Alan Read online

  “Another visitor?” Dallas chuckled, with several of the others joining in. “It seems our ranks are growing all the time.”

  “This is not that sort of visitor.” I turned to Tamhas and Keira.

  “My friend, Emelie,” Keira said with a tremor in her voice. “Her bracelet was in the woods.”

  “Why would she be here?” Ainsley asked. She and Keira hadn’t gotten off on the best of terms, but they seemed to be warming up to each other quite nicely. Rather than an accusation, her question was one of concern.

  “We went looking for any sign of her because she sent Keira a message of concern a week ago,” Tamhas explained. “Stating she was in Scotland and would be looking for her.”

  “She might not necessarily have come here straight away,” Keira added. “She might even have become lost at first. But someone found her, and they left this behind.”

  “Damn it!” I could control myself no longer. “I knew that as soon as we began bringing in outsiders, something like this would happen. This is why I was so unfair—I know you all thought I was,” I continued when mouths opened, as though my family was ready to protest.

  My dragon would not be silenced. “This is why I was so unfair. This is why I did not wish for us to open our lives to the lives of humans.”

  Of everyone present—including Tamhas and Keira, who were stunned into silence—it was Ainsley who spoke up. Naturally.

  “To be fair, neither Klaus nor Keira are human,” she called out from the rear of the group. “Klaus is a shifter, same as us.”

  I should have known she would take his part.

  “He is not a dragon,” I reminded her before looking to him. “I mean no offense.”

  “You spoke of humans,” she countered, her voice more strident than before. “I merely remind you that he is not one.”

  The two of us needed to have a talk about undermining me while among the others. I expected no less from her when we were alone—she had always been one of rather strong opinions, to put it mildly—but my leadership was still fresh enough, still so new, that I feared what the effects of too much opposition might bring.

  Doubts, whispers, perhaps the belief that one of the others might be better suited to leadership than myself.

  “Neither is Keira, not entirely, she continued. “She is a Blood Moon Priestess.”

  “Aye,” I growled, jumping on this fact. “And it is because of her relation to the Priestesses that her friend has disappeared. For if any of you believe this does not have something to do with the coven, speak now. I’m willing to listen if you truly do not believe the Priestesses have a hand in this.”

  The silence was deafening.

  I nodded slowly, more than a bit relieved. We had no time to argue the point if it was a matter of readying ourselves for war with the Priestesses.

  “For all we know,” I added with a snarl, “this friend is one of the Priestesses, herself.”

  “That is not true,” Keira spat. “She knew no more of them than I did before my arrival. These Priestesses aren’t exactly a viral sensation, you know?”

  “You were not aware you were one of them,” I reminded her. “Who is to say she isn’t also an unknown member of the coven?”

  “I’ve seen the back of her neck before,” she informed me with a smug smile. “She used to wear her hair as short as a man’s in the back. She doesn’t have the mark I have.”

  Tamhas slid an arm around her waist, and she leaned against him. He shot me a look, as though asking me to take it easy on her.

  I knew she was hurting, worrying about her friend, but that was hardly a concern of mine. My concern was with the clan, as always. This Emelie was not one of us. A mere human. Humans would gladly have hunted us down and murdered us until we were no more.

  My dragon reminded me of something else—something even more insidious, something which would surely get through to her and Tamhas and my sister. All of them.

  “What if this is their way of getting to you?” I asked. “What if they want you back, and this is their way of finding you? What if they thought she was you?” My anger grew with every word, like a cloud billowing larger all the time, until I was very nearly enraged.

  She seemed to shrink beneath my suggestions, as though she had already considered herself at fault for whatever might be happening to her friend. And it would be her fault, all of it, because she had chosen to find Tamhas at all.

  This pleased my dragon immensely. He pushed me forward, as though urging me to take one final shot which would render her silent for good. He wanted to hurt her for putting us in danger, for bringing the coven so intimately into our lives after hundreds of years of separation.

  None of them knew the reason for the separation. None, except me.

  Even so, I didn’t wish to make things any worse for the girl. No, I was not a beast, nor a demon, no matter the fact that I was a dragon. I would not purposefully hurt her.

  “Well? What are we going to do?” she asked. “What are you going to do?”

  “What am I going to do?” I repeated over the sound of my dragon’s roar. How the others did not hear it, I was uncertain, as it seemed to split my head in two. I would need to shift and take flight once this was over, most likely, or else risk bursting free of my human form and destroying everything around me with a snap of my tail.

  I looked around, from one of my kin to another, searching for support. For at least one of them to tell Keira it would be madness to go out there and look for someone who meant nothing to us, who had nothing to do with us. We had already come close enough to danger too many times.

  None of them spoke up, even if they agreed with me.

  Betrayal! my dragon insisted, ready to dispense swift justice.

  “I do not understand a single one of you,” I growled, my eyes still traveling over the faces I had known the entirety of my long life. “How can you stand there and say nothing to defend the protection of your clan? Do you all truly believe it would be a wise decision on my part to allow for such flagrant disregard for our safety? Why should I lead us down this path, when we all know what the certain outcome will be?”

