Page 16 of Brutal Alpha Bully

At first, the sliding door sticks. I hold my breath, eyes shut, praying that Xeran didn’t hear the noise, that it wouldn’t wake him up in the middle of his sleep.

Alphas may sleep less, but they sleep harder. When he doesn’t come barreling through the door, Nora and I work together, jimmying the door from either side so we can move it along the track and create a space just wide enough for us to slip through. I have to take her backpack off again, set it down on the porch and go after it, but it works.

Nora looks to me, and I hold a finger up to her, then climb over the side of the railing. It’s harder to control my own body like this. I manage to lessen the pull of gravity and lower down a little slower, but I still hit the ground harder than I intended, and I feel the shock of it in my ankles.

When I’m standing on the ground, wet grass tickling my ankles, Nora holds her backpack over the side of the balcony and lets it drop. I use my magic to stop it a foot before it hits the ground and grab it.

Already, I can feel the drain of this expenditure. But hopefully, once we get far enough away, I’ll be able to rest and recover.

Nora climbs over the side of the balcony and finds my eyes in the dark again. And this time, unlike with the little boy, I see nothing but full trust on her face. She slides off rather than jumping, and doesn’t even close her eyes as I exert my full force of magic to help her to the ground gently.

Nora hits the ground lightly, hovering for a moment before her toes touch the grass.

Together, we move through the lawn and toward the car, but Nora touches my arm, jerking her head toward the trees. I look to the car, then to her, but she seems adamant that we should go the opposite way.

Just like she trusted me, I trust her, and we move through the grass until we break through the tree line. It finally feels like we’re far enough away from Xeran—and his excellent hearing—to talk.

“I saw him do something to the car,” Nora says, reaching out and taking her backpack from me. I try to protect it by holding on to it, but I’m weary from the use of magic and allow her to take it just for a little while. “We should go through the woods.”

“Leave the car?” I ask, glancing over my shoulder at it. “What do you think he did?”

“Probably a tracker,” Nora says. In the low light of the moon filtering in through the canopy, her blue eyes look almost black. “What kind of old friend is he, Mom?”

I bite my tongue. From the time she was a baby, my one rule in raising her has always been that I would never lie to her. That I would tell her the truth and show her the world as it really is, so she would never be hit with a reality that she hadn’t come to expect.

But now, there’s nothing I want more in the world than to keep the truth about Xeran and me to myself.

I tell myself that it’s not a lie. That I’m allowed to have things that are private. That I’m not telling her, not because I’m fabricating something, but because it belongs to me.

Trying to find a middle ground, I settle for, “I can tell you later. But for now, we have to move.”

Nora doesn’t look satisfied with this answer, but she nods, reaching back and tying up her hair before tightening the straps of her backpack and pivoting to face the dense forest around us.

For the majority of her life, Nora has lived a comfortable—though not exactly socially rich—existence on the street where my grandmother lived. But that didn’t stop me from keeping her ready. With the threat of fires, and the looming fear of an unhinged supreme, I made it a point to ensure Nora was ready for anything. That included having a go-bag, teaching her survival skills, and impressing on her the importance of a strong will.

Now, here we are, me taking a moment to breathe while my daughter thinks.

“He wouldn’t expect us to go further into the mountains,” Nora says, her chin tilting up toward the north, further from town and deeper into the dense blanket of trees falling over the mountainside. “And if we go that way, we can walk through the creek. And hopefully, obscure some of our scent.”

Maybe it’s not good form to follow your ten-year-old daughter’s advice for escape, but my brain feels fuzzy from the magic draw, so I just nod, figuring we can always reroute if I come to my senses and want to go a different way.

If I’m being honest, I hadn’t thought much further than getting to the car, getting on the road, and getting the hell out of Silverville.

We move quickly and quietly, stepping among the pine needles on the ground. I use what magic I have left to further muffle the sound of our footsteps. As we go, we might be getting further and further from Xeran, but that doesn’t mean the threat has stopped. There are still plenty of things in the woods to getus. Plenty of terrors hiding