Matebranded, p.8
Matebranded, page 8
“If he’s your mate, he can’t be rotten.” Celeste seemed so sure of herself. “Daddy wants to meet him. I want to meet him. When will you be home?”
Home. My throat tightened.
“Not yet,” I answered, changing the subject to give myself time to recenter. “And I shouldn’t keep you away from your class. I know Noah C is a handful.”
There were three Noahs in Celeste’s kindergarten class this year but Noah C was the one she talked about constantly. Last time she’d left him under the supervision of an adult who didn’t know his idiosyncrasies, the five-year-old had managed to get stuck in a heating duct, his feet dangling down from the ceiling and his shoulders wedged inside.
“Noah C’s in the principal’s office at the moment,” Celeste countered, the smile in her voice steadying me the same way it always did. “A small issue of an eraser and another student’s left nostril.”
“Let me guess, you told him he could pick his friends and he could pick his nose but he couldn’t pick his friend’s nose?”
“Slight error of judgment on my part. I know better than to give that boy ideas.” A pause then: “I will get to meet your mate, right, Elspeth? You’re not going to go wolf and just leave us?”
“I’m not going to leave you,” I promised, hoping I could stick to my word. Hoping home was still home when all this was over.
But if Celeste knew everything, she’d tell me to keep doing what I was doing. She’d tell me that caging kids was never the right move and sticking my head in the sand wouldn’t overturn the traumas I’d been responsible for. Until I knew what had happened to the young people from the pack I’d helped the Council take down, I couldn’t stop hunting.
So I hung up the phone and gave Orion the go-ahead to stake out the diner where Gabi had suggested we meet.
Chapter 14
The resources of a pack were almost as impressive as what I used to call upon while working for the Council. A car complete with clothes and cash showed up on the closest road by the time we reached it. Unfortunately, Maya came with the car.
She didn’t look any happier with either Orion or myself than the last time we’d seen her, but she drove without complaint. An earbud allowed her to pass along reports about the stakeout that had gotten underway, a stakeout Maya had pursed her lips about when she first heard our plan.
“You slept in and gave them hours to set up their own surveillance before we got there?” she’d demanded.
“Elspeth hadn’t decided on our route forward,” Orion answered, as if that explained everything.
“Then we should assume we’re driving into a trap.”
Despite Celeste’s third-hand information, I couldn’t really disagree on that point. I halfway expected Gabi wouldn’t even show up, actually.
Now, Maya shot me a look that suggested she knew what I was thinking and was glad to prove me wrong as she informed us: “She’s there.”
Then, meeting Orion’s gaze via the rear-view mirror, Maya finally let out what she’d apparently been holding in during the long, awkward drive we’d just sat through. “I hope you’re thinking straight. The matebrand might be enough to keep our neighbors happy for a while. But if you get yourself killed...”
“I won’t.”
“You can’t control that. Donovan thought he was bullet-proof also. But he wasn’t.”
Literally wasn’t. The memory of the day Orion became alpha filtered down the mate bond toward me, and I wanted nothing more than to ease the siblings’ pain.
But there was nothing I could say or do to change the past, and we’d run out of time to discuss it anyway. Because Maya was pulling into a parking lot surrounded by a row of dilapidated buildings. She nosed the car forward just a little, and my mentor’s familiar shape became visible through the diner’s plate-glass.
At which point, I forced myself to ignore the tension in the car and assess Gabi instead. She looked exactly like herself, albeit a less poised version thereof. Fiddling with a paper napkin, her eyes darted to the diner’s entrance every few seconds. Was she concerned that the Council had followed her...or concerned that her trap wouldn’t snap shut fast enough after I took the bait?
Then I noticed something else that made my fists clench. The diner had appeared to be empty other than Gabi at first glance, but now I could make out the form of a familiar teenager just barely visible behind her. Ari held hands across a table with a girl I didn’t know, their gazes so intent upon each other that I could only hope Gabi hadn’t picked up on the fact they were actually wolves on the chase.
