Leo
Fucking Christ. Am I dead?
I haven’t even opened my eyes yet and I feel like all the worst parts of having the holy hell beat out of you and getting a concussion by slamming your head into the steering wheel in a head-on collision got hitched and moved into my body. I groan weakly, and even the sound feels like it’s splitting my head open.
I can’t be dead. This hurts too much.
What the hell did she do to me?
Laying there another long moment, I force my brain to remember the last several hours. When nothing is forthcoming, I open my eyes, looking about with another groan.
Bright light rings the edges of the black-out window coverings like a full solar eclipse and my head throbs mercilessly. Great, now I’m stuck here
Sean “Lemme get dis straight.” Big Easy leans back in his chair, burly arms crossed over his broad chest. In daylight, the skull type tattooed mask around his eyes is even more pronounced and adds significantly to the impression of wariness. “All ya’ll someting extra. Ever’ single one o’ ya in de Candlewood leadership.”Jack raises his hand. “I’m normal.”A hard snort and hearty laughter explodes from Big Easy’s mate where she’s perched on the arm of his chair and from Tarot in the seat next to him. “Jack,” Vermillion drawls, “much as we love ya, ain’ nobody accuse ya o’ bein’ normal, even if ya didn’t shift in half de time other wolves do.”Facing me, Jack mutters, “Why does everybody always say that?”“Is there really an issue for you, Big Easy?” Leo bites defensively. “Your mate and your sister wield the tarot cards like the Fates. Tarot there,” his eyes light on her and soften, skimming her from head to foot where she lounges comfortably with a sly smirk curling her lips, “she
Darby “I smell snow. What about you, Tessa?”Beside me, she scents at the air. Yes, Luna. At this elevation, there will likely be quite a lot.“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen snow, and not ever in your lifetime.” I’m chattering away mindlessly, trying to contain my anxiety. So many things happened over the weekend, besides the alliance to go after the vampires, I’m coming undone at the seams.I am looking forward to the experience. Though I may need a new ball. Yellow will be difficult to see against snow.“Your ball is not yellow anymore. I’m not certain they have a name for that particular shade of grime. Perhaps we should stop by the pet boutique on the plaza on the way ho
Sean “Ready, little girl?”Tossing the two beaded braids below her ear over her shoulder, Sandy flashes me a heart-stopping grin and tucks her backpack of clothes in a sheltered niche above the water level at high tide. Naked and flinching at both the cold air and the sharp stones on the shallow cave’s floor, she grabs the two waterproof equipment packs and heads for the cold, northern Pacific water. “Last one in’s a smelly wolf.”“You’ll regret that.” Hobbling to the same niche where my mate left her clothes, I stuff my pack in beside hers. “Hold up, Sandy. My phone’s ringing.”Shoving my hand in the outer pocket, I retrieve the device, immediately alarmed to see Ian’s number. “Ian?”
Darby Numb with shock and bitter cold from sitting against the cavern wall, I still notice when Slimy returns, his long leather duster sweeping outward like a cloak, blackness spreading out behind him like the darkest night. He’s still wearing his vicious grin, but it falls immediately seeing the punctures that linger, bright red and gaping open at my wrists.Crouching over me, he jerks my face up to look at him, turning it left and right. I assume he’s looking for more injuries, but at this point, the punctures are the least of what I’ve suffered. And frankly, I hope the fact that they’re visible creates a problem for him. A big problem.“Who did this to you?” he demands, his freezing fingers closing on my throat when I fail to answer, my eyes drifting away from his face to stare
Jack Tessa, Ian and I are deep into the mine now, with no signal to the mapping device and following a blind tunnel. There’s occasional jabber on the pack link as pockets of vampires are located and swiftly killed, but no one’s found any sign of Darby. Or any other non-vampire for that matter.The whole mine reeks of vamps, like a fucking cesspool of eviscerated decomposing body and rotten eggs. And I don’t mean eggs a little yucky and past their time. I mean the kind that explode the grey muck of ghastly stench that poisons your olfactory memory for the rest of your days. It’s fucking revolting.The fuck? Do they just not have noses? How the hell can these vamps live trapped in this stink?They are foul creatures, Triumvir.
Leo “How long has she been like this?” Dr. Myers demands as soon as I materialize inside the specially outfitted hospital room with Darby, directing elemental air to lower her gently to the bed. A flurry of activity ensues as Dr. Myers waits for my answer, barking orders to the hospital staff inside the room.Flattening myself against the wall to keep out of the way, I reply over the blips and bleeps of the monitoring equipment and the hushed, rushed dialog between staff trying to save Darby. “It took me an hour and a quarter to get here. That was within a few minutes of Ian finding her.”“Her pulse is rapid and erratic, respiratory rate is high. BP is low. Temperature is 35°C.”Dr. Myers checks Darby’s pupillary response, then steps back against the opposite wall as a nurse uses medial scissors to cut Darby’s jacket and shirt off, exposing four circular burns like the ones you get from the cigarette lighters in old cars. “There are more injuries here, Dr. Myers.”I blanch, staring
Darby There’s this twilight period between sleep and waking, where untethered consciousness warps into the illusionary and hallucinatory thoughts and impressions of dream. The fragmented evolving mindscape of bizarre sounds, abstract landscape, and ephemeral ideas that’s the knife’s edge of lucidity and oblivion. In this place, our meandering cognitive perceptions, odd and out-of-context when dismantled upon waking, seem completely unremarkable and entirely reasonable.It’s in one of these hypnagogic intrusions into the veiled plane between life and death, while my brain steadily reassembles the strictures with which I interpret the world, that a perfect symphony of low level fragrances—petrichor tinged with moss and vetiver’s fresh, intensely green woodsy-ness—flashes, like a sputtering burst at the
Mattie“Hello Mattie.”“Alpha.” I know he hears the surprise in my tone. “Please, come in. Would you like some tea?” I offer, lifting a pot from the setting on sofa table in the living area of our Candlewood coven house. I’m taken aback by his presence at our door and worry for the reason. Though my coven is powerful, none of us engages in any significant form of white or healing magic. I ache to have to tell him that, if that’s why he’s come. “How is your mate?”Prompted by my question, he appears to think of his Luna and smiles, and I’m shocked again to see he—the ever-composed Alpha Ian—is blushing. “Recovering, thank you,” he replies in his smooth baritone, declining tea with a massive hand raised in a stop and slight shake of his head.“That&rsq