Novak Raven (Harper's Mountains Book 4) (18 page)

But the police officers ignored her. They talked low to Weston, turned him around, handcuffed him. The Bloodrunners surged forward, angry, yelling, cursing. The quieter officer was reading him his rights, but she couldn’t understand why they were guiding Weston to the police cruiser behind hers.

“Weston!” she screamed, panicking. “Something’s wrong! I changed my mind. I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this. Weston!” Avery was sobbing by the time the officers settled into the front of the cruiser. Through the glass, she pleaded with them. “He’s mine. That man back there is mine, and you said we would go together. I don’t want to go if I can’t be with him. Please. Please put him beside me or let me out.”

The quieter police officer turned in his seat as they drove away. “I’m Officer Ryan and this is Officer Hammond. We aren’t here to hurt you. We’re here to help. Everything is going to be okay, I promise. We’ll have you back where you belong in no time.”

Tears blurring her vision, Avery pressed herself against the window and watched the Bloodrunners and 1010 disappear. A whimper crawled up the back of her throat.

“You don’t understand,” she said in a small, terrified voice. “I’ve never belonged anywhere but here.”

Weston shook his leg in quick succession and clenched his hands tighter. Waiting to be questioned, he was handcuffed to a chain on the table. What was taking so fucking long? If they would just ask what they needed to, he could clear this all up and get Avery back to 1010. Kiss her, hold her, tell her everything was going to be okay. He’d seen her face through the window of that cop car. She’d been terrified.

“Fuck,” he gritted out. He cast another pissed-off glance over his shoulder at the two-way glass. There were people behind it watching him. He could feel them there, but all he could see from here was his angry face, shadowed by his baseball cap. His eyes were black as tar, but fuck it. They knew what he was. No point in hiding.

He could Change right now and escape the stupid fucking handcuffs, but what good would that do? It would just prolong this already spectacularly shitty night.

He had to get to Avery, make her feel safe again. She’d been holed up into herself, like a retracted turtle, ever since she’d seen the ravens at Big Flight. They were to blame for this. He didn’t know what was going on completely, but every instinct in his body screamed this was the doings of the council. Fuckin’ ravens. He wanted to pluck every feather from their bodies and light them on fire. Anger was his only companion right now. Weston’s body hummed with it until he was uncomfortable. Squeezing his eyes closed, he rubbed his eye sockets with the heels of his palms and tried to stave off an oncoming headache.

When he opened his eyes, though, he wasn’t in the interrogation room anymore. He was back in The Box. The single swinging lightbulb above swayed back and forth from the vent that blasted freezing cold air. Gooseflesh rippled across his body with the bone-deep chill. The claw marks were still in the wall, but there were more, and they were deeper. The red was gone, though. The room smelled of bleach. There was a single bucket in the corner, but other than that, there was nothing in the room.

Nothing but Avery.

She sat pressed into a corner, balled up, her knees to her chest. She looked older than the last time he’d seen her in here. She wasn’t emaciated or pale looking. Her hair looked clean and cascaded down her shoulders, but her face held the same horrified, hopeless expression, and her lips moved constantly as she whispered something too low for him to hear. Her glassy aquamarine eyes stared right through him.

Weston looked behind him to see where her gaze landed, but the two-way mirror had disappeared and nothing remained but a white wall. He wasn’t chained to the table anymore, but was standing. His palms were up, outstretched. They looked so solid in this vision.

Avery was panting too hard now, her words coming out jerkily. The hopelessness in her eyes tore at his chest. He couldn’t save her from her past. It was done. Over. He couldn’t even comfort her, but that knowledge didn’t stop his instinct to try.

Weston strode over to her, his boots loud against the dingy white tiles. Louder than in any of his other visions.

He could hear her now. “Me and Ryder bought a whole box of spy stuff and put the cameras all around Willa’s Wormshack. She’s a Gray Back like me, and really funny. You would like her. If she caught us, she would just laugh, so that’s why we picked her to spy on first, but all we got is three straight hours of video footage of her working with her worms. She sells them to bait shops and for people who make fancy gardens. She makes a stupid amount of money at it, but that’s not why she does it. She loves worms. Like…she LOVES worms. We did catch funny audio of her talking to them, though. She called them her babies, and named one of them Dingleberry. And I swear she thought of kissing one when he wiggled extra cute in her hand. Ryder and me were laughing so hard.” Avery’s voice hitched, and another tear streamed down her face. “The spy cameras are so small we’ll never get caught. Never get caught. Never. Never. So small we’ll never get caught.”

