Prologue - Warrick #2
“But the human treatment managed symptoms. It didn’t cure anything.
Timoth knew that. He told the Council. They didn’t care because the imported version was faster and cheaper, and your family took its cut on every shipment.
” Torek’s voice rumbled with rage. “And when the wasting mutated and the vermin’s solution no longer worked?
Leeath, my daughter, was one of the first to die.
Not because we couldn’t have had our own cure.
Because we chose not to finish developing it. ”
“Do you think I don’t carry that?”
“I know you carry it, but you keep the gate open anyway. There’s too much money to be made, too much power for your family, for you to have the balls to do what’s right. The gate corrupts us, don’t you see, Janos? The vermin, they corrupt us.”
“Don’t be so fucking naive, Torek. Closing the gate will kill more.
” My father shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet.
“What about the red fever three years ago? The southern territories lost two hundred in the first week before our healers cross-referenced human virology research and identified the mutation. Without the gate, the southern territories wouldn’t exist anymore.
We learn from them, Torek. We progress, we adapt, we use what we can to benefit us all.
Yet, you told the Council we should let the southern territories die. ”
“It was a small price to pay to keep our blood clean, free of contamination, from the vermin’s manipulations. We can progress on our own, according to what we know is right.”
“We? You mean you?”
Torek’s lips twitched. “I have a vision for our people, Janos. One that doesn’t involve you.”
“So you’re here to murder my son and me? Seal the gate and pretend it never existed?” My father’s breathing was ragged. He was losing blood. I could smell it.
Torek’s jaw tightened. “You can’t change what has to happen. The gate comes down tonight. The only question is whether your son walks away from this.”
My father laughed, the sound bitter. “We both know that’s not what you’re offering. You need us both dead, or the Council will never accept your leadership. Not with a true-blood Kassar still out there.”
“I don’t want the boy dead. Let him go, Janos. You and I settle this between us. I win, the cub walks away, and I use your blood to destroy the gate. You win—” he shrugged, “well, then you both walk away, and the gate stays open.”
I glanced around at the fighters behind Torek and knew that if my father won, they would never let us leave here alive. My father looked down at me. Just for a second.
“Remember what we are, Warrick,” he said. Then, quieter, so quiet I almost missed it: “Your mother would’ve known what to say. I’ve only ever known what to do.”
Then his eyes went back to Torek, and I saw something pass between them, something older than this fight, older than the politics. A realization and acceptance that one of them would die tonight.
“You always were a liar, Torek,” my father said.
My father changed his grip on my arm.
Torek saw it.
“Don’t do it! He can’t escape in there. We’ll still hunt him, Janos.”
I heard it, though, the panic beneath his words.
With one hand on my arm, the other on my belt, my father swung me toward the gate with everything he had left. He was already starting to Shift, and I felt his claws tear into my skin, a bright flare of pain opening down my forearm. I flew through the air, arms spinning, and hit the gate.
The cold hit me like a fist. There was a ripping sensation, like being dragged through water that was too thick, too heavy. Then I was through, rolling across the frozen earth, the air thin and strange and biting in my lungs.
I spun around, fingers digging into the ground.
The gate was still open. Through it, I could see the clearing, the bodies, the blood on the snow, the fighters moving, surging toward the gate.
And my father. Standing at the stone.
He’d torn his own arm open, a deep gash from elbow to wrist. Blood was sheeting down his hand, as he smeared his blood across the stone surface in long, desperate strokes, whispering words I couldn’t hear.
The stone screamed. There’s no other word for it; it was a sound like metal and glass and something alive all breaking at once, and the shimmer between us began to fracture, gold and red light splintering like cracks in ice.
Through the dying light, I saw Torek sprint toward the gate. He couldn’t let me escape, not if he wanted to rule.
My father stepped back from the stone. He turned to face his enemy. And even through the shimmer, even though the light was coming apart around us, I saw them both Shift, their bones cracking, bodies exploding outward, two tigers where two men had been, as they launched themselves at each other.
Then the light shattered outward and went dark, and where the doorway had been, there was nothing. Just dead stone.
The last thing I ever saw of my father was him as a massive white tiger in mid-air, jaws open, bleeding from a dozen wounds, leaping straight at Torek’s throat.
Then he was gone. And I was alone. My father had done Torek’s job for him; he’d broken the gate, destroyed generations of our power, just to save me.
I got back to my cabin past midnight. It wasn’t much from the outside; cedar siding gone silver with age, a covered porch that creaked, but inside, I’d made it mine.
Open plan living space: kitchen along the back wall, a scarred oak table I’d picked up at an estate sale, a couple of leather armchairs angled toward the woodstove.
One bedroom through a door I rarely bothered closing.
I’d lined every available surface with books on portals, gates, dimensional theory; they spilled off shelves onto the floor, stacked on the kitchen counter, wedged between the chair cushions.
Anything that might tell me how to reopen what my father had destroyed. Research had so far gotten me nowhere.
I lit the woodstove more for comfort than warmth; my resting temperature would have put a human in an emergency room, and an Illinois winter was a mild inconvenience.
But fire was fire, and something in my tiger brain responded to it in ways I’d stopped trying to analyze.
I poured two fingers of whiskey and settled into the chair by the window.
My phone was face-down on the arm of the chair where I’d dropped it.
I turned it over. One missed call. Davan.
He always called me on a Friday to see how I was. As always, I never answered.
I set the phone down again and ran one finger down the jagged ridge of raised skin running down my forearm, faded now but still there.
My father’s claws where they’d caught my arm as he’d thrown me; not meaning to hurt, just moving too fast, too desperate.
Wounds by an Alpha never healed, and the scar was the last thing my father ever gave me.
He’d saved me by trapping me. Broken the only bridge between us, so Torek couldn’t cross it and hunt me down.
But I knew my dad was dead. Had to be. If Janos Kassar had survived, he would have found a way to reach me.
He would have rebuilt the gate or torn the world apart looking for another one. He would have come for me.
Fifteen years of silence told me everything I needed to know.
My mother might still be alive, but I doubted it. My parents had been fated mates, and none survived the death of their mate for long. If my father were gone, she would have followed. That was the mercy and the cruelty of the bond. You never had to grieve alone. You didn’t get to grieve at all.
You’re full of self-pity tonight.
My tiger never had time for self-reflection; he was all about the now, the future. He knew there was nothing we could do to change the past, so why waste time thinking about it?
I’m fine.
You’re not fine. You haven’t been fine since we landed here. You’ve just learned to do a convincing impression of it.
I didn’t argue. He was right. But the familiar burn of hatred for Torek flared through me.
When I figured out how to wake a broken gate, I would go home and hunt him.
I’d make him pay for what he’d done. For my father’s blood.
For the life I should have had. For years of exile in a world where I’d never belong.
Outside, the forest pressed close. I finished the whiskey and watched the fire die down to embers.
Tomorrow, I had to leave early for an interview with a woman in Millbrook.
Someone who might have information on Andrew Coleman, a financial predator I’d been investigating.
It was a routine interview, a routine case, a routine day in a routine life that consisted entirely of boring fucking routines, because it was the scaffolding that held me upright.
Maybe something will change.
Nothing changes, I told him. Nothing ever changes.
He went quiet; he’d had enough of me wallowing.
Seven hundred and eighty Fridays. Fifteen years and nothing. But next week, I’d go back to that stone. Press my palm against the cold rock. Wait for a shimmer that never came.
Because it was all I had.