Lunar Marked (Sky Brooks Series Book 4) (21 page)

After a few minutes he moved off me, nudged me to my side, and cradled me to him. I shifted back farther—he still seemed too far away. He was like a blanket, covering me, and I relaxed in a deep slumber.

O
nce again
, I rolled over after a night with Ethan to an empty bed.
Son of a bitch.
His scent drifted throughout the room and I was reminded of the night before. Why did I expect more? I shouldn’t have had any delusions about who he was—his reputation spoke for itself. But I still called him a few choice words as I pulled the covers around me tighter. They smelled like him, too.

But hunger pangs kept me from sleeping. When I went to the kitchen I found the front door was slightly ajar. I peeked out and saw Ethan going through the trunk of his car, a towel barely concealing him.

“Are you serious?” I barked from the door.

He grinned. “Good morning.”

“Get in the house!” I looked around what was about to be become a busy street in a few minutes. Clothes in hand, he walked toward the house but not before David drove by, smiling as his car came to a slow crawl.
Perfect. I know what the topic of our next meeting will be. He’ll want details about my night with “sour face.”

As he returned to the house, the taut muscles of his chest, abs, and legs contracted and relaxed with each step. The pronounced ridges just below his stomach barely kept the towel on. “If that thing falls off, the neighbors will have you arrested,” I said.

He gave me that self-assured smirk and kissed me on the cheek. “I think I’ll be okay.”

“Why, because you’re an attorney or because you don’t think anyone will call the police on you?”

He leaned down kissed me again and said, “Both.”

I still had a hard time believing he was an attorney, laws just seemed optional to him.

I
found
Ethan in front of the dented wall after we had showered and dressed. “You did this?” he asked, looking over at me.

I nodded, standing next to him. The Aufero was in the corner, still pulsing the odd color that had become the norm, but the magic that drifted off it was stronger and more beseeching. As though it had a mind of its own, its aversion to Ethan remained. When he came near it, the beat quickened, and a diaphanous field protected it from being touched by him.

Ethan pressed his hand against the field, slowly moving along it, like Josh did when he was looking for a weakness in mine. “Tell me everything that happened yesterday with Ethos.”

I retold it, Ethan stopping me often to ask for more detail. “I know you didn’t know that language, but can you repeat it?”

Closing my eyes, I tried to replay each moment of the encounter in my head, the way the magic felt, the way I felt, the sound of Ethos’s voice, the smell that lingered in the air, everything. And then I mumbled the words Ethos said, trying to get Maya to respond.

He kept repeating them over and over to himself.

“How many languages do you know?”

“I speak four, well five now.” He grinned. I wondered how long it took for him to learn Portuguese, especially since he spoke it well. It reminded me of my family, when I visited them last year. It would have been nice to have family to speak it with, but they had to ruin things by trying to kill me.

“I knew Anderson was going to be trouble the moment I met him. I can’t believe he is okay with working with Ethos” Ethan said, sneering.

“He was promised the position of Beta of the were-animal pack, definitely an improvement, being the leader of two hundred to being second-in-command of thousands.”

“Whoever is the Alpha couldn’t turn his back for a second without having Anderson’s knife shoved into it. He will only be the Beta temporarily before he does everything to claw himself to the Alpha position,” Ethan said. He frowned and then asked, “And the shooter? Who was it?”

“Ethos called him Derrick.”

After a long pause, Ethan identified him as the fourth in the Ares pack, and another wolf. He took out his phone, and I could feel the anger coming off him. Ethan’s emotions were very hard to ignore, a turbulent wave that overtook the room, singeing anything nearby. I touched his hand. “Who are you calling?”

“Anderson.”

Ethan wasn’t very diplomatic. His skills of negotiation were often reduced to telling the person his expectation of compliance, with a poorly veiled threat for good measures. This situation was bad; I thought poking the Alpha would only make it worse.

“I think you should wait.”

“Wait on what, Sky?”

“How will speaking with him change anything? He has an agenda, and you aren’t going to coerce him to change. He sees Ethos as a means to an end and that is where we should direct our attention.”

“Ethos wouldn’t have been able to do any of that alone. Without them, how would it have ended yesterday?”

