Brice only looked at him. Dimitri saw him regain his strength, his confidence, right before he raised his arms, now giant bear paws, and broke Dimitri’s hold. Dimitri took one step back but no more. Brice regarded him narrowly, planting his bear paws on his human hips—which looked ridiculous. The man had lost all sense of shame.
“Simeon’s fort isn’t far. You’ll understand once you talk to him.”
“Talk? How can I talk to a Fae? I don’t understand their language. And who the fuck is Simeon? That Fae who tried to control me with his sword?” Satisfaction seeped through Dimitri’s worry. “Surprised the hell out of him when it didn’t work.”
Brice didn’t share his amusement. “No, he was just a soldier. Simeon is the leader of this area, which are the lands of his clan. I told him about you and Jaycee. He’ll want to see you.”
Dimitri allowed himself some measure of relief. If Brice wasn’t lying, then Jaycee hadn’t been pulled into Faerie, at least not that Brice knew of. She’d be in New Orleans, with Dylan on his way. Dylan would take her to Kendrick, and Kendrick would keep Jaycee safe. She’d be all right.
Sure. Dimitri knew Jaycee. She’d fight like hell to come after Dimitri, to search for him. She’d be up in Dylan’s and Kendrick’s faces until they mounted a rescue, the crazy woman. One reason why he loved her.
Yes, he loved her, Dimitri thought, his heart filling with exultation. No shame in it. Shifters—and humans—who tried to fight falling in love, who tried to convince themselves they didn’t need love in their lives—were just stupid.
Fall, you idiots. The landing is fantastic.
“You don’t need to be afraid of him, Dimitri,” Brice was saying. His kind, patient voice was back. “It’s not what you think.”
“I think your mind has been warped by fast-talking Fae,” Dimitri said. “Why’d you run from the club tonight? Or was it last night?” He looked around at the gray sky above the trees. It seemed to be daytime again, so they must have been out a while, though he’d heard time probably ran differently in Faerie. “Whenever. Did you hear Dylan was coming for you?”
“I did, yes.” Brice gave him a nod. “I have eyes and ears everywhere, my friend. I wanted to take my Shifters to safety before he found us.”
“So they’re all here?” Dimitri asked. “Your followers, including Maeve, who deserted her own mate?”
“She knows we need her.” Brice spread his hands. “I’m sorry I lost Casey, but it couldn’t be helped. Is he all right?”
“Hurt, but he’ll live,” Dimitri said in clipped tones. “Why did you come back through the circle? For us?”
“No, you pulled us back when you lit the brazier. The spell must not have dispersed yet. I’m glad you opened the way again, though. I didn’t want to lose you.”
“I’m touched.” Dimitri stepped back. “Make another spell—send me back.”
Brice gave him a pitying smile. “I can’t. I’m not a mage or a Fae.”
“Can this Simeon person do it?”
More of the smile. “I imagine so. He’s the most powerful Fae around.”
“Good.” Dimitri folded his arms. “Let’s go see him, then. Better than running around naked in the woods.”
“I am pleased I will not have to force you. You will understand, Dimitri, and be glad. The Goddess sent you to me for a reason.”
“Blah, blah, blah.” Dimitri gestured toward the trees. “Lead on. And stay ahead of me. I want to keep my eye on you.”
“Certainly.” Brice, happily for Dimitri, closed his mouth and started to walk into the woods—which looked exactly like the woods in all other directions.
Dimitri morphed down into wolf to follow, but Brice stayed human. Just what I need, Dimitri growled to himself. Instead of cuddling up to Jaycee, I’m following a big bear ass through freezing rain.
Jaycee would laugh at the pun. Dimitri resolved to do everything he possibly could, including destroying all of Faerie if necessary, to get back to her and hear her laugh again.
* * *
The house’s front door swung open as soon as Jaycee rumbled up the drive on Dimitri’s big Harley. The lights were on as well, the hall’s chandelier putting out enough glow to spill past the porch and out into the night.
