Edge of Seventeen (9 page)

Eunice was a casual acquaintance of
Sunday’s. At their initial meeting, Sunday instantly made Eunice
for a witch. It wasn’t something she did or something she said.
Eunice’s palpable caretaker aura was as clear to Sunday as the
woman’s salt-and-pepper hair. What the coven lacked in Sammy and
Kayla utter and complete mundane-ness, it made up for in spades
with Eunice. The magic swam around her. Sunday read Eunice’s aura
like a book. No doubt about it, Eunice was a witch, a powerful one
at that, as caretakers often were.

Having identified Eunice, Sunday carefully
investigated her. She even stalked Eunice to ensure that, with her
guard down, the caretaker didn’t suddenly change dispositions.
Manufacturing a caretaker spirit was tough, and even a skilled
witch could only hold the façade for so long before the veil
dropped. If Eunice was faking, she was the best imitation that
Sunday had ever seen. In truth, it would have made Sunday admire
her just a bit for being able to pull it off.

“That makes me feel better,” Sunday
confessed. She might not tell them how, but it did. It was a
comfort to know that Eunice would be among the coven.

“So, where are we meeting?” Her friends
answered with broad smiles.

The more information she had, the better. If
she was going to join them, then Sunday needed to take the proper
precautions before attending. For Sunday, worst-case scenarios were
high on a scale of probability, particularly where witches were
concerned. Though doubtful that Kayla and Sammy would ever be
invited to join a coven even the slightest bit threatening, there
was a chance that Sunday would be waltzing into a veritable lion’s
den. As much as she tried to avoid it, Fate did have the tendency
to put her right where she least wanted to be.

“We always meet at Vicky’s house,” Kayla
answered. “She lives with her grandma, who is kind of our leader, I
guess. She’s been practicing since she was a teenager, so, like,
decades.”

“And decades,” Sammy joked.

“I’m going to need the address,” Sunday
stated flatly. And that was that. Old habits died hard. Sunday was
back at the task of sussing out threats within covens, acting the
judge, jury, and executioner. Hopefully, it stopped short this
time, though.

The ride to Vicky’s later that night was
easy. Through mostly residential streets, the late night traffic
proved to work in Sunday’s favor. She rode around the block one
more time, keeping her eye out for any neighboring houses with the
lights still on and potential late nighters and insomniacs. Any one
of the neighbors might consider a woman riding around on a bicycle
well after two a.m. on a weeknight, suspicious.

More often than not, Sunday planned escape
routes from places that she frequented. Staying off the radar meant
knowing the quickest routes out of town and securing drop boxes
with essentials in case of a quick escape. She couldn’t be sure
that she was being stalked, but it was a possibility. During her
reign as the Incarnate, Sunday had done some terrible things. If
recognized, someone might sound the alarm, and then vampires would
crawl out of the woodwork and put her head on a stake in
retribution. Given Kayla and Sammy’s overwhelming mundaneness,
however, their coven was likely no more than a glorified suburban
book club.

As she came around the corner again, Sunday
hopped off her bike and dropped it behind a tree. If she was going
to enter a coven’s den, she had to do a bit of homework beforehand.
Picking locks was easy. Years of breaking into empty houses for a
night’s sleep and stealing cars made her a veritable pro, but that
wasn’t a skill she needed to use tonight. She crept closer to the
house and peered into the windows.

Nothing jumped out of the shadows with a
neon sign blaring,
Evil Witches,
and likely, it wouldn’t. If
Sunday were going to learn anything about what went on in Vicky and
her grandmother’s house, then she would have to use the
extrasensory gifts in her arsenal. All energy left a stain. It
lived and breathed in the world, seeping from people’s pores and
swarming in the air between them. Magic fragranced the air with its
residue, and Sunday’s unique gift was her ability to sense and
manipulate it. She couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t know
how to do this, and given a lifetime of practice, she had developed
quite the skill. Whatever weaknesses she had, she’d learned to
discover and manage, and her strengths had blossomed in the
process.

