Bear Reign (Alpha Guardians Book 7) (2 page)

“You’ll never get that off,” Crane told him levelly. “You will serve whomever I give you to, for a time. And then the next… and then the next. That is how it shall be.”

“There is no way to be free of it, ever?” Ephraim whimpered.

“Only if your master, the one holding the keys, gives up their greatest wish in order to free you. And don’t think you can beg and borrow your way into it; it has to be of their own volition, for you can never ask to be freed.” Crane tilted his head. “The power of the djinn, balanced with their eternal servitude. It is a balance you will come to know soon enough.”

A knock on the door sounded, and Crane called over his shoulder for them to enter.

The door swung open to admit a tall, thin woman. All sharp angles and burning brown eyes, she couldn’t have been a day below sixty-five years old… and none of her carefully applied powder or rouge hid a bit of it. She gave Ephraim a long, slow smile filled with unnaturally sharp, perfectly white teeth.

“Ah, Bethesda,” Crane said. “As you requested, I have brought young Ephraim here to your house for his training. I want him treated very, very gently. He’s very soft yet, and there will be many takers after your clientele have lost interest. You understand?”

Crane dangled the keys before her in the air.

“Yes,” she snarled, snatching them from Crane with a scowl. Then she turned that sickening smile on Ephraim again. “You’re prettier than I expected. Have you ever met a Vampyre, darling?”

“D-don’t touch me!” Ephraim took an instinctive step backward, which turned Bethesda’s expression dark as night.

She jingled the keys in just the way Crane had, mocking.

“Sit on the bed.” Those two words had his feet moving, had him stepping back and back until the bed bumped the backs of his thighs. He slowly sank down to sit. If he tried to resist, tried to turn away, every single nerve burned like wildfire. Bethesda grinned again, baring her teeth. “It won’t be that bad. Well, not after the first time.”

Bethesda reached out and slid her fingers into Ephraim’s long hair, gripping it tight and tugging his head to the side. Exposing his neck, he realized. Bethesda’s lips parted. As her mouth descended toward his neck, Ephraim knew the first true moment of despair in his young life.

“
S
o then he
messaged me and was all like Netflix and Chill, and I was like, nooooo way Jose.”

Dawn smacked her gum, flipping her dark hair over her shoulder. Sophie examined her friend and coworker for a moment, admiring her smooth cocoa skin and impeccable dress. Dawn was always done up to the nines, makeup and nails and hair perfectly matching the outfit of the day.

Sophie looked down at her own thrice-worn jeans and wrinkled ivory silk top and sighed. Dawn always outclassed Sophie in the having-her-shit-together department, but today Sophie was practically slumming it. She hadn’t been out in the sun since midsummer, so she’d completely lost her tan. Her long blonde hair was a wild mess of unbridled waves, and her nails… well, it was better not to get into the finer points. It wasn’t pretty.

“So then he had the nerve to say I was a tease!” Dawn said, pulling a face.

“Mmmhm,” Sophie said. She scrunched up her face and stared at the rain hitting the broad plate glass window that faced Royal Street, one of New Orleans’s most popular high-end shopping districts. The weather had killed all the walk-in traffic to Sophie’s little dressmaker’s shop, and Sophie knew she should be doing any number of little tasks. She and her sales assistant, Dawn, should be dusting the place from top to bottom, doing inventory, rotating out some of the stock, or at least changing the elegant mannequins in the front window.

Sophie glanced at the mannequins for the briefest moment, then looked away. She knew well enough what they looked like; all done up in pastel silk dresses, trimmed out in full 1950s flair. It was a beautiful display, though it was over two months old at this point. Tears stung her eyes every single time she thought about the stupid dolls for more than half a second.

Lily picked those outfits. She stood there and dressed those mannequins, touched them. She smiled and laughed and frowned while she was setting up their display
.

And then,

It was her last display, on her last day of her whole life. It was the last thing she touched before…

Thus the tears.

“Sophie!”

Sophie turned to look at Dawn, guiltily wiping at the corners of her eyes.

“Oh, girl…” Dawn said, hopping up from her perch behind the cash register and walking around to hug Sophie. “We have to get you a hobby or something, honey. I love you, I really do, but you are spending all your time focusing on what happened to your sister and no time on what’s happening to
you
, right here and now.”

“I know,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “I get up in the morning and I think I have a handle on it, but by lunch I’m just…”

“It’s okay,” Dawn said, giving her another little hug. “I was thinking maybe we could go to that Wiccan power circle thing tonight, since you said you haven’t been able to do any magic since… Lately, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Sophie said, rubbing her hands over her face, trying to wake herself up a little bit. She was exhausted all the time, but she never really slept. Hell, she never did much of anything… it seemed like food, sleep, and basic self-care only happened when they were absolutely necessary. “I don’t feel much of a spark. Besides, I was never more than a low level white witch. It’s not like I’m going to get powerful all the sudden. I don’t think that’s how it works.”

