Beta (33 page)

“Deirdre,” said a man.

She turned to see a familiar face waiting for her. He stood beyond the bushes in an endless, grassy field, where the beginnings of dawn tinted the night sky a paler shade of sapphire touched with fiery orange.

“Daddy?” she asked.

Alasdair Tombs was so much shorter than she remembered, only an inch taller than Deirdre was now. He had always seemed impossibly huge to her—so big that nothing could have ever hurt him, or gotten between them. But he was small now. Just a man.

He looked a lot like Deirdre in many ways. They had the same little gap between their front teeth. His hair was curlier, a little lighter, almost more brown than black. But that wide smile was all his.

“I hoped I wouldn’t see you so soon, Deirdre,” he said. “It’s too early.”

She laughed and tried to step out of the blackberry bushes. They were too dense for her to push through. “What are you talking about? It’s been years. I’d say it’s about damn time I got here.”

“No, baby girl.” He wasn’t trying to reach out for her. He looked so sad. “This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. You’ve got business to take care of. A whole life.”

The blackberry bushes tugged more sharply as Deirdre tried to break free. She was starting to get annoyed. She wanted to join her father in the grassy fields, not remain all tangled up in thorns. “I didn’t ever want to take care of business on my own in the first place. Help me get out of these bushes. They pinch.”

Alasdair Tombs remained impassive.

Anger and grief twisted within Deirdre’s chest.

“Come on, Daddy!”

“I can’t,” he said. “You know I can’t. That’s not how it works.”

“Why not? Don’t you want me to come back?” She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I want to be with you.”

His eyebrows creased. “I know, baby girl.”

It had been so long since anyone called her that. The sound of it hurt all over.

But most of the pain was in her chest.

Deirdre touched her fingers to her breast. She couldn’t seem to look down to see herself, but she felt warm blood slicking her hand. It pulsed from between her fingers. She was bleeding.

Tombs.

Her heart leaped.

Somehow Alasdair Tombs was further away than he’d been moments earlier. He wasn’t just beyond arm’s reach now. He was on the next hill, a distant point so small that she could no longer make out the gap in his teeth that she’d inherited from him.

“Daddy!” Deirdre cried, holding her arms out.

She couldn’t hear his response. The wind was picking up now.

Dawn erupted, engulfing her in sudden heat so intense that it felt as though the sun had fallen onto the fields. Its fiery blaze made the grass catch. Flames swept in rippling orange waves to encircle Deirdre’s feet.

The blackberry bushes ignited.

She sucked in a breath to shout to her father, but there was no oxygen left. She was hot—so hot. Deirdre was consumed.

But she wasn’t afraid.

The fire felt right. It was a piece of her, as natural as the breath from her lungs.

Her father was beyond it all. It formed a wall that couldn’t be breached between them.

“Daddy!”

If he was yelling back at her, she couldn’t hear it. The roar of the fire filled her ears. It buoyed her up, lifting her into a vast, sunny sky, where it never rained and it was always warm.

Her arms spread. Her chest bled.

And Deirdre finally flew.

When Everton Stark had woken up that morning, he had planned on doing two things. First, he’d planned to save Deirdre Tombs from the Office of Preternatural Affairs, killing anyone who got in his way. And second, he’d planned that he and Tombs would get revenge upon the sidhe.

He was a man who liked having a plan.

Too bad everything was rapidly going to hell.

His wife’s compulsion rattled through him. It suffused every atom of his bones and muscles. It filled his every thought until there was nothing but those words:
Shapeshift. Now
.

It hurt. It hurt more than anything he’d experienced before.

Stark pushed against Rhiannon’s compulsion, railing against it. But it was like a vortex sucking him into the depths of a bottomless ocean. It dragged him down, ever lower, into a chasm where there was nothing but her command.

Shapeshift.

You’re too weak
.

Stark had last seen Rhiannon shortly before Genesis. He had been searching through a hospital’s security footage for signs of his family, and he had discovered that Rhiannon had been there just one week earlier.

