CHAPTER 5 #2
One thing became crystal clear to me: We needed to get the hell out of this house as soon as possible and never come back.
This place was too dangerous for us. Mary already loathed me, and I had a feeling that if she found out our bond triggered Michael’s alpha gene, not even her love for him would keep us safe.
I stepped behind him and placed the tip of my knife to the right of his spine, low on his back, where the tattoo started. “How deep do I need to cut?”
“Not very. My body has already pushed most of the ink out. What’s left should be concentrated near the surface.”
“Okay. I’m starting.”
We both braced ourselves.
I angled the blade and made the first cut.
Fuck, that hurt, but the pain was nothing compared to the sight and smell of my bleeding mate. Every instinct inside me reeled against this. I pulled the knife away, staring in horror at the well of crimson that flooded up from the wound. I had hurt him. Goddess help me, I’d stabbed my mate.
Michael growled again. “You have to be faster than that.”
I rubbed at his skin, smearing the blood away, and found that he’d already healed. Damn it, he was right; I needed to be much faster. He’d gained my increased regeneration with everything else.
There is no way out of this, I told myself. It’s going to be awful no matter what. Don’t drag it out, Layla.
Fighting myself with every movement, I put the knife back to the rune, plunged it in sideways, as shallow as seemed safe, and sliced the skin free. At least the blade was sharp enough that I didn’t have to saw at him.
His flesh came away with sickening ease. I pulled it free with my other hand and dropped it to the shower floor. It hit with a wet plop that made my stomach roil.
I clenched my jaw against the pain and moved to the next rune. What we needed was a distraction. “So, Amy and Ronald?”
Michael nodded as I cut the next mark free. “They had an… infatuation. Years ago. Before she got married.”
“Looked like they might not be totally over it.”
“They still share some affection. How close they remain is none of my business, though.”
Fair enough. I cut another rune away, gritting my teeth against the pain. My next question came out clipped. “Does Amy’s husband know?”
“I’m not sure. As I said, it isn’t my affair, pardon the choice of words, and I choose to stay out of it.”
Stab. Slice. Plop. I was getting faster. Another rune came free.
“Why did your mother call a meeting without you?” I asked.
He somehow managed to chuckle as I cut another splotch of ink loose. “With her, one can never be sure.”
“What’s your best guess?” I needed to keep him talking, keep us both distracted.
“That she called the meeting and plans to make an offhand comment during it that will make our lieutenants believe she was the one who initiated our rift. And that I’m not there because she’s exiled me for disappointing her, or some other paltry reason.”
“Think they’ll believe it?”
“They’ll believe it. It wouldn’t be the first time Mother banished a child.”
“When was the last time?”
“Half a decade ago, when Nathaniel didn’t go to the college she selected for him.”
Thirty runes left to go. “Seriously? She banished him for that?”
“She wanted him to stay in the city and attend Harvard, but he chose Stanford.”
Twenty-nine runes left. “No doubt to get away from her.”
“Yes, well, there was some difficulty with that. In order to attend, he had to temporarily submit to the local alpha out there, and Mother…”
He didn’t have to finish that sentence. I barely knew Mary, but from the little I’d already learned about her, she took the word controlling to a whole other level.
Michael’s arms flexed as I cut another piece away—his first outward display of discomfort. Thank the Goddess for giving werewolves an increased pain tolerance. If he were human, he’d be screaming. Hell, in his place, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t be screaming.
I dropped the rune to the floor and braced myself against the next wave of pain.
My lower back felt like it was on fire, and even though Michael was healing the wounds almost as fast as I made them, streams of crimson coated his ass and dripped down the back of his legs.
At our feet, a small pile of discarded skin sat like something out of a Hannibal Lecter movie.
The coppery tang of blood was so sharp that I could taste it on my tongue, and the sight…
ugh. I was never going to have another nightmare-free night of sleep again.
“Do you have any sense of what Anna might have stolen from you?” Michael asked.
