Unharmed.
Elain let Lina and Mai do the climbing. Exhausted and trembling, she walked over to the other cockatrice. He was still alive—barely.
Without a second thought or an ounce of remorse, Elain pointed her gun at the back of his head and fired two more rounds into his skull.
“He dead?” Lina called out.
“Yep,” Elain said as she stared down at him. “Dead-dead.” She fired one more round into him for insurance.
“More dead?” Lina called.
“Yep.”
She turned to watch the women making it to the top of the rock pile to free Lacey.
“Hey!” Lina shouted. She bent over, picked up something, and then straightened as she held up a book to show Elain. “Looky what I got!”
Elain shaded her eyes. “That what I think it is?”
“You betcha! Not a copy, either.”
“Hot damn,” Elain muttered. “We finally caught a fucking break.”
Something was wrong. Elain felt so tired and frazzled that she couldn’t puzzle it out. Then, it hit her.
She’d scented three men.
She was staring up at the rock pile and getting ready to call out a warning to Lina and Mai when she heard the shot. At first, she didn’t put the next two events together.
Mai had been kneeling there and freeing Lacey, and then she was falling over on top of her.
Lina screamed.
Elain turned and spotted the male cockatrice approaching from the woods before he saw her. Instinct took over. She fired the last three rounds she had in the clip at him. Even as he was falling, she hit the catch for the magazine, letting it drop to the ground as she grabbed the spare from her jacket pocket and slammed it home, emptying all eight of those rounds into him.
He twitched on the ground and lay still.
“ShitshitSHIT!” Lina screamed. “No!”
“Get me free, Lina,” Lacey ordered.
“Mai, honey, no!” Lina wailed.
Elain couldn’t climb the rocks. “Mai!”
“Lina! Get me free, dammit!” Lacey screamed.
Lina ripped the tape off Lacey’s wrists and the old Seer bent over Mai. “Go get Callie!” Lacey ordered her. “Now!”
“But our phones don’t work!”
“Lina!” Elain roared, beyond enraged, her Alpha clawing to the surface. “Go!” she edicted.
Lina looked at her and disappeared.
“Is she alive?” Elain asked, praying she was.
“Yes, there’s still time.”
“We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere.” Her phone was also useless. She threw her face back to the sky. “Ryan!” she roared.
Nothing.
Callie appeared on top of the rocks. “Oh, my god!” she screamed.
Lina returned right behind her.
“Callie,” Lacey ordered. “You have to pass your powers to her. It’s the only way.”
“But, I don’t know how, I—”
Helpless, Elain yelled, “Feel it, dammit!”
Callie dropped to her knees next to Mai. “Shit!” She looked around and spotted the knife where Aliah had dropped it. “Give me that!”
Lina dove for it, passing it to her.
Callie took a deep breath and started chanting, the knife’s point beginning to glow orange as she did. “Hold her hands for me. Palms up.”
Lina and Lacey each grabbed one of Mai’s hands.
Callie chanted too low and fast for even Elain’s ears to understand. She drew sigils on Mai’s palms, on her own palms, and dropped the knife before she laced fingers with Mai, palms pressed together.
She screamed to the sky. “Goddess Above, Goddess of All, here and now please heed my call! Before me is my friend in need, and into her thus I do seed. My powers great, my powers small, here and now, I give her all!”
A bright flare of light enveloped them. For a moment, all Elain could hear was the sound of Lina sobbing.
Then Mai’s voice, weak, but full of spunk. “What the fuck did that fucking fucker fucking hit me with? I hope you fucking fucked his fucking shit up.”
Lina screamed, in happiness this time, and threw her arms around Mai. Callie sat there, looking stunned and weak.
“Fuckin’ A I fucking did!” Elain called back, laughing, relief filling her.
Lacey draped an arm around Mai’s shoulders. “We need to get down from here.”
Elain was about to shout out what a great idea that was when she heard noises behind her in the woods. She spun around, gun ready and having forgotten she’d emptied the clip.