“You didn’t tell me Ari was inside.” My voice turned sharp, fueled by that secondhand memory of the day Orion took over the role of alpha. Ari didn’t need to get caught up in yet another bloodbath if Gabi was about to betray me to our employers.
“He asked to be included,” Orion rumbled, reaching forward so his hand could brush mine. The spark of our tattoos colliding made my breath catch.
Then space reasserted itself between us as Orion elaborated: “Ari’s earned the right to be treated as a warrior.”
“He’s earned the right not to be placed in the line of fire,” I retorted. The boy couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Sometimes I didn’t understand wolves at all.
I suspected that final comment had drifted down the mate bond toward Orion even though I’d tried to keep it silent. But if his hackles were raised by my snark, he didn’t show it. Instead he simply murmured, “Agree to disagree.” Then he opened the door and got out.
An old-fashioned metal bell chimed as I entered the diner solo. Orion and I had argued about this part. He wanted to go in first, or at least to stand at my back while I traveled into the path of danger. But I’d been adamant that this conversation needed to happen between myself and Gabi. Maya had taken my side because she didn’t want her brother putting himself at risk.
Two against one was effective despite our differing motivations. Eventually, reluctantly, Orion had agreed to wait by the car.
Now, I could feel his eyes on me, hotter than the reflected sunlight that had radiated back up out of the pavement I crossed walking across the road toward the diner. Air-conditioning slammed into my face, but entering the diner didn’t break the connection between us. Instead, the matebrand tattoo caressed my arm like Orion’s thumb once had, raising complicated feelings underneath my skin.
Was I letting our bond twist my understanding? Was I stepping off the path for no reason other than hormones and magic-induced trust of a near stranger? Was I being irrational, just like Julius always warned?
When Gabi rose and started crossing the scant ten feet separating us, I was glad of the excuse to stop navel-gazing. I was less glad when Ari and the girl dropped hands, the scent of fur so strong it overrode old odors of burgers and fries.
There was no one else around, the staff presumably having been bribed to make themselves scarce the way Gabi and I had practiced in training. Which meant unaware humans wouldn’t see if the pair of teenagers shifted.
But going wolf was still a very bad idea. I only had time to shake my head, hoping they’d obey my subtle admonition. Then Gabi and I were face to face, close enough for either of us to try to take the other down.
Her hand flew up and I blocked instinctively. But she wasn’t attacking. She was handing over what appeared to be a map.
“Go ahead. Look at it. You’re well covered.” Gabi’s gaze flitted from Orion, leaning against the hood of the car Maya sat within, over to Ari and the teenage girl.
So she had known they were werewolves. Did she feel comfortable letting Ari and his friend surveil the joint because she had enough forces on hand to take out all of us? Or was this a good-faith meeting and she’d merely accepted the fact I would send in watchers beforehand?
Either way, the teenagers had finished their job and would be safer where a sniper bullet couldn’t reach them. “Tell Ari and his girlfriend to get out of sight of the windows,” I told Orion via the mate bond. He didn’t argue. Instead, a moment later, the pair giggled and scuffled their way toward the bathroom.
I wanted to ask Orion to retreat also. After all, he was far more exposed than the teenagers had been. But I didn’t bother. I knew that request would be met with a solid No.
So once Gabi and I were alone, I took her advice and glanced at the map. It was instantly recognizable—a four-state region separated into pack territories and the intervening outpack desert. Dots represented jobs I’d engaged in over the last two years, jobs I hadn’t paid any particular attention to since they’d been interspersed between others elsewhere in the country.
“What am I looking at?” I asked Gabi, forgetting for a moment that we weren’t necessarily on the same side. This felt like the kind of logic puzzle she’d set for me and Celeste before my sister chose college and the mundane world over reporting to the Council, before I became Gabi’s coworker rather than her trainee.