Softly, Sunday flattened her palms on the
cool kitchen window and took a slow, deep breath to relax. She
closed her eyes and created a blank canvas in her mind. Sweat
beaded on her forehead as her grip around her psychic shields
loosed. Instantly, millions of thoughts, feelings, and expressions
pummeled her consciousness. The initial onslaught always seemed the
worst part of the ordeal. Suddenly opening herself up to the energy
around her meant it all barreled in at once. Like a boulder dropped
into a fast-running river, the waters crashed over her, and if she
didn’t catch her breath quickly, she’d drown.

Jaw clenched and squeezing her eyes tightly,
she braced herself and breathed.
In. Out. In. Out.

Battening down the hatches wouldn’t work. If
Sunday wanted to gather information, accessing the psychic memory
of the space was essential. She had to open herself up and let the
energy flow through her. Like the pro that she had once been,
Sunday needed to be the conduit
and
the conductor. She
visualized the stream breaking around her. The rapid current tore
past her too quickly for her to make sense of what she was seeing.
She needed to pull herself together if she wanted to take a reading
of the house.

Her fingers cramped, and Sunday pressed her
hand against the glass again, firm in her resolve.

“Show me,” she whispered. “I’m looking for a
threat. Show me the history of this place.”

The bartender held the photograph in his
hand, carefully scanning it for details that could spark some
recollection. After a minute, he laid it on the bar and pushed it
back to the barrel-chested man who had handed it to him in the
first place. Crow’s-feet crinkled the corner of Cyrus’ eyes as he
glared at the bartender.

“She’s hot, and I’d like to think I’d
remember a good looking girl like that. Truth is, man, she can be
any one of these chicks.” He fanned over the space around them.

A muscle in Cyrus’ jaw popped, and he
slammed his hand onto the countertop and pushed the picture back to
the bartender.

“She’s changed a bit. Check again,” he
challenged.

The bartender’s fingers trembled as they
flitted with the edge of the photograph. After another long look,
he shook his head.

“Sorry. I wish I could help you, but I
can’t. What makes you think this chick would be here anyway?
Where’d you say she was from?”

“I didn’t.” Cyrus rubbed his beard and
breathed out a hard sigh.

“She your girl?”

“Nope. She’s no one’s girl.”

He snatched the photograph back, sneaking a
quick glance at it before shoving it into his chest pocket. He
scanned the bottles on the shelf behind the bartender.

“Get me a whiskey. Make it a double.”
Through the mirror behind them, he saw Angel chatting it up with a
pair of lounge flies. He jutted his chin at the mirror. “And
whatever the Hell those girls are having, get them a round.”

In the last few years, Cyrus had visited
more cities than he had in his whole life prior. Each time, a lead
took him somewhere, and then a new one led him somewhere else. The
search for the Incarnate had gone on far too long, and it was
wearing thin. Intermittently, he came across some new intel, but
just as soon as he’d follow the lead, the trail would go cold. This
latest photograph was a recent acquisition. Outside of the
photographs he’d been collecting, Cyrus hadn’t laid eyes on the
target for almost ten years.

Cyrus had hardly finished his drink when
Angel strode up behind him and shoved a brunette into his face.
With his arm around her friend, Angel winked and told him that
their dates didn’t intend on spending the night at the bar. All his
thinking of the Incarnate had given rise to a dangerous need. An
angry erection tugged at his jeans, and it was all he could do to
stop from ripping Angel’s offering apart right there at the
bar.

The girl ran her hand up his thigh, looking
up at him through heavy lashes. Her hand found his bulge, and she
licked the lips of her cat-like grin. She leaned into him, her
breasts spilling from her cleavage, and placed her lips to his
ear.

“You hungry?” she purred.

The brunette’s name was Peaches. It was a
fucking joke, but Cyrus didn’t care.

In her friend’s apartment hours later, she
laid her head on his sweaty chest and fingered the hair over his
heart. An hour of pounding into Peaches’ soft, velvet flesh had
done nothing to soothe him. A ball gathered in his chest wound so
tight he could burst.

He reached for the photograph in his jacket
and stared at it over the mess of damp tresses on his chest. The
Incarnate just over a year ago was nothing like the girl he’d left
behind at the compound.

When Bernadette put out the first contract
on the Incarnate over a decade earlier, every preternatural sect
jumped at the proposition. The Alaska pack won out because of
Cyrus. He was a storied tracker, and his involvement secured the
deal. At the time, Bernadette was the most powerful witch in the
country. Later, with the Incarnate at her behest, Bernadette rose
as a dictator over the preternatural realm.

