“Why are you whispering?”
“Because your men are standing behind the front door, at the view finder, watching us. They have been for quite some time.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” She jumped up and shoved the door open fast enough she caught Brodey in the nose with it.
“Ow, babe! What the fuck?”
“No, you what the fuck! Spying on me? Seriously?”
Cail crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re crying on the shoulder of a guy who”—he looked around her at Ryan—“no offense, we barely know, on our front porch, in the middle of the night. What’s up?”
“He has a point,” Ain added, staring at her.
Ryan smoothly stood and answered before she could. “New mother hormones, for starters,” he said without missing a beat. “She had some questions about the…issue she and the others have been working on. She and the others are, understandably, frustrated at their lack of progress. I was merely trying to reassure her. And she became rather emotional during the course of our conversation, doubting herself and her powers. I didn’t feel right simply sitting there and not consoling her. I’m sorry if it was improper. No disrespect or impropriety was intended. I consider Elain a friend and colleague, nothing more.”
Brodey started to say something but Ain overruled him. “At ease, Brod.”
Ain stepped forward and took her hands in his. “I’m sorry we were spying on you. We were concerned when you got out of bed and didn’t come back. Yeah, we watched you.”
She realized she’d forgotten to put that little bubble around her to not wake them up. Then she felt worse, not better, when Ain brought her hands to his lips and kissed them. “We do trust you,” he said. He released her hands after one final squeeze. “Come on, guys. Let’s let them talk. Seer stuff. They need privacy.”
Cail gave her a kiss and an apologetic smile.
Brodey looked at the blood on his hands, then her.
“You’ve had worse, you big baby,” she said.
“You’re right.” He smiled. “I have.” His smile faded. “Sorry. He’s right. I trust you.” He leaned in for a kiss.
“Sorry about your nose.”
“Mom, Mai, and Lina all warned us to give you space,” he said. “Sometimes, I need my head knocked around to drive a lesson home.”
“Got that right,” Ain grumbled.
Once they were alone again, Elain stepped onto the porch again, shut the front door behind her, and retook her spot on the steps with Ryan seated next to her.
“Does this get any easier?” she asked.
“I’ll let you know if it ever does.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“I’ve already taken the necessary steps to smooth things over. I suggest that if Daniel Blackestone ever mentions the three missing men, you refer him to me.”
“Why?”
He smirked. “I just lied my ass off to three Alpha wolves without my pulse budging and they bought it without hesitation. I sorta-kinda do this for a living.”
“Lying?”
“Keeping the peace so people don’t know what really goes on out there. So their minds rest easy. So they can sleep at night without fear.”
“I thought you were a good guy. I mean, I know you’re a good guy. Screw it, you know what I mean.”
He slowly nodded. “Sometimes, being the good guy means sparing those we love the absolute truth.”
“I hate this job,” she muttered.
“You aren’t the first one to ever utter those words.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Carl Shupe ended his phone call and dropped the handset onto the base before leaning back in his chair. One more informant who’d told him information they’d heard about a new shifter mega-Clan that had been formed, united by the Maine wolf Clan.
Inconvenient.
If all the other shifter races were against the cockatrice, it was only a matter of time before they took out all of the low-hanging fruit and started working their way up toward people like him, cockatrice who avoided making waves, who kept their heads down, who didn’t attack the other shifters.
Well, not that the other shifters knew of. He had all sorts of illegal operations going on that no one could ever trace back to him, seed money he’d loaned out through other shell corporations.
But between the idiocy down in Louisiana over Thanksgiving a year and a half earlier, Cameron’s dumb-assed stunt in Yellowstone just a few months later, and then the meth operation that seemed to have literally been wiped off the face of the planet in Maine, things were getting…interesting.
Not in a good way, either.
He’d deliberately kept his nest small throughout the years, never taking a mate when he had no use for one. If he wanted pussy, he had that on demand through dozens of women who were his to use whenever he wanted, until their fathers or brothers or husbands or mates made good on their business obligations to him. He damn sure didn’t want to have to deal with the aggravation of a mate’s family wanting part of his business.
He didn’t need those kinds of distractions.
What he needed was that goddamned spell book Aliah had teased him with before disappearing. He’d already talked to a couple of people overseas who thought they might be able to make use of scans of pages, but he hadn’t wanted to commit himself yet and had phrased his questions in hypotheticals. If anyone thought he really had an actual copy of the Grimoire Lilitu, he’d find himself looking over his shoulder every second.
Having the real book in hand was a different story. Then he could hire someone who could read the damned thing and do the magick for him. Someone whose ass he owned via their kids or other beloved family being held as collateral.
He thought he’d tracked down Aliah’s baby’s information, based on the limited details he had from his sources, but whether or not the baby had survived whatever happened in the Maine wolves’ Clan territory was still unknown. Aliah had given false information when she’d registered at the hospital and had her baby, listing her address as a storefront third-party mail box outlet in Bangor.
He had no clue where she’d been staying, no idea where to go hunt down her living quarters to search for the book.
