It was a beautiful evening despite the turmoil that seemed to cling so desperately to Pandora, so she and Jax followed Kira onto the back porch. Pavia and Tristan had returned to the vampire reintegration center a little while before, but Luke was sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs waiting for them. He was leaning back to stare up at the stars, but when they arrived, he sat up, face set in a more businesslike mode than Pandora was used to from him.
“Did you tell them?” he asked Kira.
She shook her head. “I was waiting until we could all talk.”
He nodded with understanding.
Pandora, however, was confused. She collapsed into one of the chairs, weary and drained, but her focus was acute. “Where’s Naya? And why do you think the titans have her?”
“Earlier this week, my grandfather got a call from one of the local conduit chapters based in the Midwest,” Kira started. Her grandfather was the head of the protector council, and Pandora remembered his wrinkled face well. He had been the first conduit to greet her when she’d arrived in Sonnyville as a vampire, and though the old man appeared frail, his voice was strong, his convictions were stronger, and even then, she’d been a little intimidated by him.
Yet, that wasn’t what had caught her attention.
The word Midwest was.
She and Jax shared a knowing look.
“Just how far west are we talking?” Pandora muttered.
“Salt Lake City,” Kira told them apologetically, sorry because they all knew what those three words really meant.
One of the few major cities within driving distance to the titan enclave, Pandora thought, scowling.
“A few days ago, they got a surprise visit from a government official requiring the assistance of a protector conduit and punisher conduit who knew how to perform the cure. The head of the local chapter explained that it’s not common knowledge, and only a few conduits know how to enact the procedure properly. So, they called here for help. Normally Luke and I would go on a trip like that, but my grandpa didn’t want to bother us in the middle of wedding planning. And since we’ve been keeping pretty much everything you’ve been telling us secret, he didn’t really understand the gravity of the situation. So, he sent someone else, a friend of ours who is supposed to land back in Sonnyville tomorrow morning. But my grandpa called to fill me in before our friend gets back, since he knew I’d be annoyed he didn’t ask us—which I totally am, by the way. I don’t know why people think that becoming a bride means that you suddenly have to drop everything else in your entire life. I mean, hello, I can work and plan a wedding. I can multitask. I mean, I know we decided on a really quick engagement, and it’s been a little crazy and a little stressful, but the nerve—”
“Uh, Kira, honey,” Luke murmured, reaching out to hold her hand as he cut her off.
“Right, sorry.” She shook her head and gripped his fingers tightly, tossing him a grateful glance before returning to the story. “Anyway, my grandpa told me, and I immediately called our friend and asked him to tell me everything that happened and everything he saw. He couldn’t confirm that he went to the enclave, but I mean, it must have been. He took the jet—conduits have a private jet, courtesy of Uncle Sam—and met them in Missoula, which I think is in Montana? Right? Doesn’t matter. When he got there, they led him and the punisher who came in from their base out in California—it’s like Sonnyville but scary—to a helicopter. Then they blindfolded them and flew for a while, before landing somewhere. They stayed blindfolded as they were pushed into a car, then brought to some building and shuffled into an elevator, and finally, after all of that, the blindfold was removed.”
Kira paused to take a breath.
The girl could speak a mile a minute—it was absurd—but Pandora took the spare moment to look at Jax. He felt her stare and turned. They nodded minutely to each other.
Because it was the enclave.
It must have been.
There was no other spot in the world that would have required so much ridiculous caution, such confidentiality. The location of Sonnyville was technically supposed to be hush-hush, but the entire supernatural world pretty much knew everything about it. The enclave, however, was different. Some titan bases were a little more public, but the US base was the center of all titan activities across the globe—and if there was one thing titans knew, it was how to keep a secret.
Too many, in fact.
“So, when he was finally able to see, he was in some sort of holding area. There were a few of what looked to him to be glass-fronted cells, like a small prison almost. And they led him to one containing a vampire. But, and this is the important part, he passed a handful of other prisoners on the way. I asked him to tell me every single person that he saw, and all of them were supernaturals in various human and quasi-human forms, except one, which he said looked like a furry black lump on the ground.”
“Naya?” Pandora said immediately.
Kira nodded. “I asked him if he thought it might have been a werejaguar, and he said it could have been. They’d kept him walking quickly, and the creature he passed wasn’t moving. It looked like a sack of fur splattered on the ground. But I think it was her. I mean, it’s got to be, right? You lost track of her just outside the enclave, and they must have found her when it became clear they wouldn’t be able to find you.”
