Page 8 of Fated Exile

I'm not the only one. As Delilah pulls away and begins to stand, she's stopped by a sudden, insistent hand on her wrist. The woman in my arms has gotten a second wind and an unexpected strength. Her bright blue eyes are wide open and fixed on Delilah's face as she struggles to lean up, clutching her close.

"Don't go." Her breath wheezes softly, and I have to hold her up to keep her from struggling out of my arms, but she's surprisingly spry. “Celeste, don't go. She's with them... she'll kill you."

Delilah's lips part, and I can practically feel the tenuous hope in the air. "Are you...? We look so alike, could you be..."

Blinking her eyes, the woman puts a hand on Delilah's cheek, and awareness ripples through her. In a soft, hopeful voice, she says, "Oh my. I was confused for a moment. You look so much like her. But of course—you're Celeste’s little girl."

The excitement dims in Delilah's eyes. "Oh."

"I'm Kerry." The woman's hand grabs onto Delilah's and hugs it tight. "I'm your aunt, little one."

Roarke jumps in sharply to say, "Yourdyingaunt. No offense, ma'am, but I'm shocked you're even conscious. This blood loss is too much to handle."

"Strength spell." Kerry's mouth flickers, and she glances up at me, brows climbing. "You're handsome. Very warm, and these biceps... they don't make many like that. Must be a werewolf."

She's going to like Cat. They're the only two women I know who could be dying from a dozen open wounds and still find the time to hit on a man.

"We have to make a decision, quick," Marcus says, impatiently cutting through the hopeful family reunion taking place. "Are we going after those vampires? Because if we delay even one more moment, they'll get away."

Kerry says, "Don't do it. She's escaped, that wretched thing, and she'll be at her full power now. Anyone you send after her cadre will die a bloody death."

Delilah glances over her shoulder towards the open door beside the altar. She chews on her lower lip, and I can tell she's torn.

On the one hand, the dying woman is quite likely a relative of hers. On the other, it's entirely possible that the only way we'll get ahead of the threat at our doors is to pursue those vampires.

In a low voice, I tell her, "We were almost wiped out by them earlier today, and apparently that was when thatthing," I motion towards the iron cage, "was safely contained."

"Mostly contained." Kerry winces as Roarke puts a tourniquet around her calf, cutting off blood flow to an especially egregious wound. "Turns out she'd evolved to cast outside even iron bars and hundreds of feet of black rock. Who knew?"

Delilah seems to make the decision in a single moment. "We'll turn around, regroup, and bring the wounded to the medical center. Once we have more warriors and a better idea of the threat at hand, a group will return here and pursue the threat—butonlyonce we know what we're facing. Otherwise, we'd be going in blind, and between the curse and the earlier attack, we're too weak to risk it."

Marcus frowns at this, his eyes flicking to Roarke. The latter doesn't even look up at him, and I know it's deliberate. He's ceding some of his authority to Delilah, to make sure that the warriors accept her—and by proxy, the rest of the pack.

A tense moment hangs in the air. If they refuse to honor Delilah's decision and go off on their own, it's more than just their own safety that they're risking. The pack may not accept Delilah, which could be a disaster. We have no idea if she can lift the curse without being a member of the pack, folded into the threads that connect us to our mates, each other, and by extension, the land itself.

"Sounds good," Marcus says. Wally and Barry nod gruffly. Ian doesn't look like he knows a decision was made. "Let's get a stretcher together. We can take apart a few pieces of that altar and string her up with some fabric from those drapes hanging behind it."

"Thank you," Delilah says, and my shoulders sag in relief as the moment of tension passes. "I appreciate it. Who knows—maybe Kerry can give us some answers about what we're up against."

We both look down to the woman in my arms, who I'm still struggling to think of as Delilah's aunt. Despite whatever strength spell she cast to keep her conscious through the blood loss, she's starting to fade. Her eyes are slipping closed, her breathing is shallow, and her skin has gone clammy and pale.

But at Delilah's words, she manages to gather the strength to say, "I can tell you exactly what you're up against: the greatest monster I've ever known. Someone whose face and voice will haunt my dreams all my life." Her hand slips from Delilah's, and her voice grows drowsy as she mumbles, "Say your goodbyes, because now that she's out, she's going to kill us all."

As she passes out, her hand goes limp and falls to the side, somehow snuggling right up against my crotch.

If I couldn't feel her slow, even breathing, I'd think she was faking sleep.

I hope she survives this—for Delilah's sake, and so we can find out what she knows.

And so she can meet Cat. I want to see them each discover that there's a woman out there just as outrageous as them.

Five

Delilah

Ihave an aunt. My mother's sister. A living, breathing connection to the woman who birthed me.

A thousand questions swirl in my mind, each fighting for prominence, but they all have to wait. As soon as we arrive at the medical center with Kerry's stretcher, she's whisked away to the back for surgery.

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