Triple Cross Read online

  “What?” Elain asked.

  She pointed at Ain. “Baba Yaga could easily pull it from his mind and memory.” She turned her finger to Elain. “But not from yours. Unless you tell her, she won’t find out. She can’t force you to reveal anything, can’t pull it from your mind if you block her.”

  “What about Mai and Lina?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. You are, believe it or not, already the strongest of the three. The pivot. Everyone thinks Lina is, but she just has better control of her more obvious powers right now. Combined with her memories of her past lives, it makes her look like she’s the head diva.”

  Elain felt weak, sick. She’d really hoped Ryan had been wrong. “But she’s not?”

  “Nope.” She pointed at Elain again. “It’s you. And by doing this, it’ll tip the scales even farther in your direction. If you want to do it.”

  Elain forced herself to meet Ain’s gaze. “What has to happen?” she asked Gigi. “To keep Ain from revealing it?”

  “You have to wipe his memory of this. With his permission, of course. Plant a new one. A different one. One that he believes is real. So his own brothers can’t accidentally get it out of him. He can’t lie to them.”

  “But I’ll still know.”

  Gigi shrugged. “You play the ‘Seer business’ card and get out of it. He’ll never try to override that, will you, Aindreas?”

  He shook his head.

  It left a bad taste in Elain’s mouth. She knew there would legitimately be times where that had to happen, to withhold information, but to go there deliberately…

  Then again, hadn’t she already done that?

  Elain stared at Ain. “I can’t say yes unless you agree to this,” she whispered. “I won’t.” She looked at Gigi again. “I don’t even know how to do it. To change his memory.”

  “I suggest taking a last-minute trip, courtesy of the jaguars—who are closing in, by the way—to Bolivia for a few days. They can get you paperwork for the baby. Claim sudden Seer business, you adopted an orphaned shifter baby while there, and bring him home.”

  A ragged laugh escaped Elain. “That easy, huh?”

  Gigi slowly nodded, her voice dropping the formal tone of her Immortal role back to that cherished friend. “Yeah, it is that easy, actually. That’s what’s so sad about this. Otherwise, he’s a throwaway child. Even if you found cockatrice, they wouldn’t raise him. They’d kill him because he’s not of their nest.”

  “What’s the catch?” Elain asked. “Why are you so willing to give away your powers over a cockatrice baby?”

  She grinned. “Babs has spent Goddess knows how many years fucking around with peoples’ lives. Finally, I get a chance to let the system play out in its own way. She won’t get to have the final say here. I’ll get to stick it to her. She won’t even know it.”

  Ain spoke. “Baba Yaga won’t know he’s cockatrice?”

  Gigi’s grin faded. “No one will, except Elain and myself.” The knife vanished from her hand. She held up both hands nonthreateningly and slowly reached around Elain to touch the baby’s forehead.

  Gigi’s brow wrinkled for a moment before she straightened and leaned back. “He’s not a shifter. Won’t be, I should say. His genes are too diluted, so that makes things even easier. Other than his scent, which I’ll take care of for you with the occlusion spell, no one would be able to figure it out.”

  “What about you?” Elain said. “You give away your powers, won’t Baba Yaga be able to figure it out?”

  “Nope. She still won’t be able to read my mind. That doesn’t change. And believe me, I won’t tell her. And Oscar and I don’t have that edict crap like you wolves do. So he won’t ever know, either.”

  Ain took a deep breath and slowly let it out before answering. “Elain can take away my memory of this?”

  Gigi nodded. “She’ll figure out how to do it, as long as you are willing and go along with her doing it. I have every confidence in her. She can implant a fake memory for you that will be just as good.”

  “What about the jaguars?” Elain asked.

  She shrugged. “You simply tell them this is a don’t ask, don’t tell situation. By the time they see the baby, they will think he’s a wolf. Where he came from will be irrelevant to them.” Her gaze narrowed. “Do you honestly think Ortega will deny you considering what you know?”

  Guilt washed over her. No, Ain wasn’t the only one with secrets. “I need to tell him, don’t I?” she asked Gigi.

