‘This is part of power,’ Jared told Cassie. ‘It doesn’t make you bad to punish someone. It makes you fair.’
Cassie still didn’t want to look, but she finally turned and watched. Jared was right. They were being fair, and she had to remember that. There were many witches who ended up like her mother. What was happening now was for them. Cassie shuddered as a scream came out of the former seer. It was exactly what they planned to do to her, and it didn’t look pleasant.
Nate sent the coven home after everything was done, while his mother and Maria escorted the former priestess and the seer out of town. They didn’t have to stop and pack. While everyone left to go to the coven meeting, Nate had sent several skinwalkers to pack for them.
Cassie would have been lying to say it was sad to see them go. She did feel bad that Jess had to say good-bye to her mother, the head priestess, but she had a feeling not even Jess knew what her mother was up to. It was obvious her father didn’t know and was as surprised as the rest of the coven. It seemed like Nate’s mother was the only one who had known for sure, even though Maria and John suspected something.
It was late and almost time for the sun to rise before everything had been settled. Jared had offered to take Cassie home earlier, but she wanted to stay and help if she could. There wasn’t really much she could do, but she could learn. Watching Nate as he talked to not only skinwalkers that were twice his age, but witches that now bowed reverently to him, made Cassie realize she had much to learn beyond magic. Nate was comfortable in his job. Mikel had trained him his whole life to take over, and now he was doing just what he had been taught with the ease of someone way older than his seventeen years.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go back with Jared?” Nate asked for a second time when they had a short break between dealing with people.
Cassie had agreed to follow his lead while everything was going on, but now she was back to being defiant, at least in his eyes. In her eyes, it was called having an opinion.
“I just want to sleep in my own bed. Whitney was going to meet me back there, and my uncle will be there. Completely safe,” Cassie told him.
Well, not completely safe, as they still didn’t know who had poisoned Mikel, but safe enough for Cassie.
“I’ll stay with her,” Jared told Nate. Nate still wasn’t finished, and probably wouldn’t be for at least a few more hours.
Nate looked at Cassie and nodded. He wanted her to get some rest more than anything.
“Okay. Fine. I’ll agree, only as long as Jared is there,” Nate told her, and Cassie gave Nate a winning smile. She’d technically won.
Grasping her hand, Jared led her back into the woods around the coven circle. Cassie would be happy if she didn’t have to see another magic circle for a long time.
“It would be easier if I carry you,” he told her.
Cassie wanted to protest, but she used up all her willpower when arguing with Nate for her own bed to sleep in. He’d won before he suggested it. She was exhausted.
Jared scooped her up easily into his arms. Cassie rested her head on his chest. She was exhausted and ready to doze off at any moment. Staying up too late to learn how to use the spells from her father was on thing, but now she had been up most of the night. Cassie closed her eyes as Jared began to run. He would make it back as quick as Nate made it there. His form shifted beneath her into his night human.
‘I can make it back quicker this way,’ he told her as she noticed.
Cassie pouted as Jared ran. He still heard her thoughts. Cassie thought she had fixed that.
‘Hey. What’d I do this time?’ he asked.
‘You didn’t just read my mind that you’d make it back to my place as fast as Nate?’
Jared shrugged with Cassie in his arms.
‘Hey,’ she complained, gripping him tighter. There was much she didn’t understand. Did she lose her mental shield with everything going on, or was it an exhaustion thing? Would the shield disappear when she was tired?
‘Sometimes things still get out,’ Jared explained. ‘Yes, you are shielding your thoughts much better now. I’m glad Fiona taught you that.’
‘How’d you know?’
‘Umm, super hearing … remember, I’m a night human. I heard her on the phone with you. I’m glad she did teach you since you don’t always ask me or Nate about this stuff. You know we’d show you anything.’
Jared stopped running, and her feet touched the ground as he set her down. She opened her eyes, expecting to be home, but instead found herself standing in a very familiar lookout point. Jared tugged on her hand to move over to a stone, which was a perfect sitting spot.
“I know this isn’t our place, but it would have been if they didn’t mess with your life,” Jared said.
It was the exact spot from her vision of the future, the future she never had. Cassie walked tentatively to the rock and sat down. It was large enough for both of them, but Jared moved to the edge of the cliff. He stood and stared out into the brightening sky.
Cassie could feel the exact moment in her vision. He wasn’t a day human then, but the beautiful black cat he still should have been now.
“Do you miss it?” Cassie asked.
The way he moved was still very much like the cat he once was.
“I mean, now that I gave you images of what it would have been like,” she added. He missed the panther he once was, but he would never admit it. She was right in thinking that he missed it more than ever now that he could see how his life could have been.
Jared walked back to Cassie and sat beside her, taking her small hands in his own large ones.
An image flashed before Cassie’s eyes. She knew the feeling now and was ready for it, closing her eyes. She was going to see something, even if she still didn’t know how to control it.
Cassie was standing in her room at home. Jared was there with her. And so was Nate. She was handing Jared one of the tubes of blood from Arianna. He was eyeing the tube over doubtfully, but he didn’t complain out loud. Nate pulled Cassie back across the room to her bed.
