Chapter 18
“Do you intend to tell Celeste about her sister?”
Orion’s rumble cut through the darkness inside the rental car eight hours later. I’d thought he was asleep in the tipped-back passenger seat while I took the second shift of alternating my gaze between the dot on the tracking app and the black square of Gabi’s window. As best we could tell, after letting me and Orion slip past her and escape from the apartment building, my ex-mentor had turned in for the night and not moved since.
In the interim, Orion and I had engaged in a wild-goose chase, hunting the tracker we’d hoped might still be in Maya’s pocket. It hadn’t been, of course. The cigar scent at the bottom of the stairwell had suggested that avenue of investigation was compromised, but we still needed to try just in case. Neither of us was surprised, however, when the tracker turned up abandoned inside a city bus.
Which left us with no way of finding Maya. Worse, we only had Gabi’s word for the fact Orion’s sister was even alive, something I knew weighed heavily on his mind by the increasingly hard line of his jaw.
We also had no way of knowing whether there actually were shifter children being transferred tomorrow—well, today actually. So we watched and we waited.
And, apparently, we discussed Celeste who, last we’d heard, was safely tucked into bed in Orion’s territory. “I’m afraid to tell her,” I admitted as the first hint of dawn marked the beginning of the prophesied day of the sister matebrand. “She’s already furious with me. Once she realizes she has a real sister…”
“Celeste always had a real sister—you.” Orion’s warm hand crossed the center console to hover above my knee, not quite touching. “You need to trust her to remember that fact.”
“Yeah.”
Celeste was also a very early riser, even in the summer when school wasn’t in session. So I didn’t second-guess myself. I dialed the number of the burner phone we’d been using to stay in touch recently, only remembering the time difference between Arizona and Texas when Celeste’s voice came through muzzy and sleep-soaked. “Hello?”
“I woke you up. I’m sorry.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d called Celeste too early. Back when I’d first started working for the Council, I’d once screwed up royally and needed a pickup after getting myself stranded without clothes or a vehicle. Only a luckily placed pay phone and a found quarter saved me from public indecency charges and I’d been too embarrassed to contact Gabi or Julius. I’d known Celeste wouldn’t judge me though. Wouldn’t complain even though she had to request an emergency sub to cover her own class.
Then, she’d woken up fast just like she did now. Had jumped straight to the same question—“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“No-arterial-blood-spurting-and-no-broken-bones fine or fine-fine?”
“Fine-fine,” I assured her. “I just needed to talk to you. But we can do this later.”
“You want to talk about Finnegan.” My sister’s voice turned guarded.
In response, my autonomic nervous system suggested dropping the phone and running far and fast in the opposite direction. Instead, I huddled there inside our rental car and forced words out of my mouth. “I don’t, actually. I want to talk about Gabi.”
“Mmm?” my sister hummed, her tone instantly softening. This was the way she’d greeted midnight admissions of fear when we were both teenagers. The way she’d drawn reluctant words out of my mouth back when we were each others’ sole confidantes. There was no pressure in it, no judgment. And, gradually, my lips unfroze enough so I could recite every bit of the recent conversation from the stairwell along with the truth Orion and I had smelled on Gabi’s breath.
“I don’t know for sure that she’s your sister,” I concluded, my heart beating so hard that I could barely hear my own words, “but I know she believes she is.”
The moment of silence that followed felt like an eternity. And when Celeste finally spoke, her observation wasn’t at all what I expected. “That’s why she’s so jealous.”
“Jealous?” Gabi couldn’t be jealous. My ex-mentor was endlessly capable and relentlessly hard-nosed. It was hard to ascribe any weakness to her at all.
“She’s always hated the fact you and I are close.”
I swallowed, yearning to open up the rest of the gaping emotional wound between me and Celeste, squeeze out the pus, and let it heal cleanly. I needed to know whether she’d meant to use the present tense—are close—instead of the past tense—were close. Needed to know whether her wording had been a slip of the tongue.
But I couldn’t quite make myself tease out any of that. Because wasn’t it obvious that the two of us weren’t as close as we’d once been? Hearing Celeste confirm what I knew to be reality would have broken me, so I shut my mouth around the question I wanted to ask.
For her part, Celeste waited quite a while before speaking again. And when she did, her words were gentle. “Thank you for telling me.”
Orion’s hand finally lowered onto my knee at that point and I was deeply grateful for the contact. Because it reminded me that I had friends beyond Celeste. That I wasn’t entirely alone even if the woman I considered a sister took this new information as an excuse to be done with me.
Still, I was shaking when I hung up the phone.
The rest of the day was less emotionally fraught but considerably more frustrating. Gabi drove to the Enclave, returned home to her apartment, and showcased her ability to notice a tail by waving at us repeatedly along the way.
There didn’t appear to be any stolen shifter children being moved, at least not by Gabi. And it was day fifty-two—the prophecy’s deadline. I was certain of it.
Well, certain once I pulled up a calendar app on my phone and counted weeks since Orion and I had matebranded. “Could the prophecy be basing its timeline on something other than the formation of our matebrand?” I wondered aloud.
“If it’s counting from the day I broke our bond,” Orion answered gruffly, “then we have five days left.”
That didn’t feel right. But the prophecy was so vague I couldn’t think of any way to prevent the compulsion of a not-yet-identified sister. And I wasn’t about to ask the desert for more information when our previous request had resulted in so much loss of ink.
So I dropped both the issue of the stolen children and of the compelled sister, trying to ignore the ominous lump in my stomach that grew larger every time I thought about the fifty-second day having passed without incident. The prophecy’s fizzle should have come as a relief, but the power of the outpack had been demonstrated so clearly that I couldn’t quite believe it had missed the boat this time. Instead, I tapped on my calendar app over and over as we caught a flight back to the Arizona desert, re-counting days I’d already counted more than once.
It wasn’t until the drive south to Orion’s pack central that I finally relaxed a little. The landscape expanded out in all directions, its vastness making each of my inhales a little deeper than the last one. And I realized this corner of Arizona felt more like home after a month spent amid its sand than Julius’s mansion ever had been during my two and a half decades within its echoing halls.
Parking in a hidden alcove of Orion’s canyon, we found a cluster of pack mates waiting for us despite the late hour. I hugged Celeste hard, grateful beyond words that she was here and safe, no longer under her father’s thumb and still speaking to me. I thanked Hailey for taking care of Celeste in my absence, measuring the younger woman’s composure and finding that she’d steadied into her new role of ambassador just like Vega said she would. Then I explored the living quarters that had been set aside for the three of us while Orion slotted himself back into running a clan that had missed its alpha.
The whole time, I rubbed at a new patch of reddened skin where matebrand ink used to be, a patch that covered a full third of the original tattoo’s expanse. The most recent loss had occurred seemingly out of nowhere while Orion and I were on the plane, using no magic and making no contact with desert sand. I was flipping through the in-flight magazine and he was staring out the window while—by the set of his jaw—thinking about Maya. Then we’d both jumped, likely at the same bee-sting sensation.
“What happened?” Orion had rumbled.
I’d shaken my head. I didn’t know. I hadn’t done anything and apparently he hadn’t either.
Which was concerning. But it couldn’t be the culmination of the prophecy because we’d passed the day in question and at least a little ink remained on both of our forearms. Surely that meant my blood sister, whoever she was, wouldn’t be forming a matebrand while we were stuck inside an aerial tin can.
