Shadowmated, p.2
Shadowmated, page 2
But we hadn’t counted on dilly-dallying talking to a stranger, then talking about a stranger. We hadn’t counted on Celeste joining the invasion, moving slower than a shifter would have as she trailed her fingers along the wall to make up for the dim lighting. I just hoped the combined delays didn’t mean fire had flared up to cabinet level before we reached the source.
The second door opened onto a room that wasn’t the habitat of a toaster any more than the first had been. The third, though…
Yep, the toaster was in here somewhere. Hidden behind that wall of unquenchable flames.
Celeste was the one who slammed the door, cutting off the flow of billowing smoke. My eyes didn’t just tear now. They burned, trying to squeeze shut to protect delicate membranes.
I could see well enough, though, to know that the kitchen had passed the point of fire suppression. Celeste was right to create a barrier between the conflagration and the hallway. She was also right to hurry us further down the hallway, away from the exit rather than toward it.
After all, there could still be children locked in one of the rooms we hadn’t checked yet.
The two spaces we’d looked into on the way to the kitchen had been a bathroom and a living room, both currently devoid of life. Which left three doors further down the hall…
I hesitated, uncertain whether it would be safer to send Celeste back toward Orion and the stranger or to let her follow me deeper into what Finnegan had termed the underworld. My sister was the one who made the decision for us. “We’re not leaving kids behind in this,” she said, taking the lead as she felt her way deeper into the smoke.
Past the kitchen, heat from the fire turned suffocating. If I had to guess, I’d say the flames had burned through an interior wall and spread in this direction. It also seemed as if the air-filtration system was drawing smoke toward this end of the hallway, condensing it beyond the filter’s ability to clean.
The thought fizzled in my head, rational explanations pushed aside by painful skin prickling. By breathing gone raspy. A cough started in my lungs then shook my entire body in a way I couldn’t seem to stop.
Then Celeste was sloshing water out of a plastic bottle onto my sleeve and dragging that sleeve across my nose. The layer of wet fabric helped a little, enough so I could peer at her to ensure she’d done the same.
“Never underestimate a kindergarten teacher,” my sister admonished, her voice coming out as a croak from behind what appeared to be a cloth handkerchief tied across her nose and mouth.
My sister was right—she’d had more foresight than I had. And it wasn’t so much that I was underestimating her. It was that working together on a critical mission was unfamiliar territory for the two of us. I’d been trained to walk through hazards unflinching. She hadn’t. And I needed Celeste to make it out of here alive.
I didn’t waste time trying—and failing—to send her away though. Instead, I took the lead as we entered a portion of the hallway so smoky Celeste had to grab onto the back of my shirt to keep her bearings. Even my shifter-assisted eyesight had turned our surroundings into a blur now. Smoke and heat pressed against us in a suffocating embrace.
I could barely discern the first door on my right, the opposite side of the hallway from the kitchen. My hand had just touched the knob—still cool—when heavy footsteps pounded up behind us.
Orion. I knew the cadence of his stride without having to look, but I glanced backwards anyway as the dark shape behind me rumbled, “Finnegan swears there’s no one else here.” Despite his words, Orion continued to keep his body between Finnegan—who’d followed him down the hallway—and the rest of us.
“Won’t hurt to check,” I answered, yanking open the door. Before haze took over the air inside, I scanned the space and found it just as devoid of life as the others.
This room was an office, complete with desk and computer. Would a prisoner be given supplies like those? But if Finnegan wasn’t a prisoner, wouldn’t he have taken advantage of Orion’s turned back in order to call for reinforcements?
Which is when I realized Celeste’s fingers had left my shirt. My rasping breath was so loud in my own ears, I hadn’t heard her move away from me. But I caught the motion as she opened the next door down, the last one on the non-kitchen side.
“Bedroom,” she called back to us.
“Mine,” Finnegan answered, “and you look remarkably good in it.”