Thankfully she had. It was Oscar and the others.
Callie looked at him. “Oscar,” she softly called, as if her voice was close to giving out. “Call out to Gi. Get her to my house. Watch the baby.” She fell over.
Chapter Seventeen
Fortunately, Callie had not died, only passed out.
The newly arrived shifters helped the three women down off the rock pile. When they got Callie conscious again, she stared at Oscar.
“She’s there with her right now,” he assured her. “She heard me call to her. The baby’s safe. She said she’s got someone else on the way there to stay with her.”
Callie weakly nodded, her eyes falling closed again as Wally scooped her into his arms. “Ortega and the others should be here any minute,” she mumbled. “They called from the airport about an hour ago. They’re on their way.”
Elain sank to the ground, relief and exhaustion taking over to the point of numbing her body. As she watched, Lina, Lacey, Wally, Oscar, Kitty, and others helped Callie and Mai out of the clearing. No one noticed she wasn’t with them, everyone’s focus rightly on the other two women.
Mai would be all right, despite the cost to Callie of her powers. Not to mention, now they had the other spellbook in their possession.
Hopefully no one had scanned or copied it. If they had…
She didn’t want to think about those consequences right then.
With her baby belly making things more than a little awkward for her, Elain started climbing to her feet when she heard a sound that made her cock her head and listen closely.
When she heard it again, she followed it.
The faint sound of a baby’s cry.
Maybe it was her own pregnancy, the baby girl she carried that made her react so viscerally to the sound, but she sped up, running through the woods until she homed in and located the source. Before she broke free of the brush and into the clearing, she already knew where she’d find herself.
At the cave. The one where Mercedes had briefly kept Rodolfo captive, where the jaguars had found him.
The brush had regrown in front of it from the fall before, fresh, green spring foliage hiding the opening. If someone didn’t know it was there already, they wouldn’t know about it.
Moving slowly now, wary of traps and uncomfortably aware of the fact that not only was she alone, but that she didn’t have any weapons on her, she crept toward the cave.
Instinct told her it was a real baby, not someone mimicking one, not a recording.
When it took a deep, hitching breath and let out another desperate wail, she hurried forward and pushed through the undergrowth concealing the cave’s entrance.
Her gaze swept through the dim space, her lupine eyes quickly adjusting to the darkness. It would be impossible for an adult to hide, and she was alone.
Well, alone except for the wailing infant.
She walked through to the back of the cave, to the small alcove where the tarnished silver rings still hung, as they had first found them months earlier. Tight against the wall was an infant car seat, with a backpack and a few other things packed around it, a light baby blanket draped over it like a tent.
When she pulled the blanket back, the infant blinked, startled at her appearance. He sounded hungry.
The slight odor wafting up from the now-uncovered infant made her heart sink.
Cockatrice.
“Shit,??
? she whispered, her fingers tightening around the blanket still clutched in her hand.
“Sounds like he has quite a set of lungs on him, doesn’t he?”
Elain whirled around, startled by the sound of Gigi’s voice. She hadn’t heard the former Immortal climb through the foliage, so she must have materialized inside the cave.
“What?”
Gigi crossed her arms over her chest and stepped forward. She nodded in the direction of the baby. “The boy. He has a set of lungs on him for one so young.”
“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be watching Elise!”
“She’s safe. Ryan Ausar is with her.”
“You’re shitting me.”
She shrugged. “You’re not the only one with his number.”
Elain looked at the baby. “So what do I do with him?”
Gigi shrugged. “He’s a cockatrice. You’re a Seer. By lineage, sworn to never lift a finger to help one of them. You’ve seen firsthand what they’re capable of on a bad day, much less a good one.”
Somewhere in the distance, outside of the cave, Elain heard Ain call her name.
She dropped her voice. “But what do I do with him?”
Gigi produced a silver knife and presented it to Elain in her open palm, hilt-first.
Elain shied back. “No. I can’t kill him. He’s a baby!”
“He’s a cockatrice.”