Unless she’d had it with her that day, and the Maine wolves now had it.
He rubbed his face with his hands. If that was the case, the cockatrice race was absolutely fucked, sideways, without lube.
It was no real secret that shifters who hated cockatrice were the guardians of the Tablet of Trammel. Without the Tablet, and without a Grimoire Lilitu to help unlock the powers stolen from their line, no way could they ever rise to take their rightful place as rulers of the Earth.
And now that he had just a little taste of what that might be like, that it was really something attainable and not just a stupid myth spread throughout the ages, he wanted it.
Badly.
Some might think him crazy to purchase property in Florida so close to the wolves there, but he had a reason for such madness. Being so close to where all three Seers lived would allow him opportunities to perhaps acquire information not available up in Maine. The Maine wolves kept their Clan secrets closer than a leech kept living flesh.
The Florida wolves, however, were more spread out. Not geographically isolated. Mingling with other shifter races.
Surely he could find or bribe at least one person, shifter or human, in Florida to get information for him.
And if nothing else, he might be able to kidnap someone to interrogate. They’d never suspect him. All his resources were in the Northeast.
It would also allow him to operate with a modicum of anonymity. He wanted to start gathering likeminded cockatrice together, the ones who weren’t inbred, knuckle-dragging swamp cunts, the ones who, like him, had made their success without raising the attention of law enforcement or cockatrice hunters.
The wolves weren’t the only ones who could form a mega-Clan.
It would mean trying to break through eons of mistr
ust and infighting, but in this modern, flat-world electronic age, it was time to put petty differences aside for the greater picture.
The fact was, if they didn’t do something, and soon, they would be wiped off the globe and from history.
Any idiot could go set a car bomb off in a crowded Middle Eastern market and murder innocent women and children. While amusing, it was pointless. What, it bought them a few days, possibly weeks of instability to allow them to pillage and move without notice?
Stupidity. Utter short-sightedness.
He opened his phone and stared at one of the page scans of the spell book. A success spell guaranteed to make the one who wielded it invincible.
It would take a lot of effort and dedication to make it come to pass, but he was willing to give it a go if it meant they could take all the other shifters by surprise and give them a massive fuck-you they’d never forget. Meaning cockatrice would then be the most powerful beings on the planet, able to bend humankind to their will once and for all.
One of the scans really intrigued him, a picture supposedly of two contact points, ancient stones where the veil had been breached between Earth and wherever the mythical cockatrice sire had emerged from. The first was a circle of stones, and the second looked like a rock pile.
He kept returning to that picture, over and over again, like he should know this.
Even from the pictures, Carl felt a tug, something calling to him from out of the book.
A book he had to have.
Aliah, you dumb cunt. You had no idea what you really had. And now, thanks to your stupidity and greed, it might be lost forever.
* * * *
One moment, Aliah had been standing on top of the rock pile, facing down the three witches and about to plunge her knife into the old wolf bitch Seer.
And the next…
She wasn’t.
Aliah had spent the past…well, however long had passed, wandering and exploring this harsh, arid realm.
Hell.
Might as well call it that, even though she damn well knew better than to believe in a literal version of that mythical place.
It’d been three or four days and nights now, by her current location, but she had a feeling time was flowing differently here. Her body clock not only felt like it was seriously out of whack, it felt like it’d been jackknifed.
She returned every night to the cave in which she’d appeared and hoped to find a way to reopen the portal and get back to where she’d come from. To Earth, because this damn sure wasn’t it. A few times in the distance she’d spotted humanoid creatures walking upright on two legs. They weren’t human, and they definitely weren’t any shifter species she’d ever seen, almost reptilian in appearance. No way they could be from Earth.
A couple of times, Aliah thought she could see and hear one of those three bitches, just through the exact place where she’d dropped into the cave, and she tried to scream, to rant, to try to reach through and return.
All to no avail.
Aliah wasn’t delusional enough to deny what had happened. Somehow, those three bitches had done something to her, and the energy within the stones of the ancient rock pile had sent her…away. The spell book had warned the rock pile was a powerful portal, hence why she’d chosen to do the damn sacrificial ritual there in the first place. To tap into its ancient powers to feed the spell and to learn the exact location of the Tablet.
And she had a baby son to take care of, if someone hadn’t already found and murdered him.
Her mate…dead.
Her dreams…dead.
Now, all she wanted was vengeance.
She would have it, one way or another.
Even if she had to burn down this world and the Earth to make it happen in the process.
THE END
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tymber Dalton lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida with her husband (aka “The World’s Best Husband™”) and too many pets. Active in the BDSM lifestyle, the two-time EPIC award winner is also the bestselling author of over ninety-five books, including The Reluctant Dom, The Denim Dom, Cardinal’s Rule, the Suncoast Society series, the Love Slave for Two series, the Triple Trouble series, the Coffeeshop Coven series, the Good Will Ghost Hunting series, the Drunk Monkeys series, and many more.
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Tymber Dalton, Power of Three
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