Avery clenched her fists to her chest behind her knees, and her shoulders shook hard. It wasn’t until she ducked her chin to her chest and fell apart that Weston noticed her clothes. Jeans, instead of the nightgown from his last vision. And two thin straps of a tank top curved over her shoulders. He knew what the logo on her shirt would say if he could pry her knees away from her torso. Horror dropped him to his knees right in front of her. On the tip of her shoulder was the circular scar he’d given her the night he’d claimed her.

This wasn’t a vision from the past.

This was her future.

“So small we’ll never get caught,” she repeated in an empty tone.

It wasn’t fair. Something bad must’ve happened to him if she was here in The Box because he would never let her come back here if he was still breathing. “Darlin’,” he whispered, his eyes burning from a fate he couldn’t save her from.

“I knew you would come,” she said so softly he almost missed it.

“What?”

Avery lifted her gaze and locked onto his, as if she could see him. Her eyes were rimmed with tears, and her bottom lip trembled hard.

“You said you would be here with me, and you are.” Slowly, she opened the palm of her hand, and in it sat one of the old cameras he and Ryder had bought all those years ago. It was the size of a quarter. “I’m stronger now.” But she didn’t look strong. Her whole body was shaking, and she looked scared.

Weston reached out and touched her hand—
touched
her. Shocked, he wrapped his fingers around her wrist. “Avery, I can save you. I can get you out of here. Look, I can touch you. Come on.” He pulled, but she shook her head hard and stayed where she was, her wrist slipping from his grip. When he looked down at his hand, the tile floors showed through his palm.

“Weston,” she whispered. “This is the way it’s supposed to be. I can do this.” Two tears dislodged and streamed down her cheeks, but Avery looked different now. Her eyes were harder, more determined, and her breathing had steadied out. “You make me stronger. Wait for me.”

There was echoing power in those last three words, and Weston was catapulted backward so fast, his hands and feet flew out in front of him. He held onto the sight of Avery as long as he could.

“I love you, Ave,” he rushed out, because she should know. Whatever was happening, or if he was dead, she should hear it from him one last time.

As he slammed back into the chair in the questioning room, her whispered words echoed around the room, filling his head. “I love you, too. Wait for me. Wait, wait, Weston. Wait for me.”

Adrenaline and shock did something awful to his body, or maybe it was the power of that vision, but he was drenched in sweat and shaking uncontrollably. Weston dry heaved and closed his eyes tight against the blinding light from the fluorescent bulbs above.

The door to the interrogation room swung open, and in walked one of the cops who had taken Avery away from him. His nametag read
Hammond
, and after him filed a shorter man in a gray suit.

“This is Detective Sutton,” Hammond said as he took a seat next to the man in the suit. “He’s been the one working on the missing persons case for Avery Foley and her family.”

Weston clenched his hands together in an effort to slow the shaking in his body. He was still reeling from the vision. “Missing person’s report…” Weston shook his head hard, trying to rattle free some clear thoughts. “Avery isn’t missing. She’s where she wants to be. Or was, until you took her away in a fucking cop car like some criminal.”

“Avery isn’t under any suspicion,” Detective Sutton said blandly, slapping a thick, beige folder onto the metal table. “You are.” His hard, green eyes sliced right through Weston. “You were read your rights, yes?”

Weston nodded. What he needed to do was lawyer up and demand they bring in Harper before he said more, but then he would run the risk of them going tight-lipped about why he was here, and he needed to know what he was really doing strapped to a table in the Bryson City police station. “I’m being charged with kidnapping, but that’s not what happened.” Voice steady, he told them how Avery came to interview for him and work for him. Told them how he fell for her, and she fell for him. He kept his emotions to a minimum, kept the story simple, just stuck to the facts, and the more he spoke, the more Detective Sutton lost his air of pompousness. A little frown crept into his poker face, and his eyes narrowed.

“Do you feel like you love her?” Detective Sutton asked.

Weston leaned back in his chair and considered his answer. Something had made the detective see him as an obsessive stalker, and this question was a shiny lure into a deep trap.

