Beta (12 page)

But there was a second box now, too. It was smaller than the first. It looked a lot like a jewelry box.

Deirdre hesitated in the doorway, watching Stark for signs of attack.

She believed that he would have already killed her if Jacek had told him she was a traitor. She really did. But there was still part of her waiting for him to approach her with evidence of her duality.

Stark was calm. He didn’t look like he was going to kill her.

At least, not that night.

She sat across from him without needing to be asked. It was strange how she could be comfortable sitting with a man who scared her so deeply. It was like choosing to sleep in a cave with a monstrous, starving tiger that might eat her at any moment.

Although Stark wasn’t a tiger. He was something far more frightening.

She sat on her hands to hide the tremor. “Did you get the coordinates from the sidhe?”

“Not yet,” Stark said. “They’re waiting.”

“For what? We agreed to give them whatever they want.”

“And we’ll have to get that to them first.” Stark tapped his thumb on the lid of the new box. “That’s why I brought you here. We’re leaving in an hour. You and I will be doing this mission alone.”

That sounded bad. Stark had already proven that he wasn’t attached to his Betas—he’d killed Sancho with a suicidal order only a month earlier, after all. If Deirdre was going somewhere alone with him, it didn’t bode well for her life expectancy.

“Should I visit a church beforehand?” Deirdre asked. “Get my last rites in?”

“That won’t be necessary. Open the box.” He pushed it toward her.

She didn’t take it. “Where are we going that we won’t need backup?”

“You’ll like it, Tombs. I promise.” He gestured. “Now open the damn box.”

Deirdre obeyed.

There was a metal bracelet on the inside that resembled a shackle more than a piece of jewelry. It was hinged on one side, with a small square of mesh intended to rest against the inside of her wrist.

An intake bracelet. One very much like the device the homeless shapeshifter had been wearing.

Once Deirdre put that on, she’d be able to take lethe the way Stark did—just by shoving the cubes through that fine mesh. There were metal teeth within the mesh, long enough that they would bite into her flesh once the intake bracelet was clamped into place, allowing the lethe to enter her system rapidly.

“Put it on,” Stark said.

“I’m not one for jewelry,” Deirdre said.

“I don’t know why you keep defying me. You know how this will unfold. You’ll resist, I’ll insist, and you’ll do what I want anyway.”

“I like to make you work for it.” And she wasn’t ready to admit that she used enough lethe to warrant an intake bracelet. It was rapidly approaching a daily habit.

Once she had an intake bracelet, who knew how often she’d be using?

He was right, though. Deirdre was always going to do exactly what Stark told her to do.

She took the intake bracelet out of the box. The warm, smooth metal was engraved with faint runes. The band was slender and more feminine than the one on Stark’s wrist.

It looked like it would fit her snugly. He must have had the bracelet made specifically for her.

Stark could have gotten her wrist measurement during any of a dozen times she’d passed out from taking too much lethe. The idea of him touching her body when she was unconscious, even if only to measure her limbs… It made her skin crawl.

Deirdre licked her lips to wet them. Her mouth was suddenly very dry.

“I don’t want it,” she said.

She could feel his stare from the shadows in the corner. The dim light reflected off of the intake bracelet on his own wrist. He’d taken off his wristwatch to don it, and the timepiece was coiled beside the lamp. Deirdre could almost make out the inscription on the inside of its face.
For Ever
.

Her fingers shook as she loosened the latch so that she could fit the new intake bracelet around her wrist. She clamped it shut.

The metal teeth pierced her flesh.

Deirdre sucked a hiss between her teeth. It burned more than she expected, throbbing and itching and making the healing fever flush over her arm. Those teeth must have had silver on them.

A trickle of blood, black in the darkness of the room, dripped down her wrist.

“Damn,” she whispered.

Why did anyone ever want to wear such a thing?

Stark offered a cube of lethe to her, cradled between his forefinger and thumb. It looked more attractive now that her wrist was throbbing dully from the intake bracelet. The lethe would numb that sensation.

When she reached out to take it, he pulled back.

“You can’t argue with me in front of members of the Winter Court. If you do, I will kill you,” Stark said.