Just like everyone else’s, his voice had turned rough from smoke inhalation. No, that wasn’t quite right. His tone was also tinged with flirtation despite heat from the kitchen pressing into our skin like a physical force.
Celeste was mostly human, so she should have felt ten times worse than I did. Still, she leaned toward Finnegan while his entire body angled back in her direction. Both of them appeared willing to make calf eyes as the building we were inside literally went up in flames.
“Terrible pickup line,” I muttered under my breath. “Even worse timing.”
I’d kept my voice shifter low, but Finnegan as well as Orion responded by glancing in my direction. Celeste didn’t. She was so intent upon gazing at Finnegan that I expected cartoon hearts to pop out of the smoky air and form a halo around her head.
I’d never seen my sister like this. Still, when we watched movies together, she always ogled the bad boys. Was this the moment she fell for exactly the wrong man, not on screen but in real life?
Something fell then, but it wasn’t Celeste. Instead, the crash came from the kitchen. I could only hope a cabinet had come loose from the wall rather than a structural support losing its integrity. Surely a building this large would be framed in metal? Still…
“I swear there’s no one else here,” Finnegan said, his tone turning urgent as if he’d just realized he and Celeste were inside a burning building. “Let’s go.”
“There’s one more room,” Celeste countered, already moving toward the door on the kitchen side of the hallway. The door I suspected would open onto flames.
A louder crash emerged from the kitchen. The wall on that side bulged as if something heavy pressed up against it. If sheet rock collapsed into the hallway, Celeste’s only exit route would be blocked…
“It’s time to evacuate. Ladies first.”
The alpha command spun me around and thrust my feet forward before I fully understood what was happening. My motions weren’t my own as I hurried back down the hall, aiming toward the exit. Only the sound of Celeste’s parallel footsteps prevented me from struggling against the compulsion and forcing myself to stay in place.
As I walked, I puzzled as best I could while breathing through my sleeve and swiping at tearing eyes. My sister wouldn’t have left that doorknob unturned of her own free will, which meant shifter magic worked on her even though she showed no other signs of having a connection to her wolf. Thank you, Orion, I thought, grateful he’d guessed my sister’s susceptibility and used it to protect her.
Then Orion’s growl carried down the hall through the smoke. “You’re a wolf.”
“Not much of one,” Finnegan answered. “Can’t shift. Perhaps we could hold the rest of this conversation somewhere the walls aren’t about to cave in on us?”
Whatever Orion replied, I didn’t hear it. Because the alpha command—Finnegan’s alpha command?—continued carrying me down the hallway faster and faster. I thrust open the unlocked outer door and stumbled out into the fresh air of the dimly lit alley. There, I bent over and hacked out sooty yuck that had settled in my throat, blinking my eyes furiously to clear my sight.
It took me far too long to straighten and look for a sister who might need my help. Shifter constitutions tended to be hardier than humans’, and Celeste was far more human than she was lupine. The smoke had been bad there at the end, far too bad for damp cloth over a nose to protect us. Celeste might not have made it…
She had made it. Wasn’t in any distress, apparently.
Instead, my sister stood with her head cocked, gazing intently at the doorway we’d so recently stumbled out of. She was waiting for something. She was waiting for—
Finnegan emerged, not bent over but rather just as tall and sturdy as he’d looked when he greeted us the first time. His trench coat billowed out behind him like a cinematic wizard’s cloak, and he didn’t seem to chafe at its bulk despite the Texas heat and the fiery interior he’d just strode through.
In response, Celeste sighed, the breeze of air wending out of her lips soft and awestruck. I had a sinking suspicion I’d just witnessed love at first sight.
Chapter 3
Celeste wasn’t in so deep, though, that she forgot our purpose. “Do you swear to me that there are no children inside?” she demanded, half of her mind still intent upon checking that last unopened room.
