Chapter Two, “Now you see it…”

It was after she’d been on the road an hour when Dannai felt the strangeness come over her. The warning. It was bad timing, but then people who commit murders don’t exactly plan them so that they are convenient for anyone.

Somewhere, someone innocent was in mortal danger. Right now in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lily Kane, formerly Lily St. Claire, was having a vision of a grisly murder. At the same time, somewhere in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one Claire St. James, also known as Charlie, was noticing the red marks on the insides of her arms begin to glow. And because those things were happening to her dear friends, Dannai felt the warning too. It was like a humming in her blood, unpleasant and sudden and horribly urgent.

With practiced speed, Danny glanced in the rear-view mirror, down-shifted the Shelby, and pulled the vehicle over to the side of the road. There were no stations anywhere for miles in either direction. She should know; she’d made this drive enough times to have it memorized.

But the route up 101 was a scenic one, and the tourism business had called for the state to carve “look-out” points along the road so that people could pull over, break out their cameras, and snap a few keepers of the shoreline or the redwoods.

It was one such viewing spot that Danny now pulled the Shelby into and then shut it down. The small lot was empty, save for her own jet-black car. This late at night, this far from any cities or towns, there were no lights to illuminate the scenery. The early September night was black, and the sea was blacker. There was nothing to witness – no view to be viewed.

Danny turned off the lights and wasted a little energy placing a shielding spell over the vehicle. The magic she applied simply blended the car into the scenery behind it, and she prayed she wouldn’t be gone long. For so many reasons.

Danny got out of the car and closed the door, stepping away from it to summon some more of her power. As she raised her arms at her sides to transport herself to her friends’ psychic signals, she noticed the heaviness in her limbs.

Imani was right. Danny was tired. She had healed so many people lately. She’d had to keep her shield up so strong because she’d been working around alpha male werewolves. And those damned dreams haunted her night times, stealing her sleep and negating any rest she would otherwise have had.

She was growing weak.

Just let me get through tonight’s ordeal, she thought, and then I’ll get some sleep.

Her magic answered her call, surrounding her in a vortex of shifting power that melted the world around her – and then solidified it once more. Danny lowered her arms and looked around.

She was in a vast space. It was dark. There was damp; she could hear the echoing drip of something remnantly wet somewhere nearby. There was a cloying scent of rotting garbage.

There was also a sound like whimpering; soft, unsure, and muffled. Something shifted, scraping against the concrete. Danny slowly turned in place, her gemstone eyes searching through the darkness. A light spell would have cut through it. But she didn’t dare, because it appeared that she had arrived first this time. It happened every once in a while. Every now and then, Lily’s visions were so clear and so emotionally distracting that Lily left a bit of herself behind within them. When that happened, Dannai’s transportation magic would go awry, locating itself to Lily’s mental impression – instead of to Lily herself.

Danny wondered what Lily had seen in that vision. What was so bad this time that it left the seer so emotionally distraught? Whatever it was, Danny was fairly certain she was about to find out.

“I can hear you breathing.”

Danny stilled, silencing her breath. The voice had been a man’s. It was thin and grated and too high pitched.

“I saw you arrive. If you’ve been sent by him, have you come to help? Or to stop me?”

Another shift and scrape against the concrete. Danny readied a spell on the tip of her tongue, feeling the power she called go coursing through her arms and down to her fingertips. Ready and waiting.

And then the world was awash in red, as if a stop light had exploded. In the few seconds that it bathed the interior of the large open space, Danny was able to make out two tiny, bound forms laying atop a dirty mattress. She saw a man seated in a chair beside them. He was undressed. There was a knife in his hand. A lighter in the other.

He was looking at Danny with a strange kind of expectation; his expression was slanted and off. He was too thin. Hungry. His teeth were yellow.

There was a sucking sound, a separation of air as something forced its way into a space where nothing had been a moment before. Then it sealed back up again like thunder, leaving behind two tall, lean forms with glowing eyes.

Surrounding the newcomers was a dim aura of light, as if they’d wrapped themselves in it and brought it with them, just in case.

Charlie! Lily! Danny called out to them mentally, letting them know she was there. She rarely used this form of communication, as it felt claustrophobic and invasive and was on the more draining side. But it seemed natural now.

The girls turned to face her and even through the dim light, she could see that they both looked relieved. Danny’s gaze flicked from them to the children on the mattress. They were laying with their backs to one another, their wrists bound together. They couldn’t have been more than six years old. One boy, one girl, both stripped of everything but the ropes that bit into their tender flesh and the gags that muffled their sobs.

