By the Embers Dies the Fire

  “Mom!” Elain nearly tripped running down the stairs to get to her, Lacey on her heels. “Who did this? Where are the babies?” Elain got the pillowcase off her head and carefully peeled the tape from her mouth.

  “I don’t know! I heard a noise and someone pushed me from behind and—”

  “I’ll get on the phone,” Lacey said. “You bring her upstairs.” Lacey pounded back up the stairs as Elain finished freeing her mom and carefully helped her to her feet.

  “Did you hear anything? Smell anything? Recognize anyone?”

  “I think it was a man,” she said. “I never got a look at them.”

  “How long ago did it happen?” Elain asked.

  “I don’t know. Not long after you left.”

  “Where are the babies? Did they take them?”

  “Oh my god! I don’t know! Why would they take the babies?”

  “I don’t know,” Elain said, forcing herself not to growl, not to panic, “but they’re going to fucking be goddamned sorry when I find them.”

  “I can’t reach Daniel,” Lacey said as Elain got her mom upstairs and into a chair at the kitchen table. “Or Kitty. Their phones are off.”

  Elain grabbed her phone and tried Brodey, also getting his voice mail. She left him a message to call her immediately and shoved the phone back into her pocket as she headed for the living room.

  “Where are you going?”

  Elain had grabbed her purse, where she’d left it on a bookshelf too high for any of the babies to reach. From inside she pulled out a pocketknife, the nine millimeter, and two full, spare magazines from the hidden pocket in the side.

  “I’m going after Jasper,” she said. “He’s got to be following the minivan. Try Callie, see who’s around in the compound, who they can round up to get here ASAP. Tell her to get an armed guard on BettLynn and the Beasts and Elise. To not let them out of her damned sight. And to have them send out a tracker who can track me down.”

  Elain shoved the spare magazines and knife into the back pockets of her jeans and headed for the front door. “And make sure they’re all armed.”

  Lacey’s car had been borrowed by Brodey since Elain had the minivan, so Elain would have to do this on foot. Elain easily found Jasper’s footprints in the front yard, crossing over tire tracks and heading down the road. As Elain took off at a sprint, she prayed that the babies were safe.

  And that she didn’t run out of ammo before she killed whoever had taken them.

  Or, maybe this would be the day she spontaneously taught herself how to throw fireballs.

  * * * *

  Jasper ran.

  Run run run run. Babies babies babies babies.

  Protect my babies.

  The old Seer had been kind and loving to him, but he knew Elain and her family were where he was supposed to be now, where he had to move on to permanently. It was what he should do.

  Bits of his past life were starting to come back to mind, of the things he’d done.

  Of who he’d been.

  Why he was now this way.

  Protect. My. Babies.

  The crazy wolf had the minivan and was driving toward the dark place, but Jasper didn’t dare veer from the road and go overland. He knew—he hoped—that Elain would follow his trail, and anyone would need to find her if they drove.

  Besides, he had to be certain.

  Run. Run. Run. Run.

  He wasn’t exactly sure what he’d do when he caught up to the crazy wolf, but he’d have to do something, anything.

  He hadn’t liked the crazy wolf’s thoughts back in Florida, and had liked them even less when he encountered him again there in Maine. Much earlier, his thoughts were dark, clouded. But this time, they were even darker, blacker.

  Wronger.

  Like something had taken hold of him, stirred his brain in a bad, bad way.

  Infected him.

  Babies. Babies. Protect my babies.

  Run. Run.

  Jasper thought he’d felt something, and had hoped he was wrong. That was why he hadn’t taken the time to try to get Elain and Lacey’s attention at the beach. He knew they’d follow him, but he’d thought—hoped—that he’d get to the cabin and find everything right.

  But no.

  He’d immediately sensed it, and running around the cabin proved it. The vehicle was gone.

  He sensed the human woman hurt inside and couldn’t wait to try to help her.

  The babies were missing. Gone.

  My babies.