Jaycee shut off the bike, leapt from it, and raced up the steps as Ben and Angus pulled up behind her. Angus did his best to reach Jaycee so he could enter the house first, Shifter-like, but Jaycee ignored him and pounded inside. She ran into the front sitting room, Angus on her heels.
“Jaycee, will you stop?” Angus demanded.
Ben followed them into the small room and leaned on the doorframe to catch his breath. “Never try to keep up with a leopard,” he said to Angus. “You’ll just hurt yourself. But it’s all right. This house is a safe haven.”
Angus’s dark brows lowered as he took in the room. He’d found replacements for his ripped clothes at Brice’s, so he could at least ride through the city and down the highway and not be arrested. The shirt and jeans were too big for him, but Angus didn’t seem to notice. He sniffed. “It doesn’t smell safe.”
“You’ll have to trust me on that.” Ben pushed himself from the doorway and moved to Jaycee.
She’d stopped in front of the narrow door that led nowhere while Ben and Angus had argued. Rose branches still covered it.
“Can you open this?” she asked Ben. “Where are your lockpicks?”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t think it’s up to us. We never found the key, remember? I think if the house wanted us to open it, it would have led us to the key.”
“What’s in there?” Angus asked.
“I don’t know.” Jaycee’s heart beat thick and fast. She had no idea what to do, only her leopard’s instinct, which had told her to race to this house and try to wrench open the door.
“There’s nothing to say that leads to Faerie,” Ben said gently.
Jaycee put her hand on the rose vines. The leaves trembled but only from her jostling the branch. “Maybe it leads wherever you need it to go. This house is full of magic, you said, on a ley line, you think. Who knows what the people who lived here needed?”
“You could be right,” Ben conceded. “That doesn’t mean I can wave my hand and make the door take us to Dimitri.”
Jaycee shook the vines. “Come on. Let me in!”
“Whoa.” Angus gripped Jaycee’s shoulder, not to yank her away, but to calm her, one Shifter trying to soothe another. “Let’s think about this a little bit. Faerie is no place you want to go.”
“If Dimitri is there, then it’s where I have to be,” Jaycee said, her voice breaking.
Angus’s hand was warm and comforting. “Dylan’s on his way, right? He probably knows a lot more about this than we do.”
Jaycee turned to him. Angus watched her with gray eyes that held intelligence and compassion. “I thought you didn’t like Dylan,” she said.
“I don’t, but he has resources. That’s why he knows what’s going on in every Shiftertown in the country. Probably in the world.”
Jaycee knew damn well that if Dylan reached her before she had this door open, he’d stop her from trying to find Dimitri. He’d chain her up, tranq her, something, and she’d be back at Kendrick’s ranch, locked in the basement, by the time she woke up. What the hell would happen to Dimitri then?
“He’s my mate,” she said to Angus. “I have to go.”
Angus, she saw in his eyes, understood. He’d mentioned a cub when they’d asked why he worked at the club, which meant he’d had a mate. Gone now, Jaycee suspected, seeing his pain deep down. It happened too often.
Angus released her. “If you go in, I’m going with you. My mate . . .” He stopped, swallowed. “I’m going with you.”
Jaycee turned back to the vines, held on to them with both hands, and put her forehead against the leaves. “
Please,” she whispered. “Help me find him.”
The vines shivered. Jaycee raised her head and then realized that the movement didn’t come simply from the vines but from the wall itself. The house was shuddering, not hard, but enough to make the chandelier in the hall clink and the paintings in this room rattle.
Jaycee lifted her hands as the vines slithered out from under her fingers, the door coming into view once more. The rose branches curved themselves around the doorframe, forming a leafy arch.
The bolts on the door drew back on their own, the handle turned, and the door creaked open, showing Jaycee blackness.
She drew a breath, glanced once at Angus and Ben, and took a resolute step forward.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Angus this time managed to get through the door before Jaycee did. He sprang to her at the last moment, shouldered her aside, and plunged into darkness, Jaycee a step behind him.