“It must be her,” Pandora confirmed, mind whirling.
Because why would she be in her animal form, when she specifically kept that bit of knowledge from them for months during her previous stay in a titan jail?
And why wasn’t she moving?
Why was she a lump of fur instead of the graceful, beautiful, compassionate—albeit pain-in-the-butt—werejaguar that Pandora remembered?
What had happened to her?
What had they done?
“We need to rescue her,” Pandora said, tone on the verge of a growl as anger stirred in the pit of her gut. “We need to save her.”
“We will,” Jax said, not a single drop of doubt in his tone. He stretched forward, reaching out to take her fingers in his hand. He squeezed once and didn’t let go. “But if we’re going to infiltrate the enclave, we need a plan first. We need a strategy. Breaking us out was difficult enough, but breaking us back in? That’ll be, I don’t want to say impossible, but tough. Definitely tough.”
Pandora wanted to leap from her chair and dive into the shadows and go.
But his hand grounded her.
Anchored her.
Because Jax was right. Pandora was more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants, figure-it-out-as-it-happened sort of person. And it had worked out pretty well for her once upon a time, back when she was stealing jewels, swapping money for secrets, or breaking into head vamps’ jails and freeing prisoners—back when being an invisible vampire was powerful enough. But times had changed. And it wasn’t that long ago that she’d decided to sneak into the enclave with nothing but her own will and desperation and, if she were being honest, hubris to guide her.
And we all know how well that turned out…
She’d ended up stabbed and unconscious, and without Jax’s help, she’d probably be dead.
No.
She refused to risk Naya’s life so carelessly—so selfishly—again. Not when the medium had been the only one to willingly choose her, to stick by her side. Sure, their friendship had started as a mutually beneficial agreement, a bargain, but it had turned into something more. And Pandora remembered that moment in the woods after the bolters had literally blown her conversation with her mother apart. Their deal had been done. And yet, Naya had stayed, not wanting to leave Pandora alone, not wanting to abandon her. And Pandora couldn’t forget the hesitation she’d seen in those amber eyes, the struggle blazing inside of them. Couldn’t forget the hesitation in her own heart before she’d shouted at Naya to go. Couldn’t forgive herself, now aware that those few moments had cost Naya everything. Her brother. Her freedom. Her life.
Pandora’s egoism and recklessness were the only reasons Naya had been caught, the only reasons Naya had even been at the enclave in the first place.
No—this time, she wouldn’t be so cavalier. She needed a game plan.
But what? How?
More importantly, when?
“Do you think it’s a trap?” Pandora murmured, mind racing.
“It’s got to be, right?” Jax asked, unsure. “Why would they have a vampire in the holding cells? Why would they bring conduits to the enclave for the first time in the history of its existence, if they didn’t know we were here? If they weren’t trying to draw us out with this little kernel of information? If they—” Jax stopped abruptly, eyes widening in realization. “Unless…”
“Unless they were curing my father.” Pandora finished the sentence for him, gasping at the obviousness. She tightened her fingers around Jax’s hand, briefly meeting his eyes, which had lit again with that fire she’d seen up in the bedroom, a churning, angry blaze she wasn’t used to in his normally soft artist’s gaze. But it seemed the mere mention of Malcolm Scott was enough to make him fume again, a boiling pot whose lid was about to blow.
Pandora looked away, dropping his hand.
She wasn’t ready to go down that road. To wonder if her father had known there was another way to save the world, yet had deemed her life unworthy of protecting.
“My father,” she whispered, voice catching so she had to pause, giving her time to clear her throat and change the wayward direction of her thoughts. “I turned him accidentally—I told you guys about it. He must be the vamp they were curing. I can’t imagine any other reason for all the secrecy, for bringing outsiders into the enclave, except they wanted to save their director as soon as possible and didn’t want the conduits to fully understand what had happened.”
“Makes sense,” Kira added, nodding. “So, not a trap then?”
“Maybe not…” Pandora turned to Jax for confirmation.
He shrugged. “I don’t think so, not this time. I doubt they know we’re here, especially if they’ve been completely focused on curing the director. We might have actually gotten lucky for once.”
“It was bound to happen eventually,” Luke interjected with a grin. “Statistically speaking, of course.”
