Deciding Her Faete (Beyond the Veil Book 2)

E
VERNIGHT PUBLISHING ®

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2016 Elena Kincaid, Maia Dylan, and Sarah Marsh

ISBN: 978-1-77233-981-9

Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Editor: Karyn White

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

We would like to dedicate this book in loving memory of our good friend, John Tucker.  He was a friend, supporter, mentor, and a wonderful man.  He will be deeply missed.

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.

—Dr. Seuss

DECIDING HER FAETE

Beyond the Veil, 2

Elena Kincaid, Maia Dylan, and Sarah Marsh

Copyright © 2016

Prologue

That light! What the hell is that light?

“What did you do to him?” Mrs. Nieves yelled at April.

“N-nothing,” she stuttered. “He fell. I told him not to climb on the counter, but he didn’t listen and then he fell.” She couldn’t get to him in time to catch him.

“Get away from him,” she yelled again. Mrs. Nieves looked genuinely scared of her. “You’re the devil’s child.” She cradled Michael in her arms, surprisingly uncaring of the blood currently staining her new pink cashmere sweater. “They saddled me with a red-headed devil.”

“I am not,” April shouted back. She knew Mrs. Nieves didn’t like her. April was just a paycheck to her, as were her other three foster kids, but she did nothing wrong. She had told him not to climb and she was only trying to help him when he fell, but there was so much blood.

April wept as she looked down at her bloodstained hands and then back down at Michael, who lay still in the cold woman’s arms. She’d never get out of her head the sound of his head thumping hard on the kitchen tiles. And she could have sworn she saw a white and blue light flickering in the palms of her hands. She’d seen it many times before in her dreams, only this time, this definitely wasn’t a dream.

“They’ll never give me any more kids,” Mrs. Nieves cried. “They’ll blame me for this for sure,” she said shrilly, looking up at April.

“Is that all he is to you, bitch? A paycheck? We need to call 911. He needs help.” April had had enough. A ten-year-old boy lay bleeding in her arms, and all the heartless shrew could worry about was money. “If you fed us enough, if you used that money for groceries for the kids you’re responsible for like you’re
supposed
to, he wouldn’t have needed to climb up and hunt for food.”

“Don’t you dare speak to me like that, you little devil. I saw that voodoo shit you were trying to do.”

“I don’t know what you’re talk—”

“Always knew there was something strange about you,” Mrs. Nieves cut her off, her face a cruel mask. April could almost see the wheels turning in her head as an idea was forming. “They are not pinning this one on me.”

April balled her hands into fists, and a murderous rage the likes of which she had never experienced encompassed her. She flew at Mrs. Nieves, knocking her down, separating her from Michael.

“It’s
your
fault he’s hurt,” April spat as she cradled Michael in her arms. April had never been more grateful that the two younger kids, a brother and sister, were not at home to witness this. Their birth mother had been fighting to regain custody of them, so Mr. Nieves had taken them to court.

The cold woman lifted her head, and her eyes went wide with fear. April thought that Mrs. Nieves feared being hit again, but when April looked down at her own hands, she saw the real reason behind her sheer terror. As she held onto Michael, the same white and blue lights dimly emitted from her palms.

And then Michael opened up his eyes.

Chapter One

“April? Earth to April.”

“What?” She looked up to see her coworker, Dee, staring expectantly at her.

“I asked if you were in or not.” Dee huffed impatiently. “A bunch of us are going to Wave for some drinks after work.” Then she added, “Where do you go when you do that thing you do?”

“What thing?”

“Your spacing out thing. You’ve been doing it more than usual lately.”

Dee was right, of course. Her nightmares had become even more frequent as of late and dredging up old memories she definitely did not want to revisit. Like the incident with Michael. No one believed Mrs. Nieves and her crazy ramblings about April’s so-called voodoo, not even April herself. Michael must not have hit his head as hard as she had thought, and April had also been certain that she was in fact not a devil, nor his spawn, nor any kind of witch or voodoo priestess as Mrs. Nieves had claimed her to be.

