What would adding another apprentice do to our dynamic?
“Where’s this new Wanderer located?” I asked as I finally realized how long I’d been lost in thought.
“He’s in Cancun, Mexico at the moment, but you can probably catch up with him at New Braunfels, Texas,” Verðandi said.
“New Braunfels?” Tess said softly.
“Yes.”
I felt a chill go through me. Premonition is not a trait of Wanderers, but for once, I thought it might be. “Who is this new person?”
“Alexander Dockerty, your son.”
Chapter 9
Therese
I felt like saying, “Shut the front door!” Or something equally inane, but the truth was that I was too shocked to say a word. I just stared at Verðandi and waited for the punch line. She had to be wrong. We’d left Alex safe and well at his motel in New Braunfels back in November. He wasn’t a soldier, hell; he managed a restaurant and motel. How could he be chosen a Wanderer?
I was still staring at Verðandi when Rafe voiced my thoughts.
“What are you talking about, Verðandi? My son isn’t a soldier. He couldn’t have died on a battlefield in the short time since we left him.”
“Yeah,” I said, sticking my two cents worth in. “I talked to him a couple days ago; he was relaxing on a beach in Mexico.”
Rafe turned to look at me his eyes wide. I thought he was going to say something, but then he shrugged.
Rafe held out the wyvern and I took the small creature gently in both my hands. It was still munching on the bite of protein bar, but was studying my other hand, the one that held the rest of the bar. I held it out to Bruno and it grasped the bar with its wing claws and shoved an inch of it into its mouth.
“Feeding a young wyvern will bond it to you, especially when you’ve given it some of your blood,” Verðandi said.
“What? Oh, I didn’t realize that,” I said.
“That much was obvious,” Rafe said to me. “Just like you haven’t mentioned your talking with Alex lately. Verðandi, Alex couldn’t be in the military. Someone has given you bad information.”
Okay, maybe I didn’t tell Rafe how often Alex and I talked, but in my defense, Rafe never gave any indication that he wanted to know. He’d promised to tell Alex that he was his father the next time we met, but he’d always given me the impression that he expected it to be years in the future. I think Rafe was just trying to avoid Alex learning that he’d killed Laura, Alex’s mother.
Verðandi frowned and looked disappointed. “Raphael, I do not make mistakes about such things. Alex died earlier today in a fight while trying to save a young woman. He fought bravely and distinguished himself well enough to be selected as an apprentice Wanderer.”
“But this is screwy. I’ve never heard of the offspring of a Wanderer becoming one,” Rafe said, obviously as reluctant as I was to believe Alex had died today.
“Just because you haven’t heard of it before, doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened more than once in the past. I have been watching over the Wanderers since before recorded history. You think you know more than I about the selection of Wanderers?” Verðandi asked with scorn in her voice.
Rafe stared at her and I managed to keep my mouth shut. It wasn’t easy. Alex, dead, and now an apprentice like me? Unbelievable.
When Rafe spoke, his voice had the same tone as Verðandi’s. “Perhaps, Verðandi, if you were to explain how these things occur, I wouldn’t be so willing to doubt you. In the decades that I’ve served you, you’ve only appeared to me on rare occasions. Even when you have appeared, you’ve never revealed anything more about yourself and the Wanderers than you absolutely had to.”
Verðandi stared at her last remaining Wanderer (if you don’t count the apprentice as being a Wanderer, yet). Then she looked at me and I saw her eyes softening. “Raphael, I’ve done what I thought best.”
“Yeah, and see what that got us.” Rafe snapped. “You let Rowle kill all the other Wanderers before warning me. If we’d had a chance to stand together, we could have stopped him without so much bloodshed.”
Verðandi shrank back a little under Rafe’s outburst, but then she drew herself up to her full height. “You do not question my actions, Wanderer. Your power and your second chance at life is through my power, not your own. You think just because you have so much power you can question Fate herself? I see things that are unfathomable to you. I am the one who knows what will happen when a butterfly’s wings stir the air. Not you, none of you see what I see.”
Rafe wasn’t backing down. In fact, he stepped closer to her, until they were almost nose-to-nose.
“You told me that there is no geas holding me to your service. You are the one who implied that I could do as Rowle did and turn my back