There was no blood yet, but even so, Dannai tamped down the vomit that immediately swelled from her stomach to her esophagus and winced as it burned on its way back down. She wouldn’t be able to keep it there. Not for long.

She looked back up at Charlie and Lily. Charlie’s real name was Claire St. James. The turned werewolf stood a touch taller than Lily, her long and lithe musculature the result of being a female born werewolf, enhanced by the fact that she was also a dormant and had been turned by her fiancé, Malcolm Cole, two months ago. The fact that she’d been training in martial arts for more than a decade didn’t hurt.

Her long, thick, strawberry blonde hair was pulled back into a pony tail at the moment and she wore no make up. She didn’t need any. On her wrists were leather bands, much like the ones that her mate, Malcolm Cole used to wear. For Charlie, they served two purposes. They absorbed any sweat she created while playing the drums. And they hid the ancient gypsy curse that marked the insides of her arms.

Beside her, Lily Kane, formerly Lily st. Claire, spun toward the children on the mattress a few yards away, her long, gold hair fanning out in a halo of honey-shimmer behind her. Lily’s stark amber eyes flashed with both pain and anger as she took in the tiny forms that she had most likely witnessed in her vision, bound and helpless and naked on the filth of the mattress beneath them.

Lily had become a werewolf two years ago, when she’d mated with one Daniel Kane, police chief of Baton Rouge, and alpha male to the extreme. They made a striking pair, even if both were so head strong that their marriage often times found itself on rocky ground.

One clean swipe of Lily’s sharp extended claw had the children’s wrists unbound. But the two tiny forms remained where they were, trembling violently and otherwise unmoving, too traumatized to do anything else.

The man in the chair stood. “You haven’t come to help, then.” His reedy voice shook with insanely calm rage, and the knife in his hand glimmered, flashing against the magical aura surrounding the women.

“You sick, sorry son of a bitch,” came Charlie’s voice. Her ice blue eyes were glowing in warning. Her teeth were bared, her fangs elongated.

Dannai took all of this in within seconds. Sheer, precious seconds that gave her a feel for the situation so that she could summon any magic they might need to get them all through this without inviting tragedy.

The man lunged toward Charlie.

But Charlie was a martially trained werewolf and mate to Malcolm Cole, perhaps the most powerful werewolf aside from the Overseer. She carried his magic in her veins. And his curse on her wrists. Both were a boon to her now, in a time like this, when right needed a lot of help and wrong needed to be vanquished.

Charlie lunged forward as well. However, where as the naked man stumbled across the concrete, his knife hand flashing in warning, Charlie seemed to move without any warning at all. Her beautiful form blurred into motion. It stood in one place one second – and was on top of the would-be rapist and killer in the next.

Dannai closed her eyes when Charlie ripped out the man’s throat. She always closed her eyes. She couldn’t stand to see it; couldn’t stand to watch it. She could still hear it, and that was bad enough.

She knew that Charlie didn’t want to do what she did, that she didn’t want to be the assassin in their trio of supernatural saviors. But Danny, the witch, was not allowed to kill. If she ever used her magic to do such mortal harm…. Well, it was a road she could not go down, for so many reasons. Their choice was to either allow Charlie to destroy every criminal they engaged, or restrain those criminals and chance the authorities.

In the end, all three women felt that they could not afford to allow an imperfect judiciary system to help criminals as sick as these back onto the streets where they could do more irreparable harm.

It was a pact they’d made two months ago, when they’d begun this routine. If they were going to be called by the Fates to fight this kind of fight – then they were going to fight it their way.

So, Charlie killed. She did it so that Lily wouldn’t have to. She did it because she was the fighter in the group, and that was the power she had to offer. It tore Malcolm Cole apart. It tore Lily and Dannai apart. But Charlie bore the burden with incredible strength and determined purpose. If it were not for her, so many innocent women and children would be dead – raped, mutilated, tortured, missing.

While Charlie finished off the children’s abductor, Danny turned away and ran to join Lily by the bed. Lily was now holding both children, taking off her own sweater to wrap them both up in it. This is what Lily did.

Her visions led her and her two friends to the sites of the crimes they were fated to stop. Her skills as a social worker and her love for the human race in general helped ease the trauma of the dark events for the victims they saved.

And now it was Danny’s turn. As the most powerful witch in the most powerful coven in the world, it was Danny’s unique healing touch and her ability to make particularly traumatized women and children forget what they have gone through, that was required.

Danny’s powers helped them heal, both physically and mentally, so that they could get on with their lives and leave the past behind.

