The Amber Lee Boxed Set

  The worst part was that I could feel the power calling me. Like rain water dripping between the seams of cracked rocks, it had made itself known to me. This wasn’t some alien, outside force. This was me. My power. The thing that defined me. The part of my soul I had chosen to throw outside into the cold. The thing I had been born with. It felt like a woolen blanket in front of a fireplace. Like a glass of mulled wine and a box of gingerbread cookies.

  It felt like home.

  “Three, six, two,” I said as I lay on my back, silent tears streaming down my face. “Seven. One. Question mark. Four. What number replaces the question mark?”

  Six, six, six.

  Chapter Seven

  It wasn’t an ego trip. Marcus had experience, Marcus had authority, and Marcus had the pack. Aaron needed Marcus’ help with Amber, and that’s why he wanted to go to Nevada—not to avenge his own sense of self-worth. So his own kind, his own blood, wouldn’t lend a helping hand. Whatever. He had gotten by with less before and he would again. In all the time he had been up here with Amber, not once had he ever needed anyone else’s help.

  The more he mulled it over in his head, the more the guilt squeezed his stomach. Would he really have left Amber behind to go to Vegas? It was a long drive last time. Sure, he could have broken the speed limit and made it there in a few hours. But what if things didn’t go smoothly with his father and the pack while he was down there? He didn’t know that he could trust Frank and Damien to stand up to whatever challenges Amber could throw at them, even from prison. Worst of all, he knew he could trust her even less.

  Aaron stood from his bed, opened the closet, and produced a set of clothes. Amber’s clothes. A pair of jeans, a shirt, a sweater. He also grabbed a fresh towel from the bathroom and placed it on the pile with Amber’s things. She would wake up hungry after her last episode, and Aaron had a freshly killed deer waiting in the kitchen for her. But he wouldn’t give her the meat and leave her to it this time. This time he would go in and talk to her while she ate.

  Fuck it.

  He nodded, convincing himself that it was time to go and see her. Then he grabbed her things, headed down to the kitchen, and pulled a plate of freshly cut sirloin from out of the fridge. This one, though, wasn’t like the other steaks he had given her; it wasn’t a raw cutlet of meat he had tossed into the dark cellar for her to devour. This one he cooked. He let it sizzle on the pan for a while, adding some herbs and spices to it. A little salt, a little pepper. Human touches. He didn’t let it cook for too long, though. Nobody liked a burnt steak, least of all Amber—even at the best of times.

  This wasn’t the best of times.

  This time, he had a reason for giving the food a human touch. Maybe he had been going about this all wrong. Maybe she made a mistake in wanting to be chained up like an animal in the cellar, and maybe he had made a mistake in feeding her raw cuts of meat freshly taken from whatever dead animal Aaron had managed to snatch on one of his hunts. Amber hadn’t caught the beast herself, but the act of eating the meat raw and bloody probably wasn’t helping her assert her humanity.

  When the steak was cooked, Aaron took the plate and the clothes and walked toward the cellar door. He turned the knob, knowing the magick wouldn’t affect him—Frank’s doing—and let it swing wide. As ambient light from the outside fell into the dark cellar, creating a rectangular shaft of illumination that went all the way to the floor, Aaron waited. He wanted to know if she was awake and aware, if she was in the right frame of mind to accept him. He did hear something in there, but it wasn’t a chained animal caught in a pained fury; it was a woman… sobbing.

  “Amber?” Aaron said as he rushed down the stairs two at a time. “Amber!”

  He found her in the dark, laying on her back, sobbing into the ceiling. Dropping the clothes from his hands, Aaron carefully sat the plate with the steak on it down so that it wouldn’t break. He ran to her, took her in his arms, and cradled her. The emotion came pouring out of him in a great big push that threatened to send him into a fit of tears or a fit of anger, but neither happened for now and Aaron was able to keep his cool.

