Текст книги "Wild Darkness"
Автор книги: Lauren Dane
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Wild Darkness
Bound by Magick – 4
by
Lauren Dane
Chapter 1
HE tasted magick. Magick and blood rushed over his skin and through his system. His beast surged forward as he caught a human male by the back of the neck and threw him up against a nearby fence.
His beast raged within, aching to be let free. Ached to rip those who dared harm his protected to small pieces.
These humans had thrown firebombs into a community center that had been full of Others at the time. The parking lot had been full. Children had been playing on the field out back.
If it hadn’t been for Clan Gennessee—who’d posted guards who’d noted the behavior of those humans who’d attacked them—they’d have been worse off. Fortunately, they’d acted immediately and evacuated.
His fist made contact with a man’s face, satisfaction roaring through Faine as the human crumpled to the ground.
The air was filled with the stench of the fuel used in the firebombs. With sweat and fear. His beast loved the latter.
Most of the humans were down, but what caught his attention was her.
She strode through the melee like a Valkyrie. Her magick sang with each step she took. Men fell all around her as she managed to use her fists and her power to push them back. Her face was a mask of fury and vengeance.
He blew out a breath as he took her in from head to toe. Helena Jaansen was magnificent.
She was totally focused as they fought the humans for a few minutes more before the threat they posed had been thoroughly dealt with. The police had not shown up yet, though some ambulances had arrived and those who’d escaped the building when it had been firebombed were being treated out of the fray.
He watched her hungrily as things wound down, and when it was over she put her fingers to her lips and whistled loudly. Her men and women froze, turning their attention to her.
“I want a team working immediately to gather evidence. Get the kits from the van. John and Evan, I want everything on video. The police will arrive shortly. Do not impede them, but do not cede ground either.”
There was absolutely no doubt who was in charge and her people responded quickly and efficiently.
“I’ll keep an eye on these humans.”
Helena looked to Faine. “Thank you. Feel free to break something if they try to escape.” She turned away, issuing orders as she went.
The police rolled up seconds later, exiting their cars with their weapons drawn.
Helena approached them, her hands up. “Nice timing. The people responsible for trying to kill a community center full of people are all there.” She indicated where they’d taken prisoners. “Subdued and bound until you arrived.”
“On the ground!” one of the officers screamed.
Helena looked at them and then at the people they’d apprehended lined up at her feet. “My hands are up and my identification is in my back pocket. I am not going to get on the ground.”
“We will shoot you if you don’t comply.”
One of her brows rose slowly. “You can try. Or you can do your job and deal with this situation you avoided until you figured it was over.” Like cowards hung in the air, unspoken, but not unheard. Magick crackled from her body as she spooled energy from the earth beneath her, from the air all around her.
She kept her hands up, but also her feet. “There’s video of the attack. We’ve got a backup, just in case it gets lost. You’re free to look at it. My people are guarding the room where the monitors are. It’s in a relatively unscathed part of the building. Back door, up the stairs to your left. They know you’re on the way, but they will continue to monitor as you watch. We’ll wait right here with our hands up while you do.”
“You don’t give the orders here.” The cop who stepped forward sneered. She was unmoved.
“Officer—” She leaned forward slightly, reading his name tag. “Officer Franklin. I’m Helena Jaansen, and as you’re too late on the scene of an assault called in twenty minutes ago, let me catch you up to speed. I’m not giving orders. I’m letting you know how it is. You can either protect us all, as is your job, or you can refuse. In either case, I will protect my people. And you won’t stop me from protecting children from these thugs. I have no desire to make this into an issue. But should you . . .” She shrugged. “I’m not a defenseless four-year-old just trying to jump rope. I can fight back.”
The tension built up in the air all around her. And all around the witches who stood near her. They’d taken enough abuse and would endure no more. If the cop didn’t figure that out, if he decided to ignore it and push his luck, Faine knew what would happen. And who’d still be walking when it was all over.
Another law enforcement guy came up through the crowd. “Stand down, officers,” he called out.
Franklin looked back, clearly intending to countermand, but when he saw the blue windbreaker and the big, yellow FBI letters, he stopped. “This is out of your jurisdiction.”
