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  Lina frowned. “But Ryan’s father is…” Elain watched her friend’s throat work as she swallowed hard.

  “Who?” Mai asked.

  “Holy shitballs,” Zack whispered. “Baba Yaga banged Hades? No wonder she’s not real fond of Ryan.”

  “Hades?” Mai’s voice now bore a decided squeak of fear. “As in the Hades?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Elain said.

  “You know,” Lina mused. “If his last name was Benz, and he was knighted, he’d be Sir Hades Benz.”

  Zack groaned. “Just what I needed, a Janis Joplin evil earworm. Maybe I should go kill myself now.”

  “Oh, fuck you. That was funny.”

  “So, now that we’re off-topic again,” Elain interrupted, “can we please get back on-topic?”

  “Nobody appreciates good puns anymore,” Lina grumbled.

  “Yeah, we do, shortcake,” Zach shot back. “That wasn’t a good pun.”

  “What’s our next step for this vision?” Elain asked. “Do we want to try studying the beginning of the vision again?”

  “I think we have to,” Mai said. “I was wondering if we can show Zack or Kael the images we see.”

  They all looked at Zack.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “So you can see what we’re seeing,” Lina said. “Duh.”

  “How will that help?”

  “You guys might see something we’re missing,” Lina said. “Maybe we’re looking at this wrong. Maybe there’s a clue in the vision there at the end. Because when any of us have the vision as a dream or an independent vision, we only see that little snippet there on the street after it goes off and the blast is hitting the town. When we follow it back, we’re seeing different things. I’m thinking the vision as we originally saw is the key. Something there might be the clue we’re missing.”

  “Oh. Okay, now I’m tracking.” He seemed to be considering it. “Can’t hurt to try.”

  They already knew from looking at maps and Google Earth where the vision started. Or ended, depending on which way it was playing out. Running it backward, they always started out standing on the same block on the same street.

  Sitting at the table, the three women joined hands, Lina and Elain taking Zack’s hands on either side.

  “Don’t fry my brains, girls,” Zack joked without a hint of nervousness in him. Elain nervously laughed along with the others.

  If he knew what I was capable of, he might not be joking about that.

  Elain wiped that thought from her mind and focused on the vision, taking him to the moment before the blast swept through.

  “Holy crap,” Zack said. He started describing things as they were seeing them without them having to tell him, little details they hadn’t talked about before, like the color of a car or the bird sitting on the streetlamp.

  Stuff that let them all know that, yes, Zack was seeing it.

  They stayed there, with the vision frozen in place, letting Zack get a good look.

  “What’s that woman doing?” he said.

  “Which woman?” all three of them asked.

  “By the bank.”

  An older woman, her back to them, had thrown something away, from the looks of it, but they couldn’t tell what. She was walking away from a public garbage can in front of a bank and heading toward the bank’s front door.

  “Does she look familiar?” Lina asked him.

  “No, never seen her before in my life, but I’m looking at her backside.”

  They slowly stepped the vision back a little. Now they could see her face. Yes, she’d thrown something away, a paper bag.

  Unfortunately, they couldn’t physically grab hold of anything in the vision, meaning they couldn’t see what was in the bag.

  “It’s probably trash,” Mai said.

  They backed the vision up farther. Usually by this time they were running in search of the mushroom cloud’s origins before it disappeared. They’d never stayed here this long before, in terms of the vision.

  When they bumped against the end of the vision, they’d caught up with her having just straightened from what looked like picking something up from the ground. She walked around the corner of the block and shoved whatever it was she picked up into the bag.

  And that was as far back as they could take the vision.

  Even getting right up to her, they couldn’t see what it was she’d picked up. It was small enough to be covered by her hand, or fit in her hand, and then she’d put it in the bag.

  They started slowly rolling the vision forward again.

  “Why is she wearing gloves?” Lina asked.

  That’s when Elain realized the woman had on black leather gloves.

