The Fire Road Read online

  “No need to repeat that,” Ryan drawled with a smile. “I think we all heard her.”

  She finally felt steady enough to test her own legs and patted Marston’s arm as she looked up at him. “Thanks.”

  “Are you all right?” The concern on his face sent mixed feelings through her. It wasn’t just his expression—she could sense his mood. He felt genuinely concerned for her.

  And her babies.

  Something that flew in the face of what everyone else knew and thought about him.

  “Yeah, I need to go home and shower really fast, though.” She hugged him, then hugged Ryan. “Thank you.” Confusion boiled and bubbled in the back of her mind, things she knew she’d need to look at, information that hadn’t been there before.

  Barriers dropped.

  Ryan stared at her, intense, focused. “Are you quite sure you’re all right? Perhaps I should accompany you.”

  “Why?”

  He pointed to Marston. “If someone slips through your memories.”

  “You might not be able to stop Lina.”

  “She can’t poof well yet, as you call it.”

  Elain decided it would actually be better if Ryan did come with her. He’d be a good excuse as to where she’d gone. “Okay. Meet me in my yard in about ten minutes.”

  “Good. That’ll give me a chance to finish my tea.” He offered her a smile. She grabbed her tablet, gave Marston one last hug, and poofed herself into the shower in the master bathroom at home in Arcadia.

  * * * *

  When Marston and Ryan were alone, the old wolf said it. “What changed? Even I felt it. Your guy actually took a step toward you both.”

  Ryan picked up the mug of tea, sniffed it, and took a deep swallow from it. “I hope I didn’t just make a terrible mistake,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He met Marston’s gaze. “Because our Elain just destroyed the barrier between her conscious mind and her latent powers. Let us hope she discovers that slowly and manages to handle it well. Otherwise, we are all well and truly fucked, as they say.”

  “But…how did that happen?”

  “She simply walked through the veil and accessed everything within her. It wasn’t just the amulet’s history and powers she saw. It was her own mind. She took the amulet’s powers into her to examine them, even though she doesn’t understand that. I stayed with her to guide her and keep her from getting lost. She has no idea how powerful she is yet.”

  “I can’t believe she’d ever be a danger to anyone she loves. She’s not like…” He didn’t finish the statement.

  The archdemon lifted an eyebrow at him. “Not like Lina, eh?”

  Marston nodded. “Not that I blame Lina,” he said. “I almost wish Elain would let her finish me off.”

  “You need to focus on the future, not the past. You weren’t exactly in charge of your destiny.”

  “There were a lot of things I bloody well could have chosen not to do.”

  Ryan took another sip of his tea. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

  A chill filled him. “What?”

  “I’m just saying that I believe we’re merely witnessing the end of a chess match the likes of which the Universe has never seen before or likely will again.”

  “But…who?”

  Ryan sighed. “It is not my place to say. Besides, the other player doesn’t even know he’s in the game, much less that he’s about to be checkmated. And in this way, technically, it is not my place to interfere.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Elain was scrubbing up in the shower when Brodey walked in. “You all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah!” She turned, excited. “The vision’s back! I’m going to go meet with Lina right now. Ryan’s joining us.”

  He stared at her. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m great, why?”

  He blinked, finally shaking his head. “Nothing. For a second there, I thought your eyes were a different color. Must have been a trick of the light. How’d the vision return?”

  She didn’t want to Seer Says him, and she wanted to stay as close to the truth as possible. “Not sure exactly. Ryan helped me with some creative visualization, and whatever the blockage was, I destroyed it. Now we need to try to process it while everything’s fresh.”

  Brodey leaned in. “Can I get a kiss first?”

  She smiled and kissed him. “Thank you for being so understanding.”

  “Just keep me in mind when your schedule gets free enough to schedule me a needy day.”

  She turned back to him and kissed him again. “I will. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, babe.”

  He had just closed the bathroom door behind him when she clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.

  The sigils on Brighton’s altar.

