Wolf Pact: A Wolf Pact Novel (5 page)

He reached out again for her mind, but he couldn’t find her. For a few desperate seconds, there was nothing. Then, suddenly, the spark between them returned.

GO!
Tala screamed.
GO! YOU DON’T HAVE TIME! LEAVE ME!

I CAN’T
, he screamed back.
I WON’T!

The boys stood by the open passage, waiting while the room burned. Soon their bodies would be sacrificed to the flames and all would be lost. But still Lawson did not move. He was as paralyzed as Edon had been earlier at the door.

Tala, no … I won’t leave you the way Edon left Ahri. I can’t let that happen. I won’t.

Go …
Her voice was weaker now. But when she saw that he was hesitating, her voice recovered the ferocity he knew and loved so well.
Remember the pact! Go!

Never!

But she pushed him away with her mind, and before he knew what was happening, he had joined his brothers on the other side. The portal continued to close and he heard her scream as a whip cracked in the flames.

TALA!
Lawson’s heart broke in anguish and fear.
TALA!

In one instant
the brothers were sitting in the burning living room; in the next, they had disappeared. The house shuddered, heaving its last gasp, and collapsed, the hounds storming the ashes of what they’d left behind. But Lawson and his pack were gone, save one.

B
liss
Llewellyn waited at the airport for Aunty Jane to pick her up from the bonding she’d just attended. Aunt Jane wasn’t really her aunt; she was the latest incarnation of the
Pistis Sophia
, the Immortal Intelligence, what the Blue Bloods called the Watcher. She had been Lucifer’s sister in an earlier cycle and since then had been destined to foresee the return of the Dark Prince from the underworld.

Bliss scanned the cars, looking for her aunt’s Honda Civic. Sturdy and reliable, just like the form the Watcher had taken in this life, she thought. Jane Murray was a short, sensible-looking woman of late middle age who favored brightly colored wool cardigans, plaid skirts, and brown moccasins and was known to quote from Austen or Shakespeare when the mood struck.

She wondered
why Jane’s powers didn’t extend to making them look more like relatives. Though the Watcher hadn’t managed it the last time, either; when she’d taken the form of Bliss’s sister Jordan, everyone always remarked they didn’t look like sisters. Bliss herself was tall and rangy, with long, thick hair that fell in russet waves down her back. She’d even been a model once, back in New York, in another life. A life that had probably ended with the bonding she’d just left. When would she see her friends again? she lamented, thinking of Schuyler, Jack, and Oliver. She missed them so much already.

As Bliss wandered up and down the sidewalk outside the airport, her hand slipped under her shirt, and her fingers traced the long, ugly scar in the middle of her chest, a rumpled ridge of skin, bumpy and coarse. She tried not to pick at it, since it just made it worse when she did, but it was hard to stop.

The scar was a reminder of the girl she had been, dark history marked on her pale flesh. Lucifer’s daughter. Devilspawn. Silver Blood: a corrupted vampire who fed on the souls of its own kind. A Dark Angel cursed to live the rest of her immortal life on earth, reincarnated through the cycles to perform her father’s bidding. The Dark Prince had been using her as a way to seek revenge on his enemies, to wreak havoc and terror.

In the end
she had managed to fight him and regain control of herself, her body, her memories. There was some cold comfort in knowing that it was all behind her, that there was nothing left of her father’s malice except for a faded purple gash where she had plunged a knife into her own body rather than murder another innocent victim. Bliss had been ready to face death, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. But she’d been blessed with another chance, a new life, a new way forward to redeem the past and forge a new identity.