“It’s worth a try,” Nate said to Jared.
Jared popped the vial into his mouth and crunched it. He swallowed the vial, plastic and all, and suddenly began to shake.
“What did I just do?” Cassie said as she stood to grab Jared.
“No,” Nate told her, clamping his arms around her and keeping her from running to Jared.
She could feel the pain across the bond. Jared dropped to the floor and began to shake.
“We need to help him,” Cassie complained, taking deep breaths through the pain. If it felt that bad for her, then it felt worse for him.
“The first time changing is always this painful,” Nate explained to her.
“Changing?” Cassie asked. It looked like Jared was dying, not changing. When Nate wanted to be a tiger, he just stood there as a man one moment and a tiger the next.
Cassie didn’t get a chance to ask what Nate meant. On the ground, Jared was slowly changing. His limbs were popping into weird angles, and his face was elongating into a snout. He only glanced up once, and Cassie saw the amber and green blended eyes of his cat staring back at her. It took probably only five minutes, but it felt like forever as he slowly morphed into the large black cat from her vision.
Cassie opened her eyes to look back at Jared. His face held the same shock as hers did about the vision she’d seen. Slowly, a smile spread across his lips.
“You have a way to change us back.” He sounded surprised by the vision, but also excited.
“Arianna gave me some of her blood. She gave me three vials, and I had a feeling there was one for you, one for Nate, and one for me. I just didn’t know when or why I’d need to use them. She said her blood had healing powers, but I thought it was more like you would get injured and need to heal. I didn’t think what it meant by healing was bringing back your animal. I’d have told you much sooner.” Cassie was rambling and didn’t notice that Jared had grown
still.
Suddenly, Cassie wished she could see inside his mind. Something was going on.
“Jared, what is it?” she asked. He looked like he had been socked in the stomach.
‘Cassie, where are you?’ Nate asked across the bond. He was now as worried as Jared looked.
‘We’re still in the woods. We were just watching the sun rise,’ Cassie replied, but kept her eyes on Jared. He hadn’t moved at all.
‘Whitney is gone,’ he said to her. ‘I need to know exactly what she said to you before she left the woods.’
‘What do you mean “gone”?’
‘Gone. Like her brother and father. I can feel any skinwalker, and I can’t feel her anymore. Owen went to meet her at your house, and he said she wasn’t there. I went searching for her mentally and was going to ask her where she was, but she’s gone.’
“Ryder went home, and we have more trouble,” Jared finally stated, turning his gaze to Cassie.
Cassie took in a deep breath. Something more was happening. They weren’t done fighting yet.
“My dad’s dead.”
CHAPTER 11
Her room was too small, at least for pacing, Cassie decided as she made her fourteenth loop around the room before Nate came back in the door. Either she was quick, or he wasn’t as quick as normal.
“I checked everywhere she could have gone. Owen’s been looking, too, and we just can’t find her.”
“Can you follow her scent? Don’t you have animals in the clan who do that sort of thing? How can she just disappear?”
Cassie couldn’t stop the tears from falling. There was one thing that had always been steadfast in her life, and that was her friend. Whitney had never been anything but a great friend. She couldn’t just disappear. Now that the coven was dealt with, they were going to find her family with her. Whitney needed her, now more than ever.
Nate pulled Cassie into his arms, pressing her head to his chest.
“I will find them,” he told her, his voice shaking under the ear she had pressed against him. “We will find them.”
Owen burst into the room, holding something in his hand. It was a little red piece of fabric. It was small, maybe two inches by two inches, but he was excited about it.
“I’m sure this is what she was wearing when she went missing,” Owen said, handing the fabric over to Nate. “I found it out by the old diner where the wendigo attacked Cassie.”
Owen looked at Cassie, and she shook her head. Jared would have told her if any of the wendigo took Whitney. And besides, Nate would have been able to find them, since Cassie and Nate could go through the wendigo charms now.
“Then my mom should be able to track her,” Nate replied.
Cassie hoped that was true. They had just gotten rid of the most powerful witches in the coven; so help wasn’t coming from them. Cassie reached for the fabric just to be sure. She knew almost every item of clothing Whitney had. Even though they couldn’t share much, they were always going through each other’s clothing and helping pick out outfits all the time.
Cassie’s fingers touched the fabric, and a vision came crashing down on her.
From above, Cassie could see three circles of power on the ground. It wasn’t a permanent site like the coven’s, but more of a makeshift casting site. Cassie moved down closer from her aerial view and saw that in the center of each circle was a stake and a person tied to it. Whitney’s mother was tied to one, while two men were tied to the other two. One man was Whitney’s father, but she had never seen the second one before in her life. As Cassie got close enough, she could see that there were two more people tied together and bound to the ground where the three circles overlapped. Cassie pulled out of the vision as soon as she focused on the face of one of the people. Whitney was bound back-to-back with her little brother.
“Back up,” Nate growled as Cassie opened her eyes.
Where did she need to back up to? She was lying down and tried to sit up.
“Stay there,” Nate said, his voice laced with concern. He reached over and touched her face. Jared stood across the room while Owen was hovering close. He must have been the one Nate growled at. Cassie looked again. Yep, that was Jared in the room. Wasn’t he supposed to be managing the wendigo? Cassie couldn’t remember when he’d come back.
