Chapter 25

Chapter

Twenty-Five

Ben had driven separately to the hearing, so after a short conversation in the parking lot, he left in his own vehicle to meet us back at our house to await the results of the Council's vote.

Rather than rush off to follow him, Sean and I took a moment to ourselves while Matthias and Malcolm waited by the SUV. Ben wouldn't mind spending a few extra minutes at our place playing with Daisy, Rogue, and Esme before we got there.

Because shifters preferred wide open spaces as a general rule, the Council building was located well outside the city on a quiet two-lane road, so we heard nothing but the nighttime sounds of insects and the wind in the trees nearby. I rested my forehead on Sean's chest and breathed in his forest scent as he propped his chin on top of my head. I loved the warm humming of our wolf amulets against my breastbone.

We stood quietly for a while, enjoying peace while we could. I wanted so badly to be optimistic, but I sensed something in Sean's body language that told me he didn't think the vote would go our way despite everything we'd said. Swinging one extra vote, maybe. Getting two…not bloody likely, as our British pack member Rupert Bogton, who went by the nickname Boggy, would say.

Sean kissed my hair. "Ready?"

"No." I rubbed my nose on his shirt. "But yes."

He laced our fingers together for the walk back to the SUV. "'Bout time." Malcolm made a show of looking at his watch, which he'd added to his ghost outfit just now. "We were about to start walking home."

"We were not," Matthias said.

Malcolm side-eyed him, though I was the only person who could see it. "I was joking, dude. Trying to lighten things up."

"Your jokes will have to get a lot better to achieve that."

My ghost sidekick harrumphed. "I'm the funniest person on Team Alice and you know it."

Matthias's expression indicated he knew no such thing. Rather than argue, he opened the passenger door for me. "Thanks," I said as I climbed in.

"You are welcome." He shut my door and got in behind me while Sean went around to the driver's side. The entire SUV moved when Matthias got in. Malcolm floated into the back seat behind Sean, still muttering.

Sean kept the music at a low volume, and we said little for the first ten minutes or so of the drive back to the city. Sean rested his hand on my leg as he drove, squeezing gently and sharing his comforting alpha magic as I fidgeted. I didn't want to be edgy, especially in a confined space with two dominant werewolves who had plenty of their own emotions to deal with, but I couldn't help but replay our meeting with the Council in my head and wonder if I'd said the right things and presented our best case. If second-guessing myself were an Olympic sport, I'd have a dozen gold medals hanging around my neck.

This is why I prefer magic and a straight-up fight , I grumbled inwardly. Courtroom arguments and verbal sparring weren't my strong suit—far from it, in fact .

"We all did our best," Sean said, interrupting my grumpy thoughts. "You especially, Matthias. That kind of honesty takes an enormous amount of courage."

"Thank—" Matthias began.

Big, bad magic sizzled on my skin. " STOP! " I yelled.

Sean stomped the brakes instantly, which might have saved our lives—or at least saved mine, since Malcolm was already dead and the shifters were much harder to kill.

Traveling close to forty miles an hour, Sean's SUV plowed through the ward I'd sensed in the nick of time and into a billowing cloud of black magic that smelled of old blood and dark, damp earth. I immediately recognized it as the same kind that had created the ghost grenade that narrowly missed Malcolm.

Malcolm must have recognized it too, because I sensed a frisson of magic that told me he'd reflexively jumped to his lockdown crystal.

After that, everything seemed to happen both in slow motion and in between one heartbeat and the next.

One of the front tires exploded—whether from magic or something in the road, I wasn't sure. The SUV pulled hard to the right. Rather than swerve left, Sean turned into the skid and let off the brake.

The vehicle hit something I couldn't see and went airborne, rolling passenger-side down in midair. All the front and side airbags deployed, hitting us like punches from a heavyweight boxer. I felt a crunch in my face and intense pain and suddenly I couldn't breathe through my nose. The airbag chemicals burned my eyes and skin.

The wreck flung us around like rag dolls in our seatbelts before we smashed into an invisible barrier that crumpled the vehicle's front end. We spun, crashed into something else, and came to a stop—somehow, miraculously, more or less right side up on whatever shreds remained of the SUV's heavy duty tires.

Dazed, semi-conscious, and hurting all over, I slumped in my seat, held upright by my seatbelt as hot blood poured from my broken nose. My ears rang and my heart pounded. I thought I might be moaning.

"Alice." Sean's voice was ragged. "Alice? Answer me."