In the footage, Stark had seen that her hair had been pulled back into a practical knot. She had been wearing a men’s leather jacket that had dwarfed her body, making her shapeless and masculine. But Stark had recognized her hands.

He’d never forgotten her hands. The shape of her knuckles, the angle of her wrists.

For Ever
, she had whispered when she handed him that watch so many years earlier. The links of the wristband had been draped over her fingers, jingling softly as they swayed. He would never forget what her hands looked like.

Her voice filled him.

For Ever.

Shapeshift. Now
.

Stark was paralyzed by the change, locked in a battle against himself, trapped halfway between human and animal.

His hands dug into the floor. He wanted to stand up and use those claws against someone who deserved them—someone like Niamh—but if he moved an inch, he would move in many other ways. He would lose control. He was already on the brink, and it would take so little to push him over the edge.

Good gods, did he want to kill Niamh. The swanmay’s knife was still drenched in Tombs’s blood.

And Tombs was dead.

She wasn’t paralyzed by magic, like Vidya was. A valkyrie was far more difficult to kill than that. Even before Vidya had been reborn as a gaean, she had been the strongest of their unit in the Marines. She would survive.

But a shifter? A fragile Omega like Tombs, with a blade buried in her back?

She was surely dead.

“Hurry, Niamh,” Rhiannon said. “I can’t hold the portal much longer. Melchior must be unconscious.” She beckoned to Niamh and her boyfriend.

“No,” Stark growled. “Traitor.” He wasn’t certain that anyone could understand him anymore.

“I’m sorry, Stark,” Niamh said, eyes shimmering with tears. They spilled down her cheeks. “I had to.”

Vertebrae twisted inside Stark’s body, grinding against the muscle. He felt them pop. They were trying to extend into a tail. Stark pushed against it, drawing his energy within himself, trying not to hear his wife’s lingering command.

Shapeshift
.

There was a sense of permanence in that word. If he changed by her command, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to change back.

“
Tombs
,” Stark said from between his gritted teeth.

“Aw, come on. You sound so pathetic. But don’t waste time mourning your Beta,” Kristian said. He stepped up to the portal, agile on the ice. Of course he was comfortable walking on ice. He was from the damn Winter Court. “She betrayed you first. She’s been lying to you this entire time.”

“No,” Stark said.

It was impossible. She’d shot Gage without needing to be compelled. She had helped rescue Vidya from the detention center. He had seen the joy in her eyes when she put a bullet in Dr. Landsmore’s head.

“It’s true,” Niamh said. “When you gave her a day off in the city, we followed her to see what she was doing. We saw her coming out of a basement where she’d been talking to a witch—someone named Brianna Dimaria, who we tracked back to an office in Las Vegas. Do you know who Brianna Dimaria is? She’s an ally of Rylie Gresham’s.”

It didn’t mean anything. Tombs could have been merely seeking information.

There was no way to ask her now.

Tombs was crumpled only a few feet away, beyond his reach, where he couldn’t have acted in time to save her. He’d watched Niamh lifting the knife and known what she was going to do and he’d had no choice but to remain frozen in Rhiannon’s compulsion.

Stupid woman.
She might not have been dead if she hadn’t been trying to protect Niamh.

Fur swept down Stark’s shoulders, carpeting his arms.

He wouldn’t succumb.

Stark stared at his arms until the hair fell out again, puddling on the floor surrounding his hands and knees.

He was regaining ground. He was going to win.

Kristian slipped through the portal to the Middle Worlds.

Niamh threw the mass of black feathers around her shoulders. It was as long as a cloak, and when it closed around her body, she changed.

Her body grew, her feet changed, the world shimmered with unseelie magic.

Within seconds, she was no longer a woman, but a bird. Niamh hadn’t become the elegant white swan she was meant to be, but a hulking black thing, more like a vulture or the ugliest eagle he’d ever seen.

Niamh didn’t change above the shoulders. Her head remained.

