CHAPTER 20
It was dark in the summerhouse. Michael and I must have been more wiped out than I thought to have slept the entire day away.
Or maybe we really did share exhaustion through the bond.
I needed to talk to Mom again, hammer out more of what to expect.
However long I’d slept, it wasn’t enough.
I was still bone weary, crushed beneath the weight of…
I shot up in bed. That wasn’t exhaustion I felt. It was her.
She sat in the rickety chair in the corner of the summerhouse, flipping through Vogue magazine.
Her long legs were crossed at the knee, her lifted foot idly kicking the air.
She was clad in the height of fashion: spiky black heels, sequined shorts, a diaphanous top.
The bright pink of her manicured nails flashed when she turned the page.
Her skin was a rich, golden brown that looked like it had been recently kissed by the sun, and her thick hair cascaded in a gorgeous spill all the way to her waist, so black that at certain angles it flashed the jeweled blue of a raven’s wings.
Her dark eyes were heavy lidded, and the brows that arched above them were perfectly plucked.
She smiled as she read on, her glossy full lips the same shade of pink as her nails.
She was stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful.
The most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
Her eyes snapped to mine without warning. “Oh, good, you’re up,” she said, her voice lilting and musical. “Can you believe they’re trying to bring Day-Glo back into style?”
I stared back at her, frozen in terror.
Her eyes widened. “Oh, no. Don’t be afraid. I’m not here to hurt you. If I wanted you dead…” She shrugged.
If she wanted me dead, I would be dead, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing I could do about it.
“Layla?” Michael asked, pushing himself up. “What’s happen—”
“No, no. None of that,” the vampire said, waving her hand in his direction. The power that rolled off her delicate fingers was staggering.
His eyes glossed over and he turned to stare into the distance with a dull, stupid expression. A wall went up between us. The bond didn’t snap, but I wasn’t sure that this was any better. I could sense him, but I couldn’t feel him.
I grabbed his shoulders. “Michael!”
He didn’t react. It was like he’d gone somewhere else, far, far outside my reach.
I dropped my shield and tried to snap him out of it with my power, but instead of finding him, I crashed up against a wall of…
nothing. If not for my small, lingering awareness of him through the bond, it would be like he wasn’t even there.
Just like that vampire in the alley.
I let him go and faced the monster that sat in the room with me, a sinking suspicion opening in the pit of my stomach.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s fine. Just thralled. I’ll release him when I leave.”
Vampires weren’t supposed to be able to do this to us.
Werewolves were immune to the threat of being captured within a vampire’s gaze and turned into a mindless, empty shell of themselves.
But here Michael sat, evidence to the contrary.
And there she sat, absolutely stunning, proving that her glamour worked on us, too.
How? Was she so old that the rules didn’t apply to her?
Had her power grown to such proportions that our own was useless in the face of it?
“Did you thrall that vampire in the alley?” I asked.
She waved a hand in the air, bracelets clacking. “I did. But we’ll get to that in a minute. We have more important things to discuss first.”
A tear splashed down my cheek. I couldn’t help it.
This thing had murdered my birth parents.
Probably my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, too.
Did I have siblings? Did she kill them? The stink of my fear filled my nose.
There was no need for her to hold me in thrall, not when my terror kept me pinned here.
She sighed. “I meant what I said. I’m not here to harm you.”
I just stared at her.
She frowned. “How much do you remember?”
Please don’t make me remember.
Unbidden, screams filled my ears. The metallic tang of blood singed my nose. Carnage. Chaos. My vision swam. I saw broken bodies strewn across the ground. There, in the middle of it, a creature of pure evil ripping the legs off a wolf twice her size.
She grimaced. “Pure evil? That’s a bit much, don’t you think?”
Oh, Goddess. She could read my mind.
“Only when you project like that.” She sighed again. “Look, I spent decades trying to reason with your birth pack. Decades, Layla. I cleaned up their messes. I even protected the Sahtú from them when the alliance broke and they turned on their former allies.”
“Why?” I croaked. Like Gia said, the vampire virus fucks people up. Turns them into monsters bent only on bloodshed.