  She knew what they were.

  They were of his own creation, worked through the amulet and the spell book, a not-quite-black-magick version of the spell from the book to create a protective barrier and ward people off from the truth.

  That’s how he’d hidden things from them for so long. And it explained why neither she nor Ryan had figured it out before, because he’d made his own sigils.

  It took everything in her power not to pop right back to Ryan to tell him. Except that she was in the shower.

  And naked.

  And wet.

  And soapy.

  She hurried through it and dried off, poofed herself into the closet to throw on a T-shirt and shorts, and then poofed herself out into the yard…

  Right into a fresh, warm, squishy pile of horse shit.

  Aaaand she was barefoot.

  Ryan, who’d been standing there scratching the horses’ noses, let out an amused snort.

  “Smartass,” she muttered, poofing herself back into the shower to rinse her feet off.

  Brodey reappeared a moment later, his nose wrinkling. “Um, babe?”

  “I know,” she grumbled. “Don’t say it.” She finished washing her feet, poofed herself to the front door to grab a pair of flip-flops, and this time walked across the yard to where Ryan still waited with the horses.

  He smiled.

  “Don’t say it,” she grumbled.

  “Not a word, love.”

  She told him about the sigils as they walked over to Lina’s, where the lights were on downstairs.

  “That makes sense,” Ryan said. “No wonder we couldn’t decipher it.”

  Elain led the way and walked into Lina’s house without knocking, finding an anthill of activity. The smell of coffee hit Elain, and fortunately, it didn’t make her sick to her stomach. Mai was dressed in Flintstones pjs and looked half-asleep. Lina was barking orders to Zack and Kael.

  “There you are!” Lina said. “What the hell took you so—oh, hello, Ryan.”

  Elain glanced at him and spotted his smirk. “Hello to you, too, dear.”

  “Play nice, Lina,” Elain warned. “He’s helping. In fact, he might be part of the reason the blockage popped.”

  That pulled Lina up short. “What?”

  Ryan spoke before Elain could, spinning an almost but not quite truthful version that matched what Elain had told Brodey.

  Lina looked stunned. “Oh. Well, thank you. I apologize for my snark. I’m undercaffeinated and not responsible for anything I say or anything I blow up.”

  “So what do we do now?” Elain asked.

  “We’re going to put butts in chairs and work on the vision and see if anything’s changed,” Lina said. “Been a couple of months. Hopefully, we can figure out who that old bat is and take her out. I want to focus on her. Maybe we can find out from her who made the bomb, where it is, all of that.”

  “Let’s do it.” Elain slid into a seat at the table, Ryan taking up a chair next to Kael to observe.

  * * * *

  Aliah awoke with a gasping start. She’d been caught in a nightmare where her baby boy was ripped from her arms, both her and him screaming as he was whisked
off by that goddamned Florida wolf Seer bitch, Elain Lyall.

  As she sat up in bed, she tried to get her heart to stop racing, tried to slow her breathing. Swinging around to sit on the edge of the bed, she turned on the bedside lamp.

  Despite spending several months in Carl’s body, it still disconcerted her sometimes to see Carl’s arms and legs. She hated looking in a fucking mirror anymore.

  Waaait a minute…

  There was something else. Something…wrong.

  Really fucking wrong.

  Jumping up, she ran out to the living room, where she’d set up the altar on an end table that was nearly in the exact middle of the house’s physical dimensions.

  All the things she’d placed there—the herbs, the script written on a piece of parchment, the small wooden totem she’d roughly carved to fit the part—all charred and black as if they’d been consumed from the inside out. Not even a residual scent of smoke remained, no heat. The parchment was nothing but ashes.

  The spell had been destroyed.

  “Fuck! No! That goddamned cunt!” Aliah turned and ran for the burner cell she was using to keep in touch with the cockatrice in Florida. When she called, she angrily punched the hall wall with one fist while waiting for the fucker to pick up. Punched it so hard that she left a hole.

  “What?”

