Beta (24 page)

Deirdre dug her fingers into the cracks anyway, swinging a leg around to step onto the base of the statue.

Her foot slipped. It dangled an inch from the floor before she jerked it back up.

The Walkie Talkie was still smoldering with blue fire.

She swallowed hard and climbed up the statue, getting her feet onto its shoulders, bracing her arms on the top of the inlet. She climbed higher and higher, using the cracked stone as footholds. It got her a good ten feet off the floor. Twelve feet.

The walls trembled against her hands. The fight between Stark and the gargoyles sounded like it was bringing the whole cathedral down.

Or maybe the OPA had arrived.

Deirdre pushed those distractions out of her mind, checking over her shoulder to gauge the distance to the altar.

She could do it. She
needed
to do it.

Bending her knees, Deirdre took a deep breath…and then pushed off.

She flipped over backwards, gracefully tumbling through the air.

Deirdre landed on the edge of the altar.

She froze, knees still bent, toes dangling over the edge of the raised dais, arms uplifted for balance.

Did I do it?

She looked down, looked behind her, looked around for blue flame.

Nothing.

Deirdre was safe.

“Ha!” she laughed, swiping the back of her hand over her forehead. “Easy.” She rubbed her palms dry on her shirt—terror had a way of making her very sweaty—and then pulled the lid off of the pedestal.

There was no sword inside the box. Instead, it cradled a long golden chain covered in charms: crosses and pentacles and ankhs and things Deirdre didn’t even recognize.

Magic erupted.

Blue flame formed a wall around the entire dais, roaring with power. The immense heat bore down on her, scorching her eyebrows, making her arm hair curl. The lid of the stone box was instantly about a million degrees, so hot that it turned white. Deirdre dropped it with a shout.

“Tombs!”

She whirled to see Stark on the other side of the flames, standing in the hallway to the catacombs. They were separated by magical fire. He couldn’t reach her.

“What do I do?” she shouted back.

The chamber shuddered. The window level with the surface shattered, showering glass across the floor in sparkling shards.

Bodies clad in black leaped through the hole.

Agents from the Office of Preternatural Affairs.

They landed on the mosaic without catching fire. The witches glimmered with golden wards, probably meant to dispel the enchantments that had melted Deirdre’s Walkie Talkie.

Voices barked orders. Gunfire rang out.

Deirdre flung herself flat to the dais.

Stark. Where’s Stark?

She couldn’t see him anymore, and she didn’t know if it was because he’d abandoned her or because the fire blocked her view.

OPA agents stepped through the wall of flames surrounding the dais, aiming their guns at Deirdre. She had her Ruger out, but there were so many more of them than there were of her. She could only shoot one at a time.

Deirdre was surrounded. They shouted at her all at once in an overwhelming cacophony of voices.

“Drop your weapons!”

“Hands on your head!”

Deirdre hesitated to put the Ruger down. “Stark?” she yelled. “Stark!”

But he didn’t respond. He wasn’t there.

A booted foot sank into her midsection, forcing the breath from her lungs. Another foot pinned her to the dais.

“Stark!” Deirdre wheezed.

The agents restrained her. Cloth was shoved into her open mouth, muffling her cries. They plastered tape across her mouth.

“You’re under arrest,” someone said.

And Stark didn’t save her.

All she could do was watch as they brought a black sack toward her, its open end aimed toward her face. She thrashed and kicked.

The hood dropped over her head, cinched around her neck, and everything was darkness.

Hours passed.

The hood whipped away from Deirdre’s head and she winced into the sudden light that blazed directly into her watering eyes. It was too bright for her to see anything.

A hand appeared. It seized the tape by the corner of her mouth and yanked. Pain flared along her cheeks where the tape had been removed. She spit the cloth out of her mouth, working her tongue around. The roof of her mouth was so dry. Deirdre coughed.

“What’s going on?” The light felt like it was punching straight through her eyes. Her whole head throbbed. “Where am I?”

A cool male voice spoke. “You’re in the custody of the Office of Preternatural Affairs.”

Deirdre tried to stand up and couldn’t. Her arms were bound behind her back, tethered to the chair she sat in.

Her wrists sizzled faintly. The handcuffs were made of silver, and the contact stung the way that frozen toes stung when stepping into a hot shower.

“You’re under arrest for aiding the terrorist known as Everton Stark,” her captor continued. “You will be transferred to a detention center shortly.”

Cold panic swept over her. “What about a trial?”

“You don’t get a trial.” The man finally stepped in front of the light, casting shadow over Deirdre. He was a portly man wearing a well-fitted black suit and sunglasses. His skin was a few shades darker than hers, bushy eyebrows hanging low over his eyes.

“A phone call,” Deirdre said. “One phone call.”

“Tell me where Everton Stark is.”

“What? You think I should give you information just to make a damn phone call? Give me a phone!”

“If you ever want to see the light of day again, you’re going to be cooperative. Where is Everton Stark?”

Deirdre’s mouth opened and then closed again.

It wasn’t that she wanted to protect Stark. He had abandoned Deirdre when surely he could have prevented the OPA from arresting her. But she didn’t know this agent or his allegiance. She wasn’t going to talk to anyone she didn’t know for a fact to be an ally.

But if she didn’t talk, then they were going to put her in a detention center just like the one that Vidya had been kept in.

Vidya had been in that closet for so long that she couldn’t walk. Deirdre could already envision the weakness in her legs, the constant fatigue, the hunger and thirst.

She could be left like that for months. Years.

The rest of her life.

“Get me a damn phone,” Deirdre said.

The OPA agent backhanded her.

Her head snapped to the left. The taste of blood filled her mouth. Her aching skull throbbed harder.