“I swear,” Finnegan answered, his gaze so ardent that he and Celeste might have been the only two people left in the world. Neither noticed Orion stepping around Finnegan and angling himself so he could protect my sister if she ended up needing his help.
Meanwhile, smoke billowed out of the doorway we’d so recently exited through. Sirens shrieked in the not-too-far distance. And even though our faulty intel about who had been imprisoned in the basement and the question of Finnegan’s actual identity were pressing, it was clear we couldn’t stay here. We needed to disperse.
Dispersing, though, meant convincing Celeste to head somewhere safe. And while, an hour ago, I’d been frustrated by her stubborn refusal to move out of Julius’s mansion, now I was glad of it. Because her hard line meant she’d be heading back into the heart of Council life momentarily, somewhere Finnegan definitely couldn’t go.
“Nuh uh,” Celeste told me without taking her eyes off the stranger she’d become so instantly attracted to.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.” With evident effort, she wrenched her attention away from Finnegan and toward Orion long enough to demand: “Give me the address of your backup meeting spot.”
I would have played dumb, but Orion promptly rattled off directions to the all-night pancake house we’d decided upon as a place to reconvene if we got separated. Still, when Finnegan turned to follow Celeste toward her car, Orion grabbed the other man by his collar and swung him back around.
“Ride with me.” Orion’s words weren’t a question.
“It’s a curse to be so popular,” Finnegan said by way of agreement. Then he blew Celeste a kiss rather than trying to fight off Orion’s grip.
At that moment, Finnegan appeared so easygoing and awkwardly human. But as his hand dropped back to his side, I thought I caught the flash of a tattoo on the inside of his wrist, one I hadn’t seen earlier. Not that I would necessarily have noticed something as small as a silver dollar in the dim basement light with smoke in the air and flames threatening imminent immolation.
Then Finnegan’s inner wrist was hidden again and the guys were leaving, heading toward Orion’s car, the same one I’d ridden in earlier. I had no intention of joining them, though. Not when that would mean leaving Celeste alone.
“Where’d you park?” I asked my sister.
“I don’t need to be babysat,” she countered, feet still firmly planted even though the sirens had drawn considerably closer and the guard could come flying out the back door at any moment. The cherry on top—Celeste was never supposed to have been physically involved in this mission, having agreed that stealing information from the Council would be her only part in the infiltration.
“I’m not babysitting you,” I answered even though I kinda was. “Maybe I just want to spend a little time with my sister. We never get…”
In distinctly un-Celeste-like behavior, she proceeded to talk over me. “You didn’t want to spend time with me last month.”
Celeste’s plea that I help save her kindergarten class from a shooter and my rejection of that plea sat between us like a lane-width pothole sandwiched by two sets of jersey barriers. There was no way forward past it. No way to turn around and go back.
As she spoke, Celeste raised her hand to swipe a bit of burnt debris off her forehead, and it was relief at the potential subject change as much as surprise at what I saw there that made my breath catch. Capturing her fingers between my two palms, I turned her arm over and pushed up her sleeve.
A tattoo sat at her pulse point, one I knew hadn’t been present yesterday. It was a half-moon the size of a silver dollar, similar to or perhaps the same as the one I’d glimpsed on Finnegan. I had the opportunity to look more closely at Celeste’s, though. Could trace Celtic-style knotwork inside the moon, forming a shape that spilled out of the not-quite-straight side like the business end of an old-fashioned key.
This wasn’t a matebrand, but its sudden appearance suggested it was equally magical. And as my eyes followed the intertwined curves, words that had been spoken in my presence weeks ago curled up out of my memory: “Where the glyphs lie halved, null shall overlay…”
Halved glyphs. What could that refer to other than the tattoo on my sister’s wrist that looked like it would match up to the tattoo on Finnegan’s?
“How cool!” Celeste said, apparently noticing the markings on her skin for the first time.
“I think I can find out what it is,” I offered, “if you don’t mind moving this conversation to a safer location.”
