Chapter 10

Ella’s features softened slightly and she glanced at my cousin. Her eyes opened up again and she looked infinitely exhausted, like she couldn’t deal with life anymore. She numbly took her phone out of her pocket and started flipping through it. Once she got her pictures up, she picked one and handed it over without looking at me or anyone else.

I glanced down at the picture and my heart ached.

It had been taken within the last month. Millie’s hair was done up in pigtails with purple barrettes keeping them up. It set off the red in her hair beautifully. Her blue eyes were scrunched up because she smiled so widely. One of her tiny fists was held in the air while the other was holding a stuffed cat toy that she loved. When the picture had been taken, she had been wearing a baby blue dress that was absolutely adorable on her.

Yet, her safety hadn’t been enough to get her parents to the safe house. Strange, when they clearly loved her so much.

I handed the phone over to Billy and she looked down at the image. All her concentration on the baby.

She nodded after half a minute and then held her opposite hand in the air, still with her eyes on the phone. Cleaning and tracking were the most common abilities that legions get. Cleaning was always pretty much the same. The cleaner turned bodies and bodily fluid to ash. Like they had been incinerated so fast that one couldn’t actually see the fire. Tracking, however, was different for everyone.

Being a pure blooded legion, I had several abilities, but most of them I couldn’t access. One of those that I could was my tracking. For me, it was sensing only race and it was like throwing a mental blanket over a stretch of the city at a time. I knew everything that was under that blanket and exactly how far away they were from me and what direction.

Billy described hers as a maze of strings. She could feel the auras all around her and they each were like a string dangling in front of her face and hands. They each had a different feel, depending on the person. When she wanted one specific person, she reached out with her hand, took the string and followed it to its owner. She could track anybody as long as she knew what they looked like.

My cousin stood in front of me, one hand on the phone and the other in the air, for only fifteen seconds before she closed her hand into a fist and smiled brilliantly. “Got her.” Then her brow furrowed. “The signal is kinda hazy, but I’ve got a firm grasp on it. She’s… Not too far away.”

I frowned at my cousin’s expression. She looked concentrated, her fist clenched tight around that invisible string. She didn’t normally have trouble tracking. It came as naturally to her as breathing did. I thought about the empty feeling I’d gotten when trying to track the other night, and my brain tried to make a connection between the two. I shoved that down, though, because Billy needed to find Millie. She simply had to, because if we didn’t get her back soon, we might not at all.

Reggie smiled and straightened her suit some more. “Billy, Regory and Asire can take one car. The rest of us will split up and follow the trail. Hopefully we can get her back before nightfall.”

When Alain made a move to get up, Reggie held her hands up. “Not you, mister.” She shook her head. “Your mate can come with us, but you have to stay here. It would be better for your daughter if she still had a father to come home to.”

He glowered. “If you think I’m going to sit on my ass while my mate and child are in danger than you are—”

“Not going to argue about this,” Reggie said. Then she smiled grandly. “I’ve already told those watching the children today to keep you here and stable. Have fun, Alain.” Then she turned on a stiletto and started for the door, expecting the rest of us to follow her.

I went for the garage and Billy and Regory followed me. I could hear Ella talking to her mate, promising to be careful and a whole load of crap. As much as she loved Alain, I had little doubt that seeing her child would bring out her protective instincts and nothing would stand in her way.

As it should be. As it so often isn’t.

Billy hopped into the passenger’s seat and I got behind the wheel of my truck. It’s smarter not to let her drive while tracking. I personally didn’t want my truck wrapped around a telephone pole. I loved my truck. Sure, it was big and took up a lot of space. But as far as I was concerned, it was a sleek beauty.

I pulled out of the garage and navigated around all the cars in the driveway. Two cars pulled out behind me. Loki’s SUV and the other car they had driven in. A quick glance in the rearview mirror showed that they were both loaded up with Billy’s Family and the two other girls.

It was quiet until we reached the gates. Then Regory, sitting comfortably behind Billy, said, “So you’ve been keeping secrets from us for five years?” There was no heat to his voice. More like sadness that a suspicion has been confirmed and didn’t that make me feel like crap.

How did I explain this to them? How did I explain that everything we wanted, they got. They got the safety, the Family, the home, the peace that we’d all dreamed of as children. I got dumped on the side of the road, with a stranger sitting there, waiting for me. Reggie had been kind, incredibly so, but the city wasn’t. I lived in danger, in the knowledge that I’d never get the dream that we all had. That I spent every day aware that it could be my last. I couldn’t explain that. Words didn’t work.

I sighed. “I didn’t want you to worry,” I said again. If something was truly wrong, I liked to think I’d tell them, but I couldn’t say for certain. I let Billy go find a Family of her own when she would have stuck around with me. Would have preferred to stick around with me. I was no stranger to making hard choices for those I love.

“I get that,” Regory said.

“Turn right here,” Billy directed me.

“I still wish you would have said something,” he continued. Then he got really quiet for a few minutes. “I didn’t want to leave you behind,” he finally said. “I know I did what was best for Billy, at the time, but I really didn’t want to abandon you.”

“I know,” I told him, remembering the conversation from all those years ago. “I’m not bitter about anything that happened after that decision was made.”

“No… I guess you wouldn’t be. But it’s bothered me,” he explained. “For years, ever since we drove away from you, it’s bothered me.”

“I know,” I said again.

“If I could change it, I would.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“Turn left here,” Billy said.