But now that she was no longer Senator Llewellyn’s eldest daughter, no longer a student at Duchesne, no longer a cheerleader from Texas, she didn’t know who she was supposed to be. Was she still immortal? Her mother, Allegra Van Alen, had told her that she was human now, and that her true name was Lupus Theliel. Wolfsbane. But Allegra hadn’t told her what it meant. She’d only told her to find the wolves.
They are demon fighters and we will need them in the final battle with the Silver Bloods
, she’d said.
Tame them. Bring them back to the fold.
She hadn’t said anything else—not where to start, not where to go, nothing at all about how this task was to be accomplished. Bliss had managed to put it out of her mind so she could enjoy her friends’ bonding, but now that she was home, she needed to get to work.

Finally, Aunt
Jane pulled up to the curb. “Hop in,” she said. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.” Bliss thought about how much her friends would make fun of her if they could see her with this woman in this car.

“Where are we headed?” Bliss asked. Before she’d left for Italy, they had been investigating a case in Chicago, but Jane had told her to take a return flight directly to Ohio instead.

“Cleveland area.”

“Hellhounds in Cleveland?” Bliss said, smirking a little.

“Maybe,” Jane sighed. “Allegra must know something I do not if she thinks you can bring them back to our side. Hellhounds are uncontrollable, violent, and vicious, creatures of shadow. This is a dangerous proposition she has laid on your shoulders. We will have to exercise utmost care.”

“But Allegra said they stood with the Blue Bloods once … that they’ve just been estranged,” Bliss said.

Jane explained. “The hellhounds are Lucifer’s Dogs. When the Dark Prince was known on earth as Emperor Caligula, they were his guards, the best soldiers in the vast Roman army. But the hounds turned tail, betraying their master to stand with the Blue Bloods during the Crisis in Rome, helping Michael to send the demon king back to the underworld. They disappeared soon after. Some say they were punished for their actions, and once again do Lucifer’s bidding. The Repository isn’t clear on this, though.”

“Aunt
Jane,” Bliss said in a small voice. “If the hounds are with Lucifer, that means we’ll have to go down to the underworld, doesn’t it … to find them? Down to the Ninth?” She shuddered at the thought of it. She had no desire to see her father again, much less to fight him for command of his dogs. Why had Allegra put this on her shoulders? More importantly, why had she accepted? She’d done it to repent for her actions, Bliss reminded herself, because whether she had been aware of it or not, she had been the vessel for her father’s malevolent spirit in mid-world. She had accepted this task to clear her conscience, to do a bit of good in the face of impossible evil. She only hoped she was strong enough. She wasn’t a vampire anymore—just a mortal girl now, with a middle-aged mortal to help her.

Her aunt’s forehead crinkled. “I truly hope not. I hope that’s not what Allegra had planned for us. Let’s see what we can accomplish on this side of the fence for now.”

Bliss exhaled.

“What’s in Cleveland?” she asked.

“Not
Cleveland exactly, but a place called Hunting Valley,” Jane said. “There’s a burnt house with a strange story. I think something happened there that might lead us to find what we seek.”

“H
ow
was the bonding?” Jane asked as Bliss studied the papers on her lap and they drove deep into the night.

Bliss put down the newspaper clipping she was reading about the fire. She smiled a little, thinking of the happiness she had been part of so recently, which felt already as if it had happened many years before, as if the memory was already as worn as a sepia-tinged photograph. She thought of Schuyler’s shining face and Jack’s proud one. “It was wonderful,” she said, blinking back tears, feeling a deep longing and an ache for something she knew she would never have. Love throughout eternity.

Jane reached over from the steering wheel and squeezed her arm in sympathy. “I know you’re thinking about Dylan,” she said. “But you were right to let him go.”

Let him go … an interesting choice of words. Bliss could never truly let Dylan Ward go. She thought of what he had done for her: kept her sane, given her the strength she needed to fight her father’s spirit, to stand up to the Dark Prince. Her sacrifice had released her link to him—Dylan had moved on, gone to a better place—but she missed him with an ache that was a physical pain. She would never heal from it.

“One day, you will find a love as great as the one you two shared. You deserve happiness, my dear, and you will find it,” said Jane.

Bliss sniffed, blinked back her tears. “I’m okay.”