The light she saw … well, that she just decided to file away and not drive herself crazy over something she could not understand or explain, something that may have only been imagined in the first place. Besides, other than in her dreams, she had never seen it again.

Something good had managed to come out of Michael’s fall. Mrs. Nieves and her husband lost all of their foster children as well as their privilege of ever fostering again. The two younger kids had been returned to their mother, Michael finally got adopted by a nice family, and April, being that she had been nearly sixteen at the time of the incident, had proven herself to be extremely self-sufficient, and got herself emancipated.

The lawyer who had represented April in her emancipation case, Lauren Danvers, a sharp, no-nonsense woman who had two grown daughters of her own, ended up taking April into her home.

April had thought that she would prefer being on her own, as then at least no one would be able to disappoint her anymore, but something about Mrs. Danvers and her family had called to her. After being abandoned at the age of five, with no memory of her past other than her first name, she had bounced around the system and eight different foster homes. At Mrs. Danvers’s home, for the first time in April’s life, there were no strings attached, no paychecks to be collected. They simply offered her a home and genuinely grew to care for her and her for them. Even after she had made an accidental strange discovery about her pseudo-adoptive family, they didn’t kick her out. Instead, they sat her down and opened up a whole new world for her about shifters and other beings which she had once thought fictional.

She had stumbled upon a young boy, maybe a year older than her former foster brother, Michael, in the woods behind the Danvers’s house. He lay whimpering in the snow with a gunshot wound in his thigh. “Hunters … they got me this time,” he had explained.

April was confused. “Why would they be hunting
you
?”

She discovered the reason when he winced again from the pain and growled low in the back of his throat. Sharp claws extended from his fingernails, and then his eyes glowed before he growled again in a deep animalistic rumble. He should have terrified her, but instead, she found him beautiful. She wanted to take away his pain, put it on herself if she had to.

Without even realizing, she placed her hand on his thigh. “It will be okay,” she reassured him. “I’ll get you some help.”

The boy looked at her with his golden glowing eyes and smiled. “I’m okay now. Thank you.”

Once again he confused her. “But I didn’t do anything.” She took away her bloodied hands and saw that though his thigh still had blood on it, she could no longer see his wound.

She then watched with awed fascination as he changed fully into a brown wolf, larger than any she had ever seen. He gave her cheek a quick swipe with his tongue before running off deeper into the woods.

“I guess we have a lot to talk about,” she heard Mrs. Danvers say behind her.

She learned that wolves heal fairly quickly, even from a gunshot wound, but that day in the forest, the injured boy healed at an exceptional rate that saved him from a few hours of pain. She filed that incident away as well. When Mrs. Danvers told her that she had the healing touch, April had found her calling in life. She became a nurse, helping first humans then shifters once she learned their physiology.

She had felt another calling six months ago on her twenty-fourth birthday, one that led her away from her home in Washington State and relocated her to a nursing position at a hospital in Vancouver. That’s when the nightmares had started up again and continually progressed in frequency. Images of flashing white and blue lights, screams, and cruel laughter began to haunt her again, but still something in her gut told her she needed to be there in Vancouver.

It had been hard enough to let the Danvers family in emotionally, but making new connections just wasn’t her thing. No one could disappoint her if she kept people at bay, so she pretty much had kept to herself and came no closer to figuring out why her gut had drawn her north to work for a human hospital in Canada.

Maybe it was time to change her loner status, she thought. Something inside of her heart had been stirring lately, causing her to feel empty, dead inside. She felt a strong longing that she would not be able to just hide away and compartmentalize. Not this time. 

“I’m in,” she told Dee. She didn’t bother answering Dee’s second inquiry. Her memories were her own, and none that she wanted to share with a coworker she barely even knew.