  Her friend knew what she meant and nodded. “Yeah. Fair’s fair.”

  Blinking back tears, she faced Ain. “I know where Marston Hill is. And I know where Rodolfo Abernathy is. I’ve known since last year. I spoke to Marston. He’s alive. So is Rodolfo.”

  Shock drove grief from Ain’s face. “What?”

  Gigi crossed her arms over her chest again, a smirk on her face. “Ah, wolves in love.”

  It spilled from Elain. She tried to hold the tears back, but couldn’t. Ain wrapped his arms around her as she told him everything, from how Mercedes died to her moving the body to Lacey’s backyard, to the trip to Bolivia, Marston, finding out her dad’s brothers had been paid by Abernathy, what Ortega was doing to Rodolfo—everything.

  He remained quiet for a moment. Then, “Do you really want to raise this baby?”

  She looked up and met his grey gaze. “I don’t want him to die. I can’t let him die. I think we can raise him like a wolf, as if he was one of us. Maybe this is the turning point. Maybe he is the turning point to finally ending all this bullshit for good. To prove there can be good in this race. I know we can’t tell anyone about it, but at least I’d finally have hope. And that’s something. I’m tired of feeling hopeless, like we’re just spinning our wheels for nothing. I could look at him every day and feel hope that we will find a lasting peace one day. You have no idea how desperately I need that kind of hope. Especially on days like this.”

  He cupped her cheeks in his palms and slowly kissed her before touching his forehead to hers. “Okay. I’ll agree to this on one condition.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you also take away my memory of killing that mother and baby?”

  She threw her arms around him, feeling his pain, now understanding what he’d kept walled up inside him all this time, that thing that made him appear so mentally and emotionally stoic and stout when compared to his brothers.

  It was a survival tactic to preserve his sanity. “Yes. I promise. I don’t know how I’ll do it yet, but I promise I’ll figure it out. If she says I can do it, I will.”

  “Okay. And can you forgive me for not telling you about it? Do you hate me for what I did?”

  She held him tighter. “Yes, I forgive you, and no, I don’t hate you. Can you forgive me for not telling you about Marston and the rest? Do you hate me?”

  “Of course I don’t hate you. And yeah, I understand why you kept everything a secret. We all have secrets, I guess.”

  Gigi interrupted. “Not to be a party pooper, kids, but we’re going to have company soon. Let’s speed this up.”

  Ain kissed Elain again. “Then let’s do it,” he said.

  Gigi reached over and quickly unfastened the baby’s harness. She scooped him up into the baby blanket and laid him on the cave’s dirt floor between Elain and Ain. She pulled his little light blue socks off his feet.

  The knife reappeared in her hand. When Elain gasped, Gigi held up a palm. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt him. Both of you, hold out your hands, palms up.”

  They did.

  Working quickly, Gigi chanted under her breath and held her left hand palm up underneath Elain’s left hand, the knife in her right with the tip over Elain’s palm.

  “Hold still,” Gigi warned. The tip of the knife suddenly glowed with golden light, not with heat, but as if lit from within. When Gigi traced a sigil on Elain’s left palm, she didn’t feel it even though blood welled from the cuts in her flesh.

  Gigi quickly repeated
it with Elain’s right hand, and with Ain’s hands. Then she did it to the baby’s right hand, and placed his palm against Elain’s left palm. “Hold on to him. Don’t let go until I tell you to.” Then the bottom of his right foot, placed against Elain’s right palm. Gigi repeated it on the baby’s other side with Ain holding a foot and a hand.

  All through it, the baby stared up at them with muddy brown eyes before he let out a soft, questioning cry.

  Laying the knife aside, Gigi touched her fingertips to the baby’s temples. She closed her eyes. “Mate, come to me,” she muttered. Then she slipped into an ancient tongue Elain understood without knowing how. In that tongue, Gigi rhymed her chant. As she chanted, a soft golden glow gathered around them.

  “Goddess Above, Goddess Below. Through this child my powers flow. Through this couple do bestow, their love and trust and souls do know. Into this child I channel grace, washing through I change his race. From wolf he comes, and wolf he be. My powers freely given, thus mote it be.”

