Chapter 3
Three
ROUGHT
Eighty-seven fucking days.
Despite the low-lying early-morning fog along the coastline, the fruit trees on the Gage estate are losing their flowers, starting to set fruit and leaf out.
Eighty-seven fucking days.
I’ve missed celebrating yet another of my soul-bound mate’s birthdays.
Zaya turned thirty years old without me.
Eighty-seven days, and the pain that radiates through my chest is entirely different from the last time I lost her.
Both better and desperately worse. Better because even as I gaze across the abandoned estate that I once again can’t set foot on, I know my mate is alive.
I can feel my tether to her. Worse because I know what it’s like to truly and fully bond with Zaya — the comfort, the stability, of having our souls once again entwined as they’d been within the aether of the universe.
Only to have that stability disrupted before it settled, cemented.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, but I ignore it, sitting astride my bike on the road next to the locked gate and looking for any glimpse of Zaya, any hint of her pending return to the estate. And finding none.
The gryphon stretches restlessly inside me, talons expanding to scrape along the insides of my wholly human fingers.
My sight shifts for a moment, sharpening as my beast peers through me to confirm what we both already knew before climbing on the bike before dawn — Zaya hasn’t returned.
And I’m still stumbling around, shoring up the perpetually crumbling aftermath in her absence, and nowhere closer to my mate.
Eighty-seven fucking days.
And taking this moment — succumbing to the need to greet the sunrise, to force myself to accept yet another day without Zaya — is the only way I keep moving forward.
As I’ve done every morning since I returned from the barrens without her, excepting those days that my search for her has forced me away from my monitors and algorithms.
The only other option would be allowing the gryphon to subsume me completely and fly us into a solo suicide mission. But unlike my asshole brothers, I’m not so rash. Not so quick to despair. I trust that Zaya will return to us the moment she’s able to, with or without my direct help.
As the day dawns behind the slowly thinning layer of fog and mist, I close my eyes and breathe in the essence of the intersection point. In this moment, I — we — are as near as we can get to Zaya. For she is bound to this place and time as well.
My feet firmly planted on the ground, effortlessly supporting the motorcycle between my thighs even as they also ground me in the now, I exhale slowly, reaching for the energy that binds me to Zaya.
The moment the gryphon decides to amplify that connection, stretching through me to trace his own bond to his mate, my chest warms from within.
I don’t know if Zaya can still feel me, feel her soul tangled through mine, over the distance that separates us.
But she’s alive.
That’s all I get. Each dawn that I reach for her, I know she still exists in the now. She’s alive.
No sense of state or place. No more than a general direction. Though I might be influencing that last sense — the where, if not the how and the why — because I know who has my Zaya, my Marrow.
I know who is responsible for her absence. And her captivity? Though I have no idea if she’s being held, or even how she could be held against her will.
But I know who saw it happen. Who let it happen.
Fucking Reck.
This is the second time my brother has led our sperm donor to our mate, made her vulnerable to him. But this time, the Cataclysm hasn’t killed her. Perhaps because there’s no Disa to taunt with her death. Perhaps because he’s got other plans.
Zaya is the Conduit now.
Everlasting.
She returned to me once, and I’ll find her again.
My knuckles are still bruised from the last time I beat Reck down, each time hoping that he’ll hit back. That he’ll defend himself, defend his actions.
He hasn’t.
And if I push him too hard, hurt him too badly before Rath manages to pull me off him, the cu-sith tries to step in, to take over.
Then I’m forced to back off — to leave my eldest brother to his spiral of self-destruction — because no one wants the cu-sith in control.
Certainly not while our mate is missing.
Not missing. Captured.
None of us understand how the fuck our sperm donor can possibly be holding Zaya. Except that it might have something to do with her aunt, the previous Conduit, Disa. Because Disa was soul bound to our father and our uncles — meaning the Cataclysm might know far too much about how to cage her.
Why, though? To what end?
Reminding me that Reck isn’t the only death god I have to deal with right now, the gold-and-brown bushmaster twined limply around my neck — just tight enough to not be dislodged while I ride — shifts lethargically.