“I know you are.” Jane smiled. “You are stronger than you know.”

They
drove the rest of the way in silence, and an hour later arrived at their destination. Jane pulled the rental car up to a police barricade around the remains of the burned-out house in the middle of the street. “I think this is it,” Jane said. It was after midnight, and the streets were empty, the heavy cloak of darkness impenetrable. The only sound came from the crunching of their tires on the gravel. The night air was bracing cold.

They
stepped out of the car. Bliss clicked on her flashlight and led the way. Once they’d reached what remained of the house, she swept the flashlight across what must have, at one time, been the living room. “What do you think?” she asked. True to the reports Jane had pulled up for her to read on the drive, only the front door was still standing. Otherwise, everything had burned to the ground, to ashes and dust, rubble and debris, covered by a light gray snow. “An accident? Arson? Or … ?”

“Not sure yet,” Jane said. “Let’s take a closer look around, see if we find anything odd.”

Jane had printed a story about the burned house from a blog that documented supernatural phenomena. Those who’d witnessed it burning said they had heard terrible screaming, eerie roars, and manic howling from inside the house as the fire raged. But it was an abandoned home—no one was supposed to be living there—and after the fire had consumed everything, the police had found no human remains, no proof that anyone had even been in the house when it burned.

The fire had been written off as an accident—the electric company had forgotten to turn off the power and a utility cable had sparked during a blackout. That was all.

Maybe the police were right. Maybe nothing had happened here. Maybe there was nothing to see, nothing here that would lead them to the hounds.

But Bliss
kept staring at the door that was still standing, that hadn’t burned. It was impossible that an entire house could burn down leaving just the one door. She could imagine it only if there had been some sort of spell, some kind of protection over the house that the fire had managed to extinguish, but only in part.

She shone her flashlight on the scarred face of the door, and up close she could see faint traces of writing on the burned wood. Runes of some kind, perhaps. Across the dark lot Jane sneezed from the dust. “Hamlet’s ghost,” she muttered, blowing her nose.

An accident, the official reports had concluded. Maybe the whole incident had been just a hoax. That was another possibility. There was no way to know for sure. No way to know, unless …

Bliss kept her light fixed on the door, slowly sweeping it down to the ground. She pushed some splintered wood off to the side with the edge of her sneaker.

There. She saw something.

She moved closer and shone her light directly on it, her heart beating in excitement at the heady rush of discovery.

“Aunt Jane!” she called. “Here!”

In the middle of the burned wood, half-buried in the ashes, was a black pebble that shone as bright as a glittering diamond. Bliss knew what it was immediately. The Heart of Stone—it was a remnant of the Black Fire of Hell.

Bliss clicked
off her flashlight with some satisfaction. They were right. The hounds had been here.

T
he former fire
chief lived in a tidy house in a pleasant suburb, and as Bliss walked up the driveway she was struck by a feeling of homesickness so deep that she had to stop and catch her breath for a moment. The house was just an ordinary one-story home, a little cottage with pretty Christmas lights. She had grown up in a sprawling, elegant mansion in Houston and then a three-story penthouse in New York, but after traveling and then going on the road, she found something appealing about a home that was so orderly and neatly kept.
Home. Where is home now?
Bliss did not belong anywhere. She no longer had a home.

“It’s all right,” Jane said, squeezing her forearm. Her aunt always seemed to know what Bliss was thinking.

Bliss sighed as she rang the doorbell, steeling herself for what lay ahead. “He knows we’re coming, right?” she asked.

“I
spoke to him just this morning,” Jane said. “He didn’t seem to want to meet with us, but I can be very persuasive when I want to be.”

Bliss smiled. She knew that without Jane she would have given up long before. As she rang the doorbell again, Bliss wondered what would happen if she did end up finding the hounds. Would they even give her a chance to speak? Would she have to strike a bargain of her own? Why had her mother sent her to them? And how would she ever get them to join their cause?