Jesse
Tonight, the wall let go.
Not with the gradual thinning I'd come to expect, but all at once. I'd had my palm flat against the window, reading the pulse of it the way I always did before I slept, when the entire structure shuddered once, like something deep in the foundation had been pulled out, and simply opened.
The gray beyond the window turned black.
Real black. The black of actual night sky, and a thousand stars, and the horizon line far below us that meant earth, that meant altitude, that meant the aircraft I was standing inside was no longer suspended in a pocket dimension but in the physical, measurable, gravitationally committed atmosphere at somewhere between thirty-five and forty thousand feet.
The engines screamed back to life.
The plane lurched, dropping hard to the left, and I grabbed the headrest nearest to me and held on as everything that wasn't bolted down became a projectile.
A bottle skidded off the galley counter.
Cruthú launched from the back of the seat and crashed into the cabin ceiling, shrieking, wings beating hard.
Shea came off the cushion beside me with a cry as I reached for her, catching her arm just in time.
Ryan screamed Christian's name.
I was already moving.
"Jesse —" Shea's hand locked on my arm as I lurched past her.
"Get her to the seat." I grabbed the nearest wall to right myself against the tilt of the floor. "Both of you down and buckled. NOW."
She didn't argue. I caught Cruthú as the raven came careening back across the cabin, tucked her hard against my chest, and shoved open the cockpit door.
The instruments were going insane. Every warning light on the panel blazed at once, the altitude readout spinning through numbers too fast to track, and the nose of the plane was pitched down in a dive that was about to become fatal in the next sixty seconds.
In their harnesses, the pilots hung limp, still deep in the sleep I'd put them under two days ago.
No time to be delicate about it.
Slipping Cruthú under the hem of my shirt to keep her stable against me, I snapped both hands forward with a few sharp words.
It hit them like ice water, a brutal jolt to the central nervous system, and both men gasped and jolted upright in the same second, their hands going automatically for the controls before their eyes were even fully open.
"Pull up," I ordered. "You're in a dive. Nose up, full thrust, whatever you do, but do it now."
The captain's hands were already moving. Whatever the state of his mind, his muscle memory kicked in, and he hauled back on the yoke as the co-pilot slammed the throttle forward. The engines wailed. The floor tilted the other direction as the plane's nose began to climb.
I braced in the doorway and watched the altimeter stop its spin.
Nineteen thousand feet. Twenty. Twenty-two.
The wings steadied.
Closing my eyes briefly, I let out a breath.
"What the hell—" the first officer started.
"You lost control momentarily," I said, digging into his mind. "You have it back. I need you to level off and set a course for Louis Armstrong Airport. New Orleans."
Whipping around in his chair to look at me, the captain slowly repeated what I'd just said. His gray goatee was crooked, his collar undone. Behind his eyes, the scrambled pieces of the last six weeks were trying desperately to reassemble into a sequence he could live with.
My tone discouraged the attempt. "New Orleans."
He turned back to the instrument panel. A long beat passed. "New Orleans," he confirmed, his voice the careful monotone of someone who'd decided not to ask questions until they had solid ground under their feet.
Cruthú poked her head out of the neckline of my shirt and made a sound of profound exhaustion against my chest.
"I know," I told her quietly, stroking the feathers on the back of her neck. "I'm so sorry. It'll be okay now." I left her inside my shirt, just in case, while I made my way back to the main cabin.
Shea was buckled into her seat when I returned, Ryan across from her with Christian's beside her. He was conscious, barely, his topaz eyes staring up at the ceiling in the slow, unfocused way of a male running on fumes.
I stepped over the debris scattered across the aisle and dropped into the seat beside Shea.
She turned and looked at me, and for a moment I just stared at her. Cruthú hooking her little talons into my shirt and settling against my shoulder like a bird who'd made up her mind she wasn't moving again.
"Are we out?" Shea asked quietly.
"We're out."
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, they were wet.
She blinked it away before I could acknowledge it, and once again I felt the fury burn through me that had sustained me all this time.