She frowned at me. “If that were true, we’d slaughter everything we came across.
Don’t be speciesist. You’re better than that.
Sure, the virus messes with us, but eventually you get killed or you get over it.
The point is, when logic and bargaining failed and it was clear the MacKenzie wolves were going to expose us, I did what I had to. ”
“What you had to? You killed an entire pack!”
She held up a perfectly manicured finger.
“Um… pack is a loose term here. There weren’t many of you left at that point.
You’d nearly done my job for me. Trust me, those still alive were not decent wolves.
They were violent and vicious and traitorous, some of the most ruthless creatures I’ve ever come across.
” She leaned forward in her seat. “And at my age, I’ve seen some shit.
I spared those few adults able to see reason.
I left every child under the age of sixteen alive.
Then I found homes for you with loving, caring people like the Fitzpatricks.
You are so much better off for being raised by them. ”
“You think I should be happy you killed my parents?”
She sat back and frowned. “I didn’t kill your parents. They died in the infighting not long after you were born.”
It felt like the world tilted on its axis.
My name was Layla Fitzpatrick. My favorite color was purple.
I hated asparagus. I was a MacKenzie Valley wolf.
This vampire had killed my parents. Those were the facts.
They were part of who I was. Truths I held to be absolute.
And here she was, telling me I was wrong.
What next? I’d find out I actually preferred the color red?
That asparagus was a delectable, underrated vegetable that didn’t tinge my piss with a scent that made me sneeze?
“Who told you I killed them?” she asked me.
It took me a minute to process her question.
Shock and fear had turned my mind into a slow, sluggish thing.
Had anyone told me that she’d killed them?
Or had I just assumed she had? Was there a memory of it somewhere, hidden in my subconscious?
One that was so terrible my mind withheld it from me, even while the knowledge of what she’d done remained? I… I didn’t know.
She must have plucked the truth from my thoughts, because she crossed her arms beneath her breasts and grinned. “You know what they say about what happens when you assume. You make an ass out of—”
“I know the saying,” I snapped. “Sorry,” I added, clamping down on my anger. Provoking her would be beyond stupid.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I understand. That night isn’t something I like to think of, either. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t like killing people.”
I stared at her in disbelief.
“What? I’ve been alive for a very, very long time.
No one understands the value of life more than me.
” Her expression turned contemplative. “Well, maybe the elves do. Unlike the fae, they seem to abhor murder.” She fixed her gaze back on me.
“I did what I had to do that night. Before someone else could. I doubt another of my kind would have spared so many. And a fae certainly wouldn’t have. ”
Did she want me to thank her?
She shook her head. “No.”
“What are you doing here now?” I managed.
“I heard about the mating ritual going sideways, and that in the process, one of my wolves was bonded.”
One of her wolves? There was a strange possessiveness to the way she said it that freaked me out.
She shifted in her seat, looking slightly…
embarrassed. “Sorry. It’s true I’ve become quite protective over you all.
I didn’t go through all that trouble of keeping you alive and finding good homes for you just to have to kill you if you turned out no better than your parents.
Over the years, I’ve kept tabs on you all. ”
Images of her watching over me sprang into my mind.
Of her standing on top of a cliff while I hunted down a deer below.
Of her dressed in casual clothes, wearing dark sunglasses, sitting in a coffee shop in Amherst, watching me walk past. If Michael was able to null himself out of preternatural existence, there was no reason to believe that a creature as old and powerful as she was couldn’t do it, too.
I’d been foolish to take him at his word.
Something she said struck me then. “Have you had to kill more of us?”
She grimaced. “Yes. Most of the time, I’ve been able to step in before the situation became irreversible. But a few of the older children had spent too long in a fully feral pack and remained mostly wild even in the face of intense psychotherapy and heavy deprogramming.”
“Any others besides them?”
“One or two.”
My mind wanted to fill in the blanks. Did they snap? Turn lunatic because their power overwhelmed them? Get bonded, like me, only for their mate to expose some contraband secret about our abilities?
She shook her head. “Nothing like that. Some people are just born bad.” She smiled then. “Don’t worry, you’re not one of them.”
This was the strangest conversation I’d ever had.