  “No more waiting. Grab the baby now and leave immediately for the meeting place and wait for me there.”

  “We can’t do it now. They’ll kill us! We have to wait until the guys leave in the morning.”

  “Then get in position and do it as soon as they leave.”

  “But we need to spend a few days plan—”

  “Do it!” she roared in Carl’s voice, at least in that way thankful to have his body under her command.

  She ended the call and turned off the phone, pulling the battery out of it. She’d have to pack and leave immediately to head for Georgia, where she’d told them to meet her. She’d given them coordinates for not far from the trailer where she and Cameron used to live. She wanted to get to the trailer first and be ready before meeting up with them.

  This was totally going to fuck her timeline. Originally, she’d hoped to do this during winter, preferably during an ice or snow storm, so it would add to the misery of the survivors and impede rescue operations even more.

  She’d have to move up detonating the bomb to now. With the chaos to help cover her tracks, she’d be able to slip out of the country over the Canadian border, using Carl’s ID from Missouri, if necessary.

  Just one more refugee.

  Once she was out of the United States, she could stay low in the hunting cabin Carl had kept as an emergency bug-out destination. But if that fucking bitch was strong enough to disable a spell, Aliah knew it meant she could no longer fuck around and waste time, even if her plans weren’t complete.

  She’d fucking drive the truck herself to New Madrid.

  “Oh, Carl,” she muttered as she headed for the bedroom. “Wakey wakey. Road trip time.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  They worked on the vision until nearly five in the morning. Mai, farther along in her pregnancy than Elain, was exhausted and literally falling asleep at the table. They’d narrowed down the time of day the blast happened by finding a bank clock with the time and temp on it, but they hadn’t been able to track back to the woman’s identity or find out where she came from, or the exact date.

  If anything, they couldn’t go quite as far back to her arrival as they had before. Like maybe something had changed after all.

  Elain didn’t want to wonder if that something was her destroying the spell that had been placed to block their vision, and hoped she hadn’t changed the timeframe by doing so.

  They also couldn’t find anything about the man.

  Ryan helped get Mai to her front door while Elain poofed herself back to her own bed, where she collapsed.

  “You okay, babe?” Brodey mumbled.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Figure it out?”

  “No, but at least the vision’s back. I’ll take the win.”

  He got up and she drifted off to sleep. When she next awoke, dim grey light was sneaking in around the window blinds, and she was alone in bed.

  She also smelled coffee.

  She closed her eyes and ignored it.

  When she next awakened, her eyes popped open, something tickling her senses and Elain not knowing what. She still had on her T-shirt and shorts she’d worn a few hours earlier when she went to Lina’s. After using the bathroom, she wandered out to the kitchen to find a note on the table.

  Be back soon. Had to help Rick and Jan. Babies at Mom’s. Love you! - A.

  Her sweet Prime. They’d given her a morning alone.

  She padded over to the coffeemaker and poured herself a mug. She was starting to fix it the way she liked when something pinged her senses again. A sound.

  Turning, she realized Juju and Bea were sound asleep on the couches.

  No Jasper.

  Of course not. Because he’d have automatically gone to Mom’s with the babies. Good luck separating him from them.

  And that was what she was hearing, the sound of him barking.

  Frantically barking.

  She poofed herself into her mom’s living room just to hear her scolding Jasper, who was staring out the front windows.

  “Jasper, shh! No! You’ll wake the babies!”

  “Mom, what’s going on?”

  Her mom screamed, then laughed as she turned. “You scared the crap out of me!”

  “What’s going on?”

  “He won’t stop—”

  “Bad! Dark Ones! Dark Ones!”

  “Jasper!” her mom scolded again, walking over to him. “Now, you stop that or I’ll have to put you outside and—”

  “Mom? Where’s the babies?”

  “Dark Ones!” He ran over to Elain and jumped up on her. “Dark Ones!”

