Page 75 of Shadow Fall: Part Two

“Go look elsewhere, lady,” Verena said in a hard voice, crossing her arms over her chest in a move she’d learned from Em. The way she cocked her chin up was all Haley, though. “There’s no one by that name here.”

I expected resistance or aggression to show on the stranger’s face but instead she smiled. “That’s odd,” she said, trying to peer around us to Haley. A growl revved up my chest, and Emlyn’s own warning sound echoed it alongside Harvey’s. Kai stayed silent, but we all felt the air shimmer with his magic, snakes ready to take this woman out, whoever the hell she saw.

“It’s odd,” she went on, her voice less hesitant but still amused, “because there’s a woman over there who looks almost identical to my husband, Lyall. And I know that’s her name because I gave it to her.”

Haley jolted forward a step, her bump pressing to my back. “Mum.”

“One false move and you’re dead,” Kai warned the woman, but he moved back, and Haley was a force of nature who wouldn’t be contained. She rushed *Waddled.* across the pub, batting away Harvey and I when we followed, ready to catch her if she slipped.

“I thought—” Haley cried. “I thought you were in there, but it’s been months and I knew I had to be wrong but—you’re here?”

“I’m here,” Sofina Vakhara agreed, her smile somehow happy and sad at once. I’d seen that smile on my mate’s face, her eyes crinkling in the same way. “I’m here, Haley. You killed him, you saved me. You saved all of us.”

Haley shrugged, then threw her arms around her mother when they met in the middle of the pub, both clinging to each other. It had been more than a hundred years since they’d last been together, Haley just a child when Sofina left so Cronus wouldn’t hunt them. Watching them made my heart hurt, made my chest squeeze tight. I’d never known that kind of love.

A shoulder bumped mine and I jumped, but a weight fell from me when Harvey leaned against me, his wing wrapping around me. I might not have a mother, but I had my brother, and our family, and our mate, and that was more than I’d ever dreamed of locked up in a tunnel in the Damned Realm for a hundred years.

I lifted my arm in invitation when Verena stalked closer, and she reluctantly came for a hug, scowling at Sofina, no doubt thinking about her own biological mother.

“We’ve got each other,” I promised her quietly, and if I saw her answering eye roll, I pretended to only see scorn and not the tears lining her eyes.

We’d always have each other—Haley, Harvey, Verena, Em, Kai, Wynvail, and I. And the baby.

Because holy shit we were having a baby.

HALWEN

“I can walk on my own, you know,” I huffed, slanting a sharp look at Kai on my left, then Wane on my right.

“You’re four weeks postpartum,” Kai snapped, not even letting go of me when his favourite scarf threatened to suffocate him.5 “I don’t give a shit what you can do. We’re supporting you. You’re precious cargo, my rose, and since you insisted on leaving the Cock, we’re coming with.”

His worry softened my irritation. We were all stressed to leave the pub so soon, with Leila less than a month old, but it was the right thing to do. Since we moved into the Cock, and life seemed to settle into place, I couldn’t help but remember all the people who’d helped us get there. My mind returned to Busty practically every day. It was where we got Leila’s name—it meant darkness. It was both a promise that her family would always be with her, she would always be surrounded by darkness, and it was a promise to anyone who would ever try to hurt her. Fuck with my daughter and know true, final darkness.

My soul itched with the need to turn around and go back to her, but I’d come all this way and I had to follow through.

We’d ended up drawn to a house in Rhyl of all places, a cottage right on the coast. Pretty, but ordinary. I frowned, reaching into my pocket and bracing myself for the blast of magic before I wrapped my fingers around the bone key.

“Is this definitely the right place?” Wane asked, as doubtful as I was.

I nodded, frowning. The house was white-brick in a row of four-storey terraces, and not at all remarkable. But somehow, someway, Erebus was trapped inside. “He’s here. Or this didn’t work at all.”

Kai stroked my back, brushing a kiss over my temple. “If he’s not here, we’ll keep looking. Can you feel anything, Wane?”

“Nothing. Not even a single shadow.”

My shoulders slumped. I was so sure we’d be able to find him when Cerny mentioned in a family dinner—we had those now, with all my guys and Verena, all Lili’s guys, Renna, Asta, Tali, and a bunch of other new friends I’d acquired—that the bone pin he gave me when we first met was supposed to be carved from one of the old gods. A primitive being of darkness.

I was so sure the pin was carved from Erebus’s bone, that I could use it to track him, but there was nothing magical about this place, and I was way too hormonal, sleep deprived, and hungry to handle it.

I burst into angry tears, and was immediately swaddled into warmth and whipcord muscle by my mates.

“We’ll find him,” Wane promised, wrapping his wings around me and making me cry harder. “We won’t stop looking until we do.”

“Let’s canvass the place before we give up, my rose,” Kai said gently. “The pin led you here for a reason. Maybe Erebus isn’t here but a clue is.”

I wished the sky wasn’t so grey and hazy, wished there were more shadows. Would Busty reach out with a ray of shadow again?

I sniffled when Wane brushed the tears off my cheeks, and sucked up my nerve. “You’re right. Let’s check this place out and then go home.”

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