  He smelled the crazy wolf in the yard, knew from where that trail had entered the yard that the crazy wolf had come in overland on foot and stolen the vehicle.

  And the babies.

  I am not a young dog.

  He had to slow his pace momentarily to catch his breath. But when he did, he threw back his head and let out a howl, hoping Elain could hear him.

  From not too far behind him, he heard her answering howl.

  Relieved that she was following him, he slowed even more, glancing back from time to time until he finally spotted her rounding a curve about a quarter of a mile behind him.

  Hurry. Hurry. Hurry, Elain.

  He sensed her mind flowing out to meet his as she drew closer. He tried sending her an image of what he thought happened, and as she caught up she called to him.

  “Jasper, wait.”

  He stopped, the Alpha edict halting him in his tracks. He anxiously pranced in place as she finally caught up and dropped to her knees in front of him. In her right hand, he was happy to see, she carried a gun.

  She put her left hand on top of his head. “Can you show me?”

  He thought as hard as he could to her, the crazy wolf, the babies.

  “It was Brighton who took them?” she asked.

  “The crazy wolf, yes.”

  Her eyes widened. “Jasper, say that again.

  “The crazy wolf. The crazy wolf. Has my babies. Has my babies. Run! Hurry!”

  “You and I are going to have a talk when we get through with this.”

  He chuffed at her. “Later! Hurry! Babies! Crazy wolf!”

  She stood. “Lead the way. Don’t lose me. I can’t run as fast as you on two legs, and like hell am I dropping my gun.”

  He took off again, relieved that she was keeping up with him. But when he followed the scent as it turned off the road, she once again ordered him to stop.

  Pulling her phone out, she stared at it. “Shit, no service.”

  He pranced in place. “Hurry! Crazy wolf! Babies!”

  “Are there any other scents?”

  Nose to the ground, he raced around what looked like a parking area, veering off into the trees with Elain on his tail, until they found a car that smelled like the crazy wolf.

  She looked murderous. “Right. That’s Brighton’s rental.” Pulling out a pocket knife, she cut off the valve stems of all four tires while Jasper pranced in place again, waiting.

  “Okay. I think I know where we’re going now. You follow me and let me know if I’m losing the trail, but stay quiet and stay out of sight when we find him.”

  Elain led the way down the road. With the dirt, he didn’t need to lead her, because even she could see the fresh tire tracks. Then he heard something behind them and turned, chuffing, both of them jumping out of the way and into the thick cover of the trees just in time as another vehicle rushed past them.

  “Shit,” she whispered. “Those aren’t wolves.”

  Jasper growled, low and rumbling as the scent washed in their wake and into his nose.

  “DARK ONES!”

  “Cockatrice?”

  He growled.

  “Stay behind me,” she ordered. “And stay quiet unless I tell you to growl.” Keeping close to the trees, she ran after the second vehicle, Jasper doing his best to obey her and not growl the whole way.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Elain didn’t know what the hell Jasper was, but now was not the time to be questioning it. She seemed to be talking to h
im—rather, he was talking to her—and she wouldn’t argue about that. Not if it meant getting the babies back safely.

  She didn’t know what the hell Brighton was up to, but if he so much as bruised one of those babies, she’d rip his throat out herself, brother-in-law or not.

  Then again, if he was in fact the one who’d hurt her mom, he was a dead wolf walking regardless. And that would be before her father got his paws on him.

  That Jasper kept calling him the “crazy wolf” didn’t help her mood any.

  She knew exactly where Brighton was heading once the carload of cockatrice passed them. By Elain’s best guess, there were at least five of them inside.

  She stopped. “Jasper, stop. This is fucking ridiculous.” She checked that she had a round in the chamber and the safety off on the gun, grabbed Jasper’s collar, and closed her eyes, hoping she didn’t foul this up. The cave wasn’t very far from the rock pile, so she imagined the two of them materializing inside it and hoped like hell Brighton wasn’t there.