“You can put your hands down,” the FBI guy told Helena. She did, but she kept her body at attention. “Firebombs are actually firmly in our jurisdiction. Especially when it’s connected to a nationwide crime syndicate aimed at a certain group of citizens. That’s right smack dab in our wheelhouse.” He held out his identification to underline that.
One of Helena’s brows rose again and Faine wanted to put his lips on it. So often she kept her features impassive, but she had a rogue eyebrow that said what she so rarely did out loud.
FBI guy looked back to Helena. “You were saying there was video of the event?”
“Marian?” One of Helena’s people approached slowly, keeping her hands in plain sight. “Can you show Agent . . .”
“I’m Gil Anderson. Head of the new Cross Species Task Force.”
“The what?” Officer Franklin and Helena said this in unison.
“We set up this week.”
“Okay then. Marian, please show the agent up to the room with the monitors.” Helena turned back to Anderson. “We have backups of the video, by the way. I was just telling Officer Franklin this.”
“You don’t trust us to be fair?” Anderson asked this after one of his agents went with Marian.
“Experience has taught us to be cautious about human motivations. I don’t know you one way or the other. But I do know such evidence has been lost more than once since this mess started. And that makes me careful. Careful keeps people alive.”
Anderson nodded. “Fair enough. Officer Franklin, please take the humans on the ground into custody. My people will conduct interviews at the station.”
Thwarted, Officer Franklin put his hands on his hips. “You can’t just jump in the middle of this!”
“I can. And I am. So, please get these men and women cuffed. Read them their rights and throw them in cells. Separately, please.” Anderson turned back to Helena. “I’d like to interview you and your people as well.”
“Fine.”
Faine took up a spot next to her. She didn’t seem to mind, but Anderson did. He looked Faine up and down, a frown on his face. Too bad.
Helena watched them begin to process the humans and turned back to Anderson. “If any of these assholes gets lost on the way to the station, I’m going to be vexed, Agent.”
“That would make two of us. Look, I’d prefer if we could start off on the right foot. I am here to help.”
“You’ll have to excuse my pessimism, Agent Anderson. Months of constant harassment, attacks, death and threats have left me less than trusting, even when someone claims they want to help.”
Agent Anderson blew out a breath. “I understand that. I truly do. But this task force is in place to try and stop all that.”
She nodded. “I’m Helena Jaansen. I work for Clan Gennessee.”
Anderson looked up into Faine’s face. “Faine Leviathan. I work for her.”
Faine caught the ghost of a smile flitting over her lips. Just a brief flash before it was gone.
“You’re a Were of some sort?”
“Of some sort.” They’d all decided not to reveal the existence of anything beyond the Veil. For the time being, no humans needed to know a damned thing about Lycia or the packs of Lycians, part man, part giant wolf, who dominated it.
Helena decided to forge ahead. The FBI guy appeared to want to ask more about Faine and she didn’t want that.
“At four p.m.—prime after-school time, by the way—the guards noticed a group of humans who seemed to be casing the building.”
“How did they know to identify that behavior as casing?”
Helena just shot him a look. “Really, Agent Anderson?” There was no need to let on just how well trained and militarized Clan Gennessee was, or the level of training of those Others who made up their new unified defense force. Or hell, even the existence of such a defense force. However, they did need to understand the Others were not going to allow themselves to be victimized any more.
He sighed. “Fine. Go on. But don’t think I’m not going to want to know just how well your people are trained.”
He could want it until the sun burned out. She’d tell him what she wanted him to know and nothing more.
“They watched, notifying me and my people. One of the guards came out to get a closer look.” Her mouth flattened briefly as he cast a look toward the body, covered by a sheet, that they’d moved out of the way of traffic. “He was attacked by two humans, shot in the head before he’d had a chance to react. The guards inside then began an evacuation of the Others inside the community center out the back as those humans threw what we later ascertained to be firebombs through the front windows of the community center.
“By this point, we’d arrived, having only been in La Habra. They have automatic weapons, but we also have our own mode of protection. One of the men you took away is Gentry Fenton, one of the lieutenants for PURITY.”
“How many of them were there?”
“Fourteen at the first.” Faine broke in with his rumbly voice. Despite the stress and grief of the situation, it still made all her parts tingly. “Then a van approached with six more.”