  “We do not know what the outcome will be. There is nothing certain about it,” my twin sister traitorously replied.

  “It is my job, my entire mission in life to maintain the safety of this clan, in case any of you need reminding,” I called out. “It seems that safety has been the last thing on anyone’s mind. It’s as though you’ve all gone crazy! What happened to you? Why do you no longer care what happens here?”

  “Perhaps we’ve seen how little it matters whether we’re cautious or no,” Tamhas muttered, folding his arms. “We were careful before, or we thought we were. We went along as ever, going through the same motions as we had for hundreds of years. Where did it lead us?”

  “That was no fault of Gavin’s,” I was quick to remind him, shooting a brief glance of apology to his widow. Bonnie looked unfazed by everything swirling around her, as though nothing any of us said could touch the serenity which surrounded her being. She was by far the eldest member of the clan and, frankly, I could have used her support just then. But I would not go so far as to ask for it.

  “As it would be no fault of yours if anything were to bring harm to us now,” Ainsley replied in a softer voice than the one she’d used previously. “We cannot keep the outside world outside forever. Perhaps we’ve opened the floodgates, and there is no way to hold back the rush of water now. What’s done has been done.”

  Against my wishes. Not that it mattered. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. Rather than leaving me with a sense of resignation, the knowledge merely infuriated me all the more.

  It was time to bring an end to the conversation. I wanted nothing more to do with any of it. To think, the day had begun so well.

  I cleared my throat, quelling my rising anger and that of my dragon, who was all but prepared to resort to violence. But then he was always prepared to make himself known violently if wo
rds did not work. “This is all very pretty, this wordplay we seem to have gotten ourselves caught up in, but it does not change my mind. We will not entangle ourselves with the Blood Moon Priestesses, as such involvement would surely come to no good end. My decision is final.”

  I looked to Tamhas then, hoping to catch his eye, as well as Keira’s.

  His was the only face I saw of the two.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  His eyes widened when he looked about himself. “I don’t know. She was beside me a moment ago.” Everyone standing near him muttered and shrugged as though they had no better idea than he as to where his mate had gone.

  As a handful of them left to look for her in the room she shared with Tamhas, in the communication center and the kitchen, I looked down the tunnel toward the cave entrance.

  She hadn’t gone to her room. She’d gone out there, into the world, to find her friend.

  If it weren’t for Tamhas’s stubbornness and the fact that Ainsley would certainly take his side, I would’ve bid Keira farewell without a moment’s hesitation. As it was, she had only served to complicate things even further.

  4

  Emelie

  The cell, if it could be called that, had no bars. There were no visible means of keeping me locked inside. No walls, no anything. Just what looked like empty space all around me.

  And yet when I moved too far from the little chair they had given me to sit on, I walked straight into an invisible wall or forcefield or something. Whatever it was, my nose was still sore from smacking into it.

  My guard for the moment, the one with the big, sorrowful eyes, had at least tried to make it look like she wasn’t laughing at me when I did it. She failed. It was pretty obvious how funny the whole thing was to her.

  “What’s your name?” I asked at one point, since there was no barrier that wouldn’t allow me to talk. The invisible walls allowed sound to go through them, even if nothing solid could.

  She didn’t answer right away, sitting with her back to me with a book in her lap. So, witches read books. I would never have guessed it. Then again, in a cave, what else was there to do?

  I stood, then took slow, careful steps to the edge of my cell with both palms raised in front of me to catch the walls before my face did. At least I learned from my mistakes.

  “Hello? Please? Come on. I’m here totally by accident, I don’t understand anything that’s going on. The least you can do is speak to me. At least let me know I’m not all alone here.”

  Never would I have guessed that being alone would someday be a problem for me. I had spent the last four years working out of my living room, hardly ever leaving my apartment except to pick up groceries and the occasional bottle of wine. I would sometimes meet up with Keira, too, at her apartment or to get a slice of pizza when she wasn’t in training or doing her bounty hunter thing.

  The outside world had never held much of an appeal, and the people in it even less so.

  “Are you seriously going to ignore me? You’re going to leave me in this cell and spend the rest of my life pretending I’m not here? When I didn’t do anything to deserve this?” My palms touched the invisible walls, and I honestly felt the sensation of touching something solid. If I were looking in from the other side, I would’ve seen my flesh flatten out, like I was pressed against glass.

  Her head moved a little, turning toward me so I caught her quarter profile.

  “I’m not supposed to socialize with you,” she whispered. “It would be better if you kept quiet and waited for Selene to come back. I’m sure she will have more questions for you when she does. Best you save your strength for that.”

  “Save my strength?” I asked, not bothering to whisper as she did. “Why? She seemed fairly nice before. A little… overpowering, but nice.”

  “You do not know her,” she replied. “She is fair. Honest. But harsh when the need arises.”

  “There is no reason for her to treat me harshly,” I argued. I could feel panic starting to rise in my chest again, no matter how much I struggled to keep it at bay. “I didn’t do anything wrong, damn it.”

