Black Rook (13 page)

You were exhausted from the day’s drama, that’s all. Don’t see signs where none exist, foolish girl.

Mrs. Troost was hovering over the stove and a large skillet, and the warm scents of bacon and fresh bread drifted to Brynn. She inhaled, enjoying the hominess of it, and then pushed back a slight pang of guilt. Would her father notice her absence this morning? Had he even noticed her empty room last night? He barely noticed her when their paths crossed at home, and she’d become accustomed to moving through life like a ghost. She’d left no note yesterday when she sneaked out of their large house in Chestnut Hill. The only trail she’d left behind, if he cared to search for her, was using her ID to rent the car she’d driven here.

She wanted to call simply to ask if he’d noticed she wasn’t there. The devastating possibility that he hadn’t kept her from seeking out a phone.

“Morning, child,” Mrs. Troost said. She waved a spatula at her. “I’ve got bacon in the oven and eggs in the skillet, soon to be ready. Lots of extra hungry mouths this morning, so the first round is gone.”

“I’m not really a breakfast person,” Brynn said.

“There’s biscuits then.” She tossed her head toward one of the workstations. “Coffee, too.”

Brynn found the towel-covered basket of warm biscuits, right next to a coffee carafe. She skipped the caffeine for now; it would only make her jittery. A glass of orange juice found its way into her hand, and she thanked Mrs. Troost. She ate quickly and quietly, staying out of the way of the quick-moving cook as she piled eggs, bacon, and those biscuits onto a large tray. Mrs. Troost shoved through a swinging door at the far end of the kitchen, out into what was probably the dining room and more hungry breakfast seekers.

Had Rook managed to eat anything? She’d taken five minutes to shower before coming downstairs, so she hadn’t seen him since and only assumed he was in the library. She had so many questions and no one to ask.

“Mrs. Troost?” she asked when the cook returned with an empty tray.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Have you seen Rook since he came downstairs?”

“Aye, dear, he’s in the library with his father, Bishop, and a very lovely lady from the Delaware run. Ms. Reynolds, I believe her name was.” Her kind face creased with grief. “Such a terrible thing that’s happened up north.”

“Yes, it is. I wish there was more I could do.”

“So do I dear, but that’s what Mr. McQueen and his boys are for. They’ll catch the bastards who did it and make them pay for every life they took.”

Brynn had no doubt that Mrs. Troost was right. “Knight isn’t part of the meeting?”

“He’s over at Dr. Mike’s seeing to the young lady they brought back from Stonehill.”

She blinked, startled by that revelation. Rook had said they were all dead. She didn’t know there was a survivor. “Will she be all right?”

Mrs. Troost shook her head sadly. “No dear. Even if she physically recovers, after what she saw, she’ll never be all right. Not really.”

The words hit Brynn in the gut. Some traumas you never truly healed from, no matter the passage of time or distance you traveled. Intellectually, Brynn understood that. She wanted to go see this woman she’d never met, and she wasn’t certain why. What comfort could she offer?

None, of course, but maybe—just maybe—her seer ability would kick in and give her something useful about the woman. Even if it was as simple as a future in which she learned how to smile again. Alpha McQueen had asked her to remain inside of his home, but she couldn’t do anything trapped here, and she refused to cower in her room as though she had something to hide. “Mrs. Troost, where is Dr. Mike’s office?”

“From the front walk, straight across the street, one house to the right. Red shutters.”

“Thank you.”

***

The day was already heating up, humidity thickening the air, when Brynn stepped through the front door. She half-expected some sort of alarm to sound, or for a burly loup garou guard to step out of the hedges and demand to know where she was going. No one stopped her from stepping off the porch or from following the stone path to the sidewalk. Far away, someone was running a lawnmower, but no other sounds marred the peaceful morning.

Peaceful.

She admonished herself for using such a word, despite its relevance to the quiet around her. Three hundred-plus loup garou had lost their lives last night. She was basically a prisoner in this town, her life in the hands of men she’d been told were volatile animals. Peaceful should not describe the day. It should be raining, the sky crying tears for so many senseless deaths, nature mourning her children as the surviving loup mourned their kin.

