The Corollaria (8 page)

“This is all part of who we are Luke,” Carson spoke quietly, but his voice was sure and strong. “This is your destiny.
She
is your destiny.”

“But, why me?  Why not you?”

“I’m destined to be Alpha, Luke. I have to lead. Your first priority will always be to protect Emily,” Carson answered.

He breathed a heavy sigh. T
he ache in his chest was festering.  He could feel his failure to keep her safe. But it was more than that, wasn’t it? He thought of her softness against his chest, the feel of her skin beneath his lips. He imagined what it would be like to kiss her.

Slowly, he raised his eyes back up and found Carson’s serious slate eyes on him, a slight frown curved his mouth down.

Carson’s eyes were different than his brother’s. Where Luke’s were a soft pale gray, like wisps of dyed cotton, his were more like the sky at twilight, caught somewhere between the blue of the day as it faded to the black of night.

“What do we do now?” Luke asked. H
is voice shook.

Carson shared a look with Jenny. Her
golden eyes looked like fresh butter in the soft morning light.  Something Carson said suddenly clicked in Luke’s mind.

“Wait, you said Dad was the Alpha.”

Carson’s frown deepened, and a deep groove creased his forehead. He looked down and swallowed hard. He hadn’t wanted to admit it, but it was unavoidable. 

“Vanessa called me the Alpha when
she came to ask for my help,” he paused, his eyes softened and Jenny gripped his hand with long firm fingers.  “He’s either been captured, or...”

Luke didn’t need him to finish the sentence. Tears pricked his eyes, but he angrily swatted them away.
Rage bubbled up in his chest as heat shot down his spine and his body trembled violently. Suddenly he felt even more profoundly helpless. 

Carson placed a firm grip on Luke’s shoulder. “I’m going to call a meeting with the pack. Then we’ll have to figure out where she is.”

Luke’s hands curled into fists, his knuckles turned white. Carson disappeared. His voice was low and serious as he spoke on the phone in the other room. Luke tuned him out. It wasn’t hard with the blood rushing in his ears, and his heart burning with grief.  His parents were gone.  Emily was gone.  He felt like at any moment he might explode.  The wolf clawed at him. Guilt and dread and panic churned violently in his gut.

Jenny liste
ned to Carson for a few minutes, but her eyes, however, were trained on Luke. He was shaking, and her skin stung with the intensity of emotions radiating from him. She knew the vampire that they were up against was powerful and relentless. 

A few moments later, Carson rejoined them.

Before he could speak, Jenny’s said, “I know who can help us.”

Both Luke and Carson’s eyes snapped to hers.

“We have to go to the Hidden City,” Jenny swallowed nervously. It had been a long time since she’d been back. “And we have to speak with Queen Aine.”

Carson’s brows knitted together.  He
pressed his lips tightly together as he studied her a moment. “How are we supposed to get into the Hidden City and gain an audience with the Faerie Queen?”

Jenny took a deep breath.
“She’s my mother.”

C
urtis lay flat on his back on the bed.  His long legs hung off the edge, and his heavy boots scrapped the floor. It was darker now that he’d blown out the candles and he lay still and quiet in the darkness. But inside, he felt ripped apart. Tormented. At war. A tempestuous energy rolled through him.

It wasn’t just about Emily though. Everything that had once made him human, everything tied to his humanity, wholly rejected the thought of what he had become and what Samuel wanted him to do.

His vampire instincts, on the other hand, were salivating over the thought of Emily’s blood. He could still smell her. The sweetness lingered in his nostrils.  He sucked in a deep unnecessary breath to steady himself.

Kill Luke.
That’s what Samuel wanted. And he wasn’t really sure how he felt about it. There was a small part of him that resented Luke. He saw how Emily looked at him. He would always come second to Luke in Emily’s eyes. But he was pretty sure no matter how much he hated that fact, he couldn’t kill him.

But his blood commanded him to act. He felt the
compulsion to obey his maker humming in his veins.

Curtis sat up and pressed his fingers
into the corner of his eyes next to his nose. When he removed them and opened his eyes, the sudden presence of a woman in the shadows caused him to nearly jump out of his skin.

“Who the hell are you?” Curtis shouted.

“Shhh, please, keep your voice down,” she whispered back earnestly. She moved closer to the bed, her dark hair was long, straight and thick as it brushed the sides of her pale slender face. There was something oddly familiar about her. “My name is Vanessa.”

Curtis narrowed his eyes. H
is jaw clenched and he lowered his voice.  “What do you want?

She spoke quickly. H
er black eyes glimmered with desperation. “Emily is in danger. We all are. If Samuel breaks the curse, he’ll become much too powerful. He doesn’t just want to just break the Curse though. He wants a war.”

“What curse?” Curtis asked. The conversation with Emily replayed in his mind. 

“He needs her blood to break the Curse.  You have to help her.”

“What can I do?” h
e asked helplessly.

“Help her escape. But it has to be soon. Go. Talk to her. There is a secret passage behind the bookcase in the room she is being kept. You must find it and take her through it. It leads into an abandoned subway tunnel. She must make it to the Hidden City
. 
Tonight.
”

“Here,” s
he handed him a small slim black cell phone, no bigger than a credit card. He looked at her questioningly. 

“Tell her to cal
l her wolf. He must meet you,” she told him.

“Her wolf?”

His mind flashed to the previous night, the hulking gray wolf that stopped him from killing Emily, with Luke’s gunmetal gray eyes.

The wolf
had protected her.

Saved her
.

From him.

His stomach rolled with revulsion. And he suddenly understood why Samuel wanted him dead. Luke was made to protect Emily.