And that, unlike my earlier statement, got her feet traveling toward the car.
“Vega will meet us there,” I said ten minutes later as Celeste drove and I gave up on getting any details out of my aunt long distance. Vega should have known what I was talking about—after all, she’d been the one who’d recited the fragment of poetry to me. Or at least I thought she was the one. I’d been so out of it when I woke after losing my mate bond to Orion that the words had seemed to emerge from the desert itself.
Still, my aunt had been beside me when I finally managed to pry my eyes open afterwards. And she’d shared part of the same poem not long before that. I figured there was a good chance she knew the rest.
Vega didn’t seem particularly interested in doling out that information now, though. Instead, she’d responded to my request with a terse, “Not over text.”
Celeste, in contrast, was more than happy to talk about her new tattoo. “It means Finnegan and I are meant to be together, don’t you think?” she said, turning her hand over so she could consider the half-moon. Did it itch the way mine had an hour ago? Or pulse with magic like an active matebrand?
“Maybe you should keep both hands on the wheel,” I suggested.
“Because the traffic here is so terrible?”
It was still the wee hours of the morning. There were no other cars on the road.
Luckily, I was saved from answering by the glowing neon lights spelling out Partner’s Pick Pancake Palace. Orion’s car was already in the lot, and through the window I could see him and Finnegan sitting on the same side of a booth inside. I was out of the car, my footsteps picking up speed, before I noticed the eagerness spilling off Celeste.
My sister was biting her lip to plump it up the way she used to when we were tweens first embarking on the world of attraction. Her gaze never left Finnegan’s. And despite the window between them, his full attention seemed to be focused on her as well.
I didn’t like this one bit.
I liked even less being stopped by a waitress the instant we stepped in the door. “Partner’s pick?” the older woman asked as if it was a question, not the name of the establishment. At the same time, she shoved a laminated menu into each of our hands.
“I think we’ll sit down before placing our orders,” I answered, stepping around her.
Or at least I tried to. The waitress was plump, middle-aged, and entirely human, but she managed to corral me before I could slip past. “Order for your beaus first.”
“Beaus?” Had we regressed to the nineteenth century while I wasn’t looking? I had the sudden certainty that this was yet another example of outpack magic trying to drag me and Orion back together.
“It’s fun,” the waitress answered, oblivious to my guesswork. “Separates our restaurant from the chains. You order for your partner and he does the same for you. Eat delicious pancakes. Test your relationship.”
The waitress and her spiel were irrelevant, but her final sentence still managed to floor me. Test our relationship? The tenuous whatever-it-was that had been gradually rebuilding between me and Orion since our mate bond broke wasn’t ready to be tested. And I certainly didn’t need an external force manipulating us when Orion refused to so much as touch my shoulder.
No wonder I froze like a deer in the headlights even as Celeste murmured, “Mmm, pancakes.” She jabbed her finger at something on the menu then headed toward the stranger she apparently had no compunction against forming an insta-love relationship with.
Chapter 4
In the end, I ordered the meat lover’s platter. I mean, werewolves need more protein than humans and the stereotypical man liked meat. Surely I was on the right track?
Then I joined the others, sliding in beside Celeste and across from Orion. The bump of his knees against mine intermingled with stray scents carrying over from the kitchen to make my mouth water and my stomach steady. I didn’t need to overthink our future. Where we were right now was pretty darn good.
Orion’s thought processes appeared to be traveling in a different direction. “Have you noticed the paleness of Finnegan’s skin?” he rumbled, voice so quiet only another wolf would have caught the question. I glanced over at Celeste and Finnegan anyway to make sure we hadn’t been overheard and saw that I needn’t have worried. The pair was deep in conversation about their menu choices, heads bent so close together their noses nearly touched.
I still didn’t like how fast my sister was falling for this stranger, who seemed as likely to be a Council employee as their captive. But I could take an emotional step back and assess just as Orion had apparently been doing while waiting for our arrival.
