27. Aspyn
Chapter twenty-seven
Aspyn
A spyn aged 18
“I’m sorry, Aspyn, but you haven’t paid rent in two months. I can’t afford to let you stay here.”
I can’t lift my head. I’m so freaking hungry. It’s so hard to move.
The burly alpha could be my grandfather, but his distinct distaste of me flavours the air.
I curl my shoulders tighter and jerk my head in a nod. “Thank you,” I whisper.
I grab my bags and leave the house. It feels like the end. I wonder how long until the black river drags me under, too.
I will have to beg for a scrap of food or somewhere to sleep. The thought has me feeling exhausted, but what else can I do?
P resent Day
Kelly brings me a coffee and sits down at the table with the rest of us.
“Okay, so the question is: where to now? Do we have a home base or somewhere we want to live?”
The audacity of him asking such a question has me scoffing.
“I don’t want to go back to that island. I’m sorry, but I have no desire to see anyone from there ever again!” My guilt has me answering Kelly before anyone else can say anything.
“Houses can be replaced.” Shale shrugs and glares at someone behind me. “If you put one finger on her, I will break them off and shove them up your ass.”
“Sorry, Alpha, sorry. I just have a message for the omega.”
“From whom?” Kelly snarls.
I stand in a storm of growling alphas, and I, strangely, feel incredible. There is nothing threatening about the sound. It’s as comforting as a blanket full of feathers.
Ezy stands up and holds his hand out. The beta shoves the letter into his fingers and runs away.
I wonder how long he’s going to last in a hotel like this if he can’t even deal with strong alphas without sprinting away, but then I decide it’s not my problem.
Ezy opens the letter and reads it, his expression darkening before he hands it to Shale. My alpha's hand trembles before he turns to me and screws it up.
“What was it?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Shale gets off the chair and stalks over to Kelly, the two alphas stand chest to chest, murmuring to each other before Shale nods.
“Do you want to go back to the city? Which one did you grow up in?” Shale asks.
The city? Go home? I haven’t thought about it in years. Home? I’m not sure. Home is sand, beach, jungle, and endless blue skies.
“Blackburn,” I say uneasily.
“That’s where I moved when I left home,” Kelly says, surprised. “Lia, Locke, and Ryn lived there, too.”
“I hail from Chesterfield.” Ezy says.
“Blackburn,” Gael murmurs.
“And I hail from Silver Falls, Keagan from Kala, and Beau from Greene.”
“And somehow we all randomly rocked up on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean at the same time. Maybe there is such a thing as fate.”
“I don’t believe in fate,” Kelly says.
I turn my head to look at him. “You don’t think it’s fate that we met that day? We only stopped there so my mother could try to beg to keep her job because it was close to the hospital. I normally never go with her. How often did you go to that café, Kelly?”
Kelly shifts. “I’d never been in there before.”
“And then we meet again when you save me from drowning? And you think it’s not fate? It couldn’t be more so.”
Kelly shakes his head. “Coincidence.”
“Then what are scent matches?”
“What about the oracle card?” Gael says. “She painted us before we even knew there were supposed to be six of us.”
It’s the first time Gael has acknowledged he’s Daane, and I can tell it jolts him. Beau beams at him.
I can see the way these guys are pairing up. Their strengths complement each other. Beau’s extrovert energy meeting Gael’s more subdued introvert nature. Kelly’s charm and easy charisma meeting the intensity of Shale’s strength. Ezy’s broken anger being channeled by Keagan’s destructive force.
And how do they compliment me? What can I possibly give back to them?
A tiny voice in my mind whispers that they’d be better off without me.
No, they are protectors, care-takers, friends, lovers, family. I fit with them. Don’t I?
Is that why I'm still so angry with Kelly, Gael, and Ezy still? Not because of them and what they did but because of me and what I lack? Do I think that I might lose the Daane to them? Kind of, yeah. Kelly, Gael, and Ezy are mesmerizing. Are they my competition?
The fear that I’m losing the Daane as the pack has grown is like a tiny light in my heart I can’t put out.
I tear my gaze away from them and look down at my hands. I’m not ready for them to see that I’m all in now, unhappily, unwillingly. My heart beats for them. My eyes look for them. They invade my dreams with whispers, my world with touch, and the very air I take into my lungs carries the scent of them.
But trust is hard to give.
I stand up from the chair I’m sitting on and limp to the window so I can look at the beach. There are so many places I want to see, but, right now, when I close my eyes, the only place I picture us is on the islands where my guys own the island and the Raines own the ocean.
That wave comes at me again, but, this time, it’s pitch black, as dark as oil, and I’m standing on the roof of a skyscraper in the city. There’s nowhere to run, so I brace myself, but I’m not sure I can survive.
The wave hits, and I’m tossed into a free fall off the side of the building, churning and spinning in the dark.
I blink at the sudden return of light.
I’m getting really tired of whatever these visions are. Luckily, I don’t think anyone else noticed my distraction.
I ease away from them. The wave didn’t feel like a wave. It felt like fear. What is that?
My fingers itch, and I want to get my cards out and paint. I make a decision to follow the impulse and pull out my materials out of my bag and start working, while the pack continues discussing our living situation.
I don’t know how long passes when I look down at the three cards I’ve painted.
Past.
Present.
Future.
I don’t know if I have the Sight like I tell my clients or if I simply can read micro expressions really well. I think a lot of things are coincidence.