“Luke,” Vanessa said simply, her eyebrows quirked and she cocked her head examining the puzzled expression on Curtis’ face.  “I’m surprised, Hunter, that your father hadn’t told you more.”

Curtis’s eyes grew wide, “My father?”

“I have no time to explain this to you, please just hurry. It must be now, while Samuel is occupied.”

S
he gestured for Curtis to go. 

Curtis stood and briskly walked across the floor to the door, the cell phone clutched in his hand
. A tight knot lodged in his throat.

“And Curtis?” Vanessa said softly. Curtis half-turned to face her. Her face was sad, wistful and her voice strained, “When you make it to the Hidden City, tell your father I will try to find out more information and report it to him.”

And with that she vanished, leaving Curtis’s mind racing and his blood buzzing.  He shook his head and walked quietly, but as quickly as possible, down the hall to Emily’s room. It had to be late morning by now, although, he’d never know in this house. Samuel had turned this eighteenth century house into a tomb. No windows, no outside light.

He kept thinking he had no idea what he was doing, or where he was taking her. His only hope was that Luke would.

Her wolf?
  Something about that statement left a sour taste in his mouth.

He slipped easily into Emily’s room and found her still sleeping, her blond hair matted and stuck to her face.
Abruptly, all of his emotions felt frayed, and his stomach uneasy. He had to swallow several times in the dimly lit room before he could move.

Emily felt a cold hand slide across her cheek. She startled, gasping
into the darkness. Curtis’s dark eyes met hers, his lips half-lifted into a pained, uneasy smile.

“Just me, Em,” he said softly. Her skin prickled with awareness.

Emily pushed herself up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She felt so tired still. She reached up to touch her neck. Her fingers glided over two puckered scars. Curtis hesitated a moment and then handed her the cell phone.

Emily didn’t protest. She trusted Curtis.  She could feel his sincerity like a cool breeze along her skin.

“Call Luke. We’re leaving right now.”

Curtis
thrust the phone into her hand and recited a location for Luke to meet them at. His brain was working fast to make a plan.  Emily quickly dialed his number, her breathing was so fast and shallow she felt lightheaded with anticipation.

“Hello?” Luke’s scratchy voice sounded uneven and thick when he answered the
phone. For a moment she didn’t know what to say, the raw ache inside dug at her.

“It’s me
.”

“Emily! Oh god, please tell m
e...I’m so, so sorry, please, I—”

His voice choked off and she felt herself spli
nter a little more. Her blue eyes flickered to Curtis’s, and she felt a heat rise in her cheeks. Curtis looked away.

“Curtis is here—”

“What?!” Luke’s voice boomed. She could feel the intensity of his anger and fear even through the phone.   It skittered along her skin, making her hair stand on end.

“He wasn’t the one that took me. It’s a long story. I’m okay. He’s getting me out of here,” she
reassured him quickly, quietly. Her voice shook with the effort.  She told him the place to meet them at and then there was a long thick pause.

“Em
ily,” he said. The soft thick huskiness of his voice made her insides tighten. “I’ll hurry.”

~000~

The escape through the small cave like passage behind the bookcase was silent except for the loud thumping of Emily’s pulse and her ragged shallow breathing.  Curtis reached behind him in the darkness as the path sloped downward, lacing his icy fingers with hers and gently squeezing. 

It was meant to be reassuring. Instead the feel of his unnaturally cold skin and the absence of his breathing combined with his familiar shape confused her already muddled thoughts.

“I think he killed my grandmother,” Emily said suddenly. Curtis paused his long strides, and his head turned with furrowed brows. She couldn’t read his expression in the darkness. After a moment of silence, he kept moving forward.

“Come on, Em,” h
e said hoarsely. “We gotta get you safe.”

Safe
. Emily kept thinking of Luke. It was impossible not to. The raw-edged feeling inside her just kept gnawing at her, growing in its fever and intensity. An endless ache of want and confusion.

She also kept thinking about what Samuel had said, about what Curtis had said too. And about her grandmother. She’d only ever seen one faded photograph of her. She was young with long flowing blond hair. He said Emily reminded him of her.

She tried to picture her own mother, with the same fair hair and light blue eyes. The memory of her was fuzzy though. Emily had been too young when she had died, her memory made of photographs. A sudden longing for her mother, to be able to tell her about all this, about Luke, struck her hard.

Even talking to Aunt Lucinda, with her crinkly green eyes and her hard weathered smile, would help. She couldn’t help the feeling that she had known about all this. That the reason she had gone to live with the Lyall’s, with Luke, was more than just a family connection.

Her wolf.
  Those two words kept repeating themselves in her mind.  And it made her feel inexplicably anxious. A barrage of questions flooded her consciousness as Curtis led her into an abandoned subway tunnel, a faint light flickered overhead.

What did it mean that he was hers?
Were they supposed to be lovers? Make little half-wolf babies? Would her daughter be like her too? What if Luke didn't want her?
Samuel said he didn't. And that hurt. What was so wrong with her that Luke was the first wolf in history that didn’t want his mate?

She gripped Curtis’s hand tighter. Luke’s rejection
punched her in the gut. 
Was it wrong to seek comfort in Curtis’s touch?
The simple truth that he never pushed her away offered her some solace. 

Eventually, hours later, they found themselves in a busy terminal. There were lots of people milling about, rushing on and off the approaching trains.

Emily felt strangely removed from the normalcy of these people’s Saturday afternoon. She let her eyes wander around the station, observing the people. A small girl with red hair and a splash of freckles tugged on her mother’s arm.  A tall, willowy brunette with model length legs and a tall guy with perfectly tousled hair wrapped around her, kissing her neck.