Chapter 11
Eleven
RECK
I push the cu-sith to move away from guarding the house. He complies, but only because he too is channeling his murderous rage into a protection detail. Because we both know that soon … so soon now … we will be able to unleash everything.
And finally be done with it all.
The energy of the intersection point stirs underneath our silent footfalls as we stalk through the dark, verifying that everyone who needs our protection is safe within the main house. The dire awry wearing my face, but in a twisted feminine form, is sequestered down at the beach house.
She should be in the fucking ground, except that would just poison the earth.
I think about pushing to take my human form, but I’m not entirely certain that the cu-sith would allow it.
Also, I might be too … mentally unstable to force the issue.
The intersection point — and, more importantly, Zaya — seems to accept my deadly beast. Ironically, I’m not at all certain the same would hold for me.
The seething wound in my chest is no longer cauterized. It was ripped open by the mere sight of Zaya holding our severed soul bonds, even before she tore into me about the future I fucking destroyed. Or had a hand in destroying, at least.
I couldn’t protect her when she was my everything. But I’ll do so now, even as her enemy. The irony is not lost on me, though my emotions and thoughts are dampened in beast form. Or rather, my thoughts are fiercely focused when the cu-sith is at the forefront.
I’m surprised one of my brothers hasn’t tried to cage or collar the cu-sith yet. Their trust in Zaya to keep the beast in check is risky.
I push a bit more into the cu-sith’s mind so I can see through his eyes. The beast doesn’t fight me as I push my intent through him.
We climb over the wrought-iron fence surrounding the Gage family plot, brushing between marble statues and other massive headstones until we pick up Zaya’s scent and trace it around the side of the mausoleum.
She dug here, moving a marble urn in an attempt to disguise the spot.
It takes barely two swipes of the cu-sith’s claws to uncover the hidden niche, but we damage the marble by hooking those claws into the edges and tearing it open.
The scent of death slaps us in the face.
Which is unusual because only ashes appear to be interred within the niche.
We leave the urn alone, hooking out the ornate wooden box — the source from which the stench emanates.
The cu-sith fights me on picking the latched box up in his mouth, but I shove more of my intent at him, and the beast complies grudgingly.
One of my brothers will be coming for this, but it needs to be me who wields it. My fucking responsibility.
Then maybe I can finally rest. Finally rid myself of all the self-recrimination and all the memories of all the terrible things I’ve done. To strangers and family alike.
I keep that thought, that hope, to myself, because the cu-sith would never agree to sacrifice himself. Or to leave Zaya unguarded. Even without his soul bond intact, the beast desperately wants to be near his mate.
I fucking hate every minute, every second, of being near her. Every moment of being near and not belonging to her.
We slip through the darkness, dodging the awry tech as they hustle back to the lair they’re building in Mack’s old apartment next to the workshop. Their combat mage protector ghosts their footsteps, moonlight catching in her golden hair, though the tech seems blind to it.
She calls herself ‘Gigi’ in this guise. But I know — because I’m not so fucking stupid as to not pull every fucking file on anyone remotely close to Zaya — that she once hunted Coda with an Authority badge in her pocket.
Well, not literally. She was so deep undercover, it’s possible the tech doesn’t even know.
So deep undercover that maybe Gigi’s forgotten that other life herself.
Maybe she’s been made to forget by one of Coda’s or Zaya’s purple-eyed cohorts.
Some twisted fuck who digs into minds, taking whatever they want, wiping entire lives from their victims and planting whatever they want in its place.
I was never that lucky.
Both Coda and Gigi will do their jobs. Neither need any oversight from me.
I send the cu-sith where he needs to go.
The weapon that once murdered a shifter soul bound to the Conduit needs to be seen by the person even more bloodstained and fucked up than me.
She’s the wild card in everything happening right now, and I plan on using her as thoroughly as she’ll fuck with any of us given the chance.
Any of us except Precious.
Precious is always the exception for all of us.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the purple in my younger sibling’s eyes.
I knew she was the exception to every hardened rule I’d walled around my withered heart the moment I first laid eyes on my baby sister.