Anderson interviewed her people, spoke to his own after they’d viewed the video and left two hours later.
PURITY had thrown twenty people with guns and bombs at a building full of kids and elderly people. It had been bad enough that some humans had gravitated toward the bigoted message of groups like PURITY and Humans First. But this sort of violence was on a whole different level.
And becoming rapidly more common. Her sister, along with one of the witches from Owen, Molly Ryan, had been injured multiple times, most recently in the bombing of a legislative hearing room.
The human separatists clearly had no problem killing and maiming, nor with harming humans who happened to be nearby. Things were escalating and they had to answer the threat with a defense of their own. She hated it. Hated that it was necessary.
Worse, she wasn’t sure how much longer things could go on without erupting into full-blown civil war.
Chapter 2
THREE hours later, after she’d been interviewed many times over by law enforcement, after many calls from her own Clan leadership as well as leadership from several other Clans, Packs, Jamborees and other organizations, Helena blew out a breath and turned to face her people.
Despite their exhaustion, covered in soot, blood and no small amount of dirt, they waited for her to give them orders. Willing to do whatever she told them to, to protect their people.
Her gaze flitted over to the sheet and the two witches who’d been standing over it. She’d failed him. That Were who’d volunteered to be on her team. Who’d been doing his job and ended up dead for it. His pack members had shown up just a few minutes before, and as they were finally able to get past the police tape, were preparing to remove his body.
“I’ll be expecting your detailed reports. Tomorrow morning. Alix, Sam and Marcus, I want you to be lead on this. Get all the pertinent info to me. I need to speak with The Gennessee, to brief her and the rest of the Governance Council about this. She’ll then relay that information to The Owen.” More calls, more conferences, more everything.
The Enforcer from the South Bay Pack approached.
“I’m sorry for your loss. He was a good soldier.” Helena carefully spoke, knowing grief was expected, but that wolves felt it was an honor to die protecting Pack.
He inclined his head just slightly. The wolves in Southern California had just undergone a huge leadership shake-up. They’d been falling down on the job for years and recent events had made it clear to National Pack that wolves who understood what it meant to lead needed to be in charge.
The new alpha families had been much better in the months since the Magister. But they had a lot of neglect to undo. Sending people to help with the protection of all Others was a great start.
“We appreciate the honor you paid him by having your people watch over him. We’ll be sending two replacements tomorrow.”
She wasn’t going to argue. She needed every body she could get. But it was hard, she knew firsthand, to put your people in the line of fire.
“Thank you.”
“As my Alpha has made clear, we’re in this together. We can’t afford to let this break us.”
She nodded. “No, we can’t. But thank you anyway.”
He turned, his wolves carrying the body away as they left the scene.
She returned her attention to her people. “Let’s go. Get some rest. This all starts again in six hours.”
Helena noted their emotional exhaustion, the shock on their faces as it melded with rage and fear. She hated that she couldn’t fix it. Her life was jammed with so much stuff she couldn’t fix that it filled her with a sense of impotent rage all her waking hours. She was a doer. That’s how she was made. And to not be able to attack a problem and fix it was slowly wearing her down.
Faine walked ahead of her, opening the car door for her. The passenger side. Hm. She allowed it because she was beyond exhausted and driving in that state wasn’t advisable. He pulled away from the curb and away from the scene. But it was still in her nose. In her head. The faces of all those Others who depended on her to protect them.
And the sheet covering the one she couldn’t protect.
“I need to go back to the office.” She pulled her phone from her pocket as she spoke to him. Eleven new messages.
She listened to them, returned a few, sent a dozen emails and texts, and when she looked up again to take a breather, she noted he was getting off the freeway far short of Pasadena.
“Why are you getting off here?”
“You’re about to pass out. I’m taking you to my home.”
“I have a couch in my office.”
“You and your sister are very much alike.” He grumbled this under his breath, but she heard it and it made her smile.
“She has blue hair and an atrocious sense of fashion.”
“The outside doesn’t matter. Your insides are the same. Stubborn. Do you think you’ll be more effective if you work until you literally just fall over? Who will you be helping then?”