  Elain gasped as what felt like an electric current bit through her hands. The current rolled through her to Ain and Gigi and the baby, much as it did when she worked magick with Lina and Mai. As she stared down at the infant, his eyes changed from brown to blue.

  The same shade of blue she saw when she stared in a mirror.

  Gigi wasn’t done. “Binding all this power does. All through his life, all through his loves. Beyond this blood no one shall know. With my last…I make it so.”

  The glow transformed into a brilliant flash. Elain had to close her eyes or risk being blinded. It faded as quickly as it had bloomed, and when she looked at Gigi, her friend now sat back on her ass, hands cradled in her lap, head down.

  “Gigi?” she whispered.

  She held up only one finger, her whole body shuddering as she pulled in a long, deep breath before letting it out again.

  Outside, they heard a rustling. “Gi?” Oscar yelled.

  “Wait there,” she called out to him. Then she looked up. “You can let go,” she mouthed to them.

  They did, and Elain noticed the blood was gone from her hands. No marks remained. Ain stared at his and held them up to show Elain.

  Also clean.

  As were the baby’s hands and feet.

  “Get his socks back on him. Grab his stuff,” Gigi whispered as she slowly got to her feet.

  When she straightened, she let out a little moan and then laughed. “Oh, yeah. I remember this,” she said. “Been a few thousand years, give or take a century or two.”

  Elain scooped up the baby, wrapping him in the blanket and laying him in the carrier while Ain started grabbing the diaper bag, backpack, and other things and moving them toward the front of the cave.

  Gigi headed toward the cave entrance. “Ain, we’ll find the jaguars and send them here to the cave. You’re on your own with your brothers. We’ll tell them you’re both safe and that you said to go back with the others and wait for your call, but beyond that, you have to handle them.”

  “Thanks.”

  She pushed through the brush and they heard her talking with Oscar before the sound of their voices faded from the clearing.

  Looking up, Elain met Ain’s gaze. “Did we do the right thing?” she asked as the enormity of their friend’s sacrifice slammed home. “Please tell me we did the right thing.”

  He put down everything and reached out a finger to the baby. His tiny fingers closed around Ain’s finger as he stared up at him.

  “Weren’t his eyes brown before? I could swear they were.” Ain asked.

  Elain nodded.

  A sad smile curved his lips. “We need to ditch that car seat and his clothes. And all this stuff. They all smell like…you know what.”

  “Yeah. Answer me.”

  He leaned in and kissed her, then whispered in her ear, “We absolutely did the right thing, sweetheart. Finally, I can sleep well knowing I absolutely did the right thing.”

  * * * *

  When Ortega Montalvo arrived at the cave a few minutes later, he looked grim. With barely a glance at the baby Elain held, he started helping Ain grab stuff.

  “We must hurry,” Ortega said. “Your brothers are nearby.”

  “What should we tell them?” Elain asked Ain.

  “We’ll have to call them once we’re on the plane,” he said.

  “I’ve sent Juan to find them,” Ortega said, “and to tell them you’ve been called away on Seer business, but that you are safe and well and will contact them. If we do not move now, they may sense how close you are and follow.”

  With Elain in the middle and carrying the infant, they raced away from the cave on foot in a different direction than the others had gone. With her pregnancy and carrying the baby in the carrier, it was all Elain could do to keep up with the jaguar, even though he was running on two feet. When they finally emerged from the woods onto another seldom-used fire road, Ricardo Montalvo was waiting for them about thirty yards away in a car.

  “Let’s go,” Ortega said, urging them forward.

  “Wait, I don’t have my passport or anything,” Elain said.

  “You will not need it,” Ortega assured her. “The airport we fly into is owned and run by me.”

  “I’ve got my wallet this time, sweetheart,” Ain tried to joke, smiling at her.

  As she settled in the backseat, the baby’s carrier cradled on her lap, she leaned her head over onto Ain’s shoulder. Yes, she remembered the time she’d had to fly up to Virginia to rescue his ass from an animal shelter.

