Chapter Twenty-One
There was an hour left before I had to meet with the council, and I was dressed and waiting. I wore black, soft leather, and my hair was slicked back from my face and hanging down my back in one long braid.
The deep scratches marred my face, and I thought maybe they’d scar me forever.
I didn’t care.
My boots added two inches to my height, putting me at a solid six feet, and I wore armor beneath my shirt. The only weapon I had on my body was the demon blade.
It was the only weapon I needed.
I think I knew even then that the council meeting wasn’t going to go the way I hoped.
Too jumpy to stay inside, I left Jared’s house. Outside waiting were Zach, Sam, Remy, and Joe. And when I looked up, I saw Jared and Rick, standing a little away, talking.
They were both watching me, something eerily similar in their eyes.
The alpha and the detective.
Joe walked right behind me and the others fell in beside me as we strode to Jared and Rick.
I think they knew the meeting wouldn’t go the way I’d hoped, too.
And I was abruptly aware that they were worried that the council was going to hurt me. God knew they’d hurt me enough to warrant that worry.
Jared opened his arms and I went to him, releasing a long, slow breath when I was wrapped in his familiar, perfect embrace. I slipped my arms around him and inhaled his scent, and as always, for a moment, I felt safe.
I felt invincible.
Surrounded as I was by such love, I didn’t need magic. I didn’t need the council. I needed only my people.
I pulled back a little and smiled up at him, but his gaze remained serious, roving my face and lingering on the demon wounds, then my lips.
“I wish I’d gotten back earlier,” he murmured.
“I wish that, too.” I cupped his face with one hand, then rose up to kiss him, gently, sweetly, slowly.
But he frowned and pulled away. “Don’t kiss me like it’s goodbye, wolf.”
I hadn’t even been aware that was what I’d been doing until he pointed it out. “I’m more worried about things than I realized,” I said. “Somehow, it seems like the council is going to…” I shook my head, unsure what I was afraid they’d do.
“Remember who you are,” Rick said. “Remember who the fuck you are.”
I stretched out a hand to him and he took it, but he only squeezed it once before releasing it. “If we thought this could be the end, Kait, we’d be a solid wall of flesh between you and the council. See what the bastards want, then come home to us.”
And even though I was in Jared’s arms, Rick tugged my braid, gently, until I tilted my head back, and he kissed my lips. Just once, and briefly, but the slide of his tongue promised deeper, hotter things.
For a second, something flared in Jared’s stare when Rick stepped back, but then he looked into my eyes, and whatever he saw there made him let it go.
He knew Rick loved me, and that Rick would be there if he couldn’t be. And he was good with that.
I guessed he knew that Rick was my human world man.
I would never have been that good of a person if things were reversed.
“Let’s go,” Joe said gruffly. “Let’s get this over with.” And when I stepped back, he was there behind me, hulking over me, his fierceness on full display. “Nobody has to worry. I’m going in with her.”
“Joe,” I said gently, “they won’t let you in.”
“Let them try to stop me,” he said, and grinned.
“Don’t leave her,” Jared told him. Obviously, he believed Joe was going in, no matter what. “We’ll be outside.”
Waiting.
“The council won’t hurt me for losing my power,” I told them. “They can be assholes, but they’re not going to punish me for something I couldn’t help. The most they’ll do is take back their badge and cut me loose. You all don’t need to go.” Then I winked at Joe. “Except maybe Joe.”
“Damn right, boss,” he said.
“We’re going,” Remy said. “Might be something there to fight, if we get lucky.”
My mother and Lucy were waiting at my car. “Goodness,” my mother said. “You’re all following her to the council meeting?”
Lucy frowned. “What are you expecting? She’s been with the council a hundred times.”
“With Voss stalking her,” Zach said, “we don’t want to take chances.”
My mother’s eyes cleared. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Good call.” She reached up to hug me. “Later days, home skillet biscuit.”
Jared took a couple minutes to talk to his beta, then walked to his car. “Ride with me, Kait,” he said, but before he opened his door, Aaron rolled up in his shiny black council car.
He parked in the street, then got out and opened the back door. “Ms. Silver,” he said. “I’m here to take you to the council meeting.”
I’d miss him if the council forced me out. I’d miss him, and I’d miss Saul.
“We’ll be right behind you,” Jared said.
