Chapter Thirteen

They drove miles from the plane in a rental that stank of pine air freshener and cigarettes.

The sprawling castle-like estate at the end of a gated road was far from what Ky expected.

He leaned between the seats of the SUV. “You sure this is the right address? The mage lives here?”

“Who knows? Never seen his house,” Roman said. “Kind of expected him to live in a sixth-century stone hovel, but he’s an unpredictable crank.”

As they stood at the front door, kicking snow off their shoes, Roman depressed the doorbell for the third time. “We’re here at the right time, aren’t we? You didn’t mix up a.m. and p.m.?”

“Pretty sure,” Flynn said.

“Pretty sure. You better be damned sure. Last time I surprised him, he did some sort of energy blast and wouldn’t see me in person for a month.”

“I thought that was because you broke the news that we had to deep-six his sister when she went psycho world-killer on us,” Ky said.

Roman grumbled, “I’m not in the mood for his attitude today.”

The door swung open. The six-foot-something mage folded his arms across his wide chest. His short dark hair and raised geometric sigils on his neck and arms were a pink contrast to his pale skin. He gave all four of them a pinched expression. His appearance had arrested around the late thirties, even though he was hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old. His bulky muscles looked more akin to someone who hauled stone for a living than a guy who moonlighted for kicks as an ER doctor around Europe. Ky had never seen him in anything other than scrubs or a lab coat. In jeans and a black button-down shirt, he exuded a misleading sense of elegant normalcy, albeit in a villain-esque way.

This was the oldest living being any of them had ever been around, not counting the angel they’d worked with twice this year.

“You’re late.” Dom’s lips pressed into a white slash. His eyes glittered diamond-sharp and cold.

“Are you going to keep us out here all night or get this business sorted?” Roman asked.

The mage examined Vivi. Both eyebrows slowly rose. “These boys aren’t good at introductions. I’m Domini Tavlin. You can call me Dom.”

“Dom? Like the main character in the Furious movies?” Vivi asked.

“Exactly like him. Maybe I am he, only taller and much better looking.” Dom’s lips twisted into a smirk. He turned and strode inside. “Good to meet you, Vivienne.”

“How’d he know my name?” she whispered.

“Guess we follow,” Flynn muttered.

“Don’t touch anything,” Dom called behind him. “Some things in here don’t react well to being messed with.”

“This place is lit with energy. Can you feel it?” Vivi asked Ky. She held her hands a few inches away from an ancient cuneiform tablet mounted to a wall. “Incredible.”

Ky squinted as he passed the tablet to examine its tiny impressions. “Mesopotamian.”

She paused in front of a limestone head whose face had long ago eroded into a smoothed surface with minimal contours. Enough definition remained to make out eyes and where a nose had been.

He caught her hand before she touched the face. “Everything related to Dom is dangerous. We have to assume that includes his art, if this is actually his place.”

As they moved deeper into the house, the aroma of garlic and fresh bread almost sent Ky to his knees. He missed preparing food far more than eating it. The smells, the crafting of a personal cuisine that resonated, the putting food together in a non-formulaic way, creating dishes he loved and knew everyone he fed would savor… He missed it.

They entered a dimly lit sitting room with several settees he gauged to be eighteenth-century, spun in reds and golds, and a huge wood-burning fireplace that radiated intense heat. Dom waved to the furniture, indicating they should take a seat.

Ky and Vivi squished hip-to-hip on the settee opposite the druid. It was a tribute to its carpentry that it held without so much as a groan of complaint. Flynn and Roman claimed stuffed chairs close to the fire.

They all stared.

Dom blinked.

Finally, Dom released an irritated exhale. “Do you prefer I put you at ease and ask why you’re here?”

When no one answered, Dom said, “You want to find out what you can’t remember and know why they don’t want you remembering. Who wants to go first?”

“I will,” Ky said.

Dom waved at the spot next to him. As Ky relocated, Dom said softly, “They didn’t take care of you. Do you think they planned to kill you soon?”

“I felt like my countdown clock was getting low.”

“You ready?”

He’d never be ready.

Dom was going to deep-read him in order to see into the recesses of his mind. Ky didn’t want him knowing anything beyond the last few weeks. But it was inevitable he’d see all of it.

A light touch on his forearm and Ky felt like his mind was hijacked. No magical reveal of lost memories ensued. Worst of all, he remained paralyzed for as long as Dom touched him. He couldn’t even open his mouth to say stop. What was probably only moments later, but for Ky felt like hours, Dom removed his hold.

Dom made a “hmm” noise and worked his teeth back and forth.

Ky bit back the urge to yell at him to tell him everything. The look on his brothers’ faces said the same thing. With Dom, you kept your mouth closed until he was ready to speak. Irritate him, and he might tell you nothing.

“They couldn’t get much from you, Ky. I respect your will to deny them after all they tried, which was substantial. In addition to drugs, they tried hypnosis to implant Sigge’s method on you. I think their failure doesn’t have to do with your curse. You’re right, they could never reprogram you to work for someone else. You’re the strongest being they’ve ever tried to manipulate. Maybe it’s because of the rewiring inside your head from that spirit.”

“What rewiring in his head?” Vivi asked. Her eyebrows folded inward, and her nose crinkled.

“Not right now,” Roman whispered to her.

“Did I give in to what they wanted?” Ky asked, hating the vulnerability in his voice.

