Going Under (29 page)

Some of her stiffness went away but he wasn’t out of the danger zone just yet.

“I was jealous. Okay? I was jealous that Sato comforted you and made you feel better
when I should have. I wanted you to come to me to share and it didn’t matter that
you didn’t have the time to do it or that it was something you needed to address with
him.”

She kept quiet.

“Damn, you’re a hard woman. Do you still love me?”

She nodded. “You think my love is so thin and flimsy that the minute you act like
a jerk it goes away? If that was the case, I’d have been over you months ago.”

“Ouch. I guess I deserved that. What can I do to make it up to you?”

“I need you to be honest with me. I need you to tell me what’s bothering you. I need
you to share with me because that’s what you do to keep a relationship working. And
it’s a relationship. One that people will know about.”

“I never hid you. I told Rose I was dating you just yesterday.”

“This isn’t dating.”

“You’re right, you’re right. And so yes, of course one that everyone knows about because
how can I not brag when my woman looks as good as you? I’m scared. Scared of losing
you. Scared you can’t count on me to protect you. Scared you’ll look at a man like
Sato and see one who is a lot more like you than I am and you’ll regret loving me.
I know you miss your human life and I worry you’ll regret your choices and this life.”

She kissed his chest, snuggling in and he let go of the panic and fear he’d been choking
on.

“I could never regret loving you, Gage. Toshio Sato is a fine man. Intelligent and
handsome, successful even. But he’s not who I love. You’re who I love. He’s not who
I want. You’re who I want. I can’t go back to my old life. That’s been hard to accept,
but that’s reality. They won’t have me. I lost it and for a while that held me back.
But I have this life now. With you and this clan. I have friends. I have a man I love
madly. I have these awesome, growing powers and sometimes I feel . . . guilty. Guilty
for thinking they’re so cool. Guilty for feeling guilty. I like being powerful. I
like my magick. I don’t regret this life. I regret that I had to lose my old one with
so much devastation. But I don’t regret that it brought me to you.”

“I like the increase in my powers too. There’s nothing to be guilty over, your powers
shut that heckler down today. I was amazed. You were also really hot and bossy. We’re
back together then?”

“I dare you to share your fears with me from now on. As a regular thing. That’s the
only way we can do this and be successful at it. There’s too much pressure to add
unnecessary relationship strain. If you’re worried or jealous or mad, you need to
say so. Or I can’t take you back. Also if you break up with me like that again, that’ll
be the last time. A relationship has to be based on trust. I need to trust you not
to take things that are so important to me and use them to hurt me. Being in a relationship
with me isn’t a game; it’s not a tool you can use to manipulate me with. I won’t stand
for that.”

“Deal. I’m sorry. You’re totally right to be mad and hurt. It was so wrong of me.
I love you so much, Molly. Please, let’s make this work.”

“All right then. I love you too. Now, pleasure me and maybe bring me donuts later.
Tomorrow will be another fun-filled day at Clan Owen.”

He grinned, walking her backward toward the bedroom. “The cast adds a challenge, but
I’m up for it if you are.”

“I totally am.”

Turn the page for Lauren Dane’s next

Bound By Magick novel

Coming soon from Berkley Sensation!

Chapter 1

HE
tasted magick. Magick and blood rushed over his skin and through his system. His beast
surged forward as he caught a human male by the back of the neck and threw him up
against a nearby fence.

His beast raged within, aching to be let free. Aching to rip those who dared harm
his protected to small pieces.

These humans had thrown firebombs into a community center that had been full of Others
at the time. The parking lot had been full. Children had been playing on the field
out back.

If it hadn’t been for Clan Gennessee, who’d posted guards . . . Guards who’d noted
the behavior of those humans who’d attacked them, who’d acted immediately and evacuated.

His fist made contact with a man’s face, satisfaction roaring through Faine as the
human crumpled to the ground.

The air was filled with the stench of the fuel used in the firebombs. With the scent
of sweat and fear. His beast loved the latter.

Most of the humans were down, but what caught his attention was
her.

She strode through the melee like a Valkyrie. Her magick sang with each step she took.
Men fell all around her as she managed to use her fists and her power to push them
back. Her face was a mask of fury and vengeance.

He blew out a breath as he took her in from head to toe. Helena Jaansen was magnificent.

She was totally focused as they fought the humans for a few minutes more before the
threat they posed had been thoroughly dealt with. The police had not shown up yet,
though some ambulances had arrived and those who’d escaped the building when it had
been firebombed were being treated outside of the fray.

When it was over she put her fingers to her lips and whistled loudly

. Her men and women froze, turning their attention to her.

“I want a team working immediately to gather evidence. Get the kits from the van.
John and Evan, I want everything on video. The police will arrive shortly. Do not
impede them, but do not cede ground either.”