Stark hit much harder than this guy.

Deirdre’s tongue darted out to lick salty blood off of her lower lip. “This is bullshit. You know this is the reason there are rebellions against the government in the first place?”

He slapped her again. It was no harder than the first time. Not enough to knock her silly, and not even enough to damage anything. He obviously wasn’t a shapeshifter.

The insult of it was far worse than the pain.

“God bless America,” she muttered.

He lifted his hand.

And then he stopped.

The agent put two fingers to his ear, eyes unfocusing as he listened to a distant voice. He said, “Yes, sir.” And then again, “Yes, sir.”

He turned off the light. No longer a silhouette, Deirdre could see that he’d split the skin of his knuckle while striking her. He plucked a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed the blood off as he walked across the cell.

Weak little human.

Deirdre was in an empty concrete box. Its only fixtures were the chair she sat in and the spotlight that had been shining directly in her eyes.

Plain as the cell was, she was certain the walls would be reinforced with silver. There were probably curses embedded into the floor, too. Even if she got out of the chair, she wouldn’t be able to break out of the room.

The agent opened the door and stepped outside.

Deirdre was alone.

She twisted her wrists behind the chair, testing the strength of the handcuffs. Silver burned her flesh.

Deirdre gritted her teeth and yanked her arms in opposite directions. She let emotions fuel her—righteous anger at what a government agent had done to her, the fact that Stark had abandoned her, the weeks of constant fear and pain.

A roar ripped out of her chest as she pulled.

And the chain snapped.

Deirdre stood quickly, patting herself down. She wore a tank top and her underwear. Everything else had been stripped away—including her weapons.

Damn
.

She checked the door and was unsurprised to find it locked. The handle stung her palm, too. It was silver.

Deirdre couldn’t break out that way.

She’d have to wait for someone to come back in.

“I’ll borrow this, thanks,” she muttered, breaking the screw that held the spotlight on top of its stand. She tossed the light aside. Glass shattered on the concrete. She didn’t want that—she just wanted the pole.

She got into the corner behind the door, clutching the stand in both hands.

It wasn’t much of a weapon, but she felt a lot more confident with its weight in her hands. The only problem was that the agent would have a gun when he came back. That was a far more effective weapon than a flimsy steel pole.

Deirdre would have to attack before she could get shot. She would have to be swift and brutal and make sure he couldn’t get up again.

She swallowed hard.

I need to be like Stark
.

Shutting her eyes, she recalled the way that he had attacked the OPA agents outside of St. Griffith’s. He hadn’t given them an opportunity to fight back. He’d popped off a few fatal shots with a sniper rifle and hadn’t worried about who they were, how many people might be waiting for them at home, whether or not it was fair for them to die.

If she wanted to survive, she’d have to be more like that.

She heard motion in the hallway outside. It had only been a few minutes since the agent left.

Her fists tightened on the pole.

Voices murmured on the other side as the door’s handle turned. Deirdre tensed, lifting the stand above her head.

The person who stepped inside wasn’t the OPA agent who had slapped her. It was a woman a few inches shorter than Deirdre with long blond hair and a cream-colored pantsuit.

Deirdre dropped the pole. It clattered to the floor.

“Rylie?”

The Alpha turned to look at her. “Oh, Deirdre.”

Any thoughts of being furious at Rylie vanished instantly.

Deirdre’s eyes flooded with tears, and all she could do was wrap her arms around Rylie in a tight embrace.

And after all of the mean things Deirdre had said after Gage died, after everything horrible Deirdre had done on Stark’s videos, Rylie still hugged her back.

The werewolf sanctuary was just as beautiful, warm, and serene as it had been last time Deirdre visited. It looked like its sky had never been blemished by a single cloud. The air smelled of pine and decaying leaves. The waterfall roared, a brook trickled through town, and the laughter and yips of shifter children echoed.

Deirdre had been envious the first time she set foot in the sanctuary, cursing the stroke of fate that had left her at boarding schools like St. Griffith’s while men like Gage grew up in paradise.

The sight of it didn’t make Deirdre envious anymore.

It made her angry.

Rylie couldn’t seem to take her eyes off of Deirdre as they walked together down the main street. Deirdre pretended not to notice. She had spent the entire flight from the detention center doing her best to compose her emotions, and she knew she’d start crying again if she glanced in Rylie’s direction.

But Deirdre was also avoiding the Alpha’s gaze because of the people who flanked her.

She was being shadowed by a tall man and a short, curvaceous woman. Neither bore any physical resemblance to the other. They didn’t look remotely related. And yet the two of them resonated in Deirdre’s senses in an identically uncomfortable fashion, warping the world around their shimmering diamond flesh.

They were Rylie’s sidhe bodyguards, and sharing a private jet with them had given Deirdre a headache.

Rylie’s cottage was indistinguishable from the others surrounding it. The Alpha werewolf didn’t live anywhere fancier than her underlings. It was the exact same quaint, tiny cottage that everybody else lived in, much the same way that Stark lived in the same tiny, dark rooms that everyone else at the asylum did.

Deirdre doubted that Rylie would appreciate having comparisons drawn between her and Everton Stark, but it was true.

There were no children around the house that day. Deirdre was surprised by how quiet it was considering the multitude of puppies Rylie had whelped.

“I sent the youngest of my kids to live with my aunt for a little while,” Rylie said, as though she’d read Deirdre’s mind. She climbed the front steps of her cottage and unlocked the door. “Aunt Gwyneth lives in a Haven with much better security than I could ever manage here—I know they’ll be safer.” She smiled weakly. “It’s nice. My house stays clean longer than thirty seconds.” Longing tinged her words.