Into the Fae (30 page)

Epilogue

“Everything hurts. It hurts to breathe, to move, to talk, even to wiggle my toes―except when I feel his touch. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know what he looks like or what his voice sounds like or if he is even real, but I know his touch. Right now, it is my lifeline. Without it, I don’t know if I will ever be able to claw my way back out of the darkness my mind has retreated to.”  ~Jewel

“Why are you standing out here?” Dillon asked him.

Dalton looked up from the place on the floor that he had been staring at for at least half an hour. He met his Alpha’s gaze for a count of three and then looked away. He didn’t like to talk. Talking led to sharing and sharing led to digging up old pain.

“Sally’s in with her,” he finally answered.

“Has she woken up at all?”

Dalton shook his head, but he didn’t mention that she had spoken to him. It had only been a whisper and he had no idea what it meant.
Five minutes longer
, she had said softly. She had seemed restless and so he’d brushed her cheek gently with the back of his hand. She relaxed and whispered
thank you.
The simple appreciation she showed him in those words made him feel after having been numb for so long . But that hadn’t been the worst of it.

Before Sally had entered the room
to do whatever it is she did while she was with Jewel, Dalton had heard the healer walking towards the room. So he had stood up and started to let go of her hand. She had squeezed like a vice grip, her brow wrinkled and her lips trembled as she spoke.
Don’t go. Please. I need you.
Her words had been a knife to his gut.
I need you
. They reverberated around in his mind digging into things better left alone. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had wanted him, let alone needed him. The only way he was able to get her to release him was when he leaned down next to her ear and whispered
I’m always with you
. And if she was who Peri claimed she was, then he had been telling the truth.

“She seems better when you’re with her,” Dillon pulled him from his thoughts.

Dalton nodded.

“Why don’t you want her to be your mate?” His Alpha finally asked bluntly, getting tired of his evasion.

“I never said that.”

“Well you sure as hell aren’t smiling like a dumb fool like most males who find their mates. Would it bother you if she was somebody else’s?”

He gave no response.

“Would it bother you if another male tended to her instead of you? Held her hand, ran his fingers through her hair, whispered in her ear?”

Dalton’s glowing eyes met his Alpha’s and for the first time in his life his wolf challenged him.

“I’m going to forgive that because I goaded you. But because I’m granting you grace you are going to take the gift that is lying in that bed and treasure h
er, protect her, and heal her. Give yourself to her and take her as your own as is your right and privilege as her mate.”

That was i
t. The tightly controlled pain that he kept safely locked away was on its way out. He made a beeline for the door and had to ignore the small moan he heard from Jewels room. Yet more evidence that she was his—it hurt to be away from her.

Dillon followed the huge wolf out. Dalton
turned on his Alpha the minute Dillon was out of the house. “I know what a gift a mate is and I know what an honor being blessed as the mate of a healer is.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“You said I could heal her,” Dalton bit out. “That I could take her as my own and give myself to her.” Dillon nodded and then waited.

“I can’t be her mate
, Alpha. I can’t heal her when I’m already broken. I can’t give myself to her when I cringe at the idea of being touched, and I can’t take her as my own because then she will see what I am.” Dalton closed his eyes and steeled himself to say words that shouldn’t be hard to say, but felt as though something had clawed its way into him and was ripping them from him. “She deserves better than what I can give her. She is going to need a gentle mate after being handled so horribly. There is no gentleness left in me.”

Dillon narrowed his eyes at his Beta as he watched the huge man feed himself lies written on his heart from a tragic past. He was definitely damaged, but who better to be the mate of a broken male than a healer? And who better to be the mate of a female who will have to relearn how to trust being touched and not cringe, than a male who has been there already? Dal
ton wasn’t ready to see it yet. For whatever reason he believed he didn’t deserve her and was trying really hard to convince himself he didn’t want her. Lucky for him he has an Alpha who doesn’t put up with self-pity. He has left Dalton alone for many years, allowing him to deal with his trauma in his own way, but that was about to end.

“Okay,” Dillon said coolly. “If that’s what you think, then I won’t force you to take care of her any longer. You will stay here with me because they are going to need us to hunt down Volcan, but you can stay away from Jewel.” Dillon noted Dalton’s jaw tightening. It was time to go for the clincher. “Vasile called to let P
eri know that some of the Alphas of the other packs are going to send their Betas to help with the search,”

Dalton snorted. “How kind of them to send their unmated dominates to a house that just happens to be full of unmated healers.”

Dillon wanted to laugh. That was the most words he had ever heard out of Dalton’s mouth at one time. He continued as if the Beta hadn’t interrupted. “If Jewel hasn’t woken up by then, it might be a good idea to see if the blood of any of the new males perhaps can do what yours did not.”

Dalton went still, his hulking form like a chiseled statue, but for his eyes. They shot up to his, and though hooded by lids Dillon could see the barely contained rage. “What is it you are looking for their blood to do?”

“Bring her back,” Dillon crossed his arms over his chest and tilted his head just a tad. “You didn’t ask Sally why Jewel was still unconscious, did you?”

Dalton didn’t respond.

“Well, maybe if you didn’t even care enough about her to want to know what was wrong, then she isn’t really yours.”

Dalton watched his Alpha walk away, purposefully leaving
those ringing words in the air.
She isn’t really yours.
As he got his breathing under control and slipped back into his
talk to me and die
demeanor, he hoped for the little healer’s sake that his Alpha was right.