I realized I’d been standing here with the tip of the knife an inch from his skin for a few moments, lost to my pain, my mind slowing to a sluggish crawl while I stared at the wreck of flesh gathered on the shower floor.
Taking a deep breath, I forced my gaze up and started in on the next rune. Twenty-seven left.
“I think it might have something to do with your mother,” I said.
“What makes you think that?”
“For starters, every time someone says her name, I want to snarl. I’m not going to lie and say that I’m a fan of your mom, but this level of repulsion feels…
I don’t know, foreign? On the drive over, every instinct inside me was screaming to grab you and barrel roll out of the SUV into moving traffic.
Because that was the safer option than coming here. ”
“And you have no recollection of what Anna might have said to make you feel this way?”
I pulled another rune free. My fingers were slick with his blood, and the skin slipped out from them and bounced off my bare leg before landing on the tile with a splat. I barely resisted the urge to gag. Twenty-six left.
I sliced into Michael again. “The only thing I remember Anna telling me is that I need to be very careful around your mother. Everything else is just a feeling.”
Michael shivered as I worked, a small, subconscious response to this continuous level of pain. He bowed his head, and his next words sounded like he spoke them through clenched teeth. “Please elaborate.”
“I’m not sure how to explain it. I guess I just feel like the biggest threat to us is no longer exposure. Anna told me I don’t need to fear her, so now your mother is my main concern.” I frowned. “Well, her and the witches.”
“What about the witches?”
“We need to be careful around them, too. And no, I have no idea why. With your mom, I get a sort of hazy sense of threat that centers around us exposing our power share and some solid memories of Anna warning me against her, but with the witches… nothing. My mind shuts down every time I try to push at the holes in my memory, like part of me really doesn’t want to remember. ”
His confusion and distrust swelled to the surface of the bond.
Right there with you, bud.
“What was she like?” he asked.
“Anna?”
He nodded.
“Nothing like I expected,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she stole most of our conversation away, but from what I can remember, she came across like one of those socialites you see on reality TV—into fashion, up to date on the latest lingo, a little prone to gossip.
One minute she told me she valued life, and the next confessed to wanting to kill that vampire if we didn’t. ”
He shot me a piercing look over his shoulder. His eyes were completely amber. “What?”
The memory coalesced with an almost audible pop.
“She was riding that vampire’s mind in the alley.
That’s why we didn’t sense him. She told me she thralled him just to test us.
She wanted to see if you were already faster and stronger.
The same thing happened when she thralled you.
If not for the bond, I wouldn’t have known you were a shifter. ”
“So she has no compunction about thralling and murdering her own kind. That must mean wonderful things for the rest of us.” His tone dripped with sarcasm.
I frowned, feeling a strange need to defend her.
What the hell had she done to me that I now felt this level of loyalty?
“I don’t think she sees herself and younger vampires as the same kind of creature.
Which, I mean, I get. You live five thousand years, and I’m pretty sure you evolve into something else entirely. ”
Michael’s scent fizzed with shock. “She’s five thousand years old?”
“Close to. Couldn’t you tell by the feel of her? The way she made your bones hurt?”
“I barely got a look at her before she put me under.” Anger became his dominant emotion, so strong it dulled my pain for a moment.
I dropped yet another piece of flesh to the floor and fought the urge to hug him. “I’m sorry she did that to you. It was awful.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s not your fault. Oddly, it wasn’t so bad when it happened. A lot like drifting off to sleep.”
I started in on the next rune. “So you weren’t, like, aware the whole time, battling against her to reassert control over yourself?”
“No. For which I’m grateful. The only thing that could have made the experience worse was an awareness of the ordeal. I wasn’t even afraid until I woke up and you told me what she’d done. Her power is…”
“Like nothing you’ve ever felt before?” I offered.
“Yes.”
“You don’t get many ancient creatures in Boston, do you?”
“No. They seem to shun cities and other areas where humans gather in great numbers.”
“They stick to the wild places still.”
“Have you encountered them up in your little wilderness enclave?”
“I wouldn’t say often. Some elves passed through a few years ago, chasing a jotunn.”