Beta (9 page)

She had given up her life—a miserable life, to be fair, but the only life she’d ever known—for a shot at finding out what kind of animal she should have been able to shapeshift into. Rylie had offered money, but all Deirdre had wanted was a meeting with the witch who could identify every gaean at a glance. Or a smell. Whatever.

Brianna hadn’t known what she was.

Deirdre had stumped two werewolf Alphas, Everton Stark, and now a witch specialist.

Where did that leave her?

Movement in the alley caught her eye.

She turned in time to see something slither under a pile of trash. It was shiny and as thick as her arm—an oversized serpent, just as werewolves were bigger than the real thing.

Deirdre was pretty sure that flash of black and red she’d seen belonged to a viper.

She stepped into the alley before drawing her gun.

“Jacek?” she whispered.

He was the only snake shifter she knew, and the worst person possible to see her meeting with an ally of Rylie’s.

Her knuckles were white on the Ruger as she kicked the trash with the toe of her boot. Deirdre tossed a bag aside and aimed the gun at the moist asphalt underneath.

There was no sign of the snake.

“Where’d you go?” Deirdre muttered. “Come on out. I don’t want to shoot you, I swear.” That would be a waste of a perfectly good bullet. She was confident she could kill a snake shifter the way she’d killed the snakes back at the group home in Oklahoma—with good old-fashioned decapitation. Or shattering his skull under her boot heel. Deirdre wasn’t feeling picky.

A shadow crossed over her, momentarily blocking the cloud-dimmed sunlight. She glanced up to see that eagle thing was dropping lower now.

Something tugged on her ankle. Hard.

She looked down to see a viper with its teeth sunken into her jeans.

“Hey!” Deirdre kicked her foot so hard that the snake went flying.

It landed and coiled, hood flaring. Its mouth opened in a hiss that exposed vicious fangs. Each was as long as her finger. Surely big enough to pierce deep into her muscle and pump her full of venom.

She clearly hadn’t kicked hard enough.

The eagle swooped out of the sky, fast as a bullet. It was so much bigger than she’d thought when she looked up at it in the sky. Its body was almost as big as hers, and covered in glossy black feathers.

It extended its talons, screeched so loudly that it nearly shattered Deirdre’s eardrums, and gently picked up the viper in its claws.

The bird smacked into her with its wing. The force of it was almost as bad as one of Stark’s punches.

It hurled Deirdre across the alley, her head cracking into the brick wall.

She landed on all fours, gun skittering away from her hand. It didn’t matter. She was too dazed to be able to shoot straight anyway. But she scrambled for her gun, even as her vision blurred, doubled, and struggled to go right again.

It might have been the head trauma, but Deirdre thought that bird had a human’s head.

And then it was gone again, viper dangling from its talons.

Deirdre was left with nothing but a black feather the size of her hand and one nasty headache.

There was no sign of the hooded assassin on Deirdre’s way back to No Capes. She didn’t see Andrew, either. As far as she could tell, nobody was following her.

She almost wished for someone to attack. At least it would have been a distraction from what was waiting for her back at the asylum.

If that viper had been Jacek, she was as good as dead.

Deirdre felt even colder than usual, and it wasn’t just the rain. Her body felt like it was cooling at the core. She rubbed her upper arms to try to warm herself, but the friction did little for her temperature. She was getting hungry, too. Cold and hungry and afraid. A miserable combination.

What would happen if she ran away? She didn’t need to stay with Stark anymore. She had only joined him to help Rylie, but Rylie had failed on her part of the bargain. Brianna didn’t know what Deirdre was. The deal was over, and so was Deirdre’s obligation to return to the asylum.

But she knew with sickening certainty that it wouldn’t matter if she ran. Stark would surely hunt her down.

And she’d never get another hit of lethe from him again.

Every atom in her body wanted to keep walking past No Capes and never stop. She could hop in a cab, go to the airport, catch a flight to somewhere far away. It would take Stark time to track her down. He probably wouldn’t even come looking until Rylie was dead.

The chances of survival weren’t great. Didn’t matter how far or fast she ran.

She had to get to Stark before Jacek did.

Deirdre went inside No Capes, feeling like she might throw up.

Niamh was still reading the Godslayer comic, oblivious to how much time had elapsed. “You would not believe what the heroine’s love interest does to her in this issue,” she said when the door jingled shut.

“Gives her a piggyback ride?” Deirdre asked dully.

“That would be hilarious.” Niamh glanced up. “Hey, where’s my panini?”

Deirdre had forgotten completely. “Sorry,” she said, returning Niamh’s cash to the jar under the window.

Niamh set down the comic book, feathery curls forming a shimmering border along the side of her body. “Look at you, Dee. You’re a wreck. Come here.”

Deirdre obediently went to the counter and let Niamh hug her very gently. The smell of camphor and vanilla clung to the air.

The swanmay rubbed a hand along Deirdre’s back. “There will be other men.”

Niamh thought that Deirdre was upset that Gage was gone.

Well, she wasn’t entirely wrong. But it was a far less immediate concern than Stark learning what Deirdre had been doing.

“That’s a pretty screwed-up thing to say to comfort someone,” Deirdre said, peeling away from Niamh. “There won’t be another Gage.”

“And thank the gods for that. There will be
better
men. Guys who appreciate you, respect your values, and give you total honesty. I mean, look at Stark. He doesn’t even have a heart and I can tell you’re growing on him.”

Every word made Deirdre more annoyed.

Better to head back to the asylum and get killed than keep listening to such crap.

“I’m going downstairs,” Deirdre said. “I have to talk to Stark as soon as possible.”

“Let me take a quick look at you.” Niamh thumbed back Deirdre’s lips to check for lipstick on her teeth, then inspected her eyeliner. “Give me five seconds. Okay?”