  “Hey, guys?” Mai was standing exactly where they’d first seen the woman, whereas the rest of them were standing by the woman’s current location, trying to see what was in her hand.

  “What?” Elain asked.

  “I think maybe it’s a cell phone.”

  “Why?”

  “Come here.”

  They hurried over. On the sidewalk lay a piece of plastic, obviously broken off of something larger. And it wasn’t dusty, like it’d been there a while.

  Zack knelt down. “I wish we could touch things.”

  “If we could touch things,” Lina said, “my fear is we can feel them. I don’t want to feel that blast any more than we already have, thank you very much.”

  “Oh. Damned good point.” He stared at it. “It does look like a piece of a cell phone.”

  “You think she found it and then threw it away?” Lina asked. “Maybe it was broken?”

  “That doesn’t feel right,” Zack said.

  Something nagged at Elain’s gut when from the corner of her consciousness something caught her ear. Pulled out of the vision, she turned around to see Kael changing the channel on the TV in the living room.

  “Stop!” Elain shouted, standing up so fast she almost tipped her chair back.

  Both Kael and her mom startled. “Sorry, honey,” her mom said. “We just wanted to watch TV.” Kael had the TV remote in his hand.

  “No, I mean stop there!” The logo for the Military Channel was displayed on the screen. The show, whatever it was, was talking about the Middle East conflict, troops dealing with IEDs. Elain walked over and listened, that nagging starting to grow in her brain again, only like a headache this time, like the worst migraine of her life, until, finally, it popped as she made the connection.

  She wheeled around. “That’s the woman who sets the bomb off!” Elain said. “It is a cell phone! She triggers the bomb with a cell phone!” She ran back into the kitchen, where the others were still holding hands around the table, but now staring at her. “She’s the one who detonates it!”

  Zack looked confused, as did Lina. “But why,” Lina asked, “would she set off a bomb that would kill her, too? Cockatrice aren’t suicide bombers. They hire that shit out or sucker others into it.”

  Elain stared at the map on Zack’s laptop, which sat open on the table. “Exactly. Because I bet someone asked her to do them a favor and didn’t tell her what would happen. Maybe they told her it was supposed to be an alibi call so their cell phone pinged somewhere to make it look like they were someplace they weren’t, but what it really did was trigger the explosion.”

  They finally let go of each other’s hands. Mai leaned forward. “Why would someone do that, though?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they paid her, bribed her, hell, maybe they had an insurance policy on her.”

  “That’s a helluva way to get a policy to pay out,” Lina snarked. “Let’s not stage an accident. Let’s nuke the Midwest. Wow, when you absolutely, positively want someone dead—”

  “I don’t know,” Elain said, “but I’m willing to bet she’s the key. The timing is perfect. She makes the call, then drops the phone to break it, and throws it away. That would take seconds in real time. She’s wearing gloves in case anyone does find the phone, to keep her prints off it. She
doesn’t think she’s going to die.”

  Elain sat with them and they tried again. No matter what they did, they couldn’t go farther back in the vision than the woman picking the item up.

  And when they allowed the vision to play forward at normal speed, it took less than ten seconds from when she picked up the item to her entering the bank, and that was with stopping the vision just as the blast was reaching within blocks of the bank entrance.

  “She didn’t know,” Elain said.

  “Or she wanted into that vault,” Mai suggested.

  They stared at her.

  “I’m just saying, maybe if she’s a cockatrice, we don’t know. Maybe she’s like, really old or powerful or something. Bank vaults are tough. Maybe she knew she could make it into the bank vault in time to survive. Maybe that was the plan. What better sympathy ploy than to be the survivor of a blast. Any trace of evidence is gone.”

  “Radiation?” Lina asked.

  Mai shrugged. “Do we really know what they’re capable of if they’re strong? She looked old. If we follow the cockatrice hypothesis, that means maybe she’s really powerful and can survive something like that. Maybe they wanted her in the bank vault to steal something—or to steal money—after the blast went off. Who knows?”

