Page 122 of Of Flame and Fate

She reaches into her back pocket, her motions slow, reflecting her exhaustion. “Hello?” Her eyes widen, her head whipping from me, to Emme, and then to Koda whose gaze is just as wide. “Dude, are you serious?”

“What is it?” I ask, hurrying forward.

She looks directly at me. “It’s Destiny. She’s alive.”

My body whips around as I feel a penetrating and familiar pull. From the flames and smoke near the crater, an immense peacock emerges, clutching Johnny’s limp form.

Gemini barks out orders, alerting the pack to follow.

But he’s too late.

The peacock disappears into the horizon, taking Fate with him.

Chapter Twenty-Six

There were days so bad, I wasn’t sure how we’d survive, and nights we couldn’t sleep because we were fighting for our lives. Yesterday and last night were one of those moments. Maybe that’s why there aren’t any tears left to cry.

The air was so dense with regret and worry it was hard to breathe, much less sleep.

I barely spoke the entire flight back to Tahoe, listening as the Alliance elite scrambled to find Johnny. Each word spoken was another icepick to the heart, spreading the numbness taking me over.

Gemini opens the passenger side door to his black SUV, allowing me through. And although he climbs inside and cranks the engine, he doesn’t immediately pull away. Instead he greets me with one of those sweet, outrageously sexy kisses he gives me when we’re alone and have no place to go.

It surprises me, given all the shit the last twenty hours have brought. That doesn’t mean I don’t welcome it and take every bit of love it carries.

He pulls away as I begin to relax, and strokes my face. “You need to sleep,” he tells me.

He’s worn. But his two wolves will keep him going for days. I don’t have a beast to energize me, and only now recognize how exhausted I am. “Okay, but with you, in our bed, and in our real home.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” he says, pressing another gentle kiss across my lips.

He pulls away, the SUV splashing through the large puddles created during last night’s rainfall. I might have burned a good part of South Carolina to ash, but Tahoe is freshly cleansed from last night’s storm.

As we near the end of the tarmac I catch sight of Emme and Bren. His head is bowed as he speaks to her quietly. She’s wearing his old biker jacket, the long sleeves dangling past her hands. But it’s her small smile that gives me pause.

There’s something special between them. I’m just not sure he’s ready to see or feel it, no matter how much she needs him to.

As Gemini pulls away from the airport and onto the main road, my thoughts return to Johnny. But how I wish I could will those thoughts away.

“All those people killed in the stadium were blood sacrifices,” I say. “Weren’t they?”

Gemini rubs his jaw, the longer whiskers of his goatee sliding between his fingers. It’s not an irritated gesture, not like it sometimes is. Like me, he’s in deep thought. “That’s what it seemed like,” he agrees.

“So Johnny will become one of them, won’t he?” I swallow back the anger and maybe more sadness than I should. “He’ll be the next big shapeshifter.”

“Maybe,” he says.

“Maybe?” I question. “He’s a witch and killed all those people. He could have sacrificed them on behalf of a dark deity. Babe, he would have done whatever it took to save his own ass.”

“It’s not as easy as that, Taran. Before becoming shifters, dark witches spend their lives delving in arts laced with evil and ill intent.” He curses. “As much as I didn’t like Johnny, he wasn’t evil. Those feelings he had for you were genuine, and came from someplace good. Good isn’t something dark witches are capable of, and neither is anything that resembles friendship.”

“Then what will he become?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, his SUV barreling down the road. “It’s obvious he made a deal with them. The neophytes and shifters wouldn’t have arrived in the numbers that they did just to kill or kidnap him. Johnny summoned them, and based on the information we gathered during the debriefing, it was when you stepped onto the stage to kill him.”

“That makes sense.” I look up at him. “You know he’ll go to the shifters, right? After everything he did, there’s no other supernatural group who will take him.”

“No, evil is all he has now,” Gemini says. “There, he’ll either be used, emerge as a neophyte, or become something more.”

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