I climbed into the car without hesitation. I was nervous, yes, but I was also excited. Excited, because the council was…they were the council. They were made of magic. They’d shared some of that magic with me. They could give me more.
They could do whatever they wanted.
Joe climbed into the car with me, and Aaron never said a word. It wasn’t up to him to argue about anything. He was there to transport me. To pick me up if I was stuck somewhere without a car or backup. To take me wherever I needed to go whenever I needed to get there.
But I’d begun to think of him as a friend I could depend on.
“Here we go,” I said when Aaron parked in the empty parking lot of one of the council’s buildings. “Here we go.”
“Nervous, Kaity Bug?” Joe asked.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Anxious about what I want to happen and nervous that it won’t.”
Aaron opened my door. “Ms. Silver,” he said, once I was out of the car. Then he stopped.
I smiled at him quizzically. “What is it, Aaron?”
“I remember a time when the council brutalized you to test your strength whilst you were dragging a nearly dead vampire from the building.”
“I remember that, too,” I said. The vampire had been Farrow, and one of the council’s people—Lilah—had tortured her so savagely that it had twisted her mind and broken her body. It had taken Farrow a long time to recover from it.
“What are you trying to say?” Joe asked him.
“It is always a good idea to be prepared for anything,” Aaron said, then turned toward his door. “I will wait for you, but none of the men who followed us here will allow me to take you from them when it’s over.” He got into the car and stared out the window. “Still, I will wait.”
I’d never seen Aaron so doleful.
My pack and my alpha stayed in the cars as I walked with Joe to the building. Because of Aaron’s words, I was beginning to believe the council might actually attack me, though I couldn’t imagine why they would.
When the council was in the city, they hid behind glamoured walls that looked like a regular warehouse from the outside. Sometimes they held meetings in a place that looked like a huge church, an effective front for supernaturals who hid from the humans.
In reality, the vampires would never have been able to step foot in a place of worship, but the meeting place was not even close to being a real church. Any human glancing casually toward it would believe that it was, however, and that was what mattered.
Immediately, the doors to the council’s hall opened to allow me inside, and Joe took my hand, linking us together. I honestly didn’t expect it to work, but when I walked through the doorway, he walked through with me.
The interior was nothing like the smallish, crumbling exterior.
Magic had birthed the space, and it was huge, grim, and terrifying—and I’d been inside many times.
But I’d gone through rather brutal training with Ael, the wolf shifter elder, and I’d saved Bastien’s vampire Farrow when she’d been held and tortured almost to her true death.
I’d seen a lot of bad shit inside the council’s hall, and the cold, eerie feel of the place coated my psyche like black ice.
I was already eager to return to the fresh air of the night outside.
The sound of my boot heels on the cold, polished floors echoed through the sterile halls, adding to the background symphony of distant screams and muted laughter.
Joe released my hand to walk behind me. “Even I can feel the power here,” he murmured.
And quite abruptly, I began to get a very bad feeling. They might not have known about the siphoner at all. Maybe they didn’t know my magic was gone.
The council had a habit of testing me. They seemed to believe it made me stronger. Or maybe they were just assholes. But if they were about to rain chaos and violence down upon my head, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. Not without my magic.
They would give me what they believed I could take—but if they didn’t know I’d lost my power, what they gave me could very well kill me. It most definitely wouldn’t make me stronger.
Two minutes later, a couple of rather large nonhuman goons stepped from the shadows and waited for us to reach them. They said nothing, but they didn’t have to.
They never even glanced at Joe.
I walked between them with Joe at my back until finally, we reached the meeting room. They shoved open the double doors, and the creaking of those doors sounded a little bit like bones breaking.
The demon blade began to burn in my tight grip before I realized I’d pulled it from its sheath. Smoke drifted from it as I stepped past the guards into the large room where the council waited.
I had to go in full of bluster and bravado, because that was who I was.
I stood before the line of council members perched on their throne seats, my feet apart, my spine stiff, my demon blade smoking in my hand, and I grinned.
“It feels extra bleak in here, guys. So tell me. How much pain is this meeting going to cause me?”
For a heartbeat, they only stared down at me, silent and blank.
Ael, the wolf elder, was the one to speak. He leaned forward and looked down at me, his huge staff in his meaty hand. “When are we going to develop something resembling trust, Kait Silver?”
I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe when you stop trying to kill me.”