Dawn blew out a breath. Sophie could see that her friend was frustrated, holding back something she wanted to say, but afraid to hurt Sophie’s feelings. It was very, very easy to hurt Sophie’s feelings these days, ever since…

“Lily died,” Dawn blurted out. “Your baby sister died. And it was terrible, like the worst thing you’ll ever go through in your whole life. A little piece of you went away, and it is never going to come back. I get that, I swear I do.” Dawn took a deep breath. “But the rest of you is withering away. This stuff, keeping the mannequins the same, refusing to scatter her ashes, that thing you do where you just go and sit outside Bellocq and
watch
…”

Sophie’s mouth dropped open.

“You know about that?!” She squeaked, her face going red. So maybe she liked to go to the Vampyre club where Lily had spent her last few hours alive. Well, less
go to
and more
sit outside and brood
, waiting for… something.

A clue. A single idea of what could possibly have happened to her innocent, kind, open-hearted eighteen year old sister. The one person who’d always been there, the only family Sophie ever had.

Had. Past tense.

“Hey!” Dawn said, snapping her fingers. “This right here? The weird zoning out? This is what I am talking ab0ut, to a T.”

“Sorry,” Sophie apologized again.

“Don’t… don’t be sorry, Soph. You just… you can’t go on like this. You need to go on a vacation, or re-engage with the Wiccan coven, or… hell, I don’t know. Start sky diving. Anything! You need to get mad, or get energized, or get something. Anything is better than just being sad every hour of the day.”

Sophie didn’t respond, just rubbed her face again and stretched.

“I should go get some coffee,” she said, trying to change the subject.

“Uh-uh,” Dawn said, crossing her arms. “You are going to go home and try to sleep. If you need it, I will call someone and buy you some pot.”

“Ugh, no,” Sophie said, but Dawn wasn’t interested in her protests.

“Fine! Get drunk, go for a run, whatever. Get tired, get some rest. And don’t you dare think of coming into the shop for the rest of the week. I will call Lacey and Maryanne and we will cover all your shifts.”

“Oh, Dawn, I couldn’t,” Sophie said, rolling her eyes.

Dawn reached out and grabbed Sophie’s hand, giving it a squeeze.

“I love you. I really, really do. But if you show up here for the rest of the week, I quit. And I know the rest of the staff will follow me. The store is a mess. Let me take over for the week, and when you come back it will be…” she paused thoughtfully. “Maybe not perfect, but better. And more importantly, different.”

She twirled a finger to indicate the merchandise racks that had slowly begun to accumulate dust. Sophie knew that Dawn couldn’t wait to change the mannequins, and it made her heart give a lurch. Still, this wasn’t a fight Sophie was interested in having. Dawn was her closest friend, and sometimes it was better just to take her advice.

Besides, there was something she needed to do tonight…

And it wasn’t catching up on her sleep.

“
Y
ou sure
you want to do this, white witch?”

The woman’s Haitian accent was a little slap in the face, a startling bit of reality. Her dark skin gleamed in the light of the small fire that lay between them, her teeth flashing white against the darkness of the sultry night air. She held her closed fist out over the fire, palm down, awaiting Sophie’s decision.

Could this really be happening?

You’re not hallucinating this. You’re not dreaming. You are actually in the underbelly of the Gray Market, paying a Vodun priestess to do spells that require dark magic
.

Blood magic, actually. Just the thought of such dark magic sent icy fingers of fear creeping down her spine. She and Lily were raised Wiccan, so Sophie had no excuse. She knew better than to come near something like
this
with a ten foot pole.

Sophie, you really have done it this time,
Lily would have said.

“Yes,” came out of Sophie’s mouth, a second before the thought even formed in her mind. She was all instinct and angry hurt right now, no room for second thoughts and self-recrimination.

The priestess arched a brow and shrugged, then dropped a little bundle of hair wrapped around a tiny glass vial into the fire. It hissed and cracked for a minute, the smell of burning hair made Sophie cough. The priestess merely stared into the fire, which abruptly flared and changed color.

“Ah,” the priestess sighed. “Your sister is gone, as you believed.”

“I knew that already. I felt her pass from the world,” Sophie said, though she’d already explained that much.

“Patience,” the woman cautioned, raising a finger in warning. “There is more. Your sister was taken by a very, very dangerous creature. He is a Loa, a greater spirit of the Voodoo and Vodun, taken to flesh to walk in this world.”

“What’s his name? What did he do to Lily?” Suddenly Sophie’s throat was tight, her whole body coiled and ready to fight.

