The Great Wolf: A Legacy of Kilkenny Novel Book Three (The Legacy of Kilkenny Saga) (22 page)

Without
thinking to restrain herself, Ivy hissed at Pompeii.  She saw right through his
diplomatic bull—

“Ivy!  Show
some control,” barked Marcus. He leaned forward and looked straight through
her. Ivy shut her mouth but did not retract her fangs. She bowed her head to
both the fairy queen and to the wolf, asking silently for forgiveness. Ivy
didn’t care how offended Pompeii and Cayleigh were. She only wanted to appease
Marcus. He was her only ally, and he was right. She should have learned to
control herself after almost six hundred years of this. It was just that she
was starving. She was seriously feeling jetlagged from her trip.

“Now,”
Marcus began once everyone had visibly calmed. “We’ve summoned you here to ask
for your services.”

Ivy knelt on
one knee, showing that she was listening. Because when one’s Council asked for
something, it was never really a request and it was never simple. “I am at the
hand of my brothers,” she said, just liked she’d been taught. It was protocol.

“The Council
acknowledges your will and is grateful.”

At those
words, Ivy was permitted to stand. She wished they’d just get to the good
stuff. Her skin was itching: the equivalent of a stomach growling out of
hunger. Her veins were drying up and it was irritating as hell.

Unexpectedly,
Pompeii spoke. “We are glad you have accepted our request, Miss Parker. The
humans have kidnapped the phoenix.” Ivy waited for the part that was supposed
to interest her. “We ask for your assistance in the retrieval.”

Ivy’s jaw
almost dropped. They had called her here…
for a bird
? Yeah, she’d heard a
few stories about the ‘amazing phoenix’. So what? It was just a bird. Ivy was a
specialist in neutralizing dangerous situations. Whenever a human found out
about an Underdweller and had exposure on their mind—Ivy was there. Whenever a
crazed cult decided they wanted to summon demon whatever from the dimension
Whatever—Ivy was there. The Council losing a fire-pet, however, wasn’t exactly
her cup of tea.

“Look, I’m
not animal control. It’s gonna die anyway, right?  When it does, I’ll loan you
a dustpan and a broom.  Bring back the ashes and play the waiting game.”

Marcus was
already shaking his head when Queen Cayleigh began to laugh. “Ignorant girl! You
disgrace yourself with your naivety.” Ivy took a step forward. But the queen
was already too delighted to be perturbed.

“The phoenix
is not a bird. Not simply. Twenty years ago, The Covenant came across what we
can only define as a second-generation phoenix.” Ivy visibly started at
Pompeii’s phrasing. A second-generation anything was unheard of. That meant
hybrid. All of the human-Underdweller hybrids had been wiped out at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Ivy would know. She’d had a hefty part in
the mission. The wolf continued, pressing past her obvious disbelief. “We
convinced this second-generation to join our cause, however, she passed,
leaving behind only a daughter. But two weeks ago her guardian was found
murdered and the phoenix was gone.”

Ivy wasn’t
impressed with Pompeii’s intimate knowledge of the mission. This lycan had the
tendency to drone, and it was difficult to keep her attention on him. Her body
was nearly burning with hunger and there was blood in that room. Ivy’s dull
green eyes were drawn to the fairy and her mouth began moving before she’d
realized she’d spoken.

“What if
she’s dead already?” The Council said nothing. Oh. Regenerating species.
“Right…”

“She is a
human when she dies in a spectacular inferno and human when she is born again,
at the same age. She ages like a human, but she has the ability to shift into
her true phoenix form at will. She is the future of the Underdwelling. You must
retrieve her. Whatever it takes, we will cover your tracks. She is the most
important asset we have if we want to carry on with the Surfacing as planned.
She is our only link to our still human side.”

Ivy rolled
her eyes and snorted, impressed by the story but not by the wolf. “Are you
still holding onto the idea that humans and Underdwellers can live in some kind
of after-school-special harmony? If I wasn’t undead, I’d vomit.”

