Chapter 22 #2
Something in me stutters at that. I realize that I’m holding my breath, but I can’t bring myself to let it go. Not yet.
“Maddox.” Ty reaches over and pulls my hands into his.
“I’m releasing you from this. You deserve a king who knows his own people.
Who can see it when someone’s got a knife to his back, and that’s clearly not me.
After all the ways you stood up for this pack, and for me, when neither they nor I thanked you for it .
. .” He shakes his head. “I think you deserve better.”
That stuttering thing in me shifts. This I can deal with. This is not . . . him not wanting me.
I would rather face Vin?a all by myself than face Ty not wanting me.
The truth of that feels like a new sort of ache, everywhere.
I wrap my fingers around his. “I do deserve better,” I agree, and his dark eyes blaze at that. Good, I think. Dick. “What is this noble bullshit? This isn’t the king who is supposed to claim me at last beneath the full Wolf Moon. This sounds like some whiny bitch.”
“Hey. Watch yourself.”
I hold his gaze and keep it steady. “I don’t need your self-pity, Ty.”
The funny part is that my heart actually hurts for him. It feels like a weight in my chest, but I also know that the worst thing I could do right now is cry. Try to hold him. Make this soft. That’s the last thing he needs.
At the end of the day, Ty is a warrior king.
One of the most sacred jobs I have is to make sure he can fight.
That’s what he needs, so that’s what I do.
“Connor betrayed you. That sucks. I’m sure that others will betray you, in time, because no matter what else is happening in this world we can be sure that people who suck will find new ways to keep on sucking. But it won’t be me.”
I say that last part a little more intensely than the rest. And I keep going. “What I need is for you not to betray me, either.”
He scowls. “I’m trying to do you a favor.”
“I don’t want it,” I shoot back at him in the same intense tone. “And anyway, you can’t release me. Don’t you know? There’s only one way out. If you want a different mate, you’re going to have to kill me. My mother told me that. It’s the only way you can clear the slate and let fate sort you out.”
He growls at that, which I guess tells me how he feels about murdering me.
Still, a girl likes to be sure. I let go of his hands and lean closer, tilting my head back to expose my neck to him. “Go on. Rip my throat out. End it now.”
“You little shit,” he growls at me.
I tilt my head back even farther. “One bite and it will all be over. I’m sure that will solve all your problems.”
He leans forward and puts his mouth on my neck. He bites down, too—but it’s not to hurt me.
Quite the opposite.
Ty licks my pulse, laughing when it picks up. His hand wraps around the back of my neck, and he tugs my head around so he can look at me.
“Never say I didn’t give you a way out, babe,” he tells me, his voice serious. “And you better always remember you didn’t want it.”
“Oh no,” I murmur. “I guess we’re stuck with each other. You’re going to have to meet me when the full moon rises after all, and get ready to run when it hits that zenith.”
It’s a lot later, and I’m a lot limper and giddier, when we both hear some barking from outside that indicates he’s needed. He bites me on the throat again, a little warning nip, and rolls away.
“Don’t disappear again,” he throws over his wide, beautiful shoulder. “I won’t like it as much the next time.”
I take a very long, hot shower and wonder why I’m not more concerned about losing a day or two.
Because . . . I’m not. At all. It’s not the loss of days that feels odd to me, only my reaction to it.
Surely that should be the sort of thing that a normal person would find . . . troubling, at the very least.
Yet try as I might, when I draw up the laundry list of troubling things that have happened recently, feeling loopy and giddy and rested from some spell Savi cast doesn’t make the list.
When I leave Ty’s den, I’m thinking that I’ll head into the grand cavern, but I stop, still deep in the tunnels. Do I really want to explain myself and my impromptu vacation on the heels of the Connor thing? I don’t. That’s the easy answer.
A more complicated answer is that if I feel anything about my loss of days, it’s that I’m running out of time.
Vin?a is already in a vessel, waiting for her moment.
Moments around here are usually moons. That means it’s three days to another bloody battle that’s not even my top emotional concern regarding the night in question.
Maybe I feel like there are loose threads that need addressing before the next potential apocalypse.
I told Winter on Christmas that I thought Augie was in a better place.
