By the Embers Dies the Fire

  Trying to figure out the physical copies was out of the question right now. Maybe later, when she mentally felt stronger, but not yet.

  Not this soon.

  There were crazy, weird notes in Brighton’s copy, written in his hand, that even Kael and Zack, researchers extraordinaire, were having difficulties figuring out.

  She guessed it didn’t help that they couldn’t know it was Brighton who’d made the notes. Ryan told her he’d done something to occlude the book and other items enough to hide Brighton’s involvement with them from everyone but her.

  And he’d made Brighton’s laptop mysteriously disappear. He was currently going through it.

  She was beginning to think she’d have to look at the real copy of Brighton’s spell book, but that was her last option, the one she hated the most.

  Even though she was only three weeks pregnant, and Ain, Brodey, and Cail were already over-the-moon happy and going overboard planning things, she knew she had a good chance of her stomach upending over some of the things she was reading.

  Brodey was, however, completely free of any dark energy. There was understandable grief and sadness over the loss of their brother, but he wasn’t handling it in a bad way. Especially not when the men were eagerly looking forward to being fathers again.

  And when they found out that the second baby was Colina, Lacey had already confirmed for Elain that she was having a boy and a girl, and that the souls were in their respective places.

  Although Lacey still giggled when talking to Elain about Mai’s unborn daughter and the irony there.

  On the table next to her, Elain’s cell phone rang. She didn’t even bother looking at it as she answered. “Hello, Ryan.”

  “Are you free?”

  She glanced around. Yesterday, she’d babysat for her mom, Mai, and Lina so they could go out and have a spa day. Today, they’d taken all the kids, leaving Elain blissfully alone, both man-free and child-free until evening. The women were taking turns swapping out mothering duties for each other one day every couple of weeks to give each of them well-needed breaks.

  “I was,” Elain said.

  She appeared in his condo in Atlanta, sitting stretched across his sofa much in the same way she’d been sitting on the lounger on her lanai.

  The man himself sat in a chair on the other side of the coffee table and thumbed his phone to end the call.

  “Well, hello there, stranger,” she said.

  He smiled as he sat back in his chair. “You have a certain glow.”

  “Yeah. You remember what I was like back right before I had Ellie? We’ll be in dangerous territory again soon enough.” She swung her legs off the couch and sat up to face him. “Only worse with twins.”

  “Oh, that is true.” He smirked. “You do get rather snarly, momma wolf.”

  “Only when I’m pissed off or scared shitless. Or both. So what’s this about?”

  He stood and reached into his pocket as he rounded the table. “I know I said I would do this sooner rather than later. It wasn’t that I was remiss in getting to it. On the contrary, I have kept an extremely close eye on you and yours until I found just what I wanted.”

  He withdrew a delicate gold chain. From it dangled a small yellowish crystal.

  “What is it?”

  “Citrine. Since you need no help with the poofy thing, as you call it, this is more a homing beacon, as it were. For you to easily contact me regardless of where you are. It’ll also help you contact others in The Firm.”

  “Others?”

  “People I haven’t introduced you to yet.” His smile faded. “People you should meet soon. Let me know what day and time is good for you and I will make the arrangements.”

  “Other demons?”

  “Archdemons, yes.”

  Elain scowled at Ryan. “Lina said there were demons at the Battle of Hilmelgamos. Helping the cockatrice.”

  He shook his head. “There are lots of entities which have been labeled ‘demons’ throughout history that actually are not. I wasn’t present at that particular skirmish, but it is my understanding that the entities you are referring to were actually a type of human-hybrid wizard. Something skirted past our planar defenses by taking human Earth women across through a barrier, much like what Boorman did, and then sent them back impregnated and with a job to do. Had the entities themselves come across, it would have triggered notice. Those were the adult offspring. No telling how many generations hence.”

  Elain felt more than a little ill. “Impregnated by what?”

  “I don’t know. That was a long time ago, and as I said—”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “Exactly. That was my father’s era.” He let out a long sigh. “Before you ask me if it’s all related to this and could be the cockatrice, I don’t know. Considering everything that has been happening lately, I do plan on having a conversation with my father in the immediate future to be briefed about such past…incidents.”

  “That’s a fairly bureaucratic way to talk about a massacre.”

  He smirked. “Well, while I cannot claim credit for bureaucracy, it certainly might have spawned from the early iterations of The Firm.”

  Elain finally reached out to touch the amulet. “What am I supposed to tell my guys?”

  “The truth. That it’s part of your duties and will keep you and Mai and Lina safer.”

  “Oh. They’ll like hearing that.”

  He unhooked the clasp and draped it around her neck before hooking it for her. “The chain is unbreakable. Never take it off.”

  “I’m not taking off my other necklace.” She cherished her paw print tag. Her men still wore theirs daily, rarely taking them off.

  “I’m not asking you to. You’ll find that if you tuck it under your clothes, you’ll not even notice it’s there, most of the time.”

