Wrath

“I know,” I said with a small smile. “I agree with you. But . . .”

“If you are wrong . . .” Blossom continued.

“We can’t take the chance there are Amadis locked up somewhere, too,” Char finished, “being treated like animals.”

So Blossom and I tried her spell one more time while they created a strategy to make our move on the DoD building.

And the break we needed came. We locked on to Dorian again.

He was with Owen, and they were on the move. Once again, we all rushed for the motorcycles. My heart stuttered for a moment when I sensed them quickly approaching our direction. Could Owen actually be bringing him to us?

No. They went right on by us. But now we knew where they were, and we sped after them. Owen drove a white two-seater Mercedes-Benz, practically flying down the country roads. We closed in on him, but he sped up. Right when Tristan said to make our move, another sports car flew out in front of us. A black BMW, right on Owen’s tail. Kali and someone else—another Daemoni—were inside. Tristan eased off the gas, and everyone else eased back, too.

“What the hell, Tristan?” I demanded. “Let’s get him!”

“Give me a minute,” he said as the cars pulled farther away from us. “We don’t know who’s with Kali, and she and Owen are pretty formidable by themselves. We don’t want Dorian involved in the crossfire.”

I groaned with frustration, but when the two cars rounded a corner and we could no longer see them, I couldn’t hold back a minute longer. If only I were driving. “Come on, let’s go before they get away!”

Tristan must have agreed because he gripped the accelerator and twisted, pushing the motorcycle to its top speed. Our knees practically slid over the ground when we made the tight turn. The two cars were about two hundred yards ahead, then . . . they disappeared. But not like they were suddenly cloaked. The cars disappeared front to back, as though they drove into or through something. But nothing was there.

We all came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the road.

“Why are we stopping?” I practically yelled.

“Yeah, what the hell?” Vanessa asked. “They’re getting away!”

“We don’t know what that is,” Tristan said through his teeth. He dismounted the bike and strode up to the place where the cars had disappeared, studying it with deep concentration.

Charlotte appeared by his side. She moved her hands in front of her, creating a ball of yellow light, then grew it larger before throwing it up in the air. An outline of what almost looked like a large door briefly appeared, a different landscape beyond it than the actual landscape in front of us. Tristan stuck his hand through it and left it there while the outline and the image beyond disappeared.

“It’s cold and wet,” he said, his brows pushing together as he held his damp hand up as proof. Here was a hot, humid day with not a single cloud in the sky.

“Huh,” Charlotte muttered. We all looked at her. “I’ve never seen a real one.”

“What?” I demanded, ready for her to deem it safe so we could go.

“It’s a portal,” Vanessa said as she walked up to it, and something caused my hackles immediately to rise.

“Of course,” Tristan said, his voice low as he tried to study what could not be seen.

Charlotte turned to Vanessa and eyed her with the same suspicion I felt. “How do you know? These are very rare. Only used by the occasional—”

“Sorcerer. Or, in this case, a sorceress. I’ve heard they could create them, then I saw one used. By Owen.” She peered at all of us as though surprised by our ignorance. “That’s how Kali got off the Amadis Island, of course. He never told you? She’d created a portal in case she ever needed it, and when she did, Owen followed her. I didn’t see Kali’s spirit come through—I don’t know if I could have seen it. But I was standing on the hillside in a Himalayan village when Owen seemed to fall out of a hole in the air.”

“A portal. But where does it go?” Tristan asked.

“Who cares?” I said. “Our son is there, wherever it is.”

“Right,” Vanessa agreed. “Who cares? Owen and Dorian are through there. We need to go!”

And that’s what bothered me. Was she here to help us find Dorian? Or had this always been about Owen for her? Owen, who had stolen our son. Was she trying to set us up by convincing us to go through the portal? For all we knew, Kali, Owen, and possibly even Lucas and more Daemoni waited on the other side to ambush us. Of course, she blocked out such thoughts if she had them.

“How do we know to trust it?” I asked her. “How do we know it doesn’t go straight into the heart of Hades? And regardless of your answer, why should we even trust you? For all we know, you have—” Holy shit. Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner? Any of us? It would explain her behavior and my oscillating feelings about her. I flew at the vampire and tackled her to the ground. “How do we know you don’t have a stone implanted in you? Is this Kali trying to get us to go through there?”

I palmed my dagger and slid it out of its sheath, then swiped my thumb over the amethyst. As soon as it appeared, I plunged it into the vampire’s chest. She bucked underneath me, but my rage at her betrayal—and once again at Kali—made me stronger, and I held her down with one hand while carving at her chest with the other. I drew the blade in a grotesque crisscross pattern over her heart until her porcelain skin was nothing but a shredded mess. When I realized my knife didn’t connect with a stone—wouldn’t connect with one—my rage dissipated, and she finally was able to throw me off and jump to her feet.

She held a hand over her heart, holding the pieces of skin together as they healed, and leaned over closer to me.

“Some day, little sister, you’re going to have to trust me.” She straightened up and rolled her shoulder. “For now, I’m going after your little boy, regardless of what Owen does.”

Then she sprinted down the road. In a heartbeat, the air seemed to swallow her whole.

I slowly rose to my feet, keeping my gaze on the ground with complete embarrassment over my actions. Unfortunately, running and hiding wasn’t an option this time. I wiped my blade over my pants a couple of times, then returned the dagger to its sheath.

“I’m sorry,” I said to whoever would listen, though I still stared at the ground. “It’s just . . . she came . . .”

A warm hand landed on my shoulder and squeezed.

“She came to you about the same time,” Blossom said. “I thought of it just now, too. I can’t believe none of us considered it when Sonya told us about hers.”

“Because we all know Vanessa’s really Amadis,” Sheree said. “We know it in our hearts, including you, Alexis.”

That statement didn’t make me feel any better, but I let out a breath of relief. The regret didn’t expunge with the air, but it helped to know I wasn’t the only one who suspected. I was just the only one who attacked the vamp with a silver blade and cut her all up. The only bit of mollification was that it didn’t hurt her—too badly anyway. I finally looked up at the others. Tristan, whose opinion of me I worried most about, shook his head but lifted his arm for me to walk into.

“So, mates,” Jax said, reverting our focus to the problem at hand, “are we goin’ through?”

“We have no idea what’s on the other side,” Blossom said. “And I’m with Alexis. I don’t completely trust Vanessa.”

“Except our son’s on the other side,” I muttered as I kicked a pebble in the road.

“The portal won’t last forever,” Tristan said, “from what I’ve heard about them.”

“They can close on their own,” Blossom affirmed, “but usually the creator closes it. I’m surprised Kali’s kept it open this long.”

“So she’s probably waiting for us to go through it,” Sheree said. “And now Vanessa’s there by herself.”

“Kali and Owen probably set it up so we’d chase them in,” I said. “Owen knows it would work. He knows what I would do for my son.”

“I could go through first, and if it’s safe, come back to get you mates,” Jax suggested.

“Portals don’t work that way,” Char ground out between clenched teeth as she paced back and forth on the pavement, her eyes on what appeared to be the road stretching in front of us, but her mind focused elsewhere.