From author:

Thank you so much for taking your time to read Into the Fae. It is my sincerest hope that you enjoyed it and will continue on this journey with the new healers. You can stay up to date one when books are due out, cover reveals, excerpts and book trailers by going to my site at
www.quinnloftisbooks.com
. Thank you again!

Please enjoy the following excerpts from myself as well as other amazing authors.

Prince of Wolves
, Book 1 The Grey Wolves Series

Quinn Loftis

Chapter 1

Jacque Pierce sat in the window seat in her bedroom looking across the street at her neighbors house; she wasn’t really being nosy she thought to herself, just curious. “Yeah,” she snorted, “only if you call curious sitting in your window seat eyes glued to your neighbor’s house like a hound on the hunt at ten o’clock at night.  I can call a spade, a spade tomorrow morning,” she told her conscience.

The Henry’s were having a foreign exchange student stay with them this year. They didn’t have any children of their own, though Jacque didn’t know if that was by choice or because they weren’t able to have children.  She had promised Sally and Jen she would get the nitty-gritty on the situation and call them.

So here she sat in her window, scoping out the neighbors house with her lights turned off and blinds cracked just enough to see and to top off her “James Bond” experience, she even had binoculars! Now if she only had the nifty back ground music to go with her shenanigans.  She had been sitting there for an hour already and was just about to give up when a black stretch limo pulled to the curb. Now isn’t this strange, she thought, a foreign exchange student arriving in a limo? She put the binoculars to her face and adjusted them to get a better look, settling them over the passenger door to see just who would emerge. She knew this was a little much but honestly in a town of 700 there just isn’t a whole lot of excitement and Jacque would take it where she could get it.

The driver got out of the limo to go around and open the back passenger door, but before he could get there the door was already opening, and the boy who stepped out of that limo had to be the most beautiful guy Jacque had ever seen, and that was only his profile. Wow, I mean wow, is all Jacque could think. Jacque couldn’t even imagine what his entire face must look like. He was tall, probably six foot one or so, his hair was jet black, it was longer on top and she could tell that he had bangs that fell across his face sweeping to the left partially covering that eye. He had broad shoulders and from what she could see of his profile, high cheek bones, a straight nose and full lips. She quickly realized her mouth had dropped open and she was all but drooling over the handsome human being who had emerged from the vehicle. She watched as he and his driver conversed, it all seemed very formal until the driver suddenly hugged the boy with obvious deep affection. He must be more than just his driver Jacque thought.

Suddenly, he turned as if he had heard what she was thinking and looked straight at her window, straight at her. Jacque froze, unable to look away from the mesmerizing blue eyes that held her in place. All her thoughts seemed to fade into the distance and she heard, or thought, she wasn’t quite sure which, the words,
“At last, my Jacquelyn.”
Jacque shook her head, trying to clear the haze that had filled it. After she came to her senses from the intense stare she recapped in her mind what his face had looked like.

She was right about the cheek bones; nose and lips, what she wasn’t prepared for was that his crystal blue eyes seemed to almost glow in the moon light. The hair that fell across his forehead and over his left eye only added to his mysteriousness. Over all he had a very masculine, very beautiful face. The shirt he was wearing was black and thanks to her handy dandy binoculars she was able to see that it fit closely to his form and showed off a muscular chest and flat stomach. He had a black leather biker jacket on, but past that she couldn’t see because the car was in the way, but she imagined his legs were every bit as nice as the rest of him.

When she looked back at the street the mysterious guy was walking into the Henry’s house. As she saw the door close she heard the voice again say
“Soon.”

Jacque sat there for a few minutes more trying to get her brain to work again, everything seemed so hazy. After blinking what felt like a thousand times she pulled herself together, picked up the phone and dialed Jen’s number.

Three rings later Jen answered, “What’s the word?” she asked.

Jacque took a slow breath and said “I think you better come over.”

“I’m there chick, see ya in 5,” Jen responded and then hung up.

Jacque grinned to herself as she thought about how great it was to have a friend like Jen who you could always depend on to be there when you needed her.

Jacque picked up the phone again and called Sally. She answered after one ring. She had obviously been diligently manning the phone, waiting for Jacque to call with details to the latest small town drama. “Jen is on her way over,” Jacque said. “I need you to come too, we need to talk.”

“Okay,” Sally said simply and hung up. 

Fifteen minutes later the three friends were gathered on Jacque’s bedroom floor, hot chocolate in hand, because naturally, how can you have a girl powwow without hot chocolate? 

“So, fill it and spill it,” Jen said.

“Okay,” Jacque said taking a deep breath, “so I’m sitting in my window seat, shades cracked lights off, binoculars in hand,” 

“Binoculars, really, you honestly were using binoculars?” Sally interrupted.

“Well you said you wanted details, so I was getting you details,” Jacque defended.

“Oooh, did you have the “Mission Impossible” sound track playing in the back ground cuz that would have been spy-tastic,” Jen said enthusiastically.

“Actually,” Jacque said distracted, “I was thinking more James Bond-ish, you know with the whole stake out thing,”

“No, huh-uh, that would be more like Dog the Bounty Hunter type stuff. But you couldn’t be Beth ‘cause you’re not stacked enough on top, so you would have to be baby Lisa the daughter….” Jen rattled on.

“You are so, so not comparing me to Dog the Bounty Hunter’s daughter right now and why are we talking about this anyway because it is sooooo NOT the point!” Jacque growled in frustration.

“Spy analogies aside, I was sitting there about an hour when finally a black stretch limo pulls up to the curb in front of the Henry’s house.”