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The air shimmered suddenly. Endelle. She caught Kerrick’s gaze and without a single nicety cried, “What the hell have you done? An emergency lift? Do you know what this means?” Kerrick’s ears rang. “Did you just lose half your IQ points, Warrior? Shit!” The decibels she employed in that one word, spoken as it was both aloud and with telepathy, pounded the hell out of his eardrums and shattered all the bottles on the bar. The sudden reek of alcohol drenched the air. “You might as well have handed Alison’s head on a platter to that motherfucker. Calling an emergency lift just gave Greaves one more piece of ammunition against us. He’ll take this to COPASS and demand retribution and they’ll give it to him. So, again, what the hell were you thinking?”
“Didn’t have a choice, ma’am,” Kerrick began. He told her what he’d told Thorne.
She scowled as she glanced at Alison. “You know, you’re really letting me down here, Warrior.”
Kerrick drew in a long deep breath through his nose. “Yes, ma’am. But there wasn’t much else I could do. The Commander didn’t just send a war party to Carefree, he sent a regiment.”
“Whatever.”
Her wings, a ruddy scarlet this time, extended to their fullest height and breadth, a reflection of her temper. She had changed her clothes from earlier in the evening and wore tight black leather pants and some kind of dark hide halter with long bristled fur. He thought buffalo, maybe.
“You’d better take her back to Mortal Earth,” she barked.
“But where?” Thorne asked. “And how do we sustain secrecy?”
She huffed a sigh. “All right, let’s take care of our little troublemaker.” She drew her feathers abruptly into her wing-locks, a movement that jostled the halter but didn’t dislodge it.
She laid a hand on Alison’s forehead. The air pulsed slowly, then rapidly all around them.
When the pulsing stopped, Endelle straightened up. “You can take her now. I’ve given her a shield, which will last about thirty-six hours. No one will be able to locate her.”
“It may not be that simple,” Kerrick said. “Both Alison and I have signatures that show up on Central’s grid. If Greaves or his generals located us because of our signatures, that means they’ve improved their technology. Your shield might block Alison’s signature but not mine.”
“Shit,” Endelle muttered. “All right. Let me think. Okay. I can put my mist around the Queen Creek house and as far as I know even Greaves won’t be able to find you.”
Kerrick nodded. “Yeah, I’d like to see him bust through your mist.”
“Damn straight about that. Okay. So, we’re done here, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer but turned to leave.
“She’when’endel’livelle!” Thorne called after her. At least three very pronounced clicks broke up the proper name.
Yep, crickets in his mouth.
Kerrick lifted a brow. How could Thorne even remember her birth name, not to mention pronounce it?
Endelle turned around and scowled at her second-in-command. “What?” she snapped.
“Could you take care of the wound, please? Neither Kerrick nor I have the ability to heal a mortal whose shoulder has been shredded.”
She clenched her jaw. “I hate details.” She blurred back and touched the wound. The flesh re-formed flawlessly, and a vibrant pink color returned to Alison’s face. So much power. She replaced the bloodied sweater, T-shirt, and jeans with a soft white, but very short, tunic.
“Thank you,” Thorne said, averting his gaze from Alison’s now bare legs. Endelle rolled her eyes, tossed an arm, then folded. She left behind a blast of wind full of stinging grit to remind her warriors just how much she disliked being taken from her usual routine.
Kerrick whirled away in order to shield Alison. When the wind stopped, he turned back to Thorne, who in turn just shook his head. Endelle was one fine piece of work. “What the hell was she wearing?”
Thorne shrugged. “I don’t know. Bear hide?”
Kerrick snorted.
Just as he was going to ask Thorne to give him a fold to Queen Creek, a double shimmer appeared near the bar some twenty feet away.
Medichi … and Marcus.
Kerrick’s jaw hardened and a hideous growl erupted out of his throat.
Thorne automatically threw an arm in front of Kerrick. “How’d it go?” he called to Medichi. “And what the hell happened to Marcus? Hey, ass**le, your pansy-ass life catch up with you?”
Marcus had a huge bump over his left eye and a deep cut on his right arm that dripped blood onto the floor. He met Kerrick’s gaze and his shoulders hunched.
“Motherfucker,” he called out, his teeth gritted. At the same moment, in a move lightning-quick, Medichi grabbed Marcus, slammed him to the floor, then put a foot on his neck. Medichi held him in place as Marcus started cursing the dust Kerrick walked on and everything else he could think of.
“Goddammit,” Thorne muttered. “Just what we need.”
“Take the ascendiate,” Kerrick cried, trying to shove Alison at Thorne. “Let me at the bastard! I’ll break his f**king neck!”
Thorne turned back to Kerrick and over Alison’s body he caught Kerrick’s face with both hands, getting up close. “You just get her to Queen Creek and keep her safe,” he cried, splitting his resonance.
Despite the fact that Alison was caught between them, Kerrick shifted his knees as well as his shoulders in a primal effort to bust out of Thorne’s hold on him. He breathed hard through his nose. He wanted at Marcus like nobody’s business.
“Calm the f**k down!” Thorne shouted. “You have guardian duty right now. You can beat the shit out of Marcus later. Right now, take care of your woman.”
These last words, spoken as they were aloud and in Kerrick’s head, brought his focus straight at Thorne’s red-rimmed hazel eyes. The pain of the combined mind-voice speak nearly brought Kerrick to his knees.
He started nodding without quite knowing what he was agreeing to. However, in deliberate measures, his breathing slowed and he didn’t see quite so much red as before.
“Ready to go?” Thorne asked.
Kerrick nodded.
The vibration began.
* * *
Kerrick stood in the middle of his Queen Creek living room on Mortal Earth.
He concentrated on steadying his heart. When Marcus had folded to the Cave, if Alison hadn’t been in his arms, he would have gone apeshit on that bastard’s ass. It sure as hell wasn’t helping his blood pressure to think about what he would have done, what he still wanted to do to his former brother-in-law. Hatred didn’t begin to describe what he felt for Marcus.