“I’ll keep an eye on these humans.” Faine spoke and she turned her attention to him.

“Yes. Thank you. Feel free to break something if they try to escape.” She turned away,
issuing orders as she went.

The police rolled up seconds later, exiting their cars with their weapons drawn.

Helena approached them, her hands up. “Nice timing. Those responsible for trying to
kill a community center full of people are all here, on the ground.”

“On the ground!” one of the officers screamed at her.

Helena looked at them. “My hands are up. I am not going to get on the ground.”

“We will shoot you if you don’t comply.”

“You can try. Or you can do your job and deal with this situation you avoided until
you figured it was over.”
Like cowards
hung in the air, unspoken, but not unheard.

She kept her hands up, but remained on her feet. “There’s video of the attack. We’ve
got a backup, just in case it gets
lost
. You’re free to look at it. My people are guarding the room where the monitors are.
It’s in a relatively unscathed part of the building. Back door, up the stairs to your
left. They know you’re on the way, but they will continue to monitor as you watch.
We’ll wait right here with our hands up while you do.”

“You don’t give the orders here.” The cop who stepped forward sneered. She was unmoved.

“Officer—” She leaned forward slightly, reading his name tag. “Officer Franklin. I’m
Helena Jaansen and as you’re too late on the scene of an assault called in twenty
minutes ago, let me catch you up to speed. I’m not giving orders. I’m letting you
know how it is. You can either protect us all, as it’s your job, or you can refuse.
In either case, I will protect my people. And you won’t stop me from protecting children
from these thugs. I have no desire to make this into an issue. But should you . . .”
She shrugged. “I’m not a defenseless four-year-old just trying to jump rope. I can
fight back.”

Another law enforcement guy came up through the crowd. “Stand down, officers,” he
called out.

Franklin looked back, clearly intending to countermand that order, but when he saw
the uniform and the big, yellow FBI letters, he stopped. “This is out of your jurisdiction.”

“You can put your hands down,” the FBI guy told Helena. She did, but she kept her
body at attention.

“Firebombs are actually firmly in our jurisdiction. Especially when it’s connected
to a nationwide crime syndicate aimed at a certain group of citizens. That’s right
smack dab in our wheelhouse.”

One of Helena’s brows rose and Faine wanted to put his lips on it.

The FBI guy looked back to Helena. “You were saying there was video of the event?”

“Marian?” One of her people approached slowly, keeping her hands in plain sight. “Can
you show Agent . . .”

“I’m Gill Anderson. Head of the new Cross Species Task Force.”

“The what?” Officer Franklin and Helena said this in unison.

“We set up this week.”

“Okay then. Marian, please show the agent up to the room with the monitors.” Helena
turned back to Anderson. “We have backups of the video, by the way. I was just telling
Officer Franklin this.”

“You don’t trust us to be fair?” Anderson asked this after one of his agents went
with Marian.

“I don’t know you one way or the other. But I do know such evidence has been
lost
more than once since this mess started. And that makes me careful. Careful keeps people
alive.”

Anderson nodded. “Fair enough. Officer Franklin, please take the humans on the ground
into custody. My people will conduct interviews at the station.”

“You can’t just jump in the middle of this!”

“I can. And I am. So, please get these men and women cuffed. Read them their rights
and throw them in cells. Separately, please.” Anderson turned back to Helena. “I’d
like to interview you and your people as well.”

“Fine.”

Faine took up a spot next to Helena. She didn’t seem to mind, but Anderson did. Too
bad.

“If any of these assholes get
lost
on the way to the station, I’m going to be vexed, Agent.”

“That would make two of us. Look, I’d prefer if we could start off on the right foot.
I
am
here to help.”

“I’m Helena Jaansen. I work for Clan Gennessee.”

Anderson looked up into Faine’s face. “Faine Leviathan. I work for her.”

Faine caught the ghost of a smile flitting over her lips. Just a brief flash before
it was gone.

“You’re a Were of some sort?”

“Of some sort.” They’d all decided not to reveal the existence of anything beyond
the Veil. For the time being, no humans needed to know a damned thing about Lycia
or the packs of Lycians, part man, part giant wolf, who dominated it.

Helena decided to forge ahead. The FBI guy didn’t need to know any more about Faine.

“At four p.m.—prime after-school time, by the way—the guards noticed a group of humans
who seemed to be casing the building.”

“How did they know to identify that behavior as casing?”

Helena just shot him a look. “Really, Agent Anderson?” There was no need to let on
just how well trained and militarized Clan Gennessee was, or the level of training
of those Others who made up their new unified defense force. Or hell, even the existence
of such a defense force.