“You know how long I’ve been awake because you’ve been with me the whole time. I don’t see you getting into your jammies.”
“Jammies?”
“Pajamas. The clothes people sleep in.”
“I don’t sleep in any clothes.”
Christ. As if her fascination with him wasn’t bad enough, he had to put that image in her head?
But before she could really go there and imagine him, all nearly seven feet of hard muscle and ebony skin, naked and in her bed, he spoke again.
“And I’m four hundred years old, Helena. I am Lycian. I was bred to be up for days on end, fighting, marching, killing, all without sleep. You’re a witch, and while you’re powerful and fierce, you can’t survive on two hours’ sleep in two days.”
“There were twenty humans in that group tonight. That means they’re not flinching at sending their ranks to die. If I sleep, I’m not following up. How many people are going to die while I take a little nap?”
Failure wasn’t something she liked at all. And in truth, she felt like she was drowning at least 60 percent of the time these days.
“You have people working three shifts. Trust them for six hours. Just six hours. You know you’ll be far more alert and less inclined to make a mistake or miss something when you get some rest. Your magick will be stronger as well.”
He was right. She knew he was. She’d used a lot of magick over the last few days. Her head hurt, her eyes felt like sandpaper and repeated adrenaline rushes followed by the crash afterward had left her muscles less and less responsive.
“Fine, but I’ll sleep on my couch at the office.”
“No need.” He pulled down a street with a huge gate at the end. High fences surrounded the neighborhood just beyond. One of the first fortified enclaves in Southern California. Designed by Others for Others ultimate safety. Round the clock security.
He pulled up to a gate that slid open after the guard recognized him. He paused, handed over a card that was scanned and approved before it was returned.
“My place is right here. You can have my bed and I’ll take the guest room. It’s a big bed. It’ll be another forty-five minutes to get out to Pasadena. That’s forty-five minutes you could be sleeping instead. It’s really all about economy, right?”
He was very, very bossy. But once she’d allowed herself to agree to sleep, her will to argue was gone.
He drove down the main street of the mini subdivision before taking a left. Guard towers dotted the several-square-block area. Barriers much like those that had been put into place outside public buildings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks surrounded those high fences to ward off any attempts at car bombs.
The outer walls were all warded by the most powerful Full Council witches Gennessee had. As were all the houses. Guards, nearly all of them shifters, prowled the streets day and night. A bustling new industry of witches who hired out to ward homes and businesses had sprung up.
Many in the area now lived this way and other such enclaves were being prepared or were already being moved into all across the country. It made her sad, but at least it kept them safer.
He pulled into his garage and she realized she’d never even been to his house before. She trudged to the connecting door as he turned off the alarm. “Wait here.”
He went in first. She wanted to make a crack about how they’d just gone through eight different security checkpoints and two different alarms to get this far. But she’d seen so much happen in the last months after the Magister had come and turned everything upside down. So much death and destruction.
She kept her mouth shut and waited patiently until he came back to her. “Come in.”
It was a surprise, how nice the place was inside. He worked so much and traveled as often as she did that she didn’t have any idea when he would have had the time to get the furniture and housewares inside.
“My sister.”
She shook herself out of her thoughts. “What?”
“You were wondering how this place got decorated. My sister came from Lycia and she took care of everything. I’m not here that often, but when I am, it’s nice to have a comfortable home to return to. A safe one.”
“Oh. That’s nice.” And it was. She wondered if he was homesick at all but didn’t have the energy to engage. She’d ask him another time.
He pushed a door open and she saw the massive bed and may have sighed wistfully.
“I can take the guest room, you know. Or the couch. I’m just going to pass out anyway.” She was sure she didn’t begin to sound convincing.
He sighed and shook his head. “Silly female. This is the best bed in the house. As your host, it’s my job to give it to you. Also, it’s the quietest room. Use it and make me happy.”
“I need a shower first. I’m covered in soot.”
Another door pushed open to reveal a bathroom. “I’ll get you something to sleep in. Towels are in that cabinet there.”
And then she was alone to get rid of her filthy clothes, leaving them in a pile in the corner. She’d deal with the towel after she was clean, not wanting to get the ones in the cabinet dirty.
Hot water rained down on her skin as she made her way into the stall. She simply stood there, letting it wash over her for long minutes.