Instead of answering, Gabi handed over another map. This one was more wide-reaching, expanding to cover the entire continental U.S. Additional dots represented locations I’d been sent to, but now there were two colors. Green across most of the country; red in the four-state region from the original map.
“I research before you go in,” Gabi said, telling me what I knew already. “Or at least I do in most cases. Where I don’t—that’s the red.”
A faintly vile scent wafted toward me, likely from a kitchen catastrophe. Ignoring it, I checked out the color differential. Prince’s takedown was red as were the home bases of two other alphas I’d bagged in the same vicinity. Orion’s pack was red, and the supposedly rotten pack the Council had removed down to its last shifter was red as well.
My stomach twisted. Had I been personally responsible for imprisoning even more innocents than I thought?
“Red dots are all next door to outpack land,” Orion mused via the mate bond, forcing me away from guilt and back onto the topic at hand. “Not much of it left except in our area.”
My gaze flicked to the window to catch sight of him, then I wished I hadn’t. Because it was hard to focus with the deep awareness of Orion’s proximity buzzing through me. It was hard to think straight when my matebrand tattoo was curling up my arm and sending tendrils toward the sensitive skin at the base of my throat.
“The way I see it,” Gabi continued, eyes dropping to my throat then rising back to my face again, “we have two options. One is to take this to Julius. Ask him who researched the red-dot jobs. Go up the chain of command.”
“The other option?”
Her lip quirked and I could tell she liked the other option better. “The other option is to head straight to the source. I’m pretty sure I know where the red-dot perps are being held. We sneak in and debrief them. If they’re innocent, we break them out.”
I wouldn’t have believed Gabi was willing to put her job on the line if I hadn’t known how much she loved free climbing sheer rock faces and driving too fast on curvy highways. She was a risk-taker but, so far, she’d always won her gambles.
This time, it looked like I was going to gamble alongside her. “Where are they being held?” I asked.
Chapter 15
It was twilight by the time we reassembled at a marina jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico. Gabi had offered to charter a plane for all of us, but I wasn’t quite ready to trust her to that extent. Instead, I’d winced at the numbers draining out of Orion’s bank account after he found us the fastest flight from Tucson to Texas and rented a sailboat on the other end of the line.
Gabi had made her own travel arrangements and arrived moments after we did. Now all of our ducks were in a row and it was time to put our plan into action.
Well, almost.
“You’re sure you want to be part of this?” I asked Orion for the third and final time as Gabi pulled weapons out of her rental car and hid them about her person. “Maya isn’t thrilled.”
In lieu of an answer, he slipped a flower behind my ear. When he’d pinched it off a bush outside the marina office, I’d thought the gesture was an absent-minded gardening impulse. The same way he’d plucked spent blooms out of a flowerbed we passed on the approach to the Tucson airport, doing the local gardener’s job.
Only this bloom wasn’t spent. Its sweetness curled around me, nearly as heady as Orion’s own aroma. Meanwhile, a vision spun down the mate bond between us, that same memory of when we met in the desert. When he’d likened me to a flower unfurling after rain.
The stars in his eyes twinkled. I leaned inward, wanting to be closer, wanting to bask in his cactus aroma.
Then the illusion broke as he replied. “I live to disappoint my sister. And I wouldn’t want to miss a sunset cruise with my mate.”
Mate. I winced, all thought of flowers forgotten. Despite what I felt, what I saw, such a complete commitment on such short acquaintance was way too much, way too fast.
And yet...I liked letting my fingers intertwine with Orion’s the way they had for most of our journey. I appreciated the fact that the tattoos had finally grown accustomed to our proximity and stopped sending magic-induced shock waves through me at each contact. Instead, holding hands with Orion filled me with something subtly different—a warmth like when I’d woken up beside him in the bunker combined with an excitement that was entirely my own.
I liked Orion. Maybe more than liked him. I wasn’t however, about to take Maya’s advice.
“If you’re going to do this,” she’d told us when she dropped us off at the airport, “then you need to deal with your matebrand. Take your relationship to the next level and that should wipe out the previous, wobbly connection.”