Today there’s something kicking in me that tells me I need to go see if that’s true.
I turn away from the communal caverns and head out the back entrance.
Then I run out into the woods instead, following that mining trail as it winds deeper into the Siskiyous.
I don’t know what I expect to see when I make the climb to the top of the crevice and peer down into it. I would have heard if something had happened to Augie. I expect him to be alive. It’s just . . . what kind of alive?
Maybe it’s because I had an enchanted sleep, or because a creepy stalker I thought was a friend watched me sleep without me any the wiser, but quality of life seems important to me today.
When I look down, I can see Augie huddled in his lean-to. He has all of his blankets wrapped around him, but he doesn’t look like he’s shivering. Or twitching like he was the last time. He’s sitting up. And when his eyes lift and meet mine, I can see that he’s lucid.
I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know if he can recognize me in my wolf form.
Either way, all he does is nod. Then he returns his attention to contemplating whatever it is that’s in front of him. Something inside him, I figure, because from my vantage point there’s nothing down there but him.
Him and whatever demons he brought with him.
Still, deep in my gut, I know that whatever happens and however it looks on the other side, Augie is going to make it. I’m sure of it.
I can tell Winter that the next time she asks.
When I get back to the den, Ty meets me in the tunnel outside his rooms.
I can see immediately from the look on his face that something’s wrong. I wait, and whine a little, shifting from paw to paw.
“More sacrifices,” he tells me. He doesn’t point out that if there are more, it means Connor wasn’t our only problem. I get there all by myself. “Looks like three goblin females, crucified—literally fucking crucified—and hung up behind Savi’s house.”
“Behind it?” I try to take that in. “But Ariel’s men and the pack were all over the place up there.”
“Exactly,” he says. “Now there are idiots in cloaks all over the place.”
“Great,” I mutter. “That sounds like a party.”
“No way is Vin?a out there fighting in some minion parade,” Ty says.
He rubs his hand over my furry head, and I lean into it.
“All things considered, maybe you should be over with the oracle tonight. The vampires are already down there fighting, and I’m feeling like I need to jump in too. The fewer minions, the better.”
I think about the implications of that as we head out.
Ty has all of our patrols on high alert, especially in the wake of the one-two punch that was Connor and my little weekend spell break.
He handpicks a selection of the lieutenants he has here, the most promising of the younger males, and orders half of them to patrol the woods around Winter’s house.
He takes the rest with him as he streaks off into the hills on the way to Ashland.
It doesn’t occur to me until I walk in the front door and sit down in a chair in the living room—where Winter is already sitting, gazing up with a curious look on her face as if the Christmas tree that’s sparkling at her holds the mysteries of the universe—that I was able to walk right in.
She’s clearly not bothering to lock anything up any longer.
A few months ago this would have been a straight-up death wish.
Tonight, however, I’m pretty sure it’s because our tough little human is starting to realize the place she occupies in this valley.
That, and it probably means there are more of Ariel’s vampire warriors in the woods.
Not to mention whatever spell Savi put on us, to ward us—though I doubt Winter trusts that any more than I do at the moment, since we have no idea if it works.
Then again, maybe she’s finally crashing out. No one could blame her.
“I take it you heard,” she says, without looking at me as I settle in my chair. “I saw it.”
“You saw . . . the three of them? Goblin females, Ty said?”
“It wasn’t immediately clear that they weren’t the three of us.” Winter is sitting with her legs crossed in the armchair, and she’s playing with the cards between her hands, though her gaze is unfocused and still aimed at the tree. This is how I know that she’s not done with her oracle shit.
“You thought it was us?” I blink. “You, me, and Savi?”
I don’t like how spooky I find that.
She looks down at the cards and shuffles them absently. “I wanted to see if the cards had anything to say about the days we lost at Savi’s. Ariel had a lot to say about that.”
When she looks at me, her mouth curves at whatever expression I must be wearing on my face. “Ty was unimpressed,” I say.
“I received a history lesson on the kind of spells that can knock a person out for days and have them acting perfectly fine until, guess what, their entire body explodes or something equally exciting. Apparently there is no shortage of such spells.”
“Sure,” I say, with a shrug. “But why would Savi cast a spell like that on herself?”