“Of course.” Pandora copied one of Kira’s trademark moves and lifted a pointed brow in his direction. But then she dropped the humor, mood sobering quickly. “But how does that help us save Naya? Whether they’re expecting us or not, we can’t exactly waltz into the enclave and rescue her. They still know she was helping me. She must be heavily guarded, heavily surveilled. And…” Pandora stopped speaking, but her focus traveled to her fingertips, finishing the thought for her. Without the shadows, without the darkness, how can I save her? Without my power, what can I do?
But was she without her power?
She’d traveled into the ebony mist and returned unharmed. She’d faced Sam. She’d spoken with him and remained unscathed. Yet with everything she knew now, the shadows felt like forbidden fruit, an apple too tantalizing to ignore, a path she couldn’t afford to follow. Dip her toe in once, and she might not be able to avoid the lure, might not be able to stop herself from turning and diving in headfirst, drowning in the magnetism Sam and his power offered.
But for Naya, she could do it again.
She’d face the temptation.
If she had to.
“I might be able to get in,” Jax said softly, eying her fingertips, mind in the same place hers was. “Alone.”
Pandora whipped her gaze to his.
“Jax,” she started, tone making it perfectly obvious how dangerous, how idiotic, how perfectly brave and how utterly out of the question that was.
“Hear me out,” he cut in, stopping her. “You don’t know what I was like when you were gone. The titans had no control over me. I had no control over me. I’d skip missions. I’d disappear for weeks on end. I’d fall off the face of the earth and then reappear at a new enclave just as suddenly. The last time I saw your father, he was talking to my father, preparing for your arrival. They sent me away, but we shared a look, and they knew I knew what was going on. No one saw me go to the tree house. No one saw me carry you to my house. No one saw us leave together. For all the titans know, I heard what they were planning and disappeared because I couldn’t handle it. So maybe I simply reappear again?”
“I’m coming with you,” Pandora stated—a fact.
“Dory—”
“No,” she said, voice a tempest just daring to be unleashed. “We do this together, Jax. Together.”
There was a note of finality in that word.
Jax nodded, agreeing. He understood. They’d do it together, the way they should have done everything else. And when they did, maybe the outcome would finally be different. Maybe together, they’d finally be able to get things right.
“What can we do?” Kira asked in the silence. “We can come. We can pretend we didn’t realize other conduits had already been there? Or we could say we’re following up—standard procedure? Or…” She paused, turning to Luke and sharing a silent idea that made him smile mischievously. “Or we could come in fire blazing and cause some mayhem?”
“No,” Pandora and Jax said at the same time.
Titan business was titan business. Neither of them wanted to put anyone else in harm’s way—because the stakes were fatally high, and they both knew it.
“But there is something you can do,” Pandora added, eliciting a surprised glance from Jax. “Something not having to do with titans,” she clarified. “But with vampires.”
“Go on,” Kira prodded, eyes brightening a shade, intrigued.
“I told you Naya was coming here because her brother was a vamp and she wanted to cure him,” Pandora said, gaze switching between Kira and Luke, who had both perked up, no longer slouching in their seats. “What I didn’t tell you is that he’s still a boy. He was kidnapped as a warning to her, taken against his will. I don’t even know if he’s hit puberty yet, and we all know that turning humans isn’t necessarily illegal, but—”
“Turning kids definitely is,” Kira broke in, fingers curling into a fist as flames sprouted furiously to life in the middle of her palm.
“Punishers have killed vamps for far less than that,” Luke added gravely, humor gone from his normally jovial expression. “They’ll work with us on this. I can get a team together in a matter of days. Tell us what you know, and we can get every conduit across the entire globe on the hunt.”
So, she did.
The four of them sat on that porch scheming until the stars disappeared and the sky turned lavender. And only when they were falling asleep with their eyes open did Pandora follow Jax back upstairs. They both paused at the sight of the shattered dresser, the wood chips strewn across the floor. Pandora was the first to move, stepping through the threshold. But she grabbed Jax’s hand, noticing the deep purple bruises lingering on his skin, and gently pulled him into the room when his feet didn’t seem to work. Together, they sank into the bed, exhausted yet invigorated for the first time in days.
No more waiting.
No more idling.
They had a mission. They had a plan.
They had a step in the right direction.
They were on the same page for the first time in what felt like forever, and that was enough for now.
When Jax rolled over in his sleep, wrapping an arm around her instinctively, protectively, Pandora was wide awake. But she didn’t push him away. She melted into his embrace and closed her eyes, falling asleep in the same breath, wondrously nightmare free.