I took custody of Muta after we’d all discovered that we were locked out of the Gage estate upon our return to the coast. My little sister, Presh, insisted that she could take care of him, and that Zaya had sent the bushmaster with them when she stood against my father.
Holding him off so that Presh and DeVille, along with Bellamy and Reck, could flee.
But Presh can’t control the death god confined to the body of a bushmaster — according to Gage family history, at least. She can’t survive being bitten by him.
I understand Zaya sending him away rather than risk losing him to the Cataclysm.
Both Presh and Reck confirmed that. But Muta is bound to Zaya.
It’s possible he’d be safe, as in not a danger to everyone and everything, in the custody of another Gage-blooded relation, but I have my doubts.
“I thought you might want to hunt the estate today,” I say to the bushmaster. “I can come back for you before sunset.”
Though the death god only occasionally takes me up on the offer to hunt, Muta is the only one of us not locked out of the estate.
Coda and Gigi were compelled to flee out the main gate without any time to pack any of the awry’s tech, only minutes after Rath and I were grounded far to the east by two dire mages in my father’s employ.
Thankfully, the mage Harlee had arranged transport for Ingrid’s and Mack’s bodies to the crematorium that morning, before the intersection point locked down.
The tech awry and the combat mage are now operating out of my apartment, though I know Gigi has tried to encourage Coda to retreat to one of the tech’s other hidden lairs off the continent.
By the time Rath and I took out the Cataclysm’s dire mages — both of us still grounded and seriously fucking injured — Zaya was gone.
Reck was racing back into Outcast territory with Presh half catatonic from the trauma of facing off with our sperm donor, then losing Zaya.
Bellamy was near dead. And Deville was, and still is, suffering the effects of being ‘touched by a goddess,’ though it took us way too long to work out what the fuck was wrong with him and how to keep it in check.
Muta raises his broad head, forked tongue flicking to scent the air.
Or maybe tasting the essence of the boundary wards that bar me from even unlocking the gate?
Even though all I want to do is to sleep in sheets that might still smell of Zaya, even as I seek some way to invade the Cataclysm’s territory and retrieve my mate — without starting an outright war.
Though given Rath’s recent reckless run at the border, I’m apparently the only one of us who gives a fuck about potentially triggering a full-scale conflict.
A war between the Outcast MC, assuming our uncle would even back us, and the Cataclysm MC would only result in a whole lot of innocents killed. Zaya wouldn’t want that.
I keep Muta with me because I’m the only one he hasn’t either threatened to bite or outright bitten. Coda has actually run out of the essence-enhanced antivenom that they usually keep on hand when working with Zaya. We’re waiting for more to be brewed by their potions-mage contact.
Reck was seriously sick for a couple of days the last time he got anywhere near the bushmaster.
Not that I didn’t enjoy watching my elder brother writhe in pain via the cameras and monitors I’ve tethered myself to near obsessively.
I’m still not capable of being in the same room as Reck without instantly wanting to hit him.
The sound of another motorcycle coming from the direction of Newport draws my attention to the road. “Time’s almost up to make a choice,” I say to Muta. “You need to eat. To hunt.”
I swear the fucking asshole snake huffs at me dismissively.
But as Rath appears up the road on his bike, the death god slides down my arm, then leg, heading toward the unruly grass along the fence line.
I haven’t seen him teleport since everyone but Zaya returned from the confrontation with our sperm donor.
Rath slides to a stop in front of the locked gate barring us from the long drive onto the estate. He doesn’t dismount or kill his engine.
My brother’s brown hair is so short it’s practically down to the skull.
Unlike mine, which is constantly falling into my eyes these days.
I also haven’t bothered to shave. If the hair and the beard weren’t getting annoying, I could go on not giving a fuck about my outward appearance.
But I suspect I’ll have to shave it all off soon, like Rath.
He’s in riding leathers, like me. Also like me, he’s not displaying any affiliation. While the Outcast MC, through Grinder, are still helping us search for Zaya and fortifying the territory that surrounds the Gage estate, our allegiance belongs to our mate now. To the Conduit.
Neither of us are wearing helmets, Rath looks as though he hasn’t slept well for days. Eighty-seven days, to be exact.