  “Amber,” he said, tapping her face, “Please talk to me.”

  She was unresponsive and limp in his arms. Her dirty face was wet with tears and her mouth slack open and sobbing. He had never seen her like this before, and his heart was breaking for her.

  A moment passed, and then another. The sobbing stopped. Amber’s neck seemed to gain a little strength and she tilted her head up to look at him. In the dark and the silence he could hear her heart beating fast, and when she saw him it sped up to a breakneck speed. He ran his hand over the side of her face, brushing the wet, mottled hair away despite being almost unable to see her. Then he felt the chains around her, and while he knew they were necessary—for her as well as for him—he hated them.

  “I’m going to get you out of these,” Aaron said.

  “No,” she said, “No, Aaron, stop.” But her voice was weak. The fight had left her. Something had happened to her down here, recently, for her to be the way she was.

  He laid her head on the ground, got up, and groped in the dark for the loose rock and the key to the shackles.

  “Aaron, you can’t—I’ll hurt you.”

  “You won’t,” he said as he unlocked the manacles around her feet. “I trust you.”

  Amber’s nose worked. Aaron heard her stomach rumble and a smile crossed his face as he released her wrists from their restraints. Immediately scrambling toward the source of the smell, she used her bare hands to grasp the steak and began taking great big bites, pausing only to breathe, chew, and swallow. He had provided a knife and fork, but…

  “Slow down,” Aaron said, circling around her, “You’ll make yourself sick.” But he got no reply save for the growls of a starved animal ripping meat with her teeth, chewing, swallowing, and breathing. The steak was gone in moments and while Amber sat there, breathing through the last of it, he walked around her and squatted.

  “I brought you some clothes,” Aaron said. “We should get you cleaned up.”

  Amber suddenly lurched and placed her hand over her mouth. On her hands and knees, she began to heave as her body fought against something. The steak? Maybe he had made a mistake in cooking it. What if her body wasn’t ready to accept something cooked after having eaten raw food for three weeks?

  He reached for her shoulder to comfort her, but she batted his hand away. When she looked up at him he saw, in the darkness, not the eyes of the woman he’d proposed to less than a moon’s turn ago, but something else. Something not quite human but not quite wolf, either. It looked at Aaron, then at the light spilling in through the open door to the cellar, then back at Aaron again.

  No…

  “Aaron,” she said. Her breathing had become quick and short, and he could see the yellow coming out of her eyes like some kind of mad glow.

  “Amber, listen to me. Listen to me!”

  But Amber couldn’t hear him; she was already gone.

  He rose to his feet in an instant and backed up just as she pounced, but when she landed on him her body wasn’t human anymore—it was a machine of muscle and bone with a snout full of teeth made for killing. The weight of her body sent him to his back and he only narrowly avoided the snap of her jaws by ducking to one side.

  She looked up at the light which caught the hue of her fur—red in the darkness—and the yellow glint in her eyes. Aaron saw the instinct, the need, and the want for freedom manifest in that fragment of a second that seemed to stretch like a dream. The wolf had taken Amber’s skin and planned to rush at the door, but it didn’t know the wards could kill her if she tried. He could almost see in his mind how the future might play out.

  Aaron would wear his wolf-beast form and topple Amber over with his superior body weight. Then he would make a run for the door, smashing the cellar stairs as he went, and crash into the kitchen above. Amber would follow, tearing chunks of flesh, muscle, and blood out of his back until the m
agick wards did the exact same thing to her.

  That was, if the wards held.

  He grabbed her by the ear, pulled it hard, and when she turned to snap at his face he had already taken the wolf-beast form. Her teeth met tough hide and she managed to pierce the skin above his brow, but it was only a scratch. Aaron leveraged his weight and rolled Amber onto her back, kicking her into the darkness, away from the door.