“I…” She looked at the baby. By her best guess, he was barely a couple of weeks old. “That woman was his mother, wasn’t she? Aliah. The wife of one of the cockatrice Marston killed.”
“You’re stalling for time. I don’t need to tell you that which you already know.”
Elain knelt next to the alcove to get a better look at him. “I can’t kill him,” she whispered, her earlier vision returning to mind.
This was that baby.
“Why not? When he grows up, he’d kill you as soon as look at you. He’s a cockatrice.”
She stared up at Gigi. “You can’t be serious? If he was raised by someone else—”
“Who? He can’t be raised by human parents who are oblivious to what’s going on around them. And soon enough, he’d end up hooked up with his kind anyway. Or hunted by them. None of the other shifter races will want him, I guarantee you.”
“There’s got to be someone who will raise him.”
Gigi’s blue eyes narrowed. “You know how Baba Yaga feels about cockatrice. Do you really think she would allow him to live if she knew about him?”
“What are you saying?”
Ain called for Elain again, sounding closer this time.
Gigi knelt in front of her. “You know as well as I do that Babs is on a little off-Earth vacay right now. She has no clue what’s going on in this plane. You might think she’s omniscient, but trust me, she’s not.”
Elain stared at the infant, her heart breaking. She knew she couldn’t kill this child, or allow him to die, just because of his heritage. There had to be a way to save him, to allow him to be raised in peace and break the damn cycle of evil once and for all. He wasn’t inherently bad just because of his genes any more than Elain knew she was inherently good because of hers.
If he had the right parents, he had a chance. As good a chance as any wolf or dragon or jaguar or any other shifter.
Elain met Gigi’s gaze again. “What are you proposing?”
Out in the clearing, she heard Ain yell, “Elain, where are you?”
Without breaking her staring contest with Elain, Gigi called out, “Aindreas, we’re in here.”
Seconds later, he crashed through the brush and slid to a stop a few feet away. “What’s going on? Elain, are you all right?”
“She’s all right,” Gigi said, “but she is at a crossroads.”
“What?”
Gigi stood, the knife still in her hand, and backed away so Ain could step forward and see the baby.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered.
“No,” Gigi said. “Son of a cockatrice.”
“What?”
Elain swallowed hard, now understanding what Gigi was saying. “How?”
“How what?” Ain asked.
Elain ignored him. “How can we do it? How can we disguise him so that Baba Yaga can’t figure out what he really is?” Her mind drifted back to the occlusion spell Marston had participated in with Lenny and Edgar.
Her stomach rolled. “I won’t kill an innocent,” Elain said. “I won’t kill anyone to do this.”
Ain frowned. “Elain, what the hell—”
Gigi held up a hand to quiet him. “You need his help.” She cocked a thumb at Ain. “He must want to do this with you.” She stared at him. “A chance for you to atone for your past sins, perhaps? Or, rather, one major sin?”
He’d been about to say something, but at her words his jaw snapped shut and he swallowed hard. Elain would swear, even in the dim light, that he went pale.
“Atone for what?” Elain barely dared to ask.
Gigi and Ain’s eyes were now locked in an epic stare-down. “She’s your mate and doesn’t know,” Gigi finally said. “Neither do Brodey and Cail. Shall I tell her, or do you wish to do the honors?”
“Tell me what?”
“How did you know?” Elain hated how Ain’s voice suddenly sounded weak, full of grief and self-loathing.
“I was there in the clearing,” Gigi said. “I saw you do it. Saw you hide the evidence of your actions.” She shook her head. “Why didn’t you tell anyone? If they were ‘just’ cockatrice, why not admit what you did, hmm?”
The baby started to let out another cry. Elain reached over and caught his hand, sent a soothing wave of energy to him.
Ain stared at Gigi, silent.
Elain finally had to ask. She dug deep, hating to do it. “Tell me, Ain.”
Startled, he spun toward her. “Did you just edict me?”