  “Shit,” Zack muttered. “That’s crazy enough to be worth looking into. Cockatrice love chaos. Nothing more chaotic than a nuclear blast in the Midwest. Except maybe a free-for-all buffet at a Starbucks.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Now that Elain’s libido had reawakened, it’d seemingly returned with a Rambo-worthy vengeance.

  Monday night, Elain was all over her men as soon as the kids were asleep for the night. They’d moved Ellie into the nursery with Connor, into a crib. With Elain’s mom and dad now living in their own house, they didn’t have to worry about adult ears overhearing them.

  “What do you want tonight, baby?” Ain whispered in Elain’s ear as she went down on Cail.

  She used their mate bond to reply. “Hard, fast, and frequent.”

  “Good girl,” he whispered before nibbling on the outer shell of her ear and sending shivers through her body.

  Brodey had emptied one load down her throat before the other two men had made it to bed. Now he was behind her, his lips and tongue already having brought her over once already and working on taking her over the edge a second time. After Brodey went to work on her clit with his talented mouth and brought her over again, Elain knew what she wanted to do.

  She lifted her head from Cail’s cock and sat up. “There’s lube in the nightstand,” she said, still trying to catch her breath. “Someone grab a towel.”

  In a few moments, as if another kind of magick, she was astride Ain with his cock deep inside her pussy, Cail was carefully loosening up her ass with his fingers, and Brodey’s revived cock was in her mouth.

  And she was a very, very happy mate.

  No, they didn’t do this every time they made love. Sometimes, however, she just wanted it, like a need, a deep craving, to have them all at once. To feel their love and energy—

  Her eyes popped open. Energy.

  Cail froze. “Are you okay, sweetie? I’m not hurting you, am I?”

  She lifted her head from Brodey’s cock. “Don’t stop!” she gasped. “Please don’t stop!”

  She looked up at Brodey and used their mate bond to silently talk to him. “Once we get going, edict me to come until all three of you are done.”

  He didn’t question her, just nodded, reaching down and stroking her hair, gathering it in his hand and holding it out of her way.

  She went back to work on his cock as Cail started easing his cock inside her ass.

  The familiar, full, stretched feeling mixed with pleasure, giving a delightful edge to them both. Once she felt Cail’s thighs pressed against the backs of hers, she started moving.

  Brodey’s grip on her hair tightened. “Mate, come for us.”

  It slammed into her like a freight train, maybe because it was all three of them, maybe because it’d been a damned long time by their usual standards, and maybe because now she was more in tune with her powers. But the pleasure ripped through her, searing her nerve endings from the inside out…

  And she was standing in New Madrid, behind the bank building, looking around a small parking area. Everything bore a bluish tinge.

  Aware that her body was fulfilling Brodey’s commands and that she might not have much time with Ain and Cail already fairly close to the edge, Elain spun around, trying to find the woman.

  There she came, crossing the street just a block down and walking toward Elain. A fast walk, too, one that looked decidedly out of place for someone apparently as old as this woman.

  Obviously, she was a cockatrice, even though Elain couldn’t scent her. But there was something hard, nearly reptilian about the set of her eyes, the jut of her jaw, and it was a certainty in the Seer’s mind.

  Elain ran toward her but the woman was already punching in a number on the cell phone as she walked. By the time Elain caught up with her, the woman was almost to the edge of the building and had hit send. She paused, dropped the phone and stomped it, picked it up, and then—

  “Elain, come!” Brodey gasped.

  She fell back into her body to the sensation of exquisite pleasure robbing her of coherent thought. In her mouth, Brodey’s cock shot a stream of cum over her tongue and she instinctively started swallowing. Below her, Ain had hold of her waist and was fucking his cock up into her pussy, adding his release to the energy. And in her ass, Cail took one last stroke before falling still.

  Elain collapsed onto Ain’s chest, all three men stroking her back, her shoulders, no one speaking.