“I cannot say his name, lest I might summon him,” the priestess said, shaking her head. “He took your sister, used her body as a vessel to allow him into the human world. Your sister was a virgin, was she not?”

“Y-yes,” Sophie whispered, her mouth going dry. That was Lily’s big secret, something no one else knew about her. Sophie’s sister had been saving herself for marriage, though she was too shy to talk about it.

The priestess knowing that fact about Lily… it made all of this seem real, very suddenly. It was a shock to her system, knowing that Lily was… on the other side?

“She’s in heaven now?” Sophie asked, her cheeks flushing. She wasn’t Christian, exactly, having come up as a pagan, but that was the only way she could think to phrase her question.

The answer was not what she’d hoped. The priestess gave a slow shake of her head, looking sympathetic.

“No, I’m afraid not, my dear. She is… in between.”

Sophie narrowed her gaze.

“You are talking about my dead sister. Please tell me you aren’t going to try to sell me some charm or spell to help her move on,” she accused.

The woman’s expression went stony.

“You already paid me for this,” she said, waving her hand around the fire. “I am no thief. Your sister is in between worlds because a piece of her still rides with the Loa, though he has long since shed her body. One as powerful as him, he must take a new Vessel every few days, I imagine. Maybe more.”

Sophie felt like her heart had been ripped from her chest.

“Did she suffer?” she found herself asking.

The priestess didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

“I believe… I believe a little part of her may still exist, along with the Loa. Like, how can you say, he is riding horseback and she sits behind him?” The woman gestured with her fingers, to indicate two people sitting close together. “She rides with him, all the Vessels ride along with him, forever.”

Sophie turned that over in her mind for a minute.

“If there is a piece of her that is still alive, we could bring her back.”

“We?” The priestess’s eyebrows shot up. “Not I.”

“I meant to say, someone. Someone
could
do that.”

“You do not want that, white witch. You would not get back the same person you knew and loved, I assure you.”

“But it is possible?”

The priestess thought it over for a moment, and then shook her head.

“Not in the way you mean, no. And the body is gone… There is nothing left to bring back, I am sure.” She hesitated.

“Tell me,” Sophie urged. “Anything, anything at all.”

“If it were me, and I cared very much about this person, I would want to free their spirit. Allow them to move on to the next world.”

“I do, I do want that. How can I do that?”

The woman pursed her lips, thinking.

“There is a way, I think. If you were to destroy the Loa, that might work. If you pulled him out of the human world, yanked him back into the spirit world by the roots. Then destroy him…” She took a deep breath. “You would need a way to kill a Loa, though. Very rare.”

“Could you find such a thing?” Sophie asked, excitement stirring in the pit of her stomach.

Another considering glance.

“The magic you would need to do this thing, it would be so dark… You would never be a white witch again. You understand?”

“Fine. Anything,” Sophie insisted.

“If the Loa does not kill you first, the stain on your soul will. You may not… you may not enter the same afterlife as your sister, white witch. Would it be worth that to free her?”

Sophie didn’t even hesitate.

“Of course.”

“Fine,” the priestess said. She pulled out a piece of paper and scrawled something on it, handing it over the fire to Sophie. “Wait until you hear from me again, white witch. Do not approach the Loa without the object I will bring you. To do so would be to assure your failure.”

Sophie opened her mouth to respond, but the priestess picked up a bucket of black ash and banked the fire without notice, vanishing into the darkness leaving Sophie alone in the quiet night air. Sophie stumbled back down the rambling back alleys of the Gray Market she’d followed to find the priestess in the first place, emerging near the front doors of Sloane General.

Once she was back in the Gray Market’s hazy street lights, she unfolded the piece of paper the priestess had pressed on her.

It had but two words: Papa Aguiel.

Closing her eyes, she knew the first moment of elation she’d felt since the moment she’d woken in her bed, knowing instantly that her little sister was no longer in the world.

Vengeance was so, so close… and she would have it.

S
ophie stood
across from the rambling residence the Alpha Guardians referred to as the Manor, biding her time. She’d stood here for four nights already, gone so far as to break some of the house’s minor wards. All because she was following a tip from a Gray Market acquaintance who said that the Guardians were pursuing the same quarry as she.

Papa Aguiel
.

The name rang through her head, over and over until she thought her heart might beat to the rhythm of his name, until her veins ran thick with the sound of it.
Pa-pa A-gu-iel, Pa-pa A-gu-iel,
her heart seemed to say.

A flurry of activity drew her attention to the front steps of the Manor. Several people stepped outside, and Sophie raised her binoculars. There, on the ground. A dark haired man in a long black coat, utterly collapsed.

How had she missed this, the one person her contact had told her to watch for?

Ephraim Crane. Soon-to-be Alpha Guardian. Immortal.