He had a point. Were-animals’ immunity to magic in animal form made them hard to be overtaken by mages, fae, and witches. And most of faes, mages and witches weren’t skilled enough fighters to be able to win. That was our advantage and when we needed magic, we had Josh and me. But there was more to it—Ethan had subdued his anger about Sebastian long enough, and he wanted revenge. The anger that sparked in his eyes made it more evident.

“Have you heard anything from Dr. Jeremy?” I asked.

He barely moved his head in a nod.

“And?”

“Nothing has changed since last night.”

I studied Ethan but didn’t get much from it, his stoicism didn’t reveal whether he thought Sebastian would survive. What would happen if he didn’t? Part of me wanted to hang on to the bliss of ignorance but I needed to know. “What happens if he survives but isn’t the same?”

“Hopefully, he will step down.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Sebastian couldn’t function as anything else. Being the Alpha came as natural to him as breathing. Would he step down?

“Skylar, you know what happens if he doesn’t,” he said, his eyes holding mine.

“Will he accept a challenge of submission?”

“You know where Sebastian and I stand on that. It hasn’t changed. If we can’t handle our position and someone feels strongly enough to challenge—” He didn’t finish the sentence, not because he didn’t want to, but because I was barely holding it together. I blinked back the tears that were threatening to fall.

“You don’t have to do anything. It’s our rules, we made them and we can break them,” I said. “If you don’t feel he is fit to lead, do what you are supposed to do, support him. That’s your job. No one has to fight, no one has to die.”

He listened in silence, his determined presence just frustrating me more. “I won’t let you do it.”

“Sky.” The sharp edge to his tone didn’t faze me one bit.

“No! I don’t want to hear anything you have to say. Promise me you will not challenge him, no matter what. Promise.”

“No,” he said softly. “If Sebastian isn’t able to continue as Alpha, I will only challenge if he doesn’t step down.”

“No. No you will not. You have to promise me you won’t.” He kept calling my name, but I refused to hear anything other than his promise to me. When he attempted to take my arm I jerked it back. “You have to promise me, Ethan.”

His voice softened, and I hated that I hadn’t been able to brush away the tear that had managed to escape. “No. I’m not going to do that. Things are the way they are. I don’t like all aspects of it, but they are our rules and nothing you say to me is going to change them. If you need to cry—go ahead, let it out. You need to scream—do that, too, but it will not change anything.”

He reached for me again, and I tried pulling my arm away but he held on tighter, drawing me closer to him. He rested his forehead against mine and cradled my face. “This situation is black and white. I know you want it to be a gray area, but there isn’t,” Ethan said in a low voice.

I yanked away from him—he would not ease me into this or charm me into thinking this was okay. I wasn’t going to accept this as anything more than what it was—murder. “Is that what you want to call it to make it easier to accept? So you just plan to ‘black and white’ the situation? Call it what it is, you two will fight until one of you murders the other,” I snapped.

Ethan didn’t possess a great deal of patience and his taut frown showed that I had reached the end of his. “You want to be a child about this, go ahead, Sky.” The coarse words were forced out through a tight jaw and clenched teeth. “A pack is only as strong as their Alpha. You’ve enjoyed the luxury of being part of one that most will not consider screwing with. You’ve never been a woman in a pack that others consider weak, because then you would understand that need for a strong pack. I don’t want to kill anyone in my pack, but if they feel the need to challenge me, they see a weakness in me; and if they see it, so will others outside the pack. If you need this to feel better then fine, get upset with me and we can fight about it all night, but after today we will not have this discussion again because it will not change anything.”

Tension filled the silence as we stood in the middle of a destroyed room, with stains of blood from a man who had orchestrated the attempted murder of our Alpha, glaring at each other. Okay, I was the only one glaring; Ethan had said what he needed, and I was fuming because I hadn’t changed anything. When someone knocked at the door, I didn’t care to answer it. I figured it was David, and I didn’t want to talk or be subjected to his questioning that would quickly devolve into him interrogating us like he was an investigative journalist.

I wasn’t in a good place to deal with it.