  She noticed how Ricardo’s nose wrinkled as he climbed back behind the wheel after helping Ortega get everything else stowed in the trunk. He turned to his brother and asked something in Spanish that Elain didn’t understand, but the older brother cut him off with a sharp word of warning.

  The baby let out another hungry sounding cry.

  Ain pawed through the diaper bag and found diapers, wipes, and extra clothes, but no formula or bottles.

  “We have to hit a store before we go to the airport,” Elain said. “We need to get him formula. She must have been breastfeeding. He’s hungry.”

  Ricardo floored it, getting them back to town faster than she could have imagined them making it. They stopped at a discount store, where Ain stayed in the car with the jaguars and the baby, sending Elain in with his wallet. She grabbed powdered formula, bottled water, bottles, nipples, and even some canned formula, enough to last them several days. To the cart she added more diapers, some clothes, baby blankets burp cloths, a new diaper bag, a portable travel crib, and a car seat. She also bought a carry-on bag, a couple of changes of clothes, and toiletries for herself and Ain.

  Working fast back at the car, they pulled around behind the shopping center and ditched everything in the store’s Dumpster that smelled like cockatrice. Elain found a manila envelope of paperwork in the diaper bag that she kept, but that was it.

  From head to toe she wiped the baby down with baby wipes and completely changed him, from diaper to clothes, before she strapped him into his new car seat in the back seat between her and Ain. As Ricardo hit the gas again and sped away from the area, Ain soothed the baby while Elain prepared him a bottle of the premixed formula.

  At first the baby didn’t seem to want to latch on. But after some gentle persistence on Elain’s part, she soon had him sucking down the bottle’s contents.

  Ain reached over and stroked the top of his head. “You realize how pissed off Brodey and Cail are going to be that we didn’t consult with them first, right?”

  “I’m not worried. They’ll get over it when they see him and fall in love with him.”

  Ortega looked over the back of the seat at them, his nose wrinkled. “Smart thinking back there, to get all new things. But why does he not smell like…that? He smells like wolf, like you and Ain. So why did all his things smell like…that? Where did he come from?”

  She didn’t look away from where the baby now contentedly nursed. “Don’t ask what you don’t
want or need to know, Ortega.”

  He grimly nodded. “Very true, my dear friend. You would think I should have learned that lesson well before now.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ain had volunteered to make the calls to Brodey and Cail, but Elain wanted to try to handle it, figuring the news would sound better from her.

  Besides, Ain was too overwhelmed, a dark, cloudy energy seeping from him now that he’d admitted his secret to her, and she wanted to spare him that extra stress if she could. She wasn’t sure he was even up to performing the mental gymnastics it would take to dodge his brothers’ questions.

  Sitting up front and using the phone system on Ortega’s plane, Elain dialed Cail’s number first.

  He picked up after the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Cail, it’s me. Listen—”

  “Elain? Where the hell are you? We were getting worried. Where’s Ain?”

  “We’re fine. Listen, I can’t talk long. We’re—”

  “Is that Elain?” Brodey yelled.

  The predictable scuffle ensued, Brodey ending up with the phone. “Elain, where the hell are you?”

  She hated to do it, but she had to. “Brodey, listen to me. Right now.”

  He went silent. Then, quietly, “Did you just edict me?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, but that’s the way this conversation’s going to go. Time is short. Ain and I are fine, and we’re on Ortega’s jet.”

  “You’re where? What? Put Ain on.”

  “Stop.” She took a deep breath and gentled her voice. “Brodey, sweetheart, I love you. I love you very much, but something’s happened. I’m not hurt, the baby is fine, Ain’s not hurt. We have to go with Ortega and take care of something very important, right now. I can’t tell you what or where. And it can’t be put off. We had to leave immediately. It’s Seer business. How are Callie and Mai? Are they all right?”

  He sounded hurt. She didn’t blame him. “They’re fine. Lacey said a soak in a tub of Epsom salts and a good night’s sleep and they’ll be fine. But you’re due in a few weeks. You shouldn’t be flying.”