Jaycee thought that nothing would feel different. Her feet landed on a firm surface like hard-packed earth, and cold air touched her face. She could see only darkness at first, though she swore a gray light like first dawn smudged the edges of her vision.
She turned back. Ben was outlined in the doorway, the bright artificial lights of the room behind him. He couldn’t come in, he’d said. Ben leaned forward but was stopped by an invisible barrier, like a reptile trapped behind glass. “Wait,” he called. “Take this.”
Angus spun back to him before Jaycee could, stepping into the house and closing his hand around the dark-bladed knife Ben had used in the fight in Brice’s basement. Angus gave Ben a grim nod and returned to Jaycee.
“Tell Kendrick,” Jaycee said to Ben. “Tell him—”
Her words cut off as the door behind her suddenly winked out, taking Ben with it. At the same time, the world around her lightened with actual dawn.
She and Angus stood just inside a wood. Beside them was an overgrown stump or some kind of pillar, completely covered with moss and ivy. A marker of some sort, perhaps.
Beyond the wood was a swath of grass, not wild but carefully trimmed, and beyond that were hedges and beds full of blossoms that wound in neat patterns around gravel walkways. A stone wall rose at the end of this, with a gate surrounded by rose vines similar to the ones around Jasmine’s house.
The rising sun didn’t give much light from behind a bank of thick clouds, but enough to glitter on the high, narrow windows of a huge house beyond the wall.
“Not what I expected,” Angus growled. He handed Jaycee the knife Ben had given him and adjusted the too-large black T-shirt he’d grabbed from Brice’s closet.
“No,” Jaycee agreed. This landscape looked tame, civilized. Jasmine’s haunted house, overgrown with vines and giant trees, the land fighting the encroachment of the industrialized river, looked far more crumbling and old than this place. As the sky grew lighter, birds began to chirp, like normal birds anywhere.
“Are we in Faerie?” Angus asked. “It’s not Louisiana—the woods are wrong. Plus, mountains.”
He pointed to the wall of mountains that were becoming visible behind the house as morning light brushed them. High mountains, with snow on their peaks, though the air where Angus and Jaycee stood was cool but not icy.
Jaycee shrugged. “Best way to find out where we are is to look.”
She started forward. Angus, doing is best to be alpha, moved to put himself in front of her. The look he gave her as he passed her told her she’d damned well better stay in the rear.
If Jaycee weren’t so worried about Dimitri, she’d find his behavior amusing. Dimitri always tried to put Jaycee behind him, but he also trusted her when she wanted to run ahead, knowing she was more cautious about true danger than most other Shifters. If Dimitri were here, they’d be strategizing about how to approach the place, dividing the scouting between them.
She could almost hear his voice, see the eager light in his eyes as they made their plans. Jaycee’s throat tightened and sobs threatened to emerge. She gritted her teeth and took a long breath, trying to keep herself under control. She’d find him. She had to.
The gate in the wall opened. Angus and Jaycee halted, fading without speaking into the shadows of trees on the walkway, doing their best to blend with leaves and flickering light.
The person who strolled out was not what Jaycee expected either. It was a woman, tall, with brilliant red hair pulled up under a wide-brimmed hat. She wore flowing garments of dark blue, but they were slim against her body, caught with a belt around her waist, her loose pants tucked into thick boots. She had a basket over one arm and a pair of pruning scissors in the other.
As they watched, the woman walked along the path, stopping every so often to stoop and tug a weed loose with her gloved hand. At one point she tamped down a protruding tuft of earth in a flower bed with her boot, muttering under her breath.
She might have been an ordinary woman coming out to have a look at her garden on a summer morning, except for the fact that her hair in its complicated braids was a brighter red than Jaycee had ever seen before, even from a salon, and the ears that showed when she turned her head were pointed.
The woman lifted her shears to snip a flower from a bush and lay it in her basket, then another. She snipped a third, then she looked up and focused her gaze directly on Jaycee. She had green eyes, so bright Jaycee could see them from twenty feet away.
“You there,” the woman said in a perfectly good, clear English. “Shifter woman. Yes, you. What the devil do you think you are doing in my garden?”