“Ivy,
please,” Marcus said, drawing her attention. His lips were turned downward and
the normally smooth span of skin of his forehead was wrinkled. He always looked
that way when he was reprimanding her, which was often. It didn’t faze her
much. “You have already accepted the burden; your quick tongue is better saved
for someone else.”

“Like whom?”
she wondered, not seeing anyone else in the haunting caves.

Queen
Cayleigh giggled to herself like a vapid cheerleader. “Like your partner.”

Suddenly,
Ivy wasn’t so hungry.

There is no cure for birth and
death save to enjoy the interval.

--George Santayana

Dane scrambled to pull on his
pants and secure the buckle on his belt properly.  The sweat on his body was
just beginning to dry but he didn’t have time to take a shower.  Almost
tenderly, he pulled his discarded t-shirt out from under Sophie’s sleeping
form.  She grunted delicately, if that was possible, and turned over on her
side, sighing.  Damn, she was hot.  But Dane had to go and Sophie would always
be there.

Without a backward glance at the
ravenous brunette, he leapt out of the small room and yanked on his t-shirt. 
He passed by his pack members as he left his house, most of them wishing him
luck, and all of them knowing exactly what he’d just come from doing.  He smiled
to himself as he smoothed down his hair, his lopsided grin taking up most of
his face.  He was young. At his age, he was supposed to be fooling around.

He
was glad though that he was the wolf being entrusted with the re-capture of the
phoenix. He’d heard some pretty wild stuff about it. 

That
it was half-bird, half-girl.

Or
that its hair was always on fire.

Or
that if you looked at it too long,
you’d
catch fire.

But
none of that really mattered to him. No other wolf had been trusted to partner
with a vamp. That was something he’d be able to hold over his alpha brother’s
head for a while. Dane usually tried to shy away from tasks handed out by the
Covenant; he didn’t want them thinking that he was rising toward an alpha
position. Too much responsibility was sure to cramp his style. But he couldn’t
pass up the chance to be the first Underdweller to see the legendary
half-phoenix. He was virtually sweating pride. No, wait. That was just sweat.
He dabbed at his forehead with the hem of his wrinkled t-shirt as he jogged
down the sidewalk to catch the next bus.

He
noticed a pretty girl glancing at his exposed stomach as he brought down his
shirt, and he let himself enjoy the view thoroughly before moving on. Something
about brunettes always got him. He saw his bus at the station. Grinning, Dane
sprinted for it.

His
own brown hair was getting long, he thought to himself as he caught sight of his
bangs hanging in his eyes. He’d cut it later. For now, he’d just be a shaggy
wolf. He didn’t miss his own unintended innuendo. Dane leapt onto the bus just
as the driver was closing the doors. See?  His brother had nothing to worry
about. Dane had great timing.

####

The Gatekeeper’s Son

Book One

By Eve Pohler

Chapter One: The Drowning

Therese
Mills peeled the white gloves off her sweaty hands as soon as she and her
parents were in the car. Now that her mother’s thing was over, she could
finally get home and out of this blue dress. It was like being in a
straightjacket.

Anything
for Mom, of course.

What
the…

A man
glared at her through her backseat window. She jumped up, sat back, blinked.
The man vanished, but when she blinked again, she could still see the eerie
face behind her lids: the scruffy black beard and dark, haunting eyes.

“Thanks
again for making tonight so special,” her mother, apparently not seeing the
man, said from the passenger seat as her father started the engine. “You two
being there meant a lot to me.”

“Did you
see that man?” Therese peered through her window for the face.

“What?”
Her mother also looked. “What man?”

“What
man, Therese?” her father asked.

“Never
mind.”

Therese
did not find it unusual that her mother hadn’t noticed the man. Although her
mother was a brilliant scientist, she wasn’t the most observant person. 