Although the witch had never explained why
she didn’t acquire possession herself, she put the fear of God in
the wolves. They kept reminding each other that they were just
scooping up, transporting, and dropping off a kid, but doubts
lingered and they’d been ready for any fallout. The Incarnate’s
power hadn’t been checked. Bernadette assured them that the clock
was ticking to some end that they wouldn’t be looking forward
to.

What the werewolf captors encountered in
Louisiana was a deceptively average fourteen-year-old girl. The
Incarnate rolled her eyes sarcastically and smacked her tongue
liberally. When she smiled, her eyes sparkled with naiveté. No
battery of unassailable fires of mystical energy battered them when
they approached her. No terror-stricken banshee wails pierced their
eardrums when she spoke. The greatest danger she seemed to pose
came from her off-key singing in the backseat as she rode with them
during her abduction.

It was in Albuquerque when Cyrus first laid
eyes on the target of their mission. He’d waited at the first spot
along the delivery route for Angel and Stephen to bring her to him.
Nothing prepared him for what he saw or felt when she arrived. The
reaction had been instantaneous. She was a magnet for all the
negativity in Cyrus’ world. All the hate. All the anger. All the
spite. All the fury. It pointed at
her
.
That girl. That
child.
Blackness closed in around them. Inspired to kill her,
Cyrus fumed at the instant he first saw her. Meanwhile, she sat
unbothered, smacking her bubblegum. Totally ignorant of him. It did
nothing but fuel his rage.

But he couldn’t just leave her. The fire
that she ignited consumed him. Dizzy with the cataclysm she
inspired in him, Cyrus sought Bernadette’s counsel. During that
conversation, the witch made him an offer, stay on as the head of
her security team, and she would help him manage the effects the
girl had on him. So he did. For three years, Cyrus oversaw the
daily on-site operations at the estate. Always working in the
shadows, Cyrus and the guards were veritable ghosts on the
property. Months would go by, and he wouldn’t even see the girl.
They would travel with an entourage that he trained while he stayed
behind to man the fortress.

For those years and through all that
separation, the firestorm in him never abated for even a moment. If
anything, knowing she was so close made it impossible for him to
function. She was toxic, and the poison’s effects were
unassailable. He was in perpetual torture. When it became clear
that Bernadette could do nothing to alleviate what ailed him, he
resigned his charge and left the witch and her preternatural
plaything.

Whatever she was, whatever her purpose, and
whatever chaos she was bound to unleash was out of his hands. He
returned to his pack in Alaska and reclaimed his position as their
lead tracker. When the Pastophori of Iset set a bounty on her head
for recapture, the pack Alpha didn’t hesitate to take the lucrative
job, nor did Cyrus hesitate to jump at the chance to recapture her.
Stephen, his pack Alpha, put the deal in place and gave Cyrus the
green light to confront her again. That was over two years ago.

Peaches stirred on his chest and snatched
the picture from Cyrus’ hand. Her pert, pink tips stood at
attention, and the firm mounds hardly moved as she lay back beside
him.

“Who’s this?” she asked. “This your
girl?”

“Nope,” he answered, grabbing the photograph
and tossing it aside on the carpet by where they lay. From the
other room, he heard Angel and Peaches’ friend starting up again.
They were at the friend’s apartment, and Angel and she had taken
the bedroom while Cyrus and his date had taken residence on the
living room floor.

“So, who’s the girl?” she asked again. This
time turning back to him, and taking a cue from the couple behind
closed doors, Peaches took his semi-hard cock in her hand and
stroked, first softly, then harder.

Cyrus laid his head back, closing his eyes.
His mind wandered back to the picture of Sunday as a grown woman.
He imagined opening her up like a cabinet of curiosities. His
erection grew full in Peaches’ hand as his wolf rose to the
surface. Rather than ignore it, he let Peaches stroke him through
it, as the photograph of Sunday in her sundress built in his mind.
Tattooed flowers draped over her shoulder and cascaded down her
arm. He hadn’t seen them yet, but he’d learned that gladiolas
covered her leg. Always, in his memories, like in the photograph,
her gaze hovered just beyond him. Cyrus found himself wondering,
not for the first time, what it would be like to look straight into
the honey saucers of her eyes.