The moment I bargained with the Cataclysm to obtain little bits of freedom for her over summers with my brothers because they needed her.
Rought especially needed to have someone to love unequivocally.
He needed a reason to live without Zaya.
But year after year, I had to return Presh to his compound, to his influence, and —
The cu-sith is still a few paces away from the beach house when the dire awry opens the front door.
She eyes my beast with a curled lip. Her eyes glow a light lavender as if her power is activated, but whatever she’s doing doesn’t bother the cu-sith’s senses.
Not that the grim reaper that is my other half is the most reliable judge of that sort of thing.
Bellamy turns her back on the cu-sith with an offish sniff, crossing back into the house and leaving the door open.
A door the cu-sith has no way to fit through.
Fuck.
I contemplate trying to communicate with my no-longer-long-lost sister without taking my human form — partly because I’m still not sure whether the cu-sith will give up control to me.
My beast and I don’t communicate, other than pushing wants and needs at each other in the most basic ways.
It’s true that the beast is more present in my mind whenever Zaya is near.
But I’ve never before allowed him this much freedom to roam as he wills.
The beast wasn’t willing to let Zaya walk away from us one last time, and I wasn’t willing to follow her. The cu-sith won. And I let it happen because I’m just … done.
Though not quite as done as I was a day ago. Not with the Cataclysm’s pending arrival and this one last task to perform.
I don’t expect redemption.
I wouldn’t accept it even if offered.
I’ve never done anything I didn’t have to do.
And everything I’ve done — every action, every death at my hand — was in the name of toppling the fucking bastard whose pernicious blood runs in my veins.
For what he did to us as children. For what he did to Zaya, both to her mother and her.
And for what he continues to do to the greater world.
I thought I could take him out if I gained enough power through the Authority. But the ripple effects from Zaya’s return have forced me to reevaluate all my plans on the fly.
And honestly? I’m fucking ecstatic that it’s now going to come down to the two of us shedding blood — and fucking eager to discover which one of us can bleed the other out first.
I don’t give a fuck if anything that Zaya was interrogating her father about is fucking true.
Everything I heard through the window — that some sort of creature or otherworldly being took over my father, maybe even killed him to use his body, position, and residual essence to take over the fucking world.
I share a fucking soul with a beast of myth and legend too. What little of that soul remains. And I haven’t wrecked even a fraction of what the Cataclysm has destroyed.
He will never be more vulnerable than he will be the moment he tries to set foot on an intersection point claimed by Zaya Gage.
I would die just to see his end. I honestly don’t give a fuck if that end is imposed by my hand or whether I just give Zaya an opening.
So I push past the cu-sith’s consciousness, and I retake my human form on the front patio of the beach house. Bones and skin twist and realign, pain crackling along every nerve and through all my senses.
I make a choice. I make it here.
Here, where I lived my greatest joy and my worst nightmare. Here, where I tried to protect those I loved and utterly failed.
Here, I choose to accept the fate that was rewritten for me the moment Disa stole my soul-bound mate from me.
I crouch naked on the threshold of the beach house, silently panting.
I’m extremely aware of the power of the cu-sith’s voice lodged in my throat, waiting.
The power of death unleashed, irrevocable.
If only I could risk using it against my father.
Unfortunately, it won’t stop just him. Only Zaya was unaffected the last time that voice slipped out of my control.
The box holding the knife sits next to my right knee. Its stench isn’t as intense to my senses in my human form.
A few paces into the house, Bellamy huffs at me like I’m a spoiled child.
“I need to know if this weapon will work on him,” I rasp as I straighten, bringing the box with me. I’m slightly shaky on my feet from the quick transformation and from having allowed myself to get so lost within the cu-sith. My human form feels fragile, breakable, in comparison.
Bellamy grabs a knit blanket off the back of the couch and chucks it at me, not responding. She continues into the kitchen area, not looking at me. Though I have no doubt she didn’t take her eyes off the cu-sith as I transformed.
As if she didn’t try to fuck me in a bar hallway in some twisted attempt at revenge. Or maybe she was just trying to get control of me — through the exchange of fluids.