In the bright light of the morning, Brynn finally understood the impact of what had happened last night. Even without relevant details, she knew the slaughter in Connecticut would cut deeply into the loup garou communities around the country. They would seek vengeance against the aggressors, whoever they were. Their lives would never be the same.

My life will never be the same, either.

Fear whispered through Brynn like a cold breeze, chilling her bones and sending a shiver down her spine. She pushed it away, unwilling to entertain her own uncertainties right now. She saw the future, but she could not predict it in any meaningful way. First things first—visit Dr. Mike’s office and check on the Connecticut survivor. Maybe this trip would be fruitless, but she had to do something.

She had to try.

***

“Shay Butler.” Knight read the name he’d been texted, relieved to finally know the identity of the sole survivor of the Stonehill massacre. He had sent a photo of the woman to Joe Reynolds a few minutes ago. Reynolds had been friendly with the Stonehill run and their Alpha, Andrew Butler. Neither of them had expected the survivor to be Butler’s only child.

“Such a shame,” Dr. Mike said.

They were in one of Dr. Mike’s upstairs bedrooms, where Shay had been brought for treatment as soon as Bishop and the others returned to town. Shay had been bleeding and hysterical, and even after Knight arrived and calmed her, it had taken a good dose of drugs to finally knock her out. She had deep gashes on her chest and throat—claw marks, Knight was certain—as well as bruises on her back and legs consistent with a fall. The weight of her fear and grief had left Knight exhausted and on the verge of a migraine. He’d never felt such naked terror from anyone before, and he never wanted to repeat the experience.

She was sleeping fitfully in the full-size bed, sweating and muttering. Knight couldn’t make himself leave her side, not for a moment. Since the instant he saw her sobbing in the back of Bishop’s van, he’d felt something he couldn’t quite explain. A deep need to take care of her, a demand of it from his normally quiet beast, far beyond his role as a White Wolf and stronger than any pull he’d ever felt for a run loup. He’d sensed her emotional state so keenly, so quickly, that it had nearly bowled him over. Her fear was acid on his tongue, her rage a burning coal in his gut.

He knew very little about Shay, except that her mother had disappeared twenty-five years ago and no one seemed to know what had happened to her—that made Shay about his age, maybe a year or two older. He knew she’d been very young when Chelsea Butler disappeared.

“Neither of us had a mother,” he whispered.

“What’s that?” Dr. Mike was on the other side of the room, arranging bandages on the dresser.

“Nothing.”

“I dare say she’ll be famished when she wakes.”

“I doubt she’ll be thinking about food.”

“You’re no doubt right, lad, so we need to think of it for her. You know what’ll happen.”

Everyone knew—it was taught to all loup from a young age, just like the necessity of the quarterly change to their sanity. The forced shift every one hundred and one days maintained the careful balance between the logical skin and instinctive beast by allowing the beast control from sunset to sunrise. It was the main reason why the quarterly cages existed. Loup garou had very high metabolisms, which meant they needed to eat often. Starvation symptoms could begin in as few as twenty-four hours and at a certain point, the beast took over. A change would be forced and the manic beast would attack the first prey it found—animal, human, or otherwise.

Shay would have enough stress; starving was not another she needed to endure. “You’re right,” Knight said.

The downstairs doorbell buzzed. Dr. Mike heaved an exasperated sigh. “I put a sign on the door that we’re closed except for emergencies.” He angled his head toward the door, bushy eyebrows furrowing. “I hope it’s not another emergency.”

So did Knight. Moments later, Dr. Mike’s heavy footsteps clumped downstairs to his office.

Knight angled his body toward the bed and shifted on the upholstered chair he’d pulled over. He snagged a washcloth off the night table and blotted sweat from Shay’s forehead. A lock of curly strawberry-blond hair stuck to her damp cheek, and he brushed it away. Her lips were parted and she was panting, caught in some terrible nightmare he couldn’t take away from her. His guards were up; he just needed to protect himself for a little while. He’d already filtered so much of her darkest emotions; any more and his own control might snap.

