31. Tate

THIRTY-ONE

TATE

After hearing the plans Emily and the hunters had, we needed to make our own plans. The first thing we needed to do was find out who Emily was working for. It was obvious that she wasn't the leader of the hunters. For one, she was a witch. Yes, hunters hated shifters and were hellbent on killing all of us, but they were suspicious of any supernatural entity. They might work with a witch to further their goals, but there was no way a group would follow a witch. Second, she seemed to be following someone else's plan. Nothing about what she'd done so far was what I would have expected from a witch leading a team. It was like the hunters had used her to go on the front lines, do as much damage as she could, and they were set to come in and sweep up whatever was left.

The morning after I told and showed Harley what I was, I invited the guys over to explain everything. They sat in the living room while I relayed the interaction with Emily. The spell, the hunters, the fate that awaited us. All of it.

Miles put his face in his hands, then looked up and said, "So at any moment, one of us is going to meet our fated mate? Just like that? Then we have to choose between dying or turning the person we love into a shifter?"

Steff looked at him and nodded. "That's exactly what he's saying."

"What if we kill her?" Blayne said.

A few weeks ago, we would have all been horrified by the idea of murder. After finding that mutilated body in the woods and dealing with Luis's men, we were harder men. It was scary how quickly you could go from a peaceful person to someone who would kill. It took surprisingly little for that change to happen.

"If we kill her, maybe it'll break the curse. Right?" Blayne asked.

That was a possibility, but we couldn't be sure. What if we killed her, and the only way to break the curse was to have her undo it? Then we'd be stuck. We'd also be murderers. Looking around at them, it didn't look like any of us was ready for that. Not even Blayne, who'd brought it up.

There were too many unknowns when it came to witches. Even those who'd had dealings with them in the past didn't know a lot. We had the witch Miles knew, Siobhan, but she was like a roving gypsy. Way too hard to find or contact for help. It would take days for Miles to find her again. We didn't have that kind of time.

"Look, before we decide anything, we need to find her or the hunters," I said.

"How?" Steff asked.

"Emily has to be nearby. She keeps popping up, and nothing Miles has found shows her living in town. My thought is that she's holed up somewhere in the forests around town. We look for her there. Based on where Harley's house is and how fast she found me and Harley at my shifting location, I've got a fairly good idea where she might be living. It's still a huge area, but we can look faster than humans can."

"So, we become the hunters?" Miles said with a shit-eating grin.

I pointed at him. "Exactly. Someone needs to stay to watch the girls, though."

Blayne raised his hand. "I'll do it. You guys are the better trackers."

After it was decided, Miles, Steff, and I left the house and drove to a pull-off on the highway. The area I wanted to search was probably fifty square miles, and would take humans weeks to search. With our heightened speed and senses, I hoped to search all of it in a day. Maybe two.

Miles and Steff shifted and sprinted into the forest. My dragon was too damned big to shift in daylight, but I was still much faster than a human. I ran beside Miles's wolf and Steff's bear.

Eventually, we split up to cover more ground. I followed my senses, searching for the scents of magic. We were out there for hours, meeting up every thirty minutes to discuss what we had or hadn't found. It started to feel like it would never end, or that we'd find nothing. We didn't even have a cell signal this far out to even check in with Blayne.

As the sun slipped lower in the sky, and right before I'd planned on calling the search off for the day, Miles howled in the distance. It was an excited and urgent sound. He'd found something. I sprinted toward him as his howls echoed across the forest. Emily might have heard it, but wolves and wild dogs were common in these woods. I came upon him in a small clearing an instant before Steff came rumbling out of the trees in his bear form. He and Miles shifted to human, and Miles grinned at us.

"You guys smell that?" he asked excitedly.

Steff and I both raised our noses to the air, pulling in the scents of the surrounding forest. My enhanced sense of smell worked incredibly well. I could smell the leaves, the rich earth, and about a mile away, a deer was taking a shit. Like I said, I had very good senses. Beneath it though, there was an undercurrent of something strong and sharp, like burnt flowers. Magic. We looked at each other, victorious smiles spreading on our faces, cutting through the dirt and sweat caked on our cheeks and foreheads.

Stalking through the woods toward the smell, it got thicker and more pungent. We were close. My vision was the strongest of all of us, and I saw it first. A shadowy structure in the distance through the trees.

"I see something." I waved at them to follow me.

Three hundred yards later, we knelt behind a growth of underbrush and gazed out at what I'd seen. It was a small wooden cabin. The exterior was black, and the building looked to be hundreds of years old. I laughed when I saw it. There couldn't have been anything more cliché.

"Looks like an evil witch's cabin from a storybook," I whispered.

"Literally what I was thinking," Steff said. "What do you guys think? Is it made of gingerbread?"

"Do you think she's inside?" Miles asked.

I shook my head. "I wouldn't think so. She's too smart for that. She may even know we're here. We might be walking into a trap. I'll check."

Stepping out from behind the overgrowth, I shifted. My dragon form would be strongly protected against any spell Emily cast toward me. It was the safe way to go. Still, I kept my long sinuous body close to the ground, moving toward the house as stealthily as my massive body would allow.

The closer I got, the more abandoned the house looked. It didn't appear as though Emily had used the cabin for very long. It did look fairly ancient, though. I crawled up onto the porch, my talons clicking on the wood. My first glance into the dusty and cloudy windows showed me that the cabin had been ransacked, like Emily had left in a hurry. Tables and chairs were turned over, books lay strewn across the floor, and broken glass piled against one wall.

