CHAPTER THIRTY
Idrove recklessly. Every passing minute felt worse.
Every passing minute made me more paranoid.
I kept kicking myself, wondering what I was supposed to have done sooner.
Wondering if there had been a way to see that Henry was the one who made the vampires or that he was stalking me and Declan for long.
I slammed my hand on the steering wheel several times, causing it to bend.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Stalking us, making vampire replacements, lying about his identity with the help of fae magic to escape his past—he was literally all the problems. Every single one. We’d all missed it, and it could be Declan who paid for it.
I could have been riskier. I could have hacked him and let him realize he was getting looked into. Would he have had time to disappear if I had? Would Alexius and Maria have stopped what they were doing to capture the vampires to help me catch Henry instead?
How did it get here so quickly?
I should check on them.
“Call Declan Abbott,” I said, pushing my finger to a microphone button on the steering wheel. It pulled up his number and started calling, the ringing coming through the speakers.
And no one picked up.
“Call Declan Abbott,” I repeated.
Feeling sick, I finally made the last turn toward my brother’s condo. I slammed the gas and slid through traffic.
The phone kept ringing, haunting me as no one answered again and again.
I got into the parking lot, jumped out of the car, and started running.
Maria could wipe the security footage of me later.
My heart was beating hard, thumping in my chest from the stress. Hoping I wasn’t too late. Hoping my uncle wasn’t one step ahead of me.
My heart stopped entirely as I reached his door. Literally. It took thirty seconds of staring, seeing the reality of how bad the night was, for it to thump again. It was that thump that finally made me go through his wide-open door.
“Lexi? Declan?” I called out, heading inside. There had been fighting. The first thing I noticed was that the glass patio door was shattered. Tables were pushed or knocked over. The TV was on the ground. Holes were in the wall.
I could smell blood.
“Lexi!” I called out louder, knowing the wild scent well. “Lexi!”
“Everly?” I heard a long groan. “Oh fuck. My head…”
I spun and rushed toward the kitchen to see Lexi on the ground, a bloody knife next to her and a hand over her ribs.
“Shit. Hold on. I’m in control. I can help you.”
“Thank you,” she said, blinking several times. “Oh gods, this hurts.”
“The stab? I bet,” I said.
“No, my head.”
I looked at her face and saw the knot forming.
“Oh yeah, that’s a bump. Tell me what happened.”
“The moment you and Declan got off the phone, I was beginning to call my father just to let him know something was wrong. Glass shattered. The patio. He came in from the patio. He was on us immediately,” Lexi said, pushing to sit up as I grabbed a roll of paper towels and started to rip some off for her.
Better than nothing. “This isn’t bleeding that bad. I got knocked on the counter… I think.”
“I can fix all of this.”
“Phone?”
“Broken. I was…” She made a motion, like she was remembering.
“I was holding it, just hit my father’s name on the contact list. He had it and snapped it in half…
he said he couldn’t have that, and none of this concerned the werewolves.
I needed to be a good… bitch and stay out of his way.
Declan was…” She closed her eyes and started to push to stand up.
“Woah, no. You need to stay down sitting for when others get here.”
“No. I can heal this. This is… pretty superficial. Getting conscious again was the most important thing. I just need to Change. It’ll exhaust me and take forever, but I can fix all this.
I need to finish.” She leaned against the counter, holding those paper towels to her ribs.
“Declan scrambled and tried calling you back as quickly as he could, but between a vampire and a werewolf, he was the slowest person in the room. He screamed for Henry not to do it… what it is. Henry, your fucking insane uncle was really weird. I tried to get Declan away from him, and he tossed me into the kitchen…”
“He’s over two hundred fifty years old,” I explained. “He probably isn’t that much stronger than you, but he makes up even more by having the experience… not that I know where he learned to fight. He spent most of his life in a nest that practiced non-violence.”
“Do you know what Henry really wants?”
“There are only a few options. He’s either going to just run away with Declan, kill him, or Turn him.”
Lexi grew paler with each option.
“We have to stop him.” She grabbed my upper arm. “We have to stop him. We have to help Declan.”
I tried to get my arm free as I spoke.
“And I will, but you—”
“If you try to leave me here because you think I can’t keep up, I will dust you in the sun myself,” she snarled, her eyes flashing into a wolf’s.