  When she opened her eyes, she grimly smiled, glad to see she’d put them exactly where she’d planned to inside the cave, with the opening just feet in front of them, covered by brush.

  And it was unoccupied except by them.

  She released Jasper’s collar and walked to the cave entrance after double-checking the safety on the gun. There wasn’t anyone in the clearing in front of the cave, so she climbed through the brush, Jasper right behind her.

  In the distance, she thought she heard a vehicle approaching and realized it was the one that had just passed her and Jasper on the fire road.

  “Stay behind me and stay out of sight,” she whispered to Jasper before hurrying toward the rock pile.

  How could she possibly forget this place? Now that she understood its original purpose, she realized how ironic it was that they had killed Aliah there. Or maybe the woman wasn’t dead after all, but sent through a portal to another realm.

  Lina did tell her to go to hell.

  As they circled around in the woods, staying out of sight of the rock pile, Elain fought every instinct she had not to just go charging out of the brush. That could very likely get her or the babies killed.

  At that point, she didn’t give a damn about Brighton.

  Jasper followed like a silent shadow behind her. She turned and knelt, whispering into his ear.

  “Sneak around and get a look. Don’t let them see or hear you. Come back to me and tell me what’s going on.”

  Like a flash, he disappeared through the brush. Whether or not Brighton would recognize the dog even if he did spot Jasper remained to be seen. The cockatrice wouldn’t know who the hell he was.

  As Elain knelt there, she heard one of the babies, Connor, let out a wailing cry. When she felt pain in her left palm, she realized she’d balled her hand into a fist so tightly that her nails had drawn blood.

  Jasper quickly returned, shoving his head against her left palm.

  “Babies okay. Crazy wolf. Five dark ones.” She received an image, from Jasper’s short point of view, of all of them on top of the rock pile. The babies weren’t visible from his vantage so close to the ground, but he’d smelled and heard them up there.

  Elain couldn’t think, could barely breathe through her fear. Yeah, she could try going in there and shooting everyone, but no telling if the cockatrice were armed, and she didn’t dare risk the babies getting hurt. If it was just one or even two, she could try materializing with her arms around the babies and disappearing again before anyone could react.

  But not all four, when she didn’t know how close they were to each other.

  And who did she save first?

  That was a choice she could not make. Colleen wasn’t her baby, but she’d sworn to Marston to protect her.

  A faint male voice came to her. “We’re here. Show us what you have.”

  She didn’t recognize the voice and suspected it belonged to one of the cockatrice.

  “I’ll do one better,” Brighton said. “The last person shall arrive any moment, and then we can begin.”

  “The Tablet better be there,” another one said.

  “Oh, it is,” Brighton assured them. “Have I steered you wrong yet? Once the portal is open, it shall be the beginning of a new era.”

  What the fucking hell?

  He was working with the cockatrice?

  She knew Brighton was batshit crazy, but how could he be working with them when he’d claimed to be fighting them for all these years?

  “I’m still not sure we can trust you,” a third one said.

  “I told you. I occluded myself. Why do you think I have the babies today?”

  “There’s only four babies. There are five of us. And I thought occlusion had to be an even match, adult for adult?”

  “These are for the portal opening spell. You’ve seen the book.”

  “They stink of wolf, all of them.”

  “Blood of the enemy,” Brighton said.

  Panic started to set in as Elain knew time was slipping through her fingers.

  “Go around to the other side and distract them by barking,” she softly told Jasper. “Don’t get caught or hurt.”

  She tucked the gun into the back of her waistband and pulled her shirt down over it. The spare mags were in her back left jeans pocket. As Jasper took off into the brush again, Elain crept closer, just to the edge of the underbrush, where she could barely see what was going on.

  She didn’t have a clear shot at any of them.

  When Jasper started barking, all of them moved to the far side of the rock pile, and Elain bolted from the trees, scaling the rock face and pulling the gun out as she cleared the top. She managed two shots, taking out two of the cockatrice, before Brighton turned.