  “They’re in the nursery,” her mom said, “but Jasper—”

  Elain grabbed her mom’s hand and literally dragged her down the hall. “Where’s your phone? And where’s Dad? Jasper, come!”

  “My what? And your dad’s with Micah and Jim. What are you doing? What’s going on?”

  Jasper was practically on top of Elain as she bolted down the hallway with her mom in tow. All three babies were sitting up in their cribs or play cribs and starting to fuss. Elain grabbed Connor first and handed him off to her mom.

  “What are you doing, Elain?”

  “Mom, sit down on the floor!”

  Her mom did.

  “Jasper, stay next to her.”

  “Dark Ones! Close and coming closer!”

  “I know they’re coming!” She could sense something tickling in her mind, a wrongness growing even more wrong by the second.

  “You know what?” her mom asked.

  “I wasn’t talking to you! I was talking to Jasper.” She grabbed Ellie and gently put her into her mom’s other arm, then grabbed Joss and settled him on her lap. “Jasper, across her legs.”

  He lay down.

  “Elain, you’re scaring—”

  Elain laid her hands on her mom’s shoulders. “Mom, you all go to Lacey’s!”

  They disappeared with a soft pop of the air.

  Elain immediately poofed into Lina’s. “Lina!”

  Zack stuck his head out of the kitchen. “Elain? What the—”

  “Where’s the Beasts? And Lina? And the guys?”

  “Lina’s asleep, and the Beasts are over at Mai’s. The guys are out with your guys. I think Kael’s out with them. What’s going—”

  “Get armed. Now! There’s cockatrice coming.” She ran into Lina’s bedroom.

  The goddess was sleepily sitting up. “What the—”

  Elain grabbed her hand, grabbed Lina’s cell phone off the bedside table, and poofed them into Mai’s living room. Mai, BettLynn, and the Beasts were sitting on the living room floor. The babies were watching
TV, and Mai looked half asleep.

  She perked up when Elain and Lina appeared. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t fucking know,” Lina said, “but I’d like a goddamned answer!”

  “Where’s Jim and Micah?” Elain asked Mai, ignoring Lina’s half-asleep snark.

  “They had to run into town. Why?”

  Elain dove for the Beasts and scooped them up despite their protests, and shoved one at each woman. Then she grabbed BettLynn and plopped her into Lina’s lap. Grabbing their hands, she pressed them together.

  “Go to Lacey’s now!”

  Lina’s protests still hung in the air as the soft pop happened.

  Elain stood and ran to the front windows. Far across the field and heading toward Lina’s house, she spotted a guy, hunkered down low like he was trying to sneak up on them.

  Motherfuckers.

  Dead motherfuckers.

  Elain poofed into her own house and grabbed her cell phone. Barefoot, she poofed back to Lina’s, where Zack, now armed, spun around.

  “Shit! Holy fuck, I nearly shot you!”

  “Where’s Kael?”

  “He’s outside and shifting to go find Jan and Rick.”

  “Sorry to do this. We need guns with the kids.” She grabbed his arm. Before he could protest, Elain said, “Tell Lina to text my guys we’re under attack and to bring guns. Zack, go to Lacey’s now!”

  He disappeared.

  She wasn’t even going to bother understanding this surge of power racing through her. She should be dead on her feet with the exertion, lack of sleep, her pregnancy, and now this stress, but it felt like she’d mainlined the fucking coffee that she’d only gotten to sniff before realizing that Jasper’s barking was a warning.

  The guy she’d spotted was still far enough away Elain knew she could get a good running start on him. She didn’t know how many of them there were, but it was imperative she lured them all to her, in one group.

  She had to take them all out at once.

  She couldn’t do that if they were fucking scattered all over the place, and she didn’t want them to know she could poof.

  Making sure he saw her come out the front door, she took the long way around and ran back toward her house, skirting in front of her parents’ house and scenting two more intruders somewhere behind it. As she looped around her own house, she spotted another guy rounding the back side of Mai’s house. She fought the urge to howl and shift, her Alpha begging to be let loose.