  She touched it. “So how do I summon you with it?”

  “You can say, ‘Ryan, appareo.’ If you want to come to me, say, ‘Ryan, vado tu appareo.”

  “Is that Latin?”

  “Kinda-sorta.” He smiled.

  “Kinda-sorta?”

  “It’s a very old language.”

  “What if I forget exactly what to say?”

  “Just grab it and mentally scream for me. If for some reason I cannot respond or bring you to me, I’ll send someone in my stead.”

  “How will I know they’re from you?”

  “They’ll know my old name.”

  She held it up so it was backlit by the sunlight streaming through the condo’s large windows. “So what’s the deal with it?”

  “Research the mystical properties of citrine. You’ll find it rather fitting. I wanted something that would not impede your natural powers in any way, could possibly enhance them, and would suit the purpose.”

  His smile faded. “I mean it. I feel responsible for the events in Maine with Brighton. I should have been more aware of the fact that there was a stray amulet out there capable of opening a portal. I had suspected the properties of that location, but had never thoroughly investigated it before because I never sensed anyone coming through to Earth from there. I also didn’t wish to stir up any dormant or latent energies by poking around too much.”

  “We can’t just destroy the rock pile?”

  “No. I mean, we could, but I literally do not know what it might unleash. One of those ‘best to leave it lay’ kind of moments. It’s not a temporal rift so much as they created it by storing up energy. Like an undying battery. When it was created they imbued it with energy.”

  She felt queasy, and not because of her pregnancy. “The sacrifices they made and the bodies they interred inside the rock pile when they built it.”

  He looked grim. “I’m sure not all the victims were actually deceased when they were placed inside it. More likely, all of them were alive.”

  Elain took a few gulps of air to settle her stomach. “But it wasn’t just the amulet. Brighton had the spell book. And the knife. And thos
e little statue thingies. So did Lenny. Instead of Bell, Book, and Candle, it’s Knife, Book, and Batshit-Crazy Asshole. And there’s other items in the books, too.”

  He smirked. “Doesn’t matter. Also, the knife was irrelevant, a set of them created here on Earth with no special powers other than a placebo effect of mentally giving the wielder a boost in confidence. Hence why Callie and you were both able to use them for your magick. As for the other artifacts listed in the books, I haven’t even begun to look into that yet. They might or might not exist any longer, and whether they have any powers remains to be seen. The power signature of that amulet, however, is something I should have actively searched for and have been remiss in doing. I have since rectified that and made a point of searching for anything with similar properties residing in unqualified hands.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. “It’s like not seeing the dust bunnies floating around your floor. They build up over time, unnoticed, until the day you lose something under the couch and reach under it just to come up with your hand covered in fuzz.”

  “Ah.”

  She let go of the amulet. “Why isn’t running off to fricking Bolivia an option, again?”

  A soft chuckle escaped him. “You are far stronger than you think, Elain. Truly. And you have a sense of humor that will help you through life. That, and your family and friends. You have an extremely powerful Triad. No doubt you three will quickly come to rival the powers that the former Triad had, in your own ways. Not the same exact powers, but equivalent. Dare I say you are stronger now, you simply don’t know how to manifest all of those powers yet.”

  “I’m still not so sure about that.”

  “I’m sure there’s a house somewhere that will disagree with you.”

  “You saw that?”

  “Again, sometimes things ‘ping’ my internal radar and I get curious and take a look. So sue me.”

  “Where’d the house go?”

  “That I cannot answer. It was a magnificent display, though. Utterly gobsmacked me, and that takes quite a lot to achieve.”

  She studied him. “But you’re not scared of me?”

  “Are you scared of me?”

  She let out a sigh. “No. Honestly? If I was single, I’d be propositioning you.”

  He smiled. “If you were single, love, you wouldn’t have to.”

  Elain blinked and found herself back on the lanai, exactly where she’d been.

  He really knows how to end a conversation on a zinger.

  Looking down, she saw the citrine amulet hanging around her neck.

  With a sigh, she tucked it under her shirt. One more thing to explain to her guys, but hopefully one they’d be happy about when she explained its purpose.

  She thought about calling Lina and Mai to let them know, then decided against it. Settling back in her lounger, she turned the iPad back on and returned to perusing the scanned copy of Brighton’s spell book.

  As if she’d put on some sort of magickal reading glasses, words and phrases she hadn’t understood before came into sharp, clear mental focus.

  “Huh.”

  She scrolled back to the beginning of the file and, sure enough, things she couldn’t understand before, now she could.

  There was no other explanation, and no way in hell now would she take the amulet off to test the theory.

  But what she did was open a browser window and Google Spanish-language newspapers. She tapped the first result.

  Yes, she knew it was Spanish. She could see it was Spanish.

  She could also understand every single damned word.

  Trying again, she Googled Russian newspapers and had to tap the button that popped up not to translate it for her from the Cyrillic text.

  Yep. She could understand it.

  Every.