“Go on. But don’t think I’m not going to want to know just how well your people are
trained.”

He could want it until the sun burned out.

“They watched, notifying me and my people. One of the guards came out to get a closer
look.” Her mouth flattened briefly as he cast a look toward the body, covered by a
sheet, that they’d moved out of the way of traffic. “He was attacked by two humans,
shot in the head before he’d had a chance to react. The guards inside then began an
evacuation out the back as those humans threw what we later ascertained to be firebombs
through the front windows of the community center.

“By this point, we’d arrived, having only been in La Habra. They have automatic weapons,
but we also have our own mode of protection. One of the men you took away is Gentry
Fenton, one of the lieutenants for PURITY.”

“How many of them were there?”

“Fourteen at the first.” Faine broke in with his rumbly voice. Despite the stress
and grief of the situation, it still made all Helena’s parts tingly. “Then a van approached
with six more.”

Anderson interviewed her people, spoke to his own after they’d viewed the video and
left two hours later.

PURITY had thrown twenty people with guns and bombs at a building full of kids and
elderly people. It had been bad enough that some humans had gravitated toward the
bigoted message of groups like PURITY and Humans First. But this sort of violence
was a whole different level.

And rapidly becoming more common.

She wasn’t sure how much longer things could go on without erupting into full-blown
civil war.

Chapter 2

HELENA
blew out a breath and turned to face her people. Covered in soot, blood and no small
amount of dirty, they waited for her to give them orders.

Her gaze flitted over to the sheet and the two witches who’d been standing over it.
She’d failed him. That Were who’d volunteered to be on her team. Who’d been doing
his job and ended up dead for it. His pack members had shown up just a few minutes
before and were preparing to remove his body.

“I’ll be expecting your detailed reports. Tomorrow morning. Alix, Sam and Marcus,
I want you to be lead on this. Get all the pertinent info to me. I need to speak with
Gennessee, to brief her and the rest of the Governance Council about this. She’ll
then relay that information to the Owen.”

The Enforcer from the South Bay Pack approached.

“I’m sorry for your loss. He was a good soldier.” Helena carefully spoke, knowing
grief was expected, but that wolves felt it was an honor to die protecting pack.

He inclined his head just slightly. “We appreciate the honor you paid him by having
your people watch over him. We’ll be sending two replacements tomorrow.”

She wasn’t going to argue. She needed every body she could get. But it was hard, she
knew firsthand, to put your people in the line of fire.

“Thank you.”

“As my Alpha has made clear, we’re in this together. We can’t afford to let this break
us.”

She nodded. “No, we can’t. But thank you anyway.”

He turned, his wolves carrying the body away as they left the scene.

“Let’s go. Get some rest. This all starts again in six hours.”

Faine walked ahead, opening the passenger-side door for her. She allowed it because
she was beyond exhausted.

“I need to go back to the office.”

“You’re about to pass out.” He pulled away from the curb and away from the scene.
But it was still in her head. The faces of all those Others who depended on her to
protect them.

And the sheet covering the one she couldn’t protect.

“I have a couch in my office.”

“You and your sister are very much alike.” He grumbled this under his breath, but
she heard it and it made her smile.

“She has blue hair.”

“The outside doesn’t matter. Your insides are the same. Stubborn. Do you think you’ll
be more effective if you work until you literally just fall over? Who will you be
helping then?”

“You know how long I’ve been awake because you’ve been with me the whole time. I don’t
see you getting into your jammies.”

“Jammies?”

“Pajamas. The clothes people sleep in.”

“I don’t sleep in any clothes.”

Christ.

But before she could really go there and imagine him, nearly seven feet of hard muscle
and tawny skin, naked and in her bed, he spoke again.

“And I’m four hundred years old, Helena. I am Lycian. I was bred to be up for days
on end, fighting, marching, killing, all without sleep. You’re a witch, and while
you’re powerful and fierce, you can’t survive on two hours’ sleep in two days.”

“There were twenty humans in that group tonight. That means they’re not flinching
at sending their ranks to die. If I sleep, I’m not following up. How many people are
going to die while I take a little nap?”

Failure wasn’t something she liked at all. And in truth, she felt like she was drowning
at least sixty percent of the time these days.

“You have people working three shifts. Trust them for six hours. Just six hours. You
know you’ll be far more alert and less inclined to make a mistake or miss something
when you get some rest. Your magick will be stronger as well.”

He was right. She knew he was. She’d used a lot of magick over the last few days.
Her head hurt, her eyes felt like sandpaper and repeated adrenaline rushes followed
by the crash afterward had left her muscles less and less responsive.

“Fine, but I’ll sleep on my couch at the office.”

“No need.” He pulled up to a gate that slid open. “My place is right here. You can
have my bed and I’ll take the guest room. It’s a big bed.”