The fury that I could do nothing—NOTHING—to ease her suffering while we'd hung in my father's grip.
I was going to kill him if it was the last thing I ever did. Preferably slowly and painfully.
Reaching up, I gently pushed her hair back from her face, then cupped her jaw, and pressed my lips to her temple.
She turned her cheek into my hand.
That was as much as either of us were capable of, right then.
"Okay?" I asked against her hair.
"No," she said. "But I will be as soon as I get out of this damn plane."
Ryan managed to get a bottle of water from the galley, and then changed her mind and went back to grab four more and a few packets of crackers since we didn't have to ration anymore.
After handing both to me and water to Shea, she sat on the floor of the aisle beside Christian's seat with her back against the opposite and handed him one water at a time until he'd gotten through both.
It wasn't blood, but it would help. And he still looked like something scraped off the bottom of a shoe.
But he was upright now and appeared a little more aware of what was going on around him.
I turned back to the window and watched the night pass outside it. If we'd been released in the same place, we should be landing in just a couple of hours.
I used that time to try to figure out what had changed and what my father was doing now.
It wasn't possible that he'd forgotten us — Marcus forgot nothing — but something had happened where we weren't important anymore.
The pocket dimension he'd built to keep us in was a living construction, threaded through with his intention, maintained by his ongoing will.
When that will broke and redirected itself entirely, the cage starved.
And my father didn't starve a cage without reason.
I knew what the reason had to be. I'd known it since Ryan put the word to it three days ago. My father had gotten his drug of choice.
Shea's fingers found mine in the dimly lit cabin.
Outside the window, the water far below us shimmered in the light of the moon. I tracked the horizon and didn't look away from it, calculating.
He'd gotten to Alice.
The realisation wasn't a guess. It was the only thing that fit.
The only context in which my father's control became porous was love.
Or, at least, what he interpreted as love.
The hunger for it consumed him. Drowned him.
He didn't love the way other beings loved.
He loved the way a man loved an obsession inside a locked box — with absolute fixation.
Perhaps that's where I got it from, because I'd been completely obsessed with the female beside me since the first moment I'd felt her presence. I knew she was mine before I ever saw her.
And my father had been mourning for generations, ever since he lost Alice Moss to his brother, and had been waiting for her to return to him ever since.
And now she had, in a sense.
Alice.
His great-great niece.
We landed at Louis Armstrong at half-past five in the morning, fifteen minutes before the sky started to go pale.
The captain taxied us to a private terminal.
I waited until the plane had come to a complete stop before I paid the cockpit one last visit.
Neither of them would remember this flight or the people who'd taken it.
We gathered what we'd brought with us, then I helped Ryan get Christian down the stairs and onto solid ground. He could walk, unsteadily, but he could walk. Ryan kept her arm around his waist and her jaw set against the effort, but she refused to let go of him.
Shea stepped off the last stair and into my arms with Cruthú on her shoulder.
She stood there for a moment with the Gulf Coast air moving through her hair, and I watched her breathe in the smell of jet fuel and gulf salt and the distant sticky sweetness of the city, and the look on her face was the look of someone who couldn't quite believe it was real.
My chest ached as her gorgeous green eyes met mine. "Come on," I said softly. "We need to get you inside out of the sun. And we need to call Luukas as soon as we find somewhere to plug in our phones.
She nodded, and let me help her inside.
We went to ground in a rented house near the Garden District that Keira had secured for us before we'd ever left Seattle. There were bags of clothes and toiletries just inside the door. The kitchen was fully stocked.
Cruthú ate then drank an entire bowl of water and then went to sleep in her travel cage.
I envied her the simplicity.
I found my phone and plugged it in, leaning against the counter as I watched the screen light up.
Forty-seven messages. Thirty-one missed calls. I scrolled through the notifications, but didn't read them yet.
Shea came to stand beside me and looked at the phone, then raised one eyebrow at me. "You need to eat. And we both need to shower. And then we'll call Luukas."
