The youngest pack mate had regressed into puppy-mode in his wolf-form, and was having way too much fun bounding around the house and nipping at everyone’s heels.

Our wolves were a part of us and yet separate creatures, with their own thoughts and agendas. Julian’s wolf knew someone was missing, but since he hadn’t met Marlowe or her wolf yet, the gravity of the situation hadn’t hit him quite as hard as it had the rest of us. Even Camden, who normally treated Julian like his perfect little brother, was getting irritated by the pup’s playfulness. He growled, lunging forward to snap his teeth around Julian’s neck. Julian whimpered in submission, then Camden finally let him go to shift back to human form.

Julian followed suit, his eyes cast downward and expression contrite. “Sorry,”

he apologized.

Camden huffed and washed off his face in the kitchen sink. I knew better by now than to ask questions on what, or rather whose, blood was covering his mouth.

“We didn’t find shit,”

he said before I could ask. “No footprints, no scents, nothing.”

I felt the bite to his tone more acutely than I ever had before, and it almost made me wince.

Nolan repeated what Elias had told me about the strange feeling in the air. “So tomorrow we’ll head south. All of us.”

Camden grunted and then headed towards the bathroom. “Whatever.”

We were all despondent over Marlowe’s capture, but he was taking it the hardest. As pack leader, he’d put way too much responsibility on his shoulders for everything that happened to us, and I’d never seen him so utterly devastated as he had been when we all came to at the temple hall and discovered our omega gone.

But how could we have even defended ourselves against such an attack? Ezra’s strength alone was unmatched—he’d ripped Roland Thorne’s head off with his bare hands like he was twisting the lid off a pickle jar.

As a pack working together, maybe we could have protected Marlowe against that kind of brawn.

But his magic…

With barely a blink, her brother had knocked out an entire temple full of shifters.

We knew absolutely nothing about those sorts of powers—how they worked or what was even possible. Marlowe had demonstrated some potential, but she was still untrained. Would she be able to fight back against her brother and this mysterious fae king who wanted her? From the prophecy, it sounded like she could be used as a weapon.

But how? Not that I doubted Marlowe’s strength of character, or even her burgeoning magical abilities, but she was no soldier. For one, she abhorred violence in all cases aside from self-defense, and for another, she was mysteriously missing the shifter proclivity towards obedience. She followed us when we barked, but only because we were mostly playing. If any of us ever tried to order her to do something she truly didn’t want to do, she’d laugh in our faces and ignore us. I imagine some sort of hand gesture would also be involved.

I missed her so much.

I took my coffee and headed back to the office, staring at the map I had made. All the known doorways to the fae world were circled, and I cross-checked them for the hundredth time with my research when a loud boom shook the house and rattled the windows.

In my shock I’d spilled my drink on my shirt, then cursed as I followed Nolan and Julian as they ran down the hall towards the back door.

Elias stood in the middle of the yard, steam rising off his heaving, bare chest, his arms extended. His green eyes were wild, and a mixture of pure glee and awe covered his features.

Where a tree once stood ten feet in front of him, now sat a smoldering stump, ash falling like snow around us.

“Holy shit,”

he whispered. “I’m Goku.”