She wasn’t a swanmay anymore. Niamh had become something else entirely.

A harpy.

She extended her wings to display the charcoal plumage that covered her body. There was pain and pride in her expression as she stretched out to her full wingspan. Stark knew what pain Niamh had endured when she lost her skin, but that pain was assuaged by her new form.

Stark had tried to give her revenge for what had happened to her. But the unseelie court had given her wings, and that was something that Niamh would have given anything to possess.

In this case, she had given Tombs’s life.

Rhiannon stroked her fingers through Niamh’s feathers. “I’ll be right behind you,” she said.

Niamh threw one last look at Tombs and then followed Kristian through the portal, flapping her wings hard against the blasting winter wind.

The entrance to the Middle Worlds was contracting to expose more of the wall behind it. Rhiannon would have to move quickly if she wanted to get through before it closed. But she was sauntering toward Tombs’s body.

“Don’t touch her,” Stark growled.

Rhiannon scooped Melchior’s gun up with one finger. It was still steaming from when Deirdre had shot him.

“My mate will want this,” she said.

The word punched through him.

Mate
.

Stark should have been her mate. They were married, for gods’ sake. They had both come back from Genesis as sidhe, so they could have been mated through magic and biology as strongly as they had been mated through law before the world ended.

But she didn’t want him.

“When I step through that portal, my magic will lift,” Rhiannon said, lashing Melchior’s revolver to her hips using cobwebs. “Your valkyrie will be fine. I won’t kill a rare gem such as her. You, however…”

She plucked the Ethereal Blade from Vidya’s immobile hands.

“I’m impressed by how well you’re resisting my command,” Rhiannon said. “Impressed, but not surprised. You were always very stubborn.”

The bone-white blade glimmered as she approached him. She made the sword look weightless, even though it must have been heavy for a woman with wrists as delicate as Rhiannon’s. She had always been stronger than she looked.

Her strength and ferocity were the things he loved about her most.

“Do you know what’s a shame?” Rhiannon asked, bending in front of him to look into Stark’s eyes. “I like you so much more than Melchior. I wish he wasn’t better than you.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Stark growled.

She drew back the sword to swing at him.

Stark finally let go.

His hands wrenched from the floor, swinging his hand at Rhiannon. His wife. The woman who had birthed his children and motivated his rebellion against Rylie Gresham.

He had changed enough that his claws remained sharp and long.

They sank easily into Rhiannon’s belly, as though she were no more solid than the cobwebs fluttering from her dress.

Stark had planned to shove his hand elbow-deep and find her heart, just as he had done with a sidhe earlier. But none of his plans were working very well that day. He saw Rhiannon’s eyes widen with shock, and he withdrew. It wasn’t even deliberate. It was instinctive.

He jerked his hand out of her body.

The blood on his claws was red.

Rhiannon stumbled away from him, panic painting her features. She stared at him, mouth open, as though words were caught just behind her teeth.

“Human blood?” Stark asked. The words didn’t come out remotely coherent this time. He was shapeshifting faster and had lost the ability to speak clearly. Even Rhiannon wouldn’t have understood what he was saying.

The portal irised behind her. Rhiannon’s dress whipped around her as she darted toward it. She stumbled over her skirt.

Groaning, she clutched at her wounded belly as human blood gushed over her hands, slicking the ice at her feet.

Stark lunged after her. “Rhiannon!” he roared, snapping at her dress with silver fangs, snagging the material in his canines. The cobwebs ripped off of her dress and stuck to his lips. They stung his face.

The Ethereal Blade almost slipped from Rhiannon’s fingers, but she caught it as she stumbled through the portal.

She was beyond his reach.

Her image rippled as though on the other side of an ocean. She glared at him from the Middle Worlds, skin frosted by winter and blood loss, fist tight on the Ethereal Blade.

Stark couldn’t hear her through the division between worlds, but he saw her lips move silently.

Soon. Ever
.

The portal slammed shut.