All I could do was groan and spit out blood. I suspected my teeth had cut the inside of my lip when the airbag hit my face.

Familiar hands cupped my neck gently but firmly. Sean, trying to keep my neck immobilized in case I had spinal injuries. "Get us out," he grated.

My foggy brain didn't understand what he meant until Matthias kicked the side of the SUV so hard that the entire vehicle rocked. He must be trying to get a crumpled door to open.

I had a difficult time putting coherent thoughts together, but the tingling on my arms caused a memory to surface.

Black magic , I remembered hazily. Someone ambushed us …

I fumbled with my bracelet, searching with trembling fingers for a diamond-shaped crystal. Times like these demanded all the crystals on the bracelet were distinctly different in not only color but design—especially spells like this, which I referred to as Last Resorts and Malcolm called DEFCON-Ones .

I closed my fist around the correct crystal, spooled blood magic, and grabbed the closest ley line with as much control and focus as I could muster, which wasn't a hell of a lot. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how I looked at it—my training while a prisoner of my grandfather in Baltimore had included being deliberately injured as badly as I was now and then ordered me to fight with magic. The goal was to make me able to do exactly what I was doing now: utilize ley lines while seriously hurt.

At least the agony of grabbing the ley line was muted by all the rest of my pain and lingering disorientation. Silver lining, I supposed.

I took a shaky breath and invoked the spell in the crystal. " Shield ."

With a visceral ignition I both heard and felt in every cell of my body, the powerful spell rolled through us to form a spherical ward large enough to enclose the SUV and a radius of about fifteen feet around it. The spellwork should null or at least displace natural, witch, and black magic. It wouldn't affect the wolves' magic or mine.

Sure enough, layers of black magic wards and spells fractured and broke, sending bolts of power sizzling back through my protection ward that made me jerk and flinch. The pain and jolts also had the unintended consequence of clearing some of the fog from my brain.

I forced my eyes open, blinked blearily a few times, and focused on Sean's bruised and bloody face, which was somehow right in front of mine. He'd apparently ripped the steering wheel off to get it out of the way so he could kneel on his seat and hold my head steady. My own warm blood dripped from my nose and lips and ran down my chin.

Through the broken windshield, I noticed we'd come to rest in the ditch between the highway and thick forest. The night was pitch dark thanks to cloud cover and lack of streetlights. The now-deflated airbags blocked most of my view, but I caught glimpses of shadows moving in the trees.

"Baby." Sean kissed my forehead. Even that hurt.

I was looking right into his golden eyes when gunshots rang out. Sean jerked twice. Blood splattered my arms.

Matthias broke my seat and laid me flat on my back so he and Sean could shield me with their bodies. More gunshots split the air. Bullets ripped through the SUV's cabin. Matthias grunted as one hit his right shoulder. Hot, tingling shifter blood sprayed across my face. Sean's shirt was bloody on his right side. I saw two bullet holes in the fabric. Rage made magic spark on my hands and the earth trembled below us.

My earth magic told me these bullets weren't silver, but that didn't mean they wouldn't be deadly. A shot to the heart or head would kill a werewolf just as easily as a human.

Now that I was lying down, I gurgled and choked on the blood from my broken nose. Sean swore .

"Hold your fire!" someone shouted outside. "Don't kill her!" The gunshots stopped. Black magic hit my ward and sizzled.

Whoever was attacking us, they'd come for me.

Sean and I looked at each other as I fought to get breaths around the blood in my airway. His glowing eyes were filled with rage and pain—and love.

"My Alice." He squeezed my hand gently. "Ben turned around and is coming back. Others will be here as soon as they can. Stay alive at any cost."

He locked gazes with Matthias. Something passed between them—a first unspoken conversation between an alpha and the man I believed would soon be his new beta. I sensed a comforting wave of magic through my nascent bond with Sean, as if a puzzle piece had fallen into place.

"Leave one alive," Sean told him.

And then they were gone out the door Matthias had kicked out.

Werewolf magic and fury sizzled on my skin as they shifted outside the SUV. I struggled to sit up or at least turn onto my side so I could breathe better. More gunshots rang out, this time in a panicked volley not directed at the SUV. My stomach clenched in anger and fear.

Familiar snarls split the air, and then the shouting and screaming began. The gunshots ended abruptly. I hoped that meant Sean and Matthias had taken out the people with guns first. The thick brush on the passenger side of the SUV prevented me from seeing what was going on.

I'd be black and blue all over soon and every one of my joints throbbed. This would be the worst whiplash I'd had in my life. I had to breathe through my mouth, but I could feel and move all my extremities. The only thing actually broken was my nose, so no way in hell would I stay in the SUV while Sean and Matthias were in danger. The only ways out of the vehicle were my shattered passenger seat window or the open doorway behind me, and I was far from nimble right now .

If one of the wolves had stayed behind, I would have had someone to guard me while I used a strong healing spell, but they'd both fully committed to Operation: Kill Them All But One.

So, no healing spell for me yet. I'd have to fight injured. Like my grandfather made sure I'd been trained to do.

For some reason, that made me hate him a little more.

Cursing, spitting blood, and moving as inelegantly as a newborn calf, I half-crawled, half-tumbled over my broken seat into the back. The top part of my seat was too heavy for me to move out of the way, so I had to scramble over it to reach the door opening.

Just before I made it outside, a man in a dark cloak and hood lunged out of the darkness as if he were about to dive into the SUV. We came nose-to-bloody-nose in the open doorway.

My would-be attacker was Mr. Touchy from the coffee shop.

He had a pair of spell cuffs in one hand and a gun in the other. Spell cuffs were designed to suppress the magic of the person wearing them, and they would work even inside my Shield ward. For all I knew, he might have even been the person who'd shot Sean or Matthias.

Mr. Touchy clearly expected me to attack with magic. Instead, I head-butted him right in the face with all my body weight. The cartilage in his nose broke with a highly satisfying meaty crunch. I liked that sound way better when it happened to someone else.

He stumbled back with a garbled yell and fired blindly. The bullet hit the front passenger door about two feet to my left. Son of a bitch. So much for don't kill her— this idiot almost killed me on accident.

And it hadn't gone unnoticed.

An absolutely berserk brindle wolf with a bloody muzzle rammed into Mr. Touchy with the full force of nearly three hundred pounds of solid muscle and white-hot lupine rage. The gun and spell cuffs went flying and I heard the distinctive sounds of bones breaking. Mr. Touchy made a gurgly sound of pain and fear as he hit the ground with Matthias's wolf on top of him. Matthias flattened his ears and bared his teeth three inches from Mr. Touchy's bloody face .

We wanted one of these attackers left alive. Mr. Touchy might as well be the lucky one.

I did something I rarely did and drew on Sean's alpha authority to make my words a command. " MATTHIAS, HOLD HIM ," I shouted.

Matthias's wolf closed his teeth on Mr. Touchy's neck but did not bite down.

A berserk wolf with prey at their feet usually did not have enough self-control to listen to anything but their bloodlust, much less someone who wasn't their alpha or mate. And yet somehow Matthias had heard me and obeyed. Greatness and strength, indeed.

It occurred to me that Valas had wasted Matthias by breaking him down and forcing him into the role of head enforcer when he could have been her greatest advisor, fighter, and ally.

A wave of lightheadedness swept over me.

It was a mistake , I thought, watching Matthias pin Mr. Touchy down. To misjudge him so greatly .

I shook my head to clear it, and the dizziness faded.

Finally, I made it out of the SUV and stumbled on the rocky ground over to Matthias and Mr. Touchy. Somewhere in the trees nearby, Sean's wolf snarled, and someone's last breaths rattled in their chest.

With the back of my hand, I wiped blood from my mouth and knelt so I could run my fingers through Matthias's thick fur. His muscles quivered with rage and menace.

Mr. Touchy gurgled on the blood from his broken nose. Matthias's wolf kept his teeth right where they were, pressing into the man's throat without breaking the skin. Matthias would know more than most how crucial it was to not infect anyone unintentionally.

"What do you want with me?" I demanded.

"I'm here to free you." Mr. Touchy raised his hand.

I caught a glimpse of a spell crystal hidden in his fist. I had no idea what it contained and didn't wait to find out. Moving so quickly that my arm blurred, I slapped the crystal out of his hand. It disappeared into the tall grass.

"I will not be captured," I said, my voice flat.

"Mistress," he protested, his pleading eyes searching my face. "I still serve you."

What the hell does that mean? I wondered.

"Serve me in death," I heard myself say.

Another, much stronger wave of dizziness and nausea swept over me. I slumped to my side, my ears ringing as unconsciousness threatened to steal me away. Maybe I had a mild concussion from the wreck.

Vaguely, I heard someone choking nearby. Had Matthias bitten Mr. Touchy despite my order not to? What was happening? Try as I might, I couldn't see anything but vague shapes moving around me.

