Head Above Water (Gemini: A Black Dog #2) (2 page)

W
e elected
to set up camp off the shoulder of the road, a stone’s throw from Chandler lands. Close enough to accommodate Graeson and Dell visiting, but far enough to keep us on the right side of fae and human law.

We looped our caravan into a tight arc formation: truck, trailer, truck, trailer, trailer, truck, trailer. Magic flowed easier through circles, and the shape gave us a compact shared backyard within the boundaries of the protective magic Aunt Dot cast while Isaac and I made the trailers level on the uneven ground.

Sweaty from establishing our base, we each retreated to our homes for a much-deserved rest break. The satellite dish mounted to Isaac’s roof twitched to wakefulness as I scanned the woods for signs of life and found none. The soft murmur of Aunt Dot’s soaps drifted from her living room window and coaxed a sigh of contentment from me. Even with crusted blood on my hands, it was good to be home.

Home being relative considering Gemini were rooted in people and not places.

I climbed the two steps leading into my trailer and grabbed a hot shower. I remember sitting on my bed to dry my hair, but the heat must have flipped my switch, because I woke to a quiet camp and found a note taped to my door. Aunt Dot and Isaac had gone into town for supplies, taking the grocery list off my fridge with them.

After stretching out the kinks in my back, I hauled my laptop out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. One of my favorite nooks in the whole house was the booth with built-in dining table. Sliding across the vinyl seat, I set up my workstation—computer, sticky notes, pen, legal pad, pencil and freeze-dried banana chips—then opened my web browser.

A quick check of my empty inbox set off a pang in my chest. Thanks to my forced leave of absence from the Earthen Conclave due to my friendship with the now-missing Harlow Bevans, and the murky nature of my relationship with a certain absentee beta warg, I was cut off from my usual resources and most of my contacts. Most. Not all. I still had one willing to stick her neck out for me. And then I had Graeson. Maybe. I’d thought we shared the same goals, but now I wasn’t as sure.

Fist pressed into my cheek, I rested my elbow on the table and started combing over my notes on the Charybdis case files, focusing on the kelpie we had taken down in Abbeville, Mississippi. When nothing new jumped off the page, I rubbed my eyes and began pondering dinner options.

A noise at the front of the trailer raised the fine hairs down my arms. The scritching of claws against metal dumped a load of adrenaline into my system. Was Aisha back for round two? Heart clogging my throat, I hauled myself out of the booth, crept to the door and peered out the window.

No one was there except for a mosquito hawk who thumped against the fist-sized exterior porch light mounted beside the steps.

Cocking my head, I filtered out the ambient noise until I heard the soft hum of the wards. They were intact, so if we had visitors, they were the friendly sort. Holding on to that comforting line of thought, I unhooked the inner screen door then shoved both it and the outer metal door open. I froze with my hand on the latch and swallowed convulsively.

White fur, matted with saliva. Slender ears perked for sounds they were past hearing. Head twisted perpendicular to its spine. Muscular hind legs still twitching.

A rabbit.

I really, really hoped this wasn’t the warg version of a welcome present. Or an apology. Aisha didn’t strike me as the kind to make amends, but I could picture her thinking nothing said
I’m sorry
quite like a fresh kill left to bleed out on your doorstep.

Chiding myself for getting choked up over a bunny, I took the first step down then leapt to the ground, knees protesting as they absorbed the impact. Nape crawling with the sensation of being watched, I forced myself to squat and trace the furrows etched into the metal siding with a fingertip. A sweeping glance under my lashes told me the gift-giver hadn’t waited around to witness its reception. I picked the furry corpse up by the ankles and set it on a spare cinderblock while I decided what to do with it.

“Ellis.”

Pivoting my weight to one side, I witnessed the moment Graeson exited from between two enormous oak trees. His rumpled shirt looked marginally fresher than his wrinkled jeans. His feet were bare and stained brown with grime. When he smiled at me, my pulse kicked up a notch. “Where have you been?” I stood and dug my bare toes into the soft dirt to anchor myself. “I met your alpha female earlier, and by
met
I mean she went for the jugular.”

The woman who stepped into the clearing behind him was as tall and lanky as a teenager, with sun-kissed skin and a splash of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her china-blue eyes shone, and her strawberry-blond hair spilled over her shoulders as she bounded toward me as naked as the day she was born. She smacked into my side and wrapped her arms around me, almost toppling us both.