She riffled through her CVS bag and came up with some of the makeup she’d bought at the drugstore. Niamh went over Deirdre with brisk gestures, cleaning off her runny eye makeup and redoing it, then applying the new lipstick.

Deirdre tolerated it as best she could, but she wanted to bite Niamh’s hands off by the time she was done.

Her friend capped the lipstick and nodded in satisfaction. “Well, you might look like someone took a dump on your emotions, and your hair’s a disaster, but at least your makeup is flawless.”

Sensitive as always.

Deirdre headed down to the basement, where multiple doors waited. One gave access to the sewer system. That door was always open when Deirdre went down there. Everyone used it so much that there was no point in closing it.

But for the first time, another one of Niamh’s doors was open.

She stopped to stare at the door. It was the one that usually had a horseshoe hanging over it, though the horseshoe was currently missing. Its usual position was marked by two empty screws and a faded patch of wall.

There was no hallway on the other side of the open door. Just a sheet of black. Deirdre couldn’t even see floor extending beyond the frame.

The cool breeze blowing out of the hallway smelled icy, fishy, and touched by a tang of copper pennies, as though there were an ocean of chilled blood hidden in a shadowless night.

That darkness made her skin crawl.

Deirdre hugged her jacket around herself and entered the sewers.

Stark was waiting in the basement when Deirdre emerged.

Her heart sank at the sight of him, but her face remained slack, hiding her emotions. “What’s up, boss?” Deirdre asked. She didn’t sound terrified at all.

“What took you so long?” Stark asked.

“Day off, remember?” She glanced around the basement. “Supervising the prisoners?”

They had chained several misbehaving prisoners to the walls downstairs—convicts who weren’t adjusting well to life outside the detention center, getting into fights, and stealing things. There were five at the moment. There had been six when Deirdre left. Considering the smears of blood where the sixth prisoner had been chained earlier, she didn’t think he’d been released peacefully.

“I’ve been waiting for you. We have a meeting, Beta,” Stark said.

He wasn’t waiting to kill her.

Deirdre couldn’t show her relief. She couldn’t show any emotion at all lest she lose control of herself.

She only gave a sharp nod to acknowledge his words.

Stark turned on his heel and marched upstairs.

She had to pass the line of chained prisoners to follow him. They watched her with anger in their eyes, and not even a glimmer of gratitude. She’d risked her life getting them out of the detention center, but they still couldn’t manage to cooperate with Stark’s pack.

“What’s the meeting about?” Deirdre asked, lengthening her stride to match Stark’s pace. He moved as swiftly as an incoming storm.

“Rylie Gresham has new bodyguards. We’re meeting people who will help us form a strategy to defeat them.” Stark had already heard about Rylie’s reinforcements. Deirdre had only just gotten word about those that same day. Where had he gotten his information?

“You need a strategy for new bodyguards?” Deirdre asked. “What’s she got backing her now, tanks or something?”

“If only,” Stark said.

They arrived on the first floor of the asylum, and it seemed like half of Stark’s pack was gathered in the entryway, standing in an uneasy half-circle facing the meeting room.

Jacek was at the front of the crowd. Deirdre’s stomach flipped inside out at the sight of him. His hate was usually so transparent, but now his expression was oblique, as blank as Deirdre struggled to keep her own face. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

Shouldn’t he look gleeful if he planned to out Deirdre to Stark? He wasn’t
that
good an actor.

Yet he didn’t even look at her.

“They came in through the basement,” Jacek said, breaking away from the others to speak with Stark. “We couldn’t stop them.” Once he drew nearer, Deirdre realized that he was sweating. He thought that he was going to be killed for delivering this news.

“I know.” Stark moved to enter the meeting room and Jacek tried to follow. But Stark barred him with an arm. “Only my Beta and I will speak to these people.”

Jacek stood back with the others. The door shut in his face.

There
was the flash of hatred that Deirdre had expected to see.

Stark held meetings in what used to be the office of the asylum’s administrator. It had a large window looking out into the courtyard, permitting warm light to flow into the room. The visitors stood by that window. In the first moment that Deirdre saw them, she thought that they were glowing—radiating with some kind of internal light.

When she blinked, the glow faded.

“You must be the liaisons,” Stark said.

The couple turned to face them. Both were bizarrely attractive, even though Deirdre couldn’t put her finger on why, exactly. They were fairly average white people. They could have been anyone she passed on the street.

“And you must be Everton Stark,” said the female. She didn’t look like she belonged in the asylum. She wore a pantsuit the color of butter with her hair swept into an elegant knot.

“My name is Pierce Hardwick,” said the man. He wore a tailored suit that matched the woman’s. “This is my mate, Jaycee Hardwick.” Her skin glistened when she dipped her head in greeting, like there were diamonds just under the surface.

Mate
?

Some werewolves mated, but these people weren’t werewolves. They didn’t have the golden eyes. And their auras were unsettling, as though the room were warping around them, distorting the space in which they stood.

“Thank you for meeting me,” Stark said. He gave a small bow to them like they were in some kind of old court from the medieval era. It was a weird gesture coming from someone like Stark.

Court. Mate.

This couple were sidhe.

Faeries.

Of all the gaean species, they were the one that Deirdre was—thankfully—least familiar with. Sidhe hadn’t existed before Genesis. Many witches had been reborn as sidhe. No longer human, but something much more.

And something with much less of a soul.

Rumor had it that the sidhe were as relentlessly self-serving as the ethereal faction, even abducting werewolves to act as their servants, but Deirdre didn’t know simply because they kept to themselves. They lived in the Middle Worlds and seldom wandered out. The Summer and Winter Courts were very private.

Pierce Hardwick extended a hand, and Deirdre realized he was offering to shake her hand. Not Stark’s.