Danny knelt beside Lily and looked into her friend’s golden eyes; Lily nodded. Danny’s gaze skirted to the two children. They were tow-headed, both blue-eyed and pale-skinned. They had a few bruises here and there, but other than the scratches left by the ropes at their wrists, they were physically unharmed. It required only a very quick psychic evaluation of their minds to determine that neither child had yet been sexually violated.

Danny and her friends had made it in time again. Danny closed her eyes, held her hands palm-down over each child’s head, and whispered the quiet words of an incantation. To the children, it sounded like a lullaby, soft and sweet and pure.

And it was this tender thought that carried them off into their healing sleep as Danny released another, separate tendril of power that wove its way gently through the children’s bodies, repairing broken blood vessels, stretched or torn tendons or muscles, and easing away any visible signs of bruising.

Charlie joined them once more, her forearms covered in blood that was not hers.

From where she was knelt beside Lily and the children, Danny waved a quick hand over her friend’s upper body and the blood was gone.

Charlie looked down at her now clean hands and exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Danny nodded and smiled.

Charlie was a little shaken up, Danny could tell. She always was after a kill. The blood awakened a hunger in her; and the prey awakened disgust. The dichotomy of the cruel and inevitable situation was one that often haunted Charlie, though she would never admit it. But there was no way out of this duty of theirs. And even if there was… would they take it?

“You look tired, Danny,” Lily spoke softly from where she cradled the two sleeping children in her lap. The thin gold chain she wore around her neck held a single enchanted pearl, which nestled in the hollow of her throat. It was a gift from Danny and it allowed her to transport to the scenes of her visions. It would also take her back to her gorgeous and swarthy, if a bit difficult, alpha werewolf husband when this was all finished, but not before Charlie’s curse took her back. They never had much time.

“I’m fine,” Danny said, brushing off the question as she knew a friend should never do. Lily gave her a rueful look, but left it alone. For now.

“I’ll take them to Council headquarters,” Lily said, looking down at the children asleep in her lap. “They’ll reunite them with their families.”

Danny nodded.

“Gotta go, guys. We still on for next Saturday?” Charlie asked.

Danny and Lily glanced toward her. She was gazing down at her arms. A warm red glow emanated from beneath the leather bands she wore around her wrists. It was time for her to go.

“Ten o’clock, girl,” Danny told her. “And it’s girls’ night only,” she reminded her. “Which means you’ll have to shake that green-eyed fiancé of yours.” This was neither the time nor the place to talk about dance club hopping. The very idea of it, to anyone witnessing the scene, would have been surreal.

But these days, these slight moments they possessed together after their jobs were done were almost all the trio had. They had been far too busy lately. The world was going to shit.

“Got it. See you then.” Charlie smiled a beautiful, weary smile. And then there was a red flash – and she was gone.

Lily stood next, cradling the children. A human woman would have had trouble with their combined weight. But Lily wasn’t human. She glanced down, readjusted their weight so that it was more even, and then her gold gaze once more cut to Danny. “Something’s going on with you, Danny. You’ve got shadows under those stained glass eyes.”

Danny didn’t say anything to that. Where would she start? The dreams? Or the two very dangerous alphas in the dreams? She should have seen this coming; she was a dormant, just like Lily and Charlie. She was tall and thin, like they were. Her eyes were stark and different, just like theirs. She was involved with the werewolves in some way – just as they had been. When she really thought about it, she was surprised the dreams hadn’t come sooner. There was so much she wanted to tell Lily.

But there was no time. So, she just shrugged.

“I’ve got a feeling about you, sweetie,” Lily told her, her shimmering eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “And when I get enough alcohol down your throat on Saturday, you’re damn well gonna tell me what it is, my friend.”

At that, Danny smiled. Lily was probably right on that count. She was the seer, after all.

“Gotta go.” Lily’s pearl began to shed a warm, white light. She hugged the sleeping children tighter to her, smiled one last time at Dannai, and then she too was gone.

Danny stood alone in the clammy, damp warehouse that was beginning to smell of blood. It was a rusty kind of scent that joined the other stenches already prevalent in the would-be crime scene. In the stretching silence, the sound of something dripping somewhere once more reached Danny’s ears. Car horns honked at each other in the distance. The mattress at her feet reeked of urine.

Suddenly Danny felt very tired indeed.

But it was her job, as always, to get rid of the evidence. It was left to her to clean the slate so that the victims could go on with their lives without questions from the authorities.

With what strength she could marshal, Dannai walked toward the fallen body of the man who had planned unspeakable things – and she closed her eyes once more. Again, the bile threatened. Again, she tamped it down and focused.

Pure, she thought. New. Be clean….

