“It is,” Jael agreed, “and this is just atasteof what he might unleash. What he's already begun unleashing in the Bay. By his actions tonight, he’s virtually guaranteed that whatever his actual capabilities, we’re going to imagine much, much worse. Hybrid shifters? No. Try electronically-controlled hybrid super-shifters. A violent attack on our home? Yes, but let’s add in a minor attack that cuts off the food supply during a storm. The point is, we don’t know what he’s fully capable of or what he’s planning, and it could be virtually anything. That’s how dark fae operate. He's counting on our fear of the unknown. Humans especially are conditioned to operate on worst-case-scenario fears, and that fear makes it much easier for the fae to manipulate their targets.”
“Well, obviously that glitter-dicked asshole has never dealt withme.” Haley leaned out the driver’s side window of the van, now idling in the center of the road, ready to go. “I’m all about thebest-case scenario, which at the moment is the prospect of ushering dozens of beautiful empanadas into their final resting place in my belly. Now, if you all don’t mind… Can wepleaseget the fuck out of here?”
Nineteen
EMILIO
The ghosts that had laid siege to my heart had lingered there long enough. If Elena and I had any hope of reconciling, if I had any hope of being a brother and friend to the guys, if I had any hope of being the man Gray truly saw when she looked at me with those pretty blue eyes, I needed to evict them.
And I needed to do it now, before they slipped out of the light and into the dark corners once again.
“My sister and I were very close growing up,” I began. “But at some point, she got involved with a new crowd, and she started spending all her time with them. Camping trips, road trips, last-minute parties I was never invited to. I hardly ever saw her that summer, and when I did, she was merely coming and going, picking up a change of clothes, bribing me not to tell my parents that her new friends weren’t… our kind.”
“They only wanted you guys to hang out with other wolf shifters?” she asked.
“They weren’t like that with me, but my sister was the alpha of our generation, poised to take over leading the pack for our father. By the time she was thirteen, she’d already been promised to the alpha of a neighboring pack—a guy named Franco, who also happened to be my best friend—and it was just accepted that they’d eventually marry and mate as adults. But that promise was made years earlier—nothing she’d ever taken seriously. And these new friends of hers… They were human. They had no idea what she was. But I figured out pretty quickly that one of them was becoming more than a friend.”
“As in…?”
“As in, she fell in love with him, Gray. A man named Jonah Shiley. He was the only one she’d told about her true nature.”
Gray sucked in a breath. “She married Jonah. He was the forbidden love she told me about.”
“Eloped, actually. None of us knew about it for a whole year. We’d thought she was living with a roommate, but it turned out that was just a girlfriend covering for her and Jonah whenever we planned to visit. She was nineteen years old, and he was twenty, and there was no telling them about the ways of the world or pack hierarchy or anything that even remotely implied their love was wrong.”
“Because it wasn’t,” she said defensively, and I realized the subtext of my words.
Gray was a human witch. I was a wolf shifter. And nothing about us—about her touch, the way she looked at me, the way my heart seemed to grow big whenever she walked into the room—felt wrong.
“No, that’s not what I meant,querida. You’re right. Their love wasn’twrong. It was just… against the rules. My parents loved us, but they were also extremely practical, and extremely loyal to the pack. When they found out about the marriage, they basically disowned her. I saw her even less than before, as if that were possible. I missed her, you know? Missed getting into trouble together, missed her teasing me, missed just… Just hanging out and being goofy with my big sister.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and I felt her own sadness wash through her. I wondered if she were thinking about Haley, or the other sisters she’d been separated from as a baby. Unlike me, Gray hadn’t really known or remembered them. She didn’t have anyone to miss.
I wrapped my arms more tightly around her, holding her close. When I finally felt her sadness retreat a bit, I continued.
“Anyway, the family she was promised to—Franco’s kin—they didn’t take the news too kindly. My buddy dropped me, and our family became pariahs. People started disrespecting my father, then outright challenging his authority. Kids at school were fucking with me. It sucked. So there I was, basically still a kid, no sister, no friends, total outcast.
“Then the inevitable happened—I got jumped after school one day, five wolves, tore my ass to shreds—Franco and his brothers. They would’ve killed me, too, if this other pack hadn’t shown up and saved me. They fought off Franco’s crew and helped me patch myself back up.”
I remembered them now, new in town, mysterious, all muscle and swagger. Chasing off Franco and his guys as if they were little field mice. I’d worried they’d beat me up themselves for being so weak, but they didn’t say a word. Just took me home to one of the guys’ apartments, patched me up, fed me. And from then on, they were always around.
“They saved me that day,” I continued. “And they protected me every day after. Pushed me to get stronger, smarter, to develop my instincts. Basically, all the things my father should’ve been doing, but he was too busy defending our territory to worry about me.
“My sister got pregnant later that year, and once again, we didn’t know a thing about it until Maya—” I stopped suddenly, my throat closing up over her name. My niece’s name. I hadn’t said it out loud since we’d left Argentina—Elena had forbidden it, even before she and I split. Hearing it now, feeling it, it brought everything rushing back in crystal clear, high-definition images. The good, as well as the bad.
Maya’s first tooth. The sound of her sweet little laugh. How she couldn’t say my name, so called me “Em-ee-o” instead.
My eyes blurred with tears, my throat stinging with the scream that wanted to claw its way out.
But Gray nestled in closer, her breath soft against my bare chest, and from her I took just enough strength to continue.
This, too, was part of the deal. No one said exorcizing these ghosts would be easy or painless.
With a cracked voice, I said, “Maya, my niece. My sister showed up on our front porch three days after the baby was born, this little pink bundle in her arms. My parents melted. And just like that, she was part of our lives again. Maya and Jonah, too.”
I stilled again, taking a moment to gather the rest of my thoughts. This was the inevitable turn in the road, the part of the story where the darkness began to seep in, and I felt it mirrored inside me now like a wisp of black smoke curling up from my gut, thickening around my heart.
“People heard about the happy little family,” I said. “That’s when the threats started.”