  It wasn’t the sick grin on his face that froze her in fear.

  It was the sight of Ellie in his arms, one of the cockatrice ceremonial knives in his right hand, the tip of it almost touching her throat.

  “Put the gun down, Elain.”

  “Who the fuck is she?” one of the three surviving cockatrice screamed, their own guns now drawn.

  “Do not fire on her.” Brighton’s steady gaze as he met hers chilled her to the bone. “We need her alive. She’s the last piece of the puzzle I was waiting on.”

  “You betrayed us!” one of the three men screamed.

  “No, she simply caught me unaware. Oh, and Elain, if you don’t put that gun down, I shall slit her throat right now.”

  “Brighton, what the fuck are you doing?” she asked, hoping her voice didn’t sound as shaky as it felt.

  “You’re one of them,” Brighton said.

  She realized he wore a large amulet around his neck, something that looked like a cross between bloodstone and tiger’s eye, and his eyes had gone completely black.

  Even his voice sounded…wrong. “I’m going to open the portal between the realms and once and for all end this battle between the races. The way it should be.”

  She spotted a familiar-looking spell book on the ground next to the makeshift altar he’d set up, where the other three babies were lying next to ceremonial stones that looked like—

  “Brighton,” she begged, “please do not do this! Think of your brothers!”

  “I am, Elain. I’m thinking of them very much. Put. The bloody. Gun. Down.”

  Elain finally knelt and set it on the rocks.

  “Excellent. Now stand over there, in the circle, if you don’t mind.”

  “Brighton—”

  “One more word and I spill her blood. Even you are not strong enough to save her from that.”

  He’d drawn a chalk circle on one of the flat center stones, with a small opening in it.

  A magick circle.

  Warm wind began to swirl around them. Elain shivered as she remembered her experience the day she’d come here. It was almost as if she could hear Aliah, screaming, ranting at her, as if there, but not there.

  If he was going to open a portal bet
ween the realms, no telling what kind of evil he’d unleash.

  “You going to kill that brat, or what?” one of the men said.

  Before Elain could stop herself, she looked at the guy and envisioned his head exploding.

  Which it proceeded to do, scaring the crap not only out of her, but out of his two remaining compatriots as they were showered with a spray of brains, blood, and bits of skull before his headless body collapsed to the rock beneath him.

  “Now, now, Elain,” Brighton lightly said. “Any more of that nonsense and you watch your daughter die before you.” He laid the knife on Ellie’s chest and reached into his pocket to pull out a piece of chalk, which he tossed to Elain before he picked up the knife again and held it to Ellie’s throat. “Close the circle.”

  Elain realized the knife was exactly like the ones they had, the ones that had been used to kill Kael’s family, the one Marston had used to kill Bertholde.

  She closed the circle and dropped the chalk. She tried to gauge her chance of killing him without hurting Ellie, and then there were the two armed cockatrice behind her as well to deal with.

  Brighton went back to the spell book and nudged it over near the babies with his foot. He’d weighted the pages down with rocks, eerily reminiscent to how they’d found Aliah had done it that day she’d tried to kill Lacey.

  As he started to chant, she realized he was reading from notes written in the margins, not just from the text itself.

  Behind her, she heard the two remaining cockatrice exclaim again as a warm wind picked up. Elain once again swore she heard screaming, a woman’s screaming shriek.

  A familiar woman’s shriek.

  Aliah.

  Okay, that sort of answered the question of where they’d sent her when Lina had screamed at her to go to hell.

  While Brighton chanted, Elain watched as his eyes impossibly grew even blacker, larger, a glow forming in the center of the amulet around his neck.

  Elain reached deep within her, terrified, as he raised the knife in his hand, preparing to plunge it into Ellie’s stomach.

  Elain held out her arms, waiting just until his arm and the knife began their sweeping downward arc to say the words in an Alpha edict with all the power she could muster.