“What’s going on?” Cassie asked as she glanced at the faces of the guys in the room. “It was just another vision.”
“Just another vision?” Owen hadn’t been let in on everything even though Cassie had told Whitney about most of the new developments in her life—like visions and new witch powers.
“It wasn’t just another vision,” Nate said, ignoring Owen’s obvious confusion. “You’ve been out for over forty minutes. At one point your bond to both Jared and me disappeared. That’s why he’s here now instead of taking care of the wendigo.”
Cassie peeked across the room at Jared. He appeared exhausted. It had only been hours since his father had been murdered, but it looked like days had passed for him.
‘Are you okay?’ Cassie asked Jared, still staying in her spot on the bed. Nate wasn’t going to allow her to get up until she came up with a better excuse as to what happened.
‘My dad’s no big deal. He had like a hundred enemies within the wendigo. I don’t think any of our alphas have stepped down without being killed. It really was just a matter of time. Lucky for me, whoever wanted power didn’t know that I’ve been the alpha since you and I bonded. They went after the wrong person.’
Cassie nodded to Jared.
“What did you see?” Nate asked, still trying to understand what had happened.
Cassie shrugged.
‘I’ll show you.’ She played the same short scene in her mind for both Jared and Nate. There was no reason she should have passed out for even a minute, let alone forty.
“That doesn’t make any sense. Your vision of the coven was longer than that, and you didn’t pass out,” Nate complained. He was in his worried mode.
Cassie would have been more concerned herself, but how could she be when all three guys were worrying enough for her? She knew what she saw, and they needed to know more.
“I need to go into that vision again,” Cassie told the guys.
“No way,” Nate said at the same time that Jared shook his head in agreement with Nate.
Cassie turned to Owen and held her hand out for the cloth he had found. Owen seemed caught between Nate and Cassie, and really wasn’t sure who to go with.
“I’m your best friend, Owen, give it to me.”
“I’m your alpha, and I say no,” Nate added. Owen froze in his spot. Nate had commanded it, and that meant the negotiating was done.
“Fine,” Cassie snapped, sitting up a bit too quickly and feeling dizzy, but refusing to acknowledge it.
A bit unsteadily, Cassie walked across the room to her bag left on the floor by her desk. Dropping to her knees, she dug through until she found the small box the seer had given her in Triclan City.
“I don’t need your permission to see the future,” Cassie told Nate as she sat back on the bed where the earth seemed to move less than when she was walking.
“Cas, you don’t need to see the future. We’ll figure this out the normal way.” Jared didn’t move from his spot, but he was just as desperate to keep Cassie from looking into the future as Nate was.
“You guys need to realize that this is my part of the coven, clan, night human world—I was born as a seer, and even though they tried to take it away from me, that’s still who I am. I’m supposed to see so that we can change the outcome. I need to go back and see more about what’s going on with Whitney. It’s a witch that has her, but I don’t know who. We need to figure it out before we head to find them if we want to stop whoever’s doing this.”
The guys had no retort. Cassie was right.
Carefully, she opened the box. Inside on a bed of fluffy cotton balls was a small vial. When Cassie picked up the vial, magic hummed warmly from it. A brief fee
ling passed over her from the person who had made it. It was a gift for Cassie to use to see the future. It was the same magic that had opened her mind before when she was a child. Cassie unscrewed the lid.
“Shoot,” Nate muttered as he stood, and Cassie paused before drinking it. “I have to leave. There’s a fight breaking out between the wendigo and skinwalkers just north of town.”
Jared nodded to him. “Ryder is heading out there now for me.”
Nate replied, “I’ll clean it up.”
Jared nodded as he remained in his spot at the window. Owen hung his head and followed Nate out of the room. They didn’t have answers, but that didn’t mean Cassie wasn’t going to get them. As soon as she was sure the guys were out of earshot, she opened the vial back up.
‘Cas, wait until Nate gets back,’ Jared suggested.
Cassie ignored him and took a sip.
“Save the rest …” Cassie got out before her world turned to black.
Cassie woke in Jared’s arms. She could remember most of the details of what she saw, but the images faded as quickly as opening her eyes. At least most of them did. She wouldn’t be able to show the one that was still playing on her mind.
“How long?” Cassie asked Jared, who was still cradling her in his arms even though she was awake.
“You’ve only been out two minutes, and you didn’t disappear like last time.”
Cassie nodded. The potion gave her much more control over the vision. She was able to rewind, check things again from other angles, and get all of the information they needed.
“How long before the guys will get back?” Cassie inquired.
Jared shrugged as she sat up. “Ryder had most of it cleaned up before Nate got there, but there’s still a few stragglers who need to be dealt with.”
Cassie went back over to her bag and pulled it to her bed, plopping it down hard enough to make it slightly bounce.
“Do you always pack bricks in your bags?” Jared teased, knowing full well the weight in Cassie’s bag came from the books she had brought with her on their trip.
“Some of us aren’t as endowed with knowing all the details at school. These unfortunate people, like me, actually have to study every now and then,” Cassie teased him back.