“Sorry about the boobs. Pretend they aren’t there.” Impossible to do when her nipples were almost stabbing me in the throat. “I had to change to keep up with Cord.” She squeezed me harder. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“No thanks to some people,” I grumbled at Graeson while awkwardly returning Dell’s hug.

Molten-chocolate eyes striated with mossy green ensnared me. “I should have been here waiting for you. I’m sorry that didn’t happen.” He caressed my cheekbone with his thumb. “I planned on meeting you at the airport to avoid a scene like the one you described.” He traced the rigid line of my jaw until his hand slid off my chin. “But you’re still here and not a scratch on you. Looks like you handled yourself.”

The urge to swell under his pride rankled. It must be the warg blood in my system. “Yes, well, I’m not a total damsel.”

“Bessemer—” Dell began in a rush.

I cut her off with a gesture. “Let him speak for himself, Dell.”

“You were worried about me.” His lips hooked to one side in a crooked smile that threatened to disarm me. “Did you think I’d stand you up on purpose?”

“You bamboozled my family into coming to Georgia.” I would not be taken in by an unspoken promise and a nice set of tattoos. The thick black bands wrapping his wrists, cypress forests sprouting up his forearms, was the only ink delineating a canvas I had seen nude almost as often as covered. I barely recognized him in honest-to-goodness clothing. “I ought to wring your neck for putting them in danger.”

I would have too, but Aunt Dot and my cousins could take care of themselves. Unlike me, the weak link, they had honed all their skills to a killing edge. Gemini were peaceful, but we weren’t pushovers. A wanderer’s life meant traveling through hostile fae territory on occasion, and when you’re on the highway alone, you learn to defend yourself, your family and your belongings, or you fast become roadkill.

“Bamboozled,” he echoed.

“You’ve got thirty seconds.” I started tapping my foot to give my nervous energy an outlet. “Give me a reason to stay, or I walk.”

“You’re aware of how the pack bond functions?” Tone light, he nearly succeeded in making me underestimate how critical his connection with the other wargs was to his continued mental health. Without the others sharing his grief over his sister’s death, he would revert to the burned-out shell of a man I’d first met not two miles from here. “Each warg is connected to me through a secondary bond that only the alpha can access outside our group. Sharing headspace with the others keeps me level, functional, but it requires an unobstructed connection to work.” His voice dipped to a rumble. “When we returned to Georgia, our minds were open books.”

“And Bessemer riffled the pages,” I finished for him. What secrets had he unearthed that warranted setting Aisha on my trail? “What are you going to do?”

“Close it.”

Dread balled, a firm knot twisting my gut. “Your grief will rebound.”

The reason for the mental Band-Aid was to grant him a reprieve. Graeson had until the next full moon to get his revenge for Marie’s death or Bessemer would announce an open challenge to fill his position, that of beta in the pack. The bond was a temporary fix, one with an expiration date fast approaching. Apparently Bessemer felt it wasn’t approaching fast enough.

“Oh, you caught a rabbit. I thought I smelled one.” Dell hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “Do you want me to clean it for you?”

In all the excitement, I’d forgotten about what had tempted me outside in the first place.

“I appreciate the offer, but I’ll pass.” Accepting gifts of unknown origins was not a thing fae did lightly. “I’ve decided I’m going to give it a proper burial.”

“Is there something wrong with it?” Nose wrinkling, Dell flared her nostrils. “Why would you toss dirt over a perfectly good meal?”

“I found it on my steps right before you and Graeson arrived.” As much as I hated for even a tiny life to be wasted, that decision had been made when the gift-giver abandoned the kill, well-intended gesture or not. “I don’t trust it.”

A nearby bush rustled as if a bird had shaken its limbs taking flight, but what prowled forward was no swallow. Thick and muscular, a gunmetal-gray wolf with a gleaming silver streak down its back emerged from the shadowy forest interior, sat on its haunches and inclined its head.

“Get in the house,” Graeson said under his breath.

“Wargs are predators.” I planted my feet. “If I show weakness now, it’ll eat me alive later.”