There had been far too many showers like this one. Where she’d stood and hoped all the death would wash off. But it was bone deep and she wondered when, if ever, she’d be able to let go of the things she’d seen . . . and done . . . over the last months.
People relied on her to make good choices. And she’d failed. More than once. And the price for that failure had been injury. It had been death.
She had no answers. Just Band-Aid fixes to stumble from one thing to the next and hope she didn’t mess up so badly more people ended up dead.
Never in her life, not even in the time after her engagement had broken, had she felt more alone. More totally overwhelmed by everything. And there was no time for it. No space to let herself relax even a little. Because the hits just kept coming.
Never in her life had she been so afraid.
Her sobs tore from her diaphragm, rusty and sharp and full of everything she tried to shove far away from her mind all day long. Tearing that open and bringing it back made her nauseated.
She let the tears come as she scrubbed her hair. As she saw the soot and blood head down the drain. She would let herself have these minutes and then she’d pull herself back together again because there wasn’t any more margin for error. She didn’t have any more room to wallow or worry. She had to keep on keeping on.
Because there was no one else to do the job.
She reined it all back. Made herself stop crying as she turned her face up to the water. Letting it heat her through to cut her shivers.
When she stepped out her legs were a great deal more steady. The warm air in the bathroom was welcome and she was grateful that he’d turned the heat up. Lycians, like shifters, had high body temps, so quite often their homes tended to be cool.
But like his brother, Simon, her sister Lark’s boyfriend—mate, whatever he was—he seemed to thrive on taking care of people he considered his to protect. Helena knew she’d become one of them.
She liked it. Even as it chafed sometimes. It was nice to have someone taking care of her when it felt like pretty much every moment of her existence now was about taking care of everyone else.
Also? He was hot and criminally sexy. When he turned all that on her it made her a little fluttery inside.
They’d been sort of dancing around each other for months but she was way too busy to enter into anything with anyone, much less a big, bossy Lycian prince who clearly had issues with the word no.
When she wiped the steam from the mirror she noticed that he’d left a huge shirt on top of a towel. She hadn’t even heard him come into the room, and then hoped he hadn’t heard her crying.
She had a reputation as an ice bitch. Crying ruined that image. Though he’d never say a word, he’d know all the same.
After a cursory towel dry of her hair, she braided it quickly, put on the T-shirt that came to her knees—which was good since she had no clean underpants—and shuffled into the bedroom where he’d left a pitcher of water, some snacks and had even turned the blankets back.
That care nearly brought her tears back, so instead she shoved some crackers into her face, gulped down three glasses of water and lay back.
Once she did that, even as she felt herself falling toward sleep, she couldn’t help recounting the last several days. One skirmish after another. Like a horror movie.
An assault by four kids at a high school in Fountain Valley. The shifter they’d attacked had handled it himself but they’d had to stop a near riot when the human parents of the bullies had shown up at the kid’s house, demanding blood.
Vandalism in Garden Grove. A restaurant had had its windows broken out; anti-Other graffiti had been spray painted on the walls. The interior had been totally destroyed and the food ruined.
A car set on fire in La Habra, which was where they’d been when they got the call about the community center in Whittier and had rushed over, only to have to engage in an actual, no shit, pitch battle on the street with crazy people who thought it was totally okay to kill kids and old people.
She hated this world. Hated that people wanted to kill her simply because she was different. Hated that her friend Molly had been attacked and was now in two casts because of the rising threat of the human separatist groups.
These were her former neighbors. The kids she and her sister, Lark, had gone to school with. People she used to think were her friends. The dividing lines had been drawn and the gulf between them got deeper by the day.
And now that Molly had given an ultimatum to the humans to leave the Others alone and stop trying to harm them or strip them of their rights as Americans, those lines kept getting drawn.
They were in a brief limbo period as Molly recovered, but soon they’d be on the road again and Helena would most likely again be on the security detail for those Others who were traveling all across the country addressing crowds of humans, Others and legislators of all types. Trying to educate. Trying to mediate. Trying to stop an all-out war before it broke out.
But the edges of the world were torn and frayed. Helena wasn’t sure how much longer things would hold before snapping.