He was very, very bossy. But once she’d allowed herself to agree to sleep, her will
to argue was gone.

The mini subdivision, now nearly full of Others, was pretty much an armed camp. Guard
towers dotted the several-block area. High fences surrounded the entire subdivision.
Barriers much like those that had been put into place outside public buildings in
the wake of the 9/11 attacks surrounded those high fences to ward off any attempts
at car bombs.

Many in the area now lived this way. It made her sad, but at least it kept them safer.

He pulled into his garage and she realized she’d never even been to his house before.
She trudged to the connecting door as he turned off the alarm. “Wait here.”

He went in first. She wanted to make a crack about how they’d just gone through eight
different security checkpoints and two different alarms to get this far. But she’d
seen so much happen in the last months after the Magister had come and turned everything
upside down. So much death and destruction.

She kept her mouth shut and waited patiently until he came back to her. “Come on.”

It was a surprise, how nice the place was inside. Faine worked so much that she didn’t
have any idea when he would have had the time to get the furniture and housewares
inside.

“My sister.”

She shook herself out of her thoughts. “What?”

“You were wondering how this place got decorated. My sister came from Lycia and she
took care of everything. I’m not here that often, but when I am, it’s nice to have
a comfortable home to return to. A safe one.”

He pushed a door open. She saw the massive bed, and may have sighed wistfully.

“I need a shower first. I’m covered in soot.”

Another door pushed open to reveal a bathroom. “I’ll get you some clothes. Towels
are in that cabinet there.”

And then she was alone to get rid of her filthy clothes, leaving them in a pile in
the corner. She’d deal with getting a towel after she was clean, not wanting to get
them dirty.

Hot water rained down on her skin as she made her way into the stall. She simply stood
there, letting it wash over her for long minutes.

There had been far too many showers like this one. Where she’d stood and hoped all
the death would wash off. But it was bone deep and she wondered when, if ever, she’d
be able to let go of the things she’d seen—and done—over the last months.

She let the tears come as she scrubbed her hair. As she saw the soot and blood head
down the drain. When she stepped out, she was grateful that he’d turned the heat up.
Lycians, like shifters, had high body temps so quite often their homes tended to be
cool.

But like his brother, Simon—her sister Lark’s boyfriend? Mate? Whatever he was—Faine
seemed to thrive on taking care of people he considered his to protect. Helena knew
she’d become one of them.

She liked it, even as it chafed sometimes. It was nice to have someone taking care
of her when it felt like pretty much every moment of her existence now was about taking
care of everyone else.

He’d left a huge shirt on top of a towel. She hadn’t even heard him come into the
room. She hoped he hadn’t come in when she’d been crying.

She had a reputation as an ice bitch. Crying ruined that image. Though he’d never
say a word, he’d know all the same.

After a cursory towel-dry of her hair, she braided it quickly, put on the T-shirt
that came to her knees, and shuffled into the bedroom where he’d left a pitcher of
water and some snacks, and had even turned the blankets back.

She shoved some crackers into her face, gulped down three glasses of water, and lay
back.

Once she did that, even as she felt herself falling toward sleep, she couldn’t help
recounting the last several days. One skirmish after another. Like a horror movie.

An assault by four kids at a high school in Fountain Valley. The shifter they’d attacked
had handled it himself but they’d had to stop a near riot when the human parents of
the bullies had shown up at the victim’s house, demanding blood.

Vandalism in Garden Grove. A restaurant had had its windows broken out, anti-Other
graffiti had been spray-painted on the walls. The interior had been totally destroyed
and the food ruined.

A car set on fire in La Habra, which was where they’d been when they got the call
about the community center in Whittier and had rushed over only to have to engage
in an actual, no shit, pitched battle on the street with crazy people who thought
it was totally okay to kill kids and the elderly.

She hated this world. Hated that people wanted to kill her simply because she was
different. Hated that her friend Molly had been attacked and was now in a cast because
of the rising threat of the human separatist groups.

These were her former neighbors. The kids she and her sister Lark had gone to school
with. People she used to think were friends. The dividing lines had been drawn and
the gulf between them got deeper by the day.

And now that Molly had given an ultimatum to the humans to leave the Others alone
and stop trying to harm them or strip them of their rights as Americans, those lines
kept getting drawn.

They were in a brief limbo period as Molly recovered, but soon they’d be on the road
again and Helena would most likely be on the security detail for those Others who
were travelling all across the country addressing crowds of humans, Others and legislators
of all types. Trying to educate. Trying to mediate. Trying to stop an all-out war
before it broke out.

But the edges of the world were torn and frayed. Helena wasn’t sure how much longer
things would hold before snapping.

* * *

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