Her grip tightened. “I can fight. I know you fucking hate me, but I love your brother more than you understand. I’ve messed up, sure, but I’ll be fucking damned if you go alone after him and leave me here wondering. I can help!”
I stared at her for a moment. We didn’t have much time. I had already spent enough here with her, my duty to make sure she wasn’t dead or dying.
“We could die,” I explained softly.
“Then I will go to Valhalla with a warrior's death,” Lexi growled, and I saw a flash of the warriors her parents were in her eyes.
An extra pair of hands is useful.
“Fine. Let’s go. I have an idea of where he might be going.”
Lexi grabbed several items before we could go. Her bag, a first aid kit from the bathroom, and alcohol. We locked Declan’s condo up so none of the neighbors would eventually investigate.
“The neighbor across the hall is on vacation. She’s the one who would have,” Lexi explained, still holding paper towels to her ribs.
“Are you sure that will heal?”
“I cut myself with the knife, Everly. It’s not deep, just bleeding more than I’d like. I’m actually more lucky my neck wasn’t broken when he tossed me like that.”
“Okay.”
“How far are we driving?”
“I think even speeding, it’s an hour away and… it’s already been thirty minutes, forty?” I could barely think straight. “He’s in the lead.”
“We’re going to get Declan back,” Lexi said as we got to the car. She got into the passenger’s seat and started stripping to reveal the injury. “What are we doing about your uncle?”
“Killing him,” I growled as I typed in the address for his second property. I reached for my laptop and used it to try to get location data on my uncle or Declan. “Did he also break Declan’s phone?”
“I think so,” Lexi answered. She already had the first aid kit open. “I could exhaust myself to Change to heal this, but then I’d have to Change back. I’ll just… stitch it.”
“Christ. Okay.” I couldn’t believe her anymore. “Do you have any practice with that?”
“Every werewolf in the pack is required to go through what is essentially EMT training while in our teen years, and it’s reinforced when we’re in our twenties.
It’s not just EMT training, there’s more to it, but you know what I mean.
Werewolves get hurt a lot. It won’t be pretty, but I know some techniques. Practiced a few times with pig skin.”
I was already speeding on the road when she said pig.
“What?”
“It’s the closest equivalent to human skin, which makes it the perfect practice. It’s actually being phased out by many for artificial skins to practice on, but when I went through training, the instructors were still using pig skin.”
I was actually impressed by her knowledge. It was a momentary distraction from the frustration of not getting accurate location data on my uncle or my brother. I could only drive as fast as I could to the address that he had intentionally kept from the nest and hope it was the right guess.
Beside me, Lexi grimaced, and I saw she was biting into her own leather belt. She pushed the needle with one hand and held the wound as closed as she could with the other. I tried not to hit any bumps or swerve too much for her.
“We need to make calls,” I finally said, knowing she wasn’t in the place to.
“I’ll make them if that’s okay.” I needed to call Alexius, Maria, and Callahan.
Or Alexius could call Callahan. We didn’t have Lexi’s phone to call her father unless she had memorized the number.
“Do you know your mom or dad’s number by heart? ”
She winced, then shook her head, growling as she bit down on the leather.
“All right then,” I called Alexius.
I should have never gotten off the phone with Declan. I would have known he was taken earlier and been able to follow faster. Fuck.
“Everly, update?”
“Henry has him. Lexi was injured, but she’s currently treating her injuries in the car with me. We’re chasing, hopefully, to the right place.”
“Maria arrived at his known home and found the… shrine you described. Only a minute ago. He’s not there, and they’re now on top of it. She’s leaving a group to clean it out and look through all that you might not have had time to.”
“I’ll send his second address.”
“Is it…” Alexius said something, and it was surprisingly correct.
“How?”
“It’s where he kept the vampires he created. It’s pretty far, Everly. We’re all going to be behind.”
“I know, but if I can catch up to him, I can take him. I’m going to put Lexi in charge of just getting Declan out and to safety while I keep Henry busy… and hopefully, killing him for this.”
“Good plan. I’ll call Callahan and tell him where his wolf is. We’ll get reinforcements from the pack. They’ll only be pledged to her safety if this goes wrong, but that shouldn’t matter.”
“What does that mean?” Lexi spat, the leather falling from her mouth and pain obvious in her face.
“If Henry succeeds in what Everly and I believe he wants, the pack won’t be allowed to have that claim over him.”
“Because he’ll be Turning,” I added, the words hard to say, “into a vampire.”