  When she got up to charge, he was ready for her with his big wolf-like feet pressed firmly against the ground, claws dug into the stone. The red wolf met him in the center of the cellar and he absorbed the blow to his abdomen. When her claws came, he batted her arms aside as best he could. As he was facing her, any rake that escaped his blocks was met with the tough skin of his carefully positioned shoulders and chest, instead of his more vulnerable gut.

  Aaron grabbed her by the throat and pinned her up against one of the walls. She snapped and yipped, and when her claw went for his side he couldn’t brace or absorb it. The claws sank deep, tearing through his hide like it wasn’t there. Aaron screamed in pain, and then putting all of the strength into the ropy muscles of his shoulders, he pushed his entire body against her and pinned her arms and face against the wall. She thrashed, kicked, wailed and howled. Scratched, clawed, and wriggled. But she wasn’t breaking free. Not now. Aaron had made a choice to stay and wrestle her until she was calm, and that was exactly what he was going to do.

  Her wolf wasn’t like his. Amber’s wolf was untrained and wet at the nose. It was quick to burn out, relying on a quick burst of power to achieve what it wanted instead of allowing itself the time to think, to rest between bouts. In this, Aaron had the upper hand. He knew the limits of his patience, of his endurance, and he knew the limits of hers having heard her scream and howl for weeks.

  Twelve minutes at a time; that’s how long her episodes lasted.

  When the twelfth minute came, not that Aaron was able to count, Amber’s body began to feel lighter against his. Aaron allowed his form to shrink with hers, and when they were both human again he caught her before she could fall to the floor. Blood was still trickling down his side and his body was covered in scratches and bruises, but she was calm now and she hadn’t gotten out.

  She would be hurt, confused, and hungry when she woke up, but he would be there holding her this time.

  Chapter Eight

  His hands stuck to my skin like soft fire. I didn’t want him to stop touching me, to let me go, not even for a second. Trails of goose-flesh blossomed over my skin wherever his fingertips went, setting my heart alight with love and lust. Aaron was speaking to me while he helped wash my back in the bath, but the sound of my thumping heart was choking the words out of his mouth. Too long. It had been too long since we just sat in silence together.

  But it wouldn’t last.

  We both knew the moment would pass, and then everything would go back to the way it had been for weeks. Three weeks, the way Aaron tells it. Though for me the number seemed abstract. Unimportant. I could have spent a life sentence down in the cellar and not have noticed. Minutes and hours blended into each other like droplets of rainwater collecting to form a pool; a pool of time I would never rise up from.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, and the echo of his voice sent me into my mind again.

  “I want to know how you are,” I said, though speaking required great effort. “I hurt you.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You always say that. I know I hurt you bad, though… and I’m sorry.”

  Aaron had drained the tub twice since I stepped into it. I was awake by the time he was ready to lower me into it. The first time I immersed myself in the lukewarm water it turned brown-red within seconds. Unusable. The second time, it took a little longer for the water to become murky, though the crimson hue remained. Blood. Lots and lots of blood.

  “You don’t have to apologise,” he said as he wrung the sponge out over my back.

  “Use your hands to wash the soap off… please.”

  Aaron did as I asked, making soft, slow, gentle circles all over my back with his hands, dipping them under the waterline and then bringing them back up to let the water cascade off my shoulders.

  “Do you remember your conversation with Frank?” Aaron asked.

  “Some of it. Pieces.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “He said I may still have a piece of the demon inside of me. He thinks it’s responsible for what’s happening.”

  Aaron nodded. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel the motions in his hands. “That’s what he’s told me, too.”

  “You believe it?”

  “I do. I know something isn’t right with you, and Frank’s always been on the ball with this kind of thing.”

  “He is…” I said, trailing off. “I can’t imagine he’s enjoyed stepping back into the role of guide, slash, mentor.”

  “I don’t know. Frank enjoys telling people how it is. He’s been tapped out, though. I can see it in his eyes.”