  Ain finally broke the silence by softly clearing his throat. “I need to…clean up. Sorry. I hate to make you move, sweetheart.”

  Elain nodded, shoving herself upright and wincing as Cail withdrew from her ass, then flopping over to her side off Ain.

  “Brod?” she said.

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “Can you find my phone?”

  “Uh, why?”

  “I need to call Lina and Mai.”

  He snorted. “Were we that good?”

  “No, it’s Seer stuff.” She mentally winced as she realized how that must have sounded. “I mean, yes, you were great. But that’s not why I need to call them. I had a breakthrough on the vision.”

  * * * *

  The three of them met at Elain’s, since her house was in the middle anyway. Sitting around the kitchen table, Elain and Lina in bathrobes and Mai in an oversized T-shirt and boxer shorts, they and Zack—who wore PJ pants and nothing else—tried lobbing ideas at each other after Elain told them what she’d seen.

  Trying to replicate Elain’s result hadn’t worked, either. Even with the three of them linking hands. Elain could and did show the others what she saw, but trying to drop all of them back into the vision at that point like they had with the original vision wasn’t happening.

  At least, not that night, it wasn’t.

  “Okay, so we know that mystery woman is the key,” Lina said. “We still don’t know who she is. If we saw her get out of a car or something, we might be able to track her identity.”

  “Next time I have that vision, if I have it again,” Elain said, “I’ll try to get to her immediately to see what number she dials.”

  “This is going to sound weird,” Mai said, “but I think the key to some of this is sex magick.”

  The other three stared at her.

  “Honey,” Lina said, “I love you, but not like that.”

  “No! Duh. I mean us with our guys.” She pointed at Elain. “She’s the strongest and she has three Alpha wolf mates. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Lina has two dragon dual elementals as mates, but she also has inherited powers, so maybe that’s why early on she looked to be the strongest. I have a human and an Alpha wolf as my mates. Maybe that’s why my powers are taking a while to manifest, even with the j
ump-start I got from Callie.”

  Neither woman had made much progress on the poofy skills despite trying to work on them. Mai had accidentally managed to bring Jim’s pants to her once.

  The snafu about that result had been the fact that Mai had been trying to get her phone out of his pants and bring it to her without going out after him, because he’d accidentally picked hers up by mistake.

  And he’d been standing out in the yard, talking to Brodey, when Mai managed that little trick.

  And Jim had been commando at the time.

  Brodey still snickered every time he thought about the horrified look on Jim’s face when he was suddenly standing there with his bare ass and other sundry body parts exposed in the breeze.

  Needless to say, Mai was hesitant to try using that skill again.

  “I do tend to get visions when my guys…” Lina cleared her throat. “When they double up, so to speak.” She looked at Zack. “Sorry for the TMI.”

  He arched an eyebrow at her. “Shortcake, we’re waaay beyond that point now, but thank you.”

  “I have to admit several of my visions have happened then, too,” Elain said.

  They looked at Mai.

  “Yeah, duh. That’s why I said it.”

  “Well, we’ve got four weeks until we go back to Maine for the formal recognition ceremony,” Elain said. “Maybe we can figure this out before then.”

  Elain had talked with Blackie, Kitty, and Lacey while in Maine last weekend, informed them about the nuclear vision, their progress on it, and what they were trying to do. They were keeping a tight lid on the news about the vision, informing as few people as possible. The last thing they wanted to do was incite a panic or get innocent people killed by vigilante shifter justice.

  Not that Elain liked sharing the atmosphere with cockatrice, but if an adult cockatrice wasn’t even aware of their heritage, or if they weren’t hurting anyone, Elain wasn’t comfortable wiping them out of existence.

  Baba Yaga might have been okay with that at one point, but Elain refused to let that power go to her head.

  The other reason to keep it quiet was they didn’t want word of it getting to any cockatrice and giving them ideas they might not already have.