The knocking persisted, and Ethan made his way across the room to answer it. I hadn’t moved from my position of staring at the empty space where he once stood with my arms crossed over my chest. I only looked at the door when Ethan exhaled an irritated sigh and opened it, leaving barely enough room for Quell to get through. It didn’t escape me that he didn’t seem surprised that Quell was out in the daytime without turning that odd gray color that happened when vampires went outside in daylight.

Quell stared at me for a long time, too long. It started to feel uncomfortable having his onyx eyes studying me for such an extended time. Then they swept over to the stains of blood on the floor, the cracked wall, the jumbled furniture that we hadn’t gotten around to rearranging. Next he regarded Ethan until Ethan’s eyes narrowed on him.

“What?”

“You failed and let her get hurt,” Quell said, his voice as dark and cold as his eyes.

I really don’t need this.

Ethan quickly closed the distance between him and Quell; I had to run to get between them. I felt like I was trying to move a parked car as I pushed into their chests trying to separate them. “You go over there and you over there,” I said pointing to opposite sides of the room.

Why in the hell did I think that was going to work?
Neither one of them budged: instead they locked their eyes on each other. “Fine, I’ll leave and you two can have at it. I don’t have time for this,” I said, starting for the door.

Quell was the first to move, slowly backing several feet away but nowhere near where I wanted him. Ethan remained in the same spot.
Stubborn bastard.

After long drifts of silence, Ethan was the first to speak. “Are things with Fi going well?”

Quell nodded slightly.

“Then why the hell are you here?”

“I was worried about her, and rightfully so—you’ve proven to be inept at keeping her safe.”

Yep, this day is going from bad to worse.

“Quell, I’m fine. It isn’t anyone’s job but mine to keep me safe.” And if I said it a million times, with a bullhorn, had it skywritten, it wouldn’t have mattered to Quell. The pack, in his opinion, was to keep me safe. If I got a splinter, he would attribute it to their negligence. He wouldn’t be happy until I was placed in a nice little bubble where I could only be viewed, never touched.

Quell stepped closer, his nose flaring as he noticeably inhaled and then slowly looked me over; then he directed his attention to Ethan. The brackets of Quell’s frown deepened. If he were a were-animal his eyes would have been flooded with the color of his animal. But he was a vampire and glints of more black smothered any remnants of light that his eyes might have managed to possess.

There was a noticeable change in his mood as his attention went between the two of us, and a knowing look of disgust fell over his face.

The heat of my embarrassment ran along my cheeks and neck.
Hell woman, if you are okay with doing it you damn well need to be okay with people knowing about it.

The subtle disdain Quell had for Ethan quickly upgraded to hate as he dragged his glare away from him.

Ethan wasn’t making the situation any better. He looked like he was ready to show Quell how effective he could be at protecting me, mainly from Quell. I wasn’t going to fix this, no matter how I tried.

“What’s the matter?” I asked Quell. There was something wrong: he was pulled so tight it was only a matter of time before he rebounded in a fury of violence. He wasn’t usually like this. I wasn’t going to fix Ethan, either, unless I found a time machine and went back to the moment when he decided that being an indomitable stubborn jackass was his life choice.

Quell spoke, his tone nearly a whisper. “I didn’t want you to leave last night, but I couldn’t stop you from doing so.” He took my hand and ignored Ethan’s low rumble. I wished I could have said his bark was bigger than his bite. “Fiona,” he continued, his expression vacant as he looked in Ethan’s direction, “came by and I couldn’t leave to check on you. I just needed to know you were okay.” His attention returned to Ethan. “You have someone watching the house now, but where were they before, when she was attacked?”

“Quell.” I gave his hand a little squeeze in an attempt to redirect him. Keen attention was focused on him and I wasn’t sure if I liked my position in between. “No one attacked me.”
Well, that’s sort of, kind of, a smidge of the truth.
This was escalating to a wildfire that I would not be able to contain if I didn’t stop it right now. “Don’t hold anyone other than me responsible for my safety. Okay?”

When I squeezed his hand again, he opened his and linked it with mine.

I hesitated before I turned, and when I did, I found Ethan peering out the window of the kitchen. “They aren’t part of our pack,” he said.