* * *
When Brice had said “fortress,” Dimitri pictured ones he’d seen replicas of in North Carolina—wooden forts against the wilderness in colonial America.
He’d never been to Russia, but he assumed the straight tower he saw on the hill before him could be right out of the European Middle Ages. The stone didn’t gleam or have flags snapping in the wind—it wasn’t a fairy-tale castle. The fortress was utilitarian, with no windows from ground to roof, except for narrow arrow slits near the top, under the crenellations.
Brice led him to it up a trail that couldn’t be called a road by any stretch of the imagination. Dimitri had hiked canyons in Arizona when he’d ducked out for a vacation—pretending he was human, of course. In those canyons and mountains, rocky trails switchbacked up sheer cliffs under wide skies, with not much vegetation to stop a fall if one happened. In the southern part of the state, what would stop you was a cactus or equally prickly brush; not a good way to go.
This trail made those look like paved highways. He and Brice began in woods, on a slope made precarious with loose dirt and dead pine needles. They came out of the woods to cliffs above the tree line—here the path was a foot wide with a solid wall on one side, a sheer drop to vicious-looking rocks on the other.
The tower loomed above them as the trail twisted toward it. As they drew closer, Dimitri saw that the thing had an honest-to-the-Goddess portcullis and drawbridge.
“It’s never been taken,” Brice said proudly, as though he’d built the castle himself.
“No shit.” An attacking army would have a hell of a time making it up this trail, especially if soldiers were in place on top of the castle’s walls to shoot downward. “You’d n-need aircraft.” Dimitri had reverted to human to climb, wanting to use his hands. With the change, his stammer returned.
“Exactly. Which Fae don’t have.”
“Why d-didn’t they make eagle Shifters?” Dimitri asked. “Eagles c-could at least shit on them.”
Brice considered the question thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Maybe they tried but the process didn’t work. Birds are of lower classification than mammals. Brains are different.”
“Birds can fly, and they d-don’t put C-Collars on each other,” Dimitri said. “Seems like a good trade-off to me.”
He closed his mouth then, saving his breath for climbing. r />
When they reached the drawbridge, which was down, Brice approached the soldier guarding it. The bridge didn’t cross a moat; it led over a sheer chasm with who-knew-what at the bottom. Water? Rocks? Dimitri peered over the edge but saw only mist. From this height, it wouldn’t matter what was down there—whatever he fell on would make him just as dead.
The soldier wore chain mail woven from silver and so thin it moved with him like a second skin. How it protected him, Dimitri didn’t understand, but it was probably overlaid with spells of some kind. Fae loved spells. The soldier had covered this with a few animal skins, one of a wolf knotted around his waist. The skins were of wild animals, not Shifters, but even so, Dimitri’s wolf hackles rose and stayed up.
The soldier wore a fierce scowl under light brown hair, his face so thin it looked like skin stretched over an elongated skull. Dimitri had met a Fae—a man called Fionn Cillian, who was the true father of Sean Morrissey’s mate. Fionn wasn’t a bad guy once you got to know him, but while he resembled this Fae superficially, he looked different in all other respects. Fionn had a heavier build, his face squarer, his hair almost white. But maybe Fae looked different depending on from what part of their world their ancestors originated, as did humans in the human world, or as species of Shifters differed from one another.
Brice spoke to the Fae in the Celtic language Dimitri didn’t understand. The fact that Brice spoke it fluently made Dimitri’s temper splinter. Brice must have been hanging out with Fae for a while, or at least had made a study of the language, which meant he’d been planning whatever he was up to for some time.
The Fae grunted words back at Brice and jabbed his finger at Dimitri, the finger lowering to point at Dimitri’s exposed balls.
Brice sent Dimitri an apologetic look. “The Fae don’t like nudity, at least not in public. They think it’s barbaric.”
“So do h-humans,” Dimitri said. “Tell him to move that f-finger or I’ll make him eat it.”
“I don’t think I’ll tell him that. He says there are clothes in the guardhouse we should put on.”