Humor crinkled the edges of Dom’s eyes. “If they’d wanted someone easy, they chose the wrong Lanzo brother.” Was it his imagination, or did Dom’s gaze wander to Flynn? “But fate may have chosen the right brother for this mission.”

A chill slithered through Ky’s shoulders as both he and Dom stared at Vivi.

Dom asked her, “Ready to see if they might have been more successful with you?”

“What is this about Sigge?” she asked.

Dom said to Roman, “Your future depends on her being a part of this. Secrecy has its place, but not here.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

Dom said gently, “Those facilities where you were kept are not simply about experimenting on your kind and trying to produce a next generation for them to manipulate. They’re programming lycan super-soldiers whom they can control and sell to the highest bidder. I suspect they haven’t been very successful raising any young lycans. If so, after three decades of trying this, they wouldn’t have been so desperate to make you and Ky…work.”

“You think FenCor is involved?” Roman asked.

Dom nodded. “Mad Sigge started FenCor. Founded it way back in the 1970s.”

“How do you know that?” Ky asked.

Dom shrugged. “I know many things. You didn’t specifically ask.”

Roman compressed his lips before speaking. “If they get the mind control to work, it’d be highly profitable. That’s what FenCor looks for in projects.”

“There was one they got,” Vivi said. “One baby. I heard them take it from the mom and kill the mom. Who knows if it survived?”

“What?” Roman’s head recoiled.

Ky whooshed out against pressure squeezing his lungs to the point he could barely breathe. An uncontrollable shudder ripped through him.

“They have lycan babies they’ve stolen? Who they’re raising?” Flynn blurted.

Roman’s head moved slowly back and forth. “So much worse than I thought.”

“They…how could they…do you think I might’ve had…?” She gripped her throat, then pressed a hand against her breastbone. Hoarsely, she asked, “What did they do to me?”

Ky’s body turned cold. She’d been there for years. It was reasonable to assume she might’ve had a child who was taken from her. Adrenaline coursed through his body with the need to annihilate every human involved in the facilities.

“Do you want to find out?” Dom held out his hand to her. “Move, Ky.”

Ky wanted to touch her as she walked past him, but he held back. Because his body vibrated with need for revenge against what they’d done, even though he didn’t know yet exactly what that’d been. For what had been taken from her. And from him. He didn’t trust his grip on the violent energy coursing through him.

She drew in a shaky breath as she sat, careful to keep as much space between her and Dom as possible on the settee.

“This won’t hurt. I’m simply going to read…” Dom frowned as he cocked his head to view the raised pink sigil behind her left ear, similar to so many of his own. He scowled. “What powers do you have? Specifically?”

“I don’t do magic anymore.”

“You can try to disregard it all you want, but you can’t shed what you were born with. You’re an elemental. Like—”

Roman coughed, catching Dom’s attention with a wide eye and headshake.

“Like me,” Dom continued.

“What exactly are you?” She craned away from him. Ky liked her distrust of him. “You seem far more than a simple elemental.”

Dom said, “Humans have labeled me many things: druid, wizard, sorcerer, mage. Take your pick. I’ve lived for longer than you can imagine and seen too much. The power gets stronger as we age. When you live thousands of years, the power becomes less fun and more responsibility. But I am the only one of my kind left. There are others who can harness the power in bits, like you, but never all of it.”

“What’s your purpose, with your never-ending existence and all-consuming superpowers?”

He clasped his hands together in front of his face and smiled. “Are you asking if I’m on the moral right or wrong side?”

“I suppose so.”

“Whose moral compass should I be following? Yours?” He inclined his head toward the brothers. “Theirs?”

She put her hand on his arm and closed her eyes. “You believe good exists, but you don’t see good in yourself. There’s also much darkness.”

He yanked his hand away, face blanched. “You didn’t say you could read people.”

“You didn’t specifically ask.” She smirked at tossing his words back at him.

Dang, the girl had balls.

Vivi said, “That much pain makes you lose sight of goodness. Your new light might help.”

“You think so?” His anger was a palpable force that whipped through the room. Ky tensed, ready to defend her if needed, not that he was sure he’d win against Dom.

Dom waved one dismissive hand. “That’s enough.”

“Tit for tat, asshole,” she said. “You tried to read me in places I didn’t want you. Just giving you a taste of your own medicine. Stick to the parameters of this read.”

“I’m not sure if I like you.”

“I really don’t care,” she said. “I definitely don’t like you.”

The two of them stared at each other for a few tense seconds until she smiled and said, “You want to see in there as much as I want to figure out what happened. Just tell me if I…what happened.”

“I’m going to need to be in some of those places you may not want me.”

She squinted at him, then stared over his shoulder across the room. In a whisper to no one in particular, she said, “That painting is talking to me.”

Ky whipped around to stare at an oil rendering of a couple in a forest. Nothing moved or made noise. Definitely no talking. Was she losing her mind?

“What’d it say?” Dom tented his fingers in front of his mouth.

“Didn’t you hear it? It was shrill. Hurt my ears.” She remained fixated on the painting.

“The Painting of Destiny speaks to only one person at a time,” Dom said.

“I’ll tell what it said to you after you read the fragmented spots in my head.”

“Do you want all of it back or just for me to read it and tell you?” Dom’s eyebrows rose, but her answer didn’t surprise him.

Why the hell hadn’t Dom offered to give back all his memories? Now Ky had to corner him for more information at some point soon.

“Give it back to me,” she said.