But there have been things I can’t explain. Like the Daane card.
Like these.
The first card shows the land meeting the sea. The word that chose the card was ‘divide’.
I study it with interest, recognising that it represents more than just the pack. The divide in ourselves, the parts of us we are not at peace with yet.
I turn it over and pick up the second card. There’s a spotlight on a china doll with a tsunami coming towards her in the background.
The word is ‘hunted’.
It sends chills up and down my spine. Hunted? From what? It’s a card of great danger and darkness. When I look at it, I feel afraid.
I turn the card over and pick up the third.
There’s a king of ice, a king of fire, and a crown upon death’s cowl. In front is a man with Kelly’s eyes but dark hair. He’s got tattoos on this fingers, and he’s holding the hand of a woman with the moon held to her chest.
The word chills me.
Dread.
I feel the importance of something that could affect us all hanging in the balance. The world seems suddenly huge, and I feel all the connections, all the intricate threads, and then, just as quickly, it’s gone, and I’m left shaken.
I sense someone coming close behind me and find Ezy there, curiously looking down at the cards.
“Do they mean anything?”
“I honestly don’t know. Sometimes things happen that could mean…” I trial off and shake my head, remembering Kelly’s outburst. I don’t want this alpha to think I’m crazy.
“I believe there are things in this world that don’t make sense,” Ezy says as if he can sense my sudden nerves.
I glance at him as he moves to sit down beside me. Everything in me goes still and alert.
“My grandpa believed in psychics and messages. Ghosts, too. I believe there is something. I’m not sure what, but there is something.”
I exhale and decide to take a risk. If he runs screaming, then he’s not the alpha for me.
“After I almost died, I started having these flashes of not the future but feelings. When I started painting, I could sometimes give someone a card or a stone because it felt right. People would come back and tell me it helped them.”
“And these cards?” Ezy spreads his fingers across the cards.
I touch the first card. The past. “This is us. We were divided not just in where we were but also our spiritual selves were broken. It’s not a negative card but one of warning and hope.”
Ezy lifts it up and looks at it. “There are footprints leading to the water. And coming out.”
I nod. I’d seen that. The Raines coming out of the ocean and Daane walking to it? Meeting on the shore? I pick up the second card. The present. “I feel such foreboding about this card. Something is happening. Perhaps something we can’t see yet. I feel like I need to warn people about it.”
Ezy picks up the last card. “I know who this is.”
“You do?” I ask in surprise.
“Sure, this is Kelly’s cousin, Bailey. He looks the same as Raider, but he’s got tattoos. Raider has no tattoos.”
I stare down at the card in Ezy’s hands. “Raider and Bailey?”
“Mm, you’ll meet them at some point, I’m sure. But I don’t know what these things mean.” He points around the card to the kings, death, and the woman with the moon.
“I don’t either, but I don’t think it has anything to do with us, anyway. It’s a future vision.”
Ezy sets the card down and turns to me. “If there was one word to describe my flaws and weaknesses, it would be control.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I need to have control. When we go anywhere, I’m the one who books the hotels, I book how we travel, what we eat and where. I plan everything down to all the details I can control.”
“Why?”
“Because…” He stops, his cheeks turning red. “Because I had no control. They controlled everything. My entire life. What I wore, where I slept, who I could speak with. Until I was twenty-one, my parents tortured me with their need to make me into their little drone. So my flaw is control.”
He shifts uneasily.
“I need to,” he shakes his head as if this entire conversation is excruciatingly painful, “and when we found you and the bonds. I just lost it. It was like standing there in a ballroom again while my mother told me I have to marry a girl who hadn’t even turned eighteen yet so I could further their business contracts. It was just so overwhelming, and it made me act like a moron, and that is no excuse for what I did!” He looks at me in panic. “I’m not making excuses, I’m just…I want you to know me. So you know when I apologise, I mean it.”
He takes a deep breath and turns so his knees are touching mine.
“I am sorry for the way I treated you. For blocking your email, for being an obnoxious asshole when the guys brought us home, for trying to put the Daane in jail, and for not getting them out the second you were upset. From the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry.”
I swallow thickly and nod, itching to pull my hands back. He seems to sense it and pulls his back instead.
There is one thing I’m curious about. “Those emails that we exchanged-”
“Yeah?” Ezy looks up, his expression tightening.
“Did you mean them? Were they real?”
I’m scared to ask, scared to know the answer. But I have to. It’s been eating at me since I met him, since he vanished. And after last night, I need to know if the guy I fell in love with really existed.
“Every single word. Those conversations I had with you were some of the most honest conversations I’ve ever had with anyone in my life. I think that’s why I was so devastated when you didn’t show up. My feelings got hurt, and instead of trying to figure out why, I just decided to run. But everything I said was true and real.”
“Even the fear of bugs?”
Ezy laughs, and I’m instantly and irrevocably entranced by him. “Especially the fear of bugs.”
“I didn’t give permission for Keagan to read your emails. But the Daane seem to have a questionable understanding of boundaries.” I say it as not an apology but an explanation.
“Not true at all,” Beau says, wandering across the room and perching on Ezy’s lap. “I understand that everything that has to do with you is in my boundary.”
We both ignore the momentary stiffening of the alpha before he relaxes and, to my surprise, slips his arms around Beau’s waist.
If his opinion and behaviour can change.
Can mine?
Can I forgive them?