  What do I say to that? They’re all tapped out because of me. “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey,” he said, turning my chin toward him. “None of this is your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  I nodded. A weak nod, but it would have to do.

  “There’s something else,” Aaron said.

  “I know. I can… smell it on you.”

  “Frank has a plan. Has he told you about it?”

  “No,” I said. Aaron grabbed the towel from the sink and stood by the side of the tub. I stood too, covering my naked breasts and lowering my head as I stepped onto the mat. Aaron wrapped me in the towel and rubbed my shoulders. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye. All I wanted to do was curl into his chest and sleep. “Tell me what the plan is,” I said.

  A heart-beat passed. “It’s not pretty. I don’t like it, but I have to trust he knows what’s best for you. Better than I do, at least in this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When Frank came back he brought something back with him. He calls it a reliquary.”

  My stomach twisted and my skin went cold. I could feel my fingers going numb. He didn’t need to tell me what a reliquary was. I probably knew better than he did, anyway. “Why did he… why would he bring something like that here?”

  “He has a ritual in mind, something designed to clean you of whatever mark that demon left on you. But it means… infecting you with another one and then pulling it all out of you.”

  “Another demon,” I said, not really looking at him but past him. Another demonic possession. Almost didn’t make it out of the last one.

  “I’ve told him I don’t like it. I mean, what if it doesn’t work?” Aaron said, “What if we can’t get it out of you? What if—”

  “Frank’s right,” I said. “It’s… the only way.”

  “What?” Aaron didn’t expect me to agree.

  “A demonic mark is all but invisible to regular magick. It’s like a bloodstain. You can clean it out, but it’ll shine under a blacklight. It never really disappears and you can’t get it out with magick. Only an exorcism can do it.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’ve studied demons and religion before, remember?” I’d also had time to think about the situation since Frank’s visit. What else was there to do down here but think?

  “So you’re okay with this?” Aaron asked.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, “I’m terrified. But what choice do I have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Aaron wrapped me in his arms and pressed me against his body. We hugged for a moment, enjoying the fact that I had somehow managed to be myself for the last… well, I didn’t have a watch, but it had been a long time. The wolf hadn’t come. It wasn’t Aaron’s presence that had kept the wolf back. In fact, it had been Aaron’s presence that usually coaxed the wolf out. Maybe it was the bath? Being clean? Being human.

  “Frank wants me to
leave the cellar,” I said, “He didn’t fill me in on all the details when he came down but he told me I need to be a witch for this to work.”

  Aaron nodded.

  “I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know if it’s safe for me to go out there. I’m not ready. Look at what I just did to you.”

  “But look at how calm you’ve been with me now. Maybe now is the time.”

  “Now?” Fear gripped my throat again and squeezed. The room started to sway and that cold thing happened to my stomach. All of these things came at once, like a dizzying burst of anxiety. “Aaron… I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “You can’t stay in here forever.”

  “I know I can’t.”

  “The wards are failing.”

  “I know, Aar—”

  His lips found mine and they pressed together like they were meant to. Whatever anger was about to come to the fore, roused by the anxiety, the fear, the uncertainty, the strength of Aaron’s kiss seemed to squash it and push it down. Down, down, down. I almost couldn’t believe the power of his passion, or the extent of my own.

  My hands felt for his belt, searching hungrily for that which made him a man, but they were met with another set of hands and denied.

  “No,” he said, “You can’t. We can’t.”

  “Why,” I said, biting his lower lip. “We can.”

  “I need you whole again. I can’t have you while you’re sick.”

  Sick.

  I hadn’t thought of it like a sickness. Even after Frank had said it, I hadn’t considered my condition to be similar to someone lying in a hospital bed, waiting for treatment. But now that Aaron said it, now that it had hit me in the chest, it made sense. I was sick. The pause, the denial, and the word—sick—dampened the fires of my lust to cold ash, and I nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Probably the same thing that I’ve been fighting ever since you stepped into that tub.”