She raised her arms at her sides and light began to gather in her palms. It was a green light, reminiscent of a freshly mowed lawn or the flash one sees on the horizon before the sun goes down. It was this glowing jade newness that spread from her out-stretched hands and into the moldy darkness of the warehouse beyond. It touched upon the mattress, and as it passed over, the bed lightened to a bright white, its dank stench lifting until it smelled of nothing but cotton and coils and preservant.

The green light continued, racing along the ground like an emerald flash flood, cleansing everything in its path. The blood disappeared, the evidence vanished. And when the bleaching light reached the body that Charlie had left behind, it leapt over the fallen form, enveloping it tightly.

Dannai grimaced with the effort it took to do away with something so large that was once alive. But she managed, if barely.

And a few seconds later, the green light receded, racing back into Danny’s body with a rush and an exhaled breath.

The kidnapper’s body was gone.

Danny fell to her knees on the ground beneath her. Her body was trembling. Sweat had gathered on her upper lip. Her breathing was quick and ragged. Dizziness waited for her, barely kept at bay.

She needed to get home. Soon. And when she did, she needed to sleep for a week.

Danny tried to stand, stumbling a little as that dizziness finally washed over her, a triumphant, insidious tide. She braced herself beside a concrete pillar, closing her eyes against the tilting darkness. “Come on, Danny. I know it’s been a long night, girl. But you just need to use a little more….” A little more magic. Enough to get her back to Thor. That was all.

Danny opened her eyes and knew what she had to do. It was a last resort and one she wouldn’t even contemplate under any but the most necessary conditions.

She let her shield fall, allowing the scent of her dormancy to re-establish itself around her. It felt strange to suddenly be without the cover she had worn for so long. It was a little like going without underwear or forgetting to buckle her seat belt.

But it freed up a bit of her power. It would be enough to make it back to her car.

Quickly, Danny used the newly acquired strength and transported herself back to that spot on the side of the road on the West coast. The sound of the surf and the salty breeze that wafted through her hair were an instant reward for her efforts. Thor was still there, as liquid black and darkly beautiful as he had always been.

Danny had never been so glad to see him. She strode to the driver’s side door, opened it, and slid behind the wheel, shutting the door behind her. The scent of leather enveloped her in a warm, welcome embrace. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

Then she opened the storage compartment between the seats and pulled out a bottled water and a dark chocolate candy bar. She kept the stash there for emergencies – and as far as she was concerned, this qualified.

She carefully unwrapped the bar, making certain not to drop any chocolate flakes anywhere in the car. Not that she couldn’t have simply willed them away later, but it was best to be careful to begin with.

She ate in silence, allowing the energy the sugar and caffeine provided to infiltrate her weakened body and awaken her tired mind. While she chewed the bits of coated nut, nougat and caramel, she thought of the sea and the incoming, rolling bank of fog half a mile out. She thought of the stars above her, half-hidden behind an impending gray. She thought of her dreams.

She thought of everything and anything but the scene she’d just left, because if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to get the chocolate down.

Finally, she was done with the bar. It had afforded her just enough energy that she might be able to throw her shield back up if she absolutely had to. But for now, she was going to leave it down and spare herself the work.

She took a long swig of her water, re-capped the bottle and placed it back in the storage compartment. Next, she crumpled the candy bar wrapper and shoved it into her purse, throwing her purse into the back seat of the car.

She started Thor, peeked in the rear view mirror, and pulled out of the viewing lot.

* * * *

It had been two months since he’d set out on his own. It didn’t take long for that first tank of gas to run out, and when it had, Lucas Caige had simply filled it back up again and kept on going. He’d had no destination in mind. He simply needed the movement, the road, and the freedom that came with two wheels, a bit of gasoline, and a lot of wind.

So, he’d gone from Vegas to Phoenix. Then up to Salt Lake City. He’d driven through Wyoming; stopped in Billings, Montana. He’d then ridden on into Seattle, where he met up with some old buddies of his.

The group of them had gone together into Oregon and camped out near Eugene. And then Lucas had continued on his own. He was still uncertain. Something was still under his skin. So, he kept going; heading South into northern California alone.

Now…. There was a strangeness settling over him. A sort of peace, maybe. It was almost lethargic. He simply didn’t want to go any further.

Maybe he was just tired.

After all, there wasn’t much for a werewolf to eat on the open road. Wolves weren’t overly fond of candy bars and bags of chips. There were only so many jack rabbits a predator could stomach and frankly, he was getting tired of washing the blood off in dank motel showers.