I followed her instructions and the conversation died down. It killed me to know that Regory had been carrying around this guilt, but the choice had been taken out of our hands. The second my mother’s family signed my Orphaning papers, all the choices we had were ripped away. At that point, I hadn’t seen Billy and Regory for two years, but they’d been working on Loki’s mate, trying to get her to let me into the Family.

It was my understanding that Loki had been okay with it, but his mate wasn’t, so he said no. Billy and Regory spent two years trying to change her mind, but she held strong, because the rumors about me were continuing. It hadn’t been a picnic for me, after they left. I’d been fourteen and on my own. I made my way down to Louisiana and hung out near New Orleans for a while.

The people hadn’t been the problem, during those years. There were two kinds. The kind that wanted to help me and the kind that wanted to hurt me. And they weren’t difficult to tell apart or to avoid. The kind ones would give me money, and I’d use that for food. There was one lady who worked the night desk at a motel and she’d let me stay for free whenever it was raining really badly. I’d go to cafés and the library and talk to Billy through email, since I didn’t have a phone.

When the weather was nice, there were a few other options I had. Sometimes I’d stay with a couple of prostitutes who were afraid of their pimp. Because they knew I could beat the shit out of him. And I did. Regularly. And sometimes people would try to hurt me and I’d defend myself. The local Family kept an eye on me, but didn’t take me in and weren’t afraid to spread rumors about me. Some about the people I hurt and some about how I managed to survive.

The rumors always managed to get back to Billy and Regory. He knew they weren’t true, but it upset him all the same. Here was a girl who he loved and couldn’t protect. The most he could do was become aggressive when someone brought it up to him.

And the rumors reached Loki’s mate. I don’t know if that’s part of the reason she didn’t want me around, but I suspected it was. She would hear them out, listen to their arguments and then say she couldn’t take that kind of risk. Whatever I did to earn her shunning me, I didn’t know. I didn’t care. What I cared about was that it hurt the man that was basically my brother and hurt the girl I had been raised with.

That, to me, was worse than her rejection.

Rejection I’m used to. I just wished that Regory didn’t have to live with this sense of failure. A part of me, some days small and some days loud, always believed that it would end like this. That I would be on my own, abandoned. So many people walked away from me, people that should have loved me and protected me. So many people hurt me when they should have held me, and I knew Billy had the same childhood. But somehow, I felt cursed, while she was safe. I wanted to preserve that.

“Left up here,” Billy said. Her eyes were a slightly darker blue than we had started. Millie’s aura must have been hard to touch, because I could see some of the color leaching back into her eyes, as she used the energy to hold onto the child.

“I won’t sugarcoat things from the city anymore,” I finally said. “Or, at least, I’ll try not to.”

Some of the tension leaked out of the car. I glanced in the rearview and saw Regory’s shoulders had relaxed and his severe expression softened, somewhat. “Thanks, Asire.”

“No prob.”

“Keep going straight,” Billy told me. Her expression was almost lax, since she had slipped into an almost trance to keep focused on the signal. She probably hadn’t heard a single thing Regory and I had said since starting this trip.

When I looked at the road again, I had to curse. I pulled over to the side and threw the car into park. When we stopped moving, Billy’s brow wrinkled and she came back to the world. She looked over at me and said, “We’re not there yet. We have to keep going straight.”

“I can’t,” I said. “In another mile or so, we’re going to come up to one of the border patrols. If they see us and we show them our IDs, we’ll be arrested immediately, even if we aren’t asking to leave the city.”

Billy blinked. “Okay… What do we do?”

The other two cars pulled in behind us. I saw Reggie and Ella get out and I followed suit. We met somewhere in the middle.

“I assume they have to keep going?” Reggie asked, a resigned tiredness about her. She had her hands on her hips and her head ducked to avoid the light rain that was falling.

“Yeah,” I said.

“We have to let them continue,” Ella said, near panic in her voice. “They have to find my baby.”

Reggie absentmindedly patted Ella’s shoulder in comfort. “Of course they’re continuing. Tell Billy and Regory to get in their cars and we’ll wait here in your truck, Asire.”

“Gotcha,” I said, turning back around and jogging to my truck. I opened the door and relayed the message. Billy and Regory didn’t hesitate to rush back to their cars. Reggie, Ella and I climbed into the truck and watched as the other two cars pulled out. My heart sank as they drove out of sight.

I didn’t like separating. We had to, because that was why they were here. But the idea of letting my cousin fight my battles wasn’t pleasant. Especially when she was doing it with a bunch of people I barely knew.

“So…” Reggie said. “Obviously, my favorite from that group is Dovie, but Loki’s nice too.”

I almost rolled my eyes.

“Seriously?” Ella asked from the backseat. “I might have lost my child and you’re talking about hunky men?”

Reggie smiled. “See, even you, a mated legion, thinks he’s hunky. What do you think, Asire?”

“That you’re ridiculous.”

Reggie laughed. “Not into that fine piece of man candy?”

I knew what she was trying to do. Downplay the seriousness of the situation so that our heads didn’t explode. We needed relief from all the tension and joking around was the best way to do it. However, Reggie was still Reggie.

I glanced at her. “Man candy? He’s like six, six,” I said. “And could probably pick up a car one handed. And you’re calling him man candy?”

“Yep,” Reggie said. “He’s the best kind. Capable of working and looking good while doing it.”

I shook my head. “Why am I friends with you?”

“Because you love me.”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m a woman who knows what she likes.”

Reggie and I started to throw insults back at each other. Extra points for creativity, but the game was to see how long we could continue it.