  Friggin’.

  Word.

  Wondering if it worked on spoken language the same way, she pulled up the Univision TV network site and…

  As if they were speaking English.

  He gave me a Babel fish. Son of a bitch.

  She picked up her cell phone and texted him. Thank you.

  You’re more than welcome. :) You might want to perhaps be…discreet in who you reveal its full properties to.

  Understood.

  With a smile, she set her phone down and started reading from the beginning of the spell book.

  Again.

  * * * *

  When Elain took another break an hour later to go inside, use the bathroom, and get herself a glass of water, it took everything in her willpower not to pour herself a stiff drink from the liquor cabinet.

  Not just because of the cockatrice spells, but because of Brighton’s notes in the margins.

  If she was reading them right, Ryan and possibly Baba Yaga had been trying to spare her feelings about Brighton’s past misdeeds in relation to what he’d done to innocents.

  He really had gone off the rails and believed what he’d preached.

  The problem was, he’d sometimes focused on people and causes that were in no way connected to the cockatrice.

  It was better Brighton was dead. He’d died for a noble cause. They’d had a small memorial service for him in Maine with everyone who was there, and some of the Lyall brothers would be joining them for the fall Gathering in Yellowstone for a more formal memorial.

  Brighton died, in most minds, a hero.

  And that’s the way Elain would make sure it stayed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  There were just too many damn weird things going on for Carl to ignore. Guys gone missing who’d had contact from someone claiming to be a cockatrice who occluded themselves as a wolf, a reported skirmish between cockatrice and wolves on wolf Clan land a couple of weeks earlier, a missing wolf who’d been a cockatrice hunter, a woman who was a wolf mate brought into an ER near the wolf Clan land the day of the supposed skirmish on wolf land…

  He needed to see for himself what was going on. Before someone did something he couldn’t stop or fix or turn around in time.

  This shit wasn’t coming from him or his, he knew it.

  When he did figure out who the assholes were behind it, the identities of the idiots stirring the wolves up against them, he was going to rip them a new asshole before he skull-fucked them with a goddamned cactus.

  He pulled up Google Earth and topographical maps of the wolf Clan land and started looking. Carefully looking. Aliah had tried some bullshit there. These latest idiots—there had to be something.

  He thought about the scans of the book and switched over to that file. Of course everyone knew about the stones, one location lost to history, if not to progress, somewhere in Europe. The original stones supposedly used to pierce the veil and summon the Dark Ones, if the legends were to be believed.

  Hell, if that book was to be believed.

  There it was, the page with the drawings.

  The second drawing…

  He studied it, then went back to the maps. There were possibly a couple of areas that might…

  Really? Could it be that?

  Pulse racing, Carl zoomed in and felt frustrated he couldn’t see right through the tree line. But if he compared the Google Earth shots to the topographical maps, it was possible that, just maybe, he’d figured out what so many people had apparently gone batshit over.

  And it was slap in the middle of wolf Clan land.

  Sitting back, he stared at his screen for a long time.

  No. Fucking. Way.

  It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

  This would take some more researching. A lot more.

  Digging into how the wolves came about their territory.

  That they legally owned the land currently comprising their territory was not in dispute. They bought more every year, constantly expanding it.

  But at some point in time before Maine was a colony or a state, someone had to have laid claim to this territory.

  He wanted to know more about that.

  Which wa
s where his money and contacts came in handy.

  * * * *

  Two weeks later, Carl was staring at a very detailed report tracing the lineage not of a person, but of property. Included in the huge binder full of information were copies of deeds and other records, including some written in French.

  The summation was that the property could be traced back to the earliest settlers of the region and even before that. It was likely no coincidence that so many early settlers came from England and Scotland.

  Interestingly enough, even before that, there were disputed theories about other explorers coming through, maybe even making contact with the indigenous people, before the written record.

  Some said Vikings.

  Carl rubbed a hand over his face. Plenty of early cockatrice nests were mistaken for—accidentally, or purposefully made to look like—Vikings. The conquest, the chaos.

  It wasn’t uncommon to make cockatrice destruction look like Vikings were the guilty ones.

  There were a few topographical anomalies in the wolf Clan territory that could potentially match up to the description Carl had given to his guy to scout out, although drone investigations were inconclusive. The locations were too far into the territory to be investigated. Perhaps with a helicopter.

  Carl didn’t care.

  He wanted to see for himself.

  The next day, equipped with a backpack and water and some beef jerky, as well as a GPS, his phone, a tablet with the scanned book pages on it, a topographical map, and a gun, he headed into wolf Clan territory overland, from a state park. It would be longer but there were no residences and little chance of him encountering anyone.

  It took him until the next morning to find it. When he did, he stood there, staring as if he’d found the Holy Grail.

  Because he had.

  “Holy fuck,” he whispered, shedding the backpack and scaling the rock pile.

  Turning around, he suddenly felt a hot wind engulf him, spinning around him, and his world went black.