“I wasn’t arguing with you today. I was trying to keep us from getting ripped off. I’m still not convinced this mythical sword exists.”

“I’m drawing lines for you, Tombs. Telling you where you can’t cross. Don’t argue with me in front of the sidhe. Don’t let them touch you. Don’t kiss or have sex with them. Don’t tell them anything about you, me, or what we do here.”

Deirdre was getting impatient. “I get it.” She reached for the lethe again.

Still, he held it out of reach.

“Just because we’re allying with them on this doesn’t mean they are friends,” Stark said.

Even if they had been, Deirdre wouldn’t have trusted them. Stark’s friends would have to be as evil as he was. “Is it true that they abduct werewolves and make them servants?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The power of the sidhe is immense. If you make me look weak in front of them, whether by defying me or succumbing to them, you will die.”

She rolled her eyes. “Okay.”

Finally, he let her take the lethe.

Deirdre bounced it lightly in her hand like dice. The oily fluid inside swirled, illuminating her cocoa skin in shades of neon blue.

She pushed it through the intake bracelet.

Her body absorbed it through the multiple points of entry, flooding her system with boiling heat. Her arm muscles spasmed.

It hurt worse than it had the first time she’d taken it—and it had hurt a lot the first time. The pain wasn’t immediately followed by the buzz of lethe’s alluring warmth.

Deirdre groaned. “That doesn’t feel good.”

Stark was holding a second cube.

“This one, too,” he said.

She didn’t hesitate this time. She slipped it into place.

The burn was numbed. Lethe overwhelmed her system, heating her blood and sending her head spinning.

There were two Everton Starks sitting in the corner, watching her with four golden eyes, his twin mouths curved into watchful frowns. Deirdre’s head fell back against her chair. Her breath sighed out of her chest, letting the tension in her muscles unravel.

All of her concerns about Jacek vanished along with the pain.

She was surprised when another glowing blue cube appeared in the corner of her vision.

“A third,” Stark said.

Deirdre reached for it, but missed. She was clumsy from the lethe.

A clumsy shifter. Beta or not, she would always be an Omega. A failure. Weak.

He held her hand against the table. Stark pushed the cube into her intake bracelet. His fingers remained steady on her forearm as her buzz grew.

And
there
it was—that high she’d experienced the first time that she’d taken lethe, all warm and pleasant and distant, taking her far away from the gloom of the asylum. The roughness of Stark’s skin against hers felt novel, interesting, not frightening at all.

“Nice,” she said. She wasn’t sure what she was talking about.

He let her stand up so that he could inject the remaining cubes into his arm. The wristwatch glimmered on the table, its soft ticking amplified a thousand times so that Deirdre could hear it echoing all through her skull.

She spun on the ball of one foot, watching the grains in the floor whirl underneath her.

“What do the sidhe want?” Deirdre asked. She giggled. “Sidhe. Sidhe, sidhe, sidhe. She, the sidhe, liked sheets on the…uh…the streets. She, sidhe, sheets, streets. It rhymes.”

“Don’t talk.” Stark didn’t sound angry. He melted into his chair, clutching his wrist. “Focus on your animal.”

He liked to try to talk to her like that, as though he were guiding her through some kind of therapy. It was ridiculous. At this point, Deirdre obviously didn’t even have an animal to call.

She wasn’t a shapeshifter. She was only an Omega, a Beta, always human.

She shut her eyes, wrapped her arms around herself, and swayed in time to the beat ticked out by Stark’s watch. “Where are we going tonight, Stark?” she asked. The hard consonants of his name cracked in her mouth.

“You told me about a doctor once before,” he said. “One of the last times you were in this room with me. You mentioned a doctor with a specialty in gaean pediatric medicine.”

“Yes, there was a doctor,” she said. “Landsmore. His name was Landsmore.” She always talked when she was high on lethe, like she couldn’t stop the flow of thoughts from her mind once the faucet had opened. “He used to give me drugs. He used to shoot me up, too.”

Stark didn’t react to that. He never did.

Talking to Stark was like doing therapy with a mannequin instead of a psychiatrist. An inanimate wooden object that neither responded nor judged. Well, he might have judged—but if he did, there was no outward show of it.