One hour and thirty minutes later and two drinks in, April wished she had just gone straight home. Dee and several coworkers, whose names she couldn’t remember, had all paired off and were currently grinding against their possible one night stands. April had done the one night stand thing herself once, and therefore had no room to judge, not that she was the judgmental type in the first place, but she realized from her experience that it did nothing for her. The encounter had only made her feel lonelier, made her yearn for a connection that she feared she would never find. She envied her shifter family and the deep bonds that they formed with their mate or mates.

And April definitely found the sleazy guy with greased up hair sitting next to her severely lacking in the connection department. He also apparently did not understand the meaning of “I am not interested” despite the fact that she had already stated it three times.

“Do you not see what’s in my hand?” April held up her gin-and-tonic and jiggled it in front of him, the ice clinking against the glass. “It’s called a drink, and I already have one.”

“You don’t have to keep being such a bitch about it.”

“Excuse me?” Now she was mad.
Who the hell does this guy think he is?
“If I am being a bitch, it’s because you won’t leave me the fuck alone!”

He got in her face then. “That’s because I bet you could use a good
fuck
. Then you wouldn’t act like such a prudish cunt. Tell me, is the hair on your pussy the same fiery red?”

April shoved him hard away from her before throwing her drink in his face. His expression changed from lascivious to extremely pissed off in an instant. He grabbed her wrist, causing her to whimper from the pain. A moment later, her wrist was free, and she came face to face with a very well defined muscular back, outfitted in a skin tight black t-shirt. His bicep bulged as he twisted the arm of the sleazeball, pinning him to the bar. April tilted her head to the left to see past the man who had come to her rescue, and saw that said sleaze cringed in pain.

“How about I rip out your tongue?” the deep husky voice asked the slimeball. “Then you won’t be able to talk that way to a lady again.”

The slime’s eyes went wide with fear as a few patrons stared at them for a moment, before returning to their drinking and flirting as if this kind of thing happened all the time. Which it probably did, April figured.

“Maybe after that, I’ll remove your arms from their sockets so you never place your unwanted hands on a woman.”

“Okay, m-man,” the sleaze pathetically stammered. “Okay. T-take it easy.”

As soon as
sexy back
released him, her greasy suitor hightailed it out of his seat and disappeared into the crowd.

She had no idea what possessed her to do it, but with his back still to her, probably making sure the asshole didn’t try to harm another woman, she couldn’t stop from leaning in closer to the tall drink of water and inhaling his scent. His shirt smelled freshly laundered, but it was his woodsy scent that made her mouth water. She felt the sudden urge to lick him, but shook her head to clear her mind of the insane thought. At least she no longer regretted coming out tonight. Things had just gotten a little more interesting.

And then he turned around, and things got
a lot
more interesting. She felt her heart skip a beat as if it forgot how to function properly. She could sense her face redden underneath his penetrating gaze. His sapphire eyes connected with her green ones as if they looked through and inside her. She had the sudden urge to brush away the few strands of dirty blond hair that concealed part of his right eye, because maybe then she’d be able to fully see into the depths of his soul as well.

“Did he hurt you?” the stranger asked with genuine concern. He gently picked up her wrist to examine it, and she immediately pulled it back. It didn’t hurt when he touched her, but his touch produced a spark that shot up her entire arm. It scared her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let me get you some ice for that.”

“No, it’s fine.” She felt her cheeks redden further. “It doesn’t hurt. And thank you … you know, for stepping in when you did.”

His brow furrowed, as if in confusion, and then he flexed his hand a few times, the same hand he touched her with, making her wonder if he felt the same spark, too.

“You’re welcome.” He took the now vacant seat next to her. “What’s your name?”

“April.”

“I’m Jason.” April’s eyes went straight to his lips when he told her his name, and she watched as those full lips slowly quirked into a sly smile as he added, “Tell me something, April, do you always like to sniff men who come to your rescue?”