"I need to call him now. We have no idea what's happened while we were trapped on that plane."
She stared at me for a moment, and when she saw I wasn't going to budge, she gave in. "Okay. Then food. Shower. Sleep."
"Yes. I promise."
A little while later, both of us fed and showered as promised, I lay beside Shea and listened to her quiet breathing. I didn't really sleep. But I rested, which was more than I'd done on that plane, and when she started to stir, I was already awake.
By six that evening, Luukas's plane had landed at the same private terminal we'd used, and the sitting room of the rented house held more people than I was entirely prepared for after weeks of seeing only three other faces.
Keira had the look she always had in a crisis.
Perfectly calm. Luukas had his hand on the back of her neck in that habitual way of his, always touching her, almost like he was afraid she was going to disappear at any moment.
And every time she exhaled, his thumb moved a fraction.
Nikulas dropped into the armchair and surveyed the room with eyes that missed nothing behind his easy going posture. Emma tucked in beside him before she'd even taken her jacket off, and Nik gave her a look that was quick, quiet, and possessive.
Aiden came through with Grace, and Grace went immediately to Ryan, who'd been sitting in the same spot on the couch for an hour saying very little. Grace put both arms around her and held on, and Ryan's hands came up slowly and held her back.
Dante and Laney were last through the door. Laney took a seat on the other side of Ryan while Dante stayed by the door, crossing his big arms across his chest as he tracked her.
Christian was on his feet. He'd finally fed after Ryan had gotten some food in her, and now he and Luukas were talking quietly.
Shea was watching me from the stool at the kitchen island, where none of the other males would accidentally touch her in the small house and cause her pain.
And Cruthú was once again on her shoulder, playing with her earring while Shea quietly tried to get her to stop. After her brief love affair with Ryan, she must've decided Shea was her favorite, after all.
I stood in the middle of them all, and for once, the dislike I usually felt from them wasn't nearly as strong as it normally was.
Everyone settled down, and I laid out what had happened to us. Then I told them the reason I suspected my father had let us go.
The silence that followed was loud as they took in the implications of what that meant.
Luukas was the one who finally broke it.
"I called Killian from the plane. He's expecting all of us in about an hour.
" He ran his fingers absently through Keira's hair.
"I didn't tell him anything except that you'd been found and the little you told me when you called this morning.
We'll fill them all in when we get there. "
"All of us?" Emma asked.
Luukas nodded. "Yes. We stay together."
My eyes met Shea's across the room, and she gave me a smile. It was shaky, but it was real. The first real smile I'd seen from her in weeks, and my entire body lit up at how perfectly beautiful she was to me.
We arrived at the French Quarter address an hour after the city went fully dark.
The soft pink Creole mansion rose behind its wrought-iron gate with the unhurried permanence of a building that had been there before most of the people inside it were born. The back courtyard gate swung open when we reached it, which meant they were watching for us.
The whole group filed through behind me. Ryan with her hand in Christian's. Luukas and Keira. Nik and Emma. Aiden and Grace. Dante and Laney. Shea at my left side, Cruthú riding my shoulder, her feathers ruffled against the night air. My ear still rang from her happiness about being outdoors again.
The back door opened before we were halfway across the courtyard.
Killian stood in the frame. Sandy hair and dark eyes that catalogued all twelve of us in a single unhurried sweep. He stopped at Luukas — one Master Vampire recognizing another — and then at me, and something in his expression shifted.
"Killian," Luukas said, crossing the courtyard to grip the male's hand.
"Luukas." His voice was deep with an Irish lilt. His eyes moved back to me. "Jesse."
I gave him a nod.
"Sounds like ye all had quite the adventure," he said.
"Not one I would've chosen, if asked."
"No." He stepped back and pulled the door wide. "I didn't think ye would."
The warm kitchen light spilled out across the courtyard stones. I stepped back and let them all through before pulling the door closed behind me, solid and certain.
Whatever came next, we were in the right place to face it.
And we were together.