“Are you telling me to kiss the girl?” Orion had rumbled, sparkles of starlight glinting in his eyes.
“I’m telling you to kiss her if you think Elspeth got her head on straight overnight. If you’re certain she now has pure intentions.”
Did I want to discover what it would feel like to brush my lips against Orion’s? 100% yes.
Did I have pure intentions? I hoped so. I thought so.
I wasn’t sure enough to take that step, however. So the two of us had instead spent the flight brainstorming figures of speech that were less likely to backfire than the one I’d uttered when Orion’s clan was under attack.
“Ready?” Gabi asked now, her tone the same as when she started a no-holds-barred sparring match. Focus, it told me. Keep your mind centered.
This wasn’t the moment to consider committing myself to a werewolf I’d met day before yesterday. This was the moment to use the skills my mentor had pounded into me. It was time to discover whether there really was an unusual amount of pack rot encircling outpack territory in the desert southwest or whether I’d been set up as a patsy by someone deep within the Council.
“Ready,” I affirmed, reaching for the rope that tied our rented sailboat to the shore.
The sun was a beautiful ball of red rolling into the ocean as I tacked into the wind. Gabi and Orion were hidden below decks and the oil rig was as an ungainly shape in the distance that gradually grew larger until it loomed high, massive rusty uprights blocking air flow enough so the tangles in my hair momentarily lay flat.
Then I was past the rig and the wind once again overwhelmed everything outside its shelter. Time to let the sails luff loudly, flapping discontent at bad trimmage.
“Oopsy,” I said aloud as the mainsheet ripped itself out of my loose grip. The rope whipped away, taking the sail with it, and I just barely managed to duck in time not to be clocked in the head by the boom as the heavy sail-bottom flew from one side of the boat to the other.
My plan was simple. When it comes to prompting chivalric behavior, a broken-down car is nothing compared to an out-of-control sailboat. There was just enough light left for any watcher to see my vessel being swept back toward the oil rig, and I was sure there would be a guard on duty to take in the view.
I was mostly sure. I was pretty sure.
Water slapped the sides of the hull and, finally, someone hailed me from the platform several stories up. “Please regain control of your boat!”
“I’m trying!” I called, voice wobbly, body leaning so far out over the water that I nearly fell in. “I can’t reach it!”
I could have grabbed that line if I’d really wanted to. But, of course, I didn’t. I wanted to fixate all attention on myself while Orion and Gabi took advantage of the descending nightfall to ease out of the cabin then lower themselves over the side of the boat and into the water.
The wind and waves were so loud I didn’t see or hear them with my ears. Still, down the mate bond Orion’s voice was clear and steady. “Now.”
I twisted the tiller and the sailboat rammed itself into the side of the oil rig.
Chapter 16
I was ready for the impact, but the reverberation still sent a shock wave through me as the thin-walled sailboat collided with the gargantuan oil rig. Going with the flow, I stumbled backward, sea spray invading my mouth as I called, “I—I need help!”
My words were half swallowed by the grinding of sailboat hull against metal pillar, but that didn’t matter because words weren’t the primary way I was communicating at the moment. Instead, I tilted my head so the harsh fluorescent glow bathing the hulking oil rig would turn my terrified expression into a mime’s mask of horror. I knew from experience that widening my eyes and mouth made me look like a little girl.
Sure enough, the voice above turned frantic. “Hey, are you okay?” A metallic clang promised the descent of a ladder. This lookout had surely been warned against allowing strangers access, but he wasn’t about to let a defenseless woman drown alone in the dark.
The sounds of wind and waves combined to create the illusion that the two of us were the only ones alert within dozens of miles. But the mate bond promised something entirely different. Orion had deployed a grappling hook, the noise as it settled into place on the oil-rig deck covered up by the louder descent of the guard’s ladder. Now, as the guard came down, Orion was climbing steadily up, his drenched body cold in the wind but his heart rate steady.