And who cared if he did judge? He was a terrorist. He killed people. He was a horrible human being, a horrible shifter. It would say better things about Deirdre’s character if he hated her.

She drifted through her past, warm with the buzz of lethe.

“The drugs were prescription. Experimental. He wanted to look inside of me and figure out what’s knocking around in my spirit, just like you do, and he thought he could get reactions by filling me with chemicals.”

With her eyes closed, she could still see the inside of Dr. Landsmore’s office, all sterile and white. He’d inhabited a nice hospital. His supplies had been state of the art.

Dr. Landsmore had always smelled like antiseptic and silver.

“At first, he wasn’t even convinced I was a shifter, so he tested that. He shot me up with silver nitrate and waited for a reaction before curing me.” Her hands slid up her throat. “I almost suffocated. I’m almost as sensitive to silver as any other shifter.”

Deirdre opened her eyes.

Stark was inches in front of her.

She stepped back, startled, and almost stumbled over her own feet. She hadn’t taken a dose of lethe high enough to quell the annoyance she felt at his encroachment on her personal space. “What are you looking at? You asked about the doctor. I was telling you about the doctor.”

Stark reached for her. She took another step back.

“Is that his fang?” Stark asked. The words sliced at her like knives.

She covered her ear with her fingers. Gage’s tooth jutted from her earlobe, sharp and curved. The touch made her stretched skin tug painfully. “What’s it matter to you?”

Stark ripped the tooth out of her ear. The earlobe tore. Warm blood splashed on her shoulder.

“Hey!” Deirdre protested, clapping a hand to her ear.

The pain ripped through her body. It was more than a physical hurt.

She felt like she was losing Gage again.

Stark’s upper lip curled as he turned the fang around in his fingers, glaring at it with so much disgust that she might as well have been decorating herself with excrement. He surely recognized the tooth he had given her. And he surely recognized what an act of mutiny it was meant to be.

“I told you that I didn’t want you showing weakness.” He shook his fist at her. “This, Tombs—this is weakness.”

Deirdre’s ribs felt like they were digging into her heart, slowing the beat, making her bleed internally. “Damn it, Stark, I shot the guy. Isn’t that good enough for you?”

“He’s dead,” Stark said. “Let him go.”

She grabbed his fist, trying to pry the fang out of his fingers. Her hand was slick with blood. “That’s not your call to make. Give it back.”

“Forget about him!”

The order just made her angrier. The furious spike within her gut was enough to override even the most pleasant lethe buzz.

Deirdre slapped Stark with all her strength.

He didn’t even flinch.

“What’s the problem, Stark?” Deirdre spat. “Jealous that you don’t have my full attention? Don’t want me to mourn friends?”

“You’re an idiot,” he said.

“Give me the fang, Stark!” She swung again, even though her palm was still stinging and she knew it would do nothing.

He didn’t let the second blow land.

His fist caught hers in a crushing grip. With a single squeeze, she felt the bones in her hand pulverize. It hurt. It hurt so much, and she didn’t care because he still had that fang, and her ear was healing, and she wanted that piece of Gage back.

Stark threw her to the floor. She tried to get up, but he pressed his foot on her chest, pinning her down.

“Love makes you weak,” he said, leaning forward until most of his weight was crushing her breastbone. She thought she could actually hear the bones creak. “I don’t want weakness in my Beta.”

“I didn’t love him,” Deirdre grunted. She pushed against his leg in vain, trying to force him off of her. She could barely breathe. “But that’s still funny coming from you. Love is weakness, huh?
For Ever?
”

It was the inscription on the inside of his watch. She expected that throwing the words at him would hurt—if not him, then her. Someone had given him that watch. And those weren’t the kinds of words that a professional contact or distant friend would have put on a watch.

She wanted a reaction out of him. She wanted to find his soft parts.

Deirdre didn’t expect him to step off of her.

She gasped for air, vision swimming. She rolled onto all fours and waited until she had enough oxygen to be steady.

“This isn’t about finding my animal,” Deirdre said to Stark’s booted feet, just inches from her face. “This isn’t about trying to keep me from being weak. You want to control me. That’s all.”