“Do you feel like she is yours?” the detective pressed on.

Weston should call for a lawyer now. He should wait for Harper before he said more, but the thought of Avery sitting in the interrogation room next door, getting grilled, made him want to end this as fast as possible.

“I want her to be a strong woman and find herself. I want her to be happy. I want her to choose her own path, connect with people, and know how special she is. So yeah. I love her. I love her so much, but if she ever wanted out of a relationship with me, that would have to be okay, because more than I want to be happy, I want her to be happy.”

Hammond looked utterly confused now. He sighed heavily, then murmured, “I’m gonna show him the video.”

“No, you won’t,” Sutton said.

“I am! This is my precinct, and he lives in Nantahala under my jurisdiction. And to be completely honest, none of this makes a lick of sense to me. The Bloodrunners have been good members of this community since the day they moved here. One of them owns the coffee shop in town, this one just opened a tourist business, the alpha has opened a law shop right on Main Street, Aaron Keller is a respected firefighter in town. And besides all that, I rode in the car with Avery Foley, and she seemed scared shitless…” He leveled the detective with a significant look. “But not from him. She spent the whole damn ride falling apart to be in the same care as Weston Novak.”

“She was falling apart?” Weston asked. “Is she okay?”

“She’s being transported to Asheville on a twenty-four-hour psych hold,” Hammond said.

“What? No, she’s been abused by her people. She can’t be strapped down or put in solitary. They can’t put her in a white room.” Weston stood and yanked on the chains.

“Sit back down!” Sutton yelled.

“Fuck,” Weston muttered, panicked. He wanted to Change, but escaping this room as a raven would be impossible unless he could somehow break through the two-way mirror.

The door swung wide, and Harper strode in, dressed in a black power suit and looking like she was about to bring hell to earth. She jammed a nail at Weston and ground out, “Sit. Now.”

Power rippled from her voice, buckling Weston’s legs under him. With a pained grunt, he slammed down into the metal chair so hard the legs screeched backward by a few inches. Wincing, Weston tilted his head away from the Bloodrunner Dragon and exposed his neck to her. Goddamn, she didn’t use her alpha powers often, but when she did, it sucked balls.

“Officer Hammond,” Harper greeted.

“Bloodrunner Dragon,” he murmured, eyes wide.

“I told you to please call me Harper.” She shoved her hand out for a shake to the detective. “Harper Keller. Who are you?”

“Uuuh, Detective Sutton.” The man shook her hand in a rush, then jerked away as though he’d been burned. Dragons. That was a power move if Weston had ever seen one but, fuck it all, he couldn’t find it in himself to be amused. Not when he was getting a crick in his neck from her alpha dragon shit.

Harper sat down, crossed her legs primly, and set her briefcase down on the floor beside her chair with a click against the tile floors.

“A kidnapping charge? We all know that’s bullshit, so what are we really doing here?”

“They took Avery to a psych ward in Asheville,” Weston gritted out.

The fire in Harper’s bi-colored eyes nearly buckled Weston. “Fffuuck, Harper, let me up.”

After she inhaled deeply, then blew it out slowly, leveling her intent gaze back on the officers, the heaviness lifted from the air.

Weston sat up straight and sucked oxygen.

Officer Hammond hit a couple buttons on his phone and shoved it across the silver table to rest in front of Weston and Harper.

A video opened on Avery’s dad’s face. He was in a car and looked worried and disheveled. “That monster has my daughter. He took her from me and from our people. From her fiancé, and I’ll stop at nothing to make sure she comes home safe again. I’ve promised my wife I will save our baby girl. I won’t fail my family.”

The humans in the room couldn’t hear the utter bullshit lie in Mr. Foley’s voice, but Harper shot Weston a disgusted look. She hadn’t missed it either. Fuckin’ manipulative ravens.

The scene cut to Big Flight’s shop, to Avery, who was huddled against the back corner. The camera was shaking, but no one could mistake the terror in her eyes. Her long hair had fallen forward, covering her cheeks, and she was hunched badly, as though she would be attacked at any moment.

“We’re here to bring you home,” Benjamin said.

Weston’s face was contorted with hate and rage, and his fists were clenched. “She is home,” he gritted out. “Who are you?”