After sixty days, Caige was ready to pull over. He was finally ready to stay in one place, in one bed, for longer than a single night. He was tired of washing his clothes at Laundromats and more than a little weary of the untrusting glances he got from dry cleaners when he took his leather jacket and boots in to get them cleaned.

He knew what they thought of him.

Scooter trash. Scum. An animal.

If they only knew.

As it was, they were more than a little surprised when he never failed to produce a shining credit card or a large roll of cash.

He sighed. It didn’t matter.

It was time for a long, hot bath, a warm woman, and a soft bed that had never been slept in by anyone else. Wolves were sensitive to these kinds of things. The stench of a thousand bodies and all of their sweaty nightmares and sticky fantasies could become overwhelming at times.

He’d gone far enough. This was as good a place to settle down for a bit as any.

That’s what he was thinking when the black Bugatti coming in the opposite direction suddenly swerved into his lane. He knew the incredibly expensive car by its headlights; it was a luxury vehicle and he was good at identifying that sort of thing. Not that it mattered.

Lucas had almost no time to react. A split second, that was all.

He leaned to the right, taking the bike off of the road and onto the shoulder. But the Bugatti kept coming. It sped completely through his lane and continued toward him, crossing the thick white line that braced the shoulder. Caige had no choice but to lay the bike down.

The night was dark; the moon and stars had been hidden by the thick blanket of fog that had rolled over the coastal road less than half an hour earlier. He had no idea what lay beyond the shoulder. How steep was the fall? How far down did it go? And what waited at the bottom?

Whatever it was, he would most likely live through it. It was his bike he was worried about.

As soon as he’d leveled the motorcycle and disconnected himself from its skidding body, the Bugatti crunched into the bike’s front tire, seemingly intent on running the two-wheeler completely over. It was an impressive feat; there wasn’t much clearance beneath the sports car.

It also meant that the driver was determined. This wasn’t an accident.

Lucas managed to roll out of the way just before the car would have sped over him as well. The sound of metal being chewed to bits, the sparks flying, the stench of spilled fuel was truly horrible. He knew his bike was toast.

As the offending sports car re-directed itself and screamed toward him, Lucas let himself drop off of the side of the road and into the nothingness beyond.

* * * *

Dannai loved the fog. It made her feel as if the rest of the world had disappeared for a while. What a magic trick that would be. It was peaceful and welcome and, in the decade that she had lived in Trinidad, she had never once grown weary of it.

Tonight, the fog had come in with what seemed a sense of purpose. It was thicker than normal, obscuring Danny’s view of anything beyond twenty or thirty feet in front of her car.

She took it slowly and let the Metallica, Rush and Nickelback pouring from her stereo beat the tension out of her muscles and sweep the worry from her mind with their demanding drum beats and impossible guitar solos.

She sighed as Tom Sawyer forced her to ease back into her seat and take a deep breath.

Something flashed through the fog up ahead. Danny downshifted, easing off of the gas. She squinted through the swirling mists and slowly took in the scene as a tangled mass of metal and torn rubber came into view.

It had once been a motorcycle; that much Danny could tell from its remains. But someone had destroyed it. A cold ball of lead sank into Danny’s stomach as she put on the brakes and searched for any sign of its rider.

Her heartbeat quickened when a tall form came climbing up over the ledge of the drop-off. He was dressed in black leather. The rider.

He’s walking. Which meant that he’d survived the crash. Danny sighed a breath of relief and parked the car in front of the motorcycle’s wreckage, shifting it into first just as the fallen rider managed the last leg of his climb back up and his boots hit pavement.

Danny rolled down her window and stuck her head out.

“Are you alright?” she called back to the man, who had his back turned toward her as he viewed the ruins of his bike with what must have been a very deep sense of regret. Danny could imagine that kind of pain. She’d hate to see anything happen to Thor.

She watched the man as she waited for an answer. He was tall and the view of him from behind was not at all unpleasant. His black jeans hugged the muscles of his legs in nothing short of a sexual taunt. His ass had to be the most perfect ass Danny had ever laid eyes on. And the broad back and thick arms encased in the leather jacket he wore were nothing to laugh at either.

He had jet-black hair that fell just to his shoulders, wavy and unkempt in that manner that she’d always found so attractive. Daniel Kane had hair like that. In fact, from behind, this man reminded her a lot of Lily’s husband.

Holy shit, she thought, suddenly. That’s not Daniel, is it? What would he be doing way out here?

But when the tall, well-built man finally turned around to face her, the expression on his handsome face a mixture of grief and gratefulness, Danny at once realized that it was not in fact Daniel Kane.

It was Lucas Caige.