Just
last spring after all the snow had finally melted around their house in the
Colorado mountains, and Therese and her mother had been able to enjoy their
wooden deck with the melted lake spread out in front of them and the forest
rising up the mountains behind them, Therese had spotted the wild horse and
foal she had seen just before winter. They both had reddish brown coats with a
white stripe between their eyes, the foal nestled beside its mother’s legs,
staring intently at Therese without moving. The animals stood beneath one of
two magnificent elm trees ten feet from their back door—the tree her mother
said had gotten the Dutch elm disease. Therese relaxed with her mother at the
wooden table on the deck, each of them with a mug of coffee in the bright
Sunday morning. Her mother had the paper but wasn’t reading it. She had that
look on her face when she was thinking of a scientific formula or method that
she planned to try in her lab. Therese stared again at the horse and didn’t
move. She whispered, “Mom.”

Her
mother hadn’t heard.

“Mom,
the wild horses,” she whispered again.

Therese
looked from the beautiful creatures to her mother, who sat staring in space,
transfixed, like a person hypnotized.

“Mom,
are you deaf?” she blurted out, and then she heard the horses flee back up the
mountain into the tall pines. She caught a glimpse of the foal’s reddish-brown
rump, and that was that.

As
Therese strapped on her seatbelt, she also considered the possibility that she
had only 
imagined
 the man in the window. She was, after all,
prone to use her imagination and fully capable of making daydreams as real as
reality, as she had, just now, with her memory of the horses.

Her
phone vibrated. A text from Jen read, “Heat sheets r n call me when u get
home.” Awesome, she thought. Therese was anxious to see who would share her
heat in tomorrow’s championship meet. She hoped she would be swimming
breaststroke in the top heat against Lacey Holzmann from Pagosa Springs. She
wanted to beat her this time.

She
searched outside her window for the scruffy face but saw only a line of
headlights as others, like they, exited the parking lot of the concert hall.
Maybe she
had
 only imagined the man. It was getting dark. The
mountains across campus were barely visible as dusk turned into night.

“We’re
both so proud of you, Honey,” Therese’s dad said from behind the wheel.

Therese
probably got her imaginative talent from her father, who was a successful crime
fiction writer. As soon as his first book made the 
New York Times
bestsellers
list, he moved his family out into their big log cabin in the San Juan
Mountains.

Therese
saw her father eyeing her in the rearview mirror. “Aren’t we, sweetie pie?”

She
wondered at her father’s need to praise her mother all the time. Didn’t her
mother already know she was brilliant and that her husband and daughter looked
up to her? “Absolutely. You’re awesome, Mom.”

Therese’s
phone vibrated again. A text from Paul read, “Wat r u waring?”

She
cringed and murmured, “Oooh. How gross.” She couldn’t believe he had got her
number. He had been stalking her around campus just before school let out for
the summer.

Before
she had a chance to delete the text, Therese heard the rear window behind her
head explode. “What the…” Glass shards pricked at her neck and bare shoulders.
The car swerved left and right. She looked back to see the window behind her
busted. The line of headlights had dispersed into chaos, horns blasting, people
shouting.

“What
the hell was that?” her father yelled. “Oh my God! Linda! Linda!”

“Dad,
what’s wrong? Is Mom…”

Another
explosion rang out, and something zipped just past Therese’s head.

“Therese?
Are you okay? Get down!”

“What’s
happening? What’s going on?” Therese cowered in the back seat as a third
explosion sounded, this time near the windshield. Therese could barely breathe.
She gasped for air, her heart about to explode.

“Stay
down! Someone’s shooting at us!” her father shouted.

The car
swerved, slowed, and turned. The smell of burned rubber permeated the air.
Therese’s head whipped back as her father gunned the accelerator. Her fingers
trembled so wildly, she was barely able to punch the correct numbers on her
phone. She messed up twice and had to start over. Finally she pressed them in
slow motion: 911. It seemed an eternity before a woman answered on the other
end.

“Nine-one-one,
is this an emergency?”