“I have to do this alone.” He walked me up the steps backward, shoved me inside and closed the screen door between us, standing close enough to talk through the mesh. “I promise I’ll explain everything when I get back.”

“I doubt that.” I snorted when his eyes twinkled in reward for my sass. “Be careful.”

“I’m beta for a reason.” He shucked his shirt, hands dipping to his fly and zipping down, holding my gaze the whole time. “Trust me.”

“Trust is earned.” Graeson had manipulated me one too many times for his own gain. Blindly trusting what he said or did wasn’t going to happen. “I expect you back in one piece.”

The now-familiar cracking sounds as bone rearranged itself held me captive at the threshold. Graeson embraced the change in steady increments, which must have increased the pain tenfold. Muscle flowed beneath his skin as he went to greet this newest visitor.

This was a statement, a master’s show of control over his body, of dominance over his wolf, and I got the feeling whoever waited for him in that clearing was the worst kind of dangerous if Graeson felt the need to show him exactly what sort of adversary he could be.

The shifting pressure became too much. Graeson ruptured, a lush sterling pelt erupting over his quivering flesh all in a blink, as though the beast inside had shredded his humanity in its eagerness to be set free.

Dell pulled on Graeson’s discarded T-shirt—for my comfort more than hers since I was the prude visiting what amounted to a nudist colony once the fur started flying—and plopped down in the flattened grass, angled so a cut of her eyes allowed her to watch over both me and Graeson.

Fingers pressed to the cool mesh of the screen door, I marveled at the sinewy wolf shaking out his fur as if being back on four legs was cause for joy. “Are you going to tell me what’s really going on here?”

“Cord told you—it’s an interpack issue.”

“We both know that’s not the whole story.” I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the eerily polite wolves long enough to peg Dell with my patented glare. “Stop giving me the edited version.”

“He’s going to kill me for this…” a sigh that meant she was caving, “…and I do mean skin me and use my fur to trim the hood of his jacket.”

Seeing as how the active secondary bond meant he was aware of Dell at every moment, able to eavesdrop on our conversation through her mind if he chose, I doubted he had murder on the brain. At least where she was concerned. The wolf in the clearing… I wasn’t so sure what the deal was there.

“Bessemer met us at the airport and kept us as
guests
in rooms we use for containing the moonsick until about an hour ago.” Meaning they had been segregated for something like twelve hours. “Taunting the caged is the kind of thing Aisha lives for, but she was noticeably absent. That lit a fire under Cord to get to you.” Busy conducting a one-woman thumb war, Dell scowled at her hands. “She must have wanted to catch you alone, force you to shift and see what makes you tick.”

“Force me to—?” I wasn’t a shifter, my soul wasn’t spliced with an animal’s, but I was capable of mimicking one or two aspects of another species for a short burst. Like when I’d used Aisha’s blood to borrow her claws, her strength and a touch of aggression. It’s not a thing I do on command, and after my first experience with the soothing warmth of the pack bond, not an action I would take lightly with a warg involved. Had Aisha not kept coming for my throat, I wouldn’t have given her the satisfaction of feeding off her magic to defend myself. “How does she know what I’m capable of?”

“The reason Bessemer isolated us from the pack was so he could take his time raking through our heads.” Her nails dug into her thighs. “We had no choice but to submit. He’s our alpha, and shutting down the bond meant Graeson would suffer.” Drops of crimson welled. “Bessemer knows you joined with us. He knows what you are. Everything Graeson learned about you Bessemer knows too.”

Crap
. So that was the point Graeson had been meandering toward when the gray wolf interrupted us.

The violation of the alpha skimming my life’s history, gleaning confidences I had never shared with anyone but Graeson, made my skin chill with shame and tingle with fury.

The details of my personal life had made for pillow talk between the alphas.

“You’re not a warg. That type of connection shouldn’t have been possible.” Dell rubbed the wounds with her palm, smearing blood as they sealed before my eyes. “He must have wanted a firsthand accounting of what you’re capable of from someone he trusts before allowing you onto pack lands.”

“Can you sense him?” Warg politics were foreign to me. Bessemer had sent his mate to get bloodied in the name of curiosity? Was that same interest enough to warrant a front-row seat for the attack, or would he be satisfied sitting at home with his senses perked until I’d made my flickering connection? “Where is he now?”