She stood, anger flashing through her. “Damn right I did. Time’s short, if you haven’t guessed. What the hell is she talking about? As your mate, you can’t lie to me.”
His shoulders slumped.
Gigi lowered her hand holding the knife. “Go ahead, Ain. Tell your mate what you did so many years ago.”
He stared at the floor. “Our sisters,” he started, his voice sounding choked with pain and grief. “You asked me about them once. I said they were dead, only one was a shifter. They didn’t just die. They were murdered together, all three of them, by a cockatrice.”
Elain wondered if the revelations would ever end, if there was a bottom to this seemingly endless well of grief.
He finally met her gaze. “I found the guy, tracked and killed him. They were kids, Elain. Colina was a shifter, only seventeen. She died trying to protect Adair and Sulwen. They were five and three. Three years old. Just a baby!”
He sank to his knees, his gaze now fixed on the infant carrier. “I followed the man’s scent trail. I was enraged, beyond reason. I tracked his scent back to where he lived after I killed him.”
“And?” Gigi prompted when he didn’t continue. “The rest of it. She should hear it all.”
He stared at the ground. “His mate was there. I went after her, she’d run through a curtained doorway.” When he looked up at Elain, there were tears in his eyes.” I didn’t know she was holding a baby. I swear I didn’t. I didn’t see the baby until after I’d already…”
Elain reached out and grabbed his wrist, fingers digging in as she sought the answer.
She found it.
Slumping back onto her ass, she stared at him. “You never told Brodey or Cail?”
“They didn’t ask if there were children. I never lied to them.”
“You just kept the facts to yourself,” Gigi said, more than a little snark coloring her tone. “How noble of you.”
Elain’s attention snapped onto her friend. “What are you accusing him of? He was ju—” She fell silent, unable to complete the word she’d been forming to defend her mate.
Gigi t
ipped her head. “He was justified? Is that what you were going to say?”
“I’m sorry, Elain,” Ain said. “I just… I spent a lot of years trying to forget what I did. I’m not proud of it. We never took the battle to mates and children, normally. But the cockatrice damn sure didn’t have the same inhibitions.”
“And that brings us back to the present,” Gigi said, holding up the knife again by the point. “Who gets the honors?”
“No!” Elain rose onto her knees, arms outspread, blocking her mate and friend from the child. “I will not allow this baby to die.”
Gigi touched the knife’s hilt to her chin. “There’s only one person, one Clan, who can protect this child,” she said.
“I told you,” Elain said, “I won’t do an occlusion spell and kill someone just to disguise him.”
Gigi smiled. “You don’t have to.”
“What?”
Now Gigi knelt between Elain and Ain. “I’ll admit what happened this afternoon caught me by surprise,” Gigi said. “Made me think. Maybe Callie doesn’t have the wrong idea. You three are the new Triad. Yeah, in a few centuries, maybe sooner, your powers will have grown and matured, and Mai likely wouldn’t have needed any help.”
Elain boarded Gigi’s train of thought. “You can transfer your powers the way Callie did?”
She shrugged. “I love Oscar. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. And, if you haven’t guessed, that’s been a long, long time. He’s a shifter, and yes, because of my lineage, as it were, I’m going to live a long, long time, and so will he. But I’ve seen a lot. Done a lot. He won’t live forever. I think it’s time, now that I have the love of my life, to start living my life for me. And for him. I can’t do that right now, not really. Not the way I want.”
Gigi looked at Ain, who still stared, shell-shocked, at the infant. “Well? It’s a cockatrice baby. You want to try to kill it, and possibly face your own mate trying to kill you in the process as she defends it?”
He shook his head.
“Or would you like to hear Plan B?”
He nodded.
“This is going to be a two-part process,” Gigi said, refocusing on Elain. “I’ll channel my powers through both you and the baby. And Ain, except the magic won’t stick to him like it will to you and the baby. That will form the occlusion spell. He’ll be as good as your blood child with Ain. No one will know he’s cockatrice-born except for myself and you two. And therein lies the weakest link.”