  “That does not mean there is no need to deal with you.” She turned away, back to her book.

  There went my panic again, bigger and stronger this time. I felt it overtaking me and was thrown back into the middle of a million memories. A million times I was bullied, or I found out I’d have to go to another home, or I’d hear the beginnings of an argument between my foster parents or them and one of the other kids in the house.

  The cause of the panic didn’t matter. It was all the same in the end. My breath would start to shorten, my palms would go cold and clammy, my heart would race so fast I was sure I’d have a heart attack because of it. My head would start pounding, my eyesight would go blurry.

  I was able to control it in the woods before it got out of hand, but this was bigger. Stronger.

  I started to hyperventilate.

  She didn’t move. Not that she would help me, anyway. I was alone. All alone. With no one to help or care. I would never see home again, I would never see Keira again. I was never meant to have a good life, a normal life. People like me ended up in caves with witches, in cells with invisible walls.

  My chest started to hurt. I had to sit down. I turned and staggered back to the chair but missed, knocking it over and sending it skidding into the invisible wall while I hit the floor.

  That got her attention. She dropped the book and came over to me, standing on the other side of the wall. “What are you doing?” she asked, chewing her lip.

  “I…can’t…” I put a hand on my chest, panting. “Can’t…”

  “Are you asthmatic?” she asked. “There was no inhaler in your pack.”

  I shook my head. “Panic. Panic.”

  I curled up, head between my knees, fighting for every breath of air. It didn’t matter what she thought, if this came off as an attempt at getting pity or tricking her. I was suffering.

  She must have finally come to that conclusion, since she was on the floor at my side in a minute. I didn’t have it in me to flinch away when her hands came into contact with my temples.

  It was the strangest thing. Like she was sucking the panic right out of my head. I could feel it going away, draining out. It didn’t happen all at once, but as it did my chest opened up, and my pulse slowed, and I could move my head without lightning bolts of pain zigzagging through.

  It couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds.

  When it was over, and she removed her hands, I was slow in straightening up. Not sure I believed what just happened. Like any quick, sudden movement would start the whole thing up again.

  It didn’t. I felt better than I had in ages.

  She was watching me intently with those strange eyes.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, a little weak but at least able to speak clearly.

  “Does this happen often?” she asked, still crouched in front of me.

  “Only when witches hold me captive in their cave,” I replied, and I was immediately sorry for it.

  She had helped me, and she didn’t have to.

  “It used to happen a lot more when I was young. I would feel like I was having a heart attack—I thought I was the first few times. Went to the ER and everything. It took three trips and a lot of tests for them to finally decide I was only having panic attacks.”

  “That seemed like quite a lot to go through.”

  If my little passive aggressive snippiness had offended her, she didn’t show it. I guessed it I was a witch with the ability to touch a person and put an end to a massive panic attack, little things like that wouldn’t bother me, either.

  “It was. Is.” I looked at her hands. “How did you do that? I mean, you touched me, and it was gone. You made it go away.”

  She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she set the chair right, then helped me to my feet. I sat down, still a little shaky but more with relief than anything else.

  “I did not
take away the panic attack. Merely the panic which caused it. I can… alter the states of those around me using touch,” she explained, hands at her sides.

  “So you made it so I wasn’t panicking anymore.”

  “Correct. I pulled it out of you.”

  “What happened to it? I mean, you pulled it out. I felt you pulling it out.” And it was the weirdest thing I ever felt. “Where did it go, if it’s a thing you can manipulate that way?”

  “It simply goes elsewhere,” she shrugged. “It’s something I’ve always been able to do. Many of us can. Some are better than others, just as some are better at manipulating other things. Energy, the elements.”

  “I see.” I didn’t see. I didn’t see a single damn thing. It was all too bonkers to be believed. Witches?

  She smiled. “You do not believe me. You do not believe any of this.”

  “No. No! No, no, no.”

  “Come, now. I am not as skilled in reading the energies and thought patterns of others as Selene is, but I can manage a bit. And I sense the fact that you do not believe me. It is all right. You do not need to, I suppose.”

  I sat back in the hard chair. “I mean, you did take away my panic.”

  “That I did.”

  “So I guess there’s something to be said for all of this…” I waved my hands around. “All of it. I’m in a cell with invisible walls, for God’s sake. I know that I need to believe what’s happening here, but it goes against literally everything I ever thought I knew.”

  “It must be difficult for you.” She folded those magic hands of hers, sighing. “I suppose we are not well-known in the outside world. Or known at all.”

  “Who are you? Wait—what is your name? I asked before, but you wouldn’t tell me.”

  She hesitated for a second, like there might be a problem with her sharing something like that with me but relaxed like she knew it was pointless. “Calliope. You can call me Callie. I prefer it, really.”

  “Callie. Who are you? I mean, all of you. Why do you live in a cave? If I were you and I had your powers, I would live in a mansion someplace. On a yacht. Something fancy.”