But I sensed it, and somehow saw it, when one by one the dead around us burned.

In my mind's eye, I watched a dark-haired man nearby burst into flame, his body collapsing into cinders. Then another. Then a woman. Another man. A second woman. And then Mr. Touchy caught fire. Matthias jumped away with a pained whine and a snarl.

Mr. Touchy died screaming. The flames hurt my skin until he too crumbled to smoldering ash.

Six people had come for me. Six had burned.

No evidence or trace left for anyone to follow. I will remain hidden .

My thoughts made no sense, and they hurt my head.

Strong arms scooped me up and carried me away. Dimly, I recognized Ben's familiar scent as he cradled me and ran. We traveled over uneven ground for a while, and then I felt myself handed over to someone whose embrace and scent I knew very, very well. Sean.

"Something's wrong," Ben said urgently. His voice sounded far away. Whatever else he said, I couldn't understand him. Voices murmured around me. They sounded angry and worried.

Slowly, the dizziness and nausea faded. I might be concussed, so I forced myself not to succumb to the desire to sleep .

Once again, I opened my eyes to find myself staring into Sean's golden gaze. "My Alice," he said, his eyes dark with fury and worry.

"Are we safe?" I asked.

"As safe as we can be." He kissed my forehead. "I think you can drop the ward."

I let go of the ley line and the Shield ward died.

With me in his arms, Sean stood with Matthias and Ben beside Ben's SUV. About twenty feet away, next to the wrecked SUV, I caught sight of a smoldering fire roughly in the shape of a person. All that remained of Mr. Touchy, I supposed.

I sighed. "So much for keeping one of them alive."

"They must have come prepared with some kind of spellwork that would kill them and immolate their bodies so we couldn't take anyone as a prisoner," Matthias said. "We don't even have clothing or magic left as clues about who these people are or who sent them."

Ben growled. "Who do we think is behind this? The Vampire Court?"

"No," I said automatically.

Matthias frowned. "How do we know?"

"Gut feeling," I said. "This doesn't feel like Charles's doing. Roadside ambush with black magic just isn't his style. The attack was sloppy."

Ben didn't look convinced, but Matthias nodded slowly. "I think I agree," he told them. "It doesn't feel like a Court operation."

"I'm not eliminating any suspects just yet." Sean turned to Ben. "You and I will stay and look for anything that didn't get burned or other evidence. I'll have to deal with the Council and the police when they show up—and they will."

"Shit," Ben and I said at the same time. Matthias growled.

The Council. Who we'd just left not thirty minutes ago after pleading our case for their support. What would they think of this attack, and how close to their headquarters it had taken place?

"Meanwhile," Sean continued, "Matthias, take Ben's SUV and get Alice home so she can use a healing spell and rest where she's protected. I've already got a couple of members of the pack coming to help us search the area and the rest will meet you at our house."

Carefully, he transferred me to Matthias. Generally, I didn't like to be carried by anyone other than Sean or Ben, but Matthias's arms felt surprisingly comforting. I rested my head on his chest.

Sean cupped my face with his hand and I leaned into his warmth. "I'll get home as quickly as I can," he told me.

"Okay," I said reluctantly. I wanted to stay, but I was in a lot of pain. I'd be of no use to anyone until I healed myself.

Ben touched my shoulder. Like Sean, he nearly vibrated with anger and concern. "You'll be okay, Alice. Matthias has you."

"I know." I let out a shaky breath. "I'm sorry we didn't get any information from these people before something happened to them."

Sean blinked, as if surprised by what I'd said. "Well, we might find something that didn't get burned." He met Matthias's gaze over my head. They had another one of those unspoken conversations. "Keep her safe," he said.

"I'll protect her with my life," Matthias promised.

Sean and Matthias got me loaded into the passenger seat of Ben's SUV, then had a conversation outside that I couldn't hear while they got dressed in spare clothing Ben kept in the cargo area. I leaned my head against the seat.

Finally, Matthias got in the driver's seat. Ben wasn't short, but he had to move the seat back as far as it would go. He put my bag and cell phone on my lap. "Thanks," I said.

"You're welcome." He made a quick U-turn. "Please talk to me while we drive so you don't fall asleep."

Apparently I wasn't the only person worried that I might be concussed. "Okay," I said.

I watched the side view mirror as we left the site of the ambush. Sean stood in the road next to the crumpled remains of his SUV, his golden eyes shining bright and angry like lanterns in the night. He didn't move until we drove around a curve and out of sight.