He focused on other things, like the subtle loveliness of her face. She wasn’t beautiful, not in a classically defined way. Her cheekbones were a bit too high, her face slightly too long, lips thin. But he imagined she could silence you with a look, or make you laugh with only her smile. His heart ached with the need to see her smile just once, except she had nothing left to smile about. He doubted she would thank them for saving her life when her entire run had died.

Father would discover who committed such a heinous crime against their people, and he would make them pay—of this, Knight had no doubts.

The floorboards in the hallway creaked, the weight too slight to be Dr. Mike returning. Knight sat up straighter, alert for danger. Brynn stepped into the open doorway. She paused, her curious gaze bouncing off him before fixing on the bed. Knight bristled, every instinct in him demanding he protect Shay from anyone who might harm her again, including their resident Magus-loup half-breed—a fact they were still keeping from said half-breed.

“She’s so young,” Brynn said, seemingly to herself.

“Are you here to gawk?” Knight asked before he could censor himself.

“What?” She fixed him with a wide-eyed stare. “Of course not.”

“Then why are you here?”

She just stared at him, utterly baffled by his rudeness. If his father was here, he’d have cuffed Knight in the back of the head for being such an ass to Brynn. His emotions were off-kilter, he knew that, but it was no reason to act in such a manner. He shoved the backwash of Shay’s emotional state into the corner of his mind and tried to remember how to be polite in stressful situations.

“I’m sorry. I’m not exactly myself right now.”

“I understand.” Brynn offered a tentative smile. “This can’t be easy for you, either. Honestly, I’m not sure why I came. I really want to do something to help. I
need
to do something more useful than sitting around twiddling my thumbs.”

Knight barely held his tongue. The logical side of his brain understood that Rook’s poisoning was an accident, and that it was very possible her arrival in town had nothing to do with Stonehill. The emotional side of his brain that mourned last night’s losses remained angry and suspicious. “Nothing that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours makes any sense.”

“Are there any suspects in the Connecticut attack?”

“Too many.” He wasn’t comfortable discussing the specifics. He wasn’t sure how much she already knew. “None of it fits, though. Loup garou kill for one reason: survival. The survival of ourselves, of our families, of our people. We do not commit murder, and we certainly don’t murder our own kind on such a scale.”

Brynn inhaled a sharp breath. “Other loup did this?”

“We aren’t certain of anything, only that there were loup scents in Stonehill that did not belong to its residents.”

“Sweet Avesta. Rook mentioned a Magus may have been there, as well.”

“He did?”

“He wasn’t subtle about accusing me of knowing something, and I’ll assure you as I assured him. I don’t. I can’t imagine a Magus doing such a thing, much less willingly working with loup garou.”

“Because we’re so offensive to the Magi?”

Her cheeks pinked. “Some less so than others.”

Knight studied the young Magus, as she in turn studied Shay. Now that Brynn no longer seemed to fear being torn to pieces by angry loup, she stood with more confidence, spoke with the assurance of someone taught to look down on those outside of her kind. She wasn’t trying to hide in a corner or save her own life. She saw a puzzle, a problem to fix, and she was here to try to solve it.

“Your visions,” he said. “You can’t control them?”

“Unfortunately, no. I had the misfortune of being my father’s second child.”

He frowned, not sure what birth order had to do with anything. He was a second child, after all, and he felt no shame in that. “I don’t understand.”

She blinked at him, then seemed to debate her words. “For Magi, magical abilities are passed down from father to child. The stronger the mother’s powers, the stronger the child’s will be. And it’s for this reason that most Magus couples have only one child. In that second child, magic is diluted and her chances of a good marriage are slim.”

“I see.” He hadn’t known that tidbit of information about the Magi, and he pocketed it for later reference. “May I ask what happened to your elder sibling?”

“She died at birth. We were twins, which are an incredible rarity among the Magi. My father told me no one was certain how our powers would be divided. My sister was born first and died soon after. As I aged and discovered my abilities were severely limited, the question of our power division was answered. I am a disappointment and second choice as heir to his name, even if never his position in the Congress.”

Knight wasn’t sure how to reply. She spoke with a quiet absolutism, sure of her own words and her place among her people. Perhaps in relation to magic, she was a disappointment. But he saw a determined young woman who’d risked her own life to save her father’s.