Ready to turn back and tell the guys what I'd seen, my body tensed. There, on the floor, something was protruding from around a corner––a pale arm ending in a decidedly feminine hand and fingers.

I shifted back and sprinted to the guys. Gasping, I said, "Looks like there was a struggle. I can see someone lying on the floor. We need to go in."

Without another word, I led them across the forest and into the cabin. Kicking the door down and bursting inside, Steff and Miles shifted, ready for battle if one was waiting inside. Instead, we found a deathly quiet room. The turned-over furniture was everywhere. It looked worse than it had from outside. The hand was right where I'd seen it. I pointed it out to the others.

Steff and Miles shifted back, then stepped toward it. We rounded the corner and looked down. Emily's lifeless eyes stared out at us from the floor.

"What the hell?" Steff asked. "How did this happen?"

Carefully kneeling down, I touched her neck, feeling for a pulse I knew wasn't there. Sure enough, she was dead, and her skin was cold. A bit of her skin flaked off under my fingers. Her body was deteriorating fast, almost like it was turning to dust.

Miles saw it. "There's no way to know how old she was. Witches can become close to immortal. I think her body is decaying years and decades in a few minutes."

The house fell deathly cold then, right when Miles finished speaking. I stood, getting away from the body, not knowing what was going to happen. Steff's breath came out in icy puffs as the temperature dropped further. Then, a massive whoosh sound erupted from Emily's body, and it burst into blue flames.

We jumped back a step, but the flames weren't hot. They were cold. Being near them was almost like holding your hand over a big block of ice. Somehow, the flames were consuming her body but were cold at the same time. Before I could even process how weird that was, something even stranger erupted from within the flames. Emily.

It wasn't actually Emily, but some projection of her. She hovered above the rapidly burning corpse of herself, and stared at us. Her mouth was moving, talking, but I couldn't hear what she was saying. Either her spirit was too weak, or the sound of the roaring flames was too loud.

Seeing that we didn't understand, she seemed to gather herself and spoke again. This time, the sound of her voice carried across the room to us. "You don't have long. The hunters are coming."

"Did they kill you? I thought you were working with them," Miles said.

She sneered at him. "They killed me because I wanted to spare Harley. No matter what, I did come to care for her. Even if she is carrying a shifter baby. They decided she was unclean and had to be taken care of. I was trying to find a counter spell to break the one I'd created. I tried and tried, but there is no cure. No way to break the spell. It'll keep going until its purpose has been fulfilled. There is no stopping it until you've all found your mates or been killed before then. When they discovered I was trying to reverse the spell, they came for me."

She was starting to fade, the flames growing weaker as her body rapidly turned to ashes. I could see the panic in her eyes. The great unknown was rushing upon her, and she was afraid. No matter how ancient or powerful you were, there was one thing that made every living creature equal. Death.

Emily looked at me. "The necklace, Tate. The opal. Make sure Harley wears it. I filled it with protection spells. If she's wearing it, and the hunters try to hurt her, it will automatically cast a shield of protection around her. No one will be able to get to her. Do it, Tate. Do it, and prepare for a fight, because there's one coming. A storm is on the horizon, and you'll have to survive it to save Harley. To protect your baby."

Without another word, her body collapsed into ashes, and the flames extinguished. She vanished. Standing there, looking at what was left of her, we were speechless. Steff even knelt to try to touch the ashes, but they too vanished, almost as though they were snowflakes melting into the floor. There was nothing left to prove that Emily Heath had ever been on this planet.

There was nothing else for us here, other than the knowledge that at least one threat was now out of the way. The hunters still remained, though. Hunters who were powerful enough to kill a witch as strong as Emily. It was terrifying, and we brooded in silence as we headed back to the car. The drive home was equally silent. I was fearful and worried. There was no way to know what my friends were thinking or feeling, but I had to assume they felt the same.

We got back to Harley's and informed her and Blayne about what we'd found at Emily's cabin. Everything we'd seen and heard, including everything Emily's spirit had told us before she vanished. After our story, Harley looked at me, and tears began to well in her eyes. She came to me and wrapped her arms around me, resting her head on my chest.

"Are you okay?" I asked, stroking her hair.

She nodded. "I'm crying for Emily. She died trying to protect me. She wasn't a good person, but in the end, she was trying to do something right. Maybe if she'd had enough time, she could have changed. Maybe."

Not long after the guys all left, Harley and I went to bed. While I brushed my teeth, Harley sat in bed, trying to read. When I sat down, she set the book aside and put a hand to her head as though she'd just remembered something important.

She touched my arm. "Things have been so crazy the last couple days, I forgot to tell you. The DNA test results came back. Good news."

I looked at her and smiled. We'd already known the baby was mine. Having definitive proof was good, though. One less thing to think about as I worked to protect my new family from these hunters. It also gave me one more thing to shove into Ortiz's face. First, I left him with a lawn and mansion full of men who were nearly dead. Those men, once recovered, would be so terrified that they'd all run back to New York. There was nothing Luis could do to bring them back.

We turned the lights off, and Harley fell asleep quickly in my arms. I stayed awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling, thinking. I'd made it very clear to Ortiz that I was not a man to be fucked with. I still needed him to know what would happen if he came near Harley and the kids—my kids—again. Between keeping them safe and Luis' life? Death was the easy option.