“Yeah?”
She’s leaning against the wall amongst the sea of furniture destroyed between Xander’s meltdown and the Hawthornes’ shifts. “You were talking about mapping out every path in front of us?”
Scrubbing a hand down my face, I curse. “Sorry.”
She offers a wry smile. “If anyone gets it, it’s us. No need to explain, I was just getting you back on track.”
Crossing the room, I slide down the wall beside her to sit on the floor. With one leg stretched out in front of me, I rest my arm on my bent knee. The guys finish pulling some clothes on as I catch them up to as far as I’d made it before my train of thought shifted tracks.
“So he’ll be prepared for you to do what he wants, object, run, or try to kill him. If we want any hope of getting a leg up on this guy, we need to do something that even he could have never predicted or prepared for.”
Hunter’s face is a pissed off mask, but that’s hardly a new development. He’s always kept the world at arm’s length, hiding behind his anger. “You want her to do it, don’t you? To try and free them? Did you know what we were? Because you sure didn’t look that fucking surprised when Xander was talking before Ash showed up.”
Everyone in the room turns to face me, and with the exception of Sabrina, I flip them all the bird. “You can fuck right the hell off with that shit. Xander was mumbling to himself as he was freaking out, talking about the block and how it should have been impossible to find her. Annika wouldn’t have come back here after giving birth, so it was pretty easy to get the gist, regardless of me not knowing the details. And the ‘free the demons’ was a dead giveaway even for an idiot.” I sweep a hand to encompass the Hawthornes. “They just couldn’t say anything because they were a bit busy when we got there.” Slade offers a terse nod of confirmation, beginning to pace.
“Stop it.” Sabrina’s soft whisper is almost imperceptible, but everyone in the room immediately freezes. “We’re not going back to being at each other’s throats and playing the blame game. If we can’t trust one another, we might as well save Ash the trouble and off ourselves.” With a humorless chuckle, she slides down to sit beside me on the floor. “Pretty sure that’s our first off-road path; imagine his face if all of his meticulously crafted plans died two feet shy of the finish line.”
Boden fists his hair, glaring at the ceiling. “Even if he seems all-powerful, he’s sent other people to do his bidding rather than leave his seat of power. He cannot possibly have reach throughout the entire world; there has to be somewhere we could go.”
––––––––
Cinjin tilts his head, eyes glazing over as he silently communicates with his other half. “What about Carina?”
Damian scrubs a hand over his jaw as he contemplates it, looking like the last half hour aged him a solid decade. But despite how overwhelming our situation is, he doesn’t appear hopelessly resigned like I’d imagine. If anything, it seems to have lit a fire under his ass. “Her brother might have kicked us out of town, but she could probably sway him to let her stay in Khalida while we deal with this. After the way Carina was eyeing Sabrina, though, the bigger problem would be getting herback.You really think sending her away is a good idea, though?”
Snorting, Cin beats Sabrina to the punch when she opens her mouth to object. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m saying that the woman clearly has some influence at her disposal, and her brother sent chills downmyspine when he threw us out of the hotel. So whatever kind of shifters they are, it makes a mind-fucked wolf demon nervous, and that could be a leg up in our favor if we got them on board.”
Picking up where he left off, Reid slowly nods. “She said her brother’s legion slaughtered the elders and freed all but the wolves that cling to their hierarchy to survive. I don’t think the other shifters are under the same sort of curse as the... Nightmares are. We literallyneedthat structure to survive. If we don’t have our alphas to siphon some of the misery from our shoulders, it crushes us, or we go mad.”
Hunter leans against the opposite wall, crossing his arms and furrowing his brow. “At the pool there was a woman with claiming marks all overher,and the others that were obviously with their mates, nothing to be seen. Doesn’t mean the marks weren’t somewhere discreet, but just the one proves that mates work differently from shifter to shifter. If they have their own mate curses, they likely suffer in separate ways than we do. Say the Nightmares really were meant to siphon some of the pain from the ungrateful humans’ shoulders; it’s on par with alphas and their packs. Might look differently than once upon a time, but the roots are still there.”
Sabrina strums her fingers on her knee. “Carina did the same thing that Ash did; masking her presence until she wanted to reveal it.”
Cinjin furrows his brow. “You did, too.” As we all look at him in confusion, he slowly elaborates, “Outside of the police station when we were all going to meet Nate after he called saying we needed an alibi. Everyone was pissed off and I remember thinking that it was weird you were lessening your presence, like you were trying to fade into the background. I thought it was an anxiety thing, but you said it was a gift, letting Slade take point because he needed to at the time.”
“To be fair, none of us have evertriedto appear like less of a threat.”
Slade closes his eyes and sighs. “If I were Xander or Ash, I’d weave my lies subtly in between a heavy dose of the truth. I can’t see how lying about the types of demons could remotely apply to what Ash’s attempting to get you to do, so we can reasonably assume that at least was true. If a Nightmare’s power is rooted in twisting reality and messing with people’s heads, then logically, taking on people’s suffering would hit us harder than the other branches. Even if the other demons carry some related affliction, it makes sense why we’ve put such emphasis on our place in the hierarchy as a means to define who we are.”
Sabrina wraps her arms around her legs, thumping her head back on the wall. “Maybe this isn’t actually a bad thing. It sounds like the demons are as much victims in this as we are.”
Reid picks up his glasses, scowling at the crack in one of the lenses. “It kills me to agree with you, but to be fair, the ones inside of us didn’t even know what theywere. They may be our bodies, but they were born into them as much as we were.”
Pulling Sabrina onto my lap, I rest my chin on her shoulder, inhaling her intoxicating coffee shop scent to settle my raging nerves. “What have they actually done beyond exist? Hell, Reid, yours was dormant almost as long as Sabrina’s was. It’s not like he ruined your life or even warred for control until that injection that youchose.He let you live your life, and resigned himself to rotting away until recently.”
Sabrina holds out her hand in front of her, claws lengthening and retracting before she sighs. ”Even if they weren’t a part of us, can any of us seriously pretend that we’re good people?” Gesturing at Bo, she demands, “How many have you killed, not because you had no choice, but for money? Sure, you picked garbage humans that arguably deserved to die, but it’s not like we’re exactly saving orphans from burning buildings, here.” Indicating Cinjin, she emphatically decrees, “Westartthe fires; not put them out. And it isn’t because of our brains’ roommates, it’s because of us.”
Wrapping a tendril of her hair around my finger, I take a page out of her book and silently count to ten before speaking. While I need the answer, I secretly hope that my other half will use the time to stop me. Unfortunately, he’s just as nervous as I am, but more afraid of not knowing, and remains silent.
“Are you saying that... you want to help Ash? After Aurelia killed herself trying tostophim?”
Boden interrupts before she can reply, staring at me like I’m an idiot for even suggesting such a possibility that our mate could sympathize with that monster’s plight. “How can literally unleashing hell on earth possibly be the right thing to do?”
She looks him dead in the eye. “We arelivingin a hell on earth; look around you.” Tossing up her arms, they flop down again in defeat. “Take away the wolves and gods know what else is lurking in the shadows, and still, what are we left with?” She shakes her head, climbing off of my lap, and I get a glimpse of the anguish within her eyes, my stomach flipping. “I’m not saying I agree with him, I’m saying that things aren’t as black and white as who’s wrong or right, and we shouldn’t treat them as such.”
She turns to face Damian. “You were obsessed with saving your pack to the point that you madeseveralquestionable decisions. Is this really any different?”
With a soft growl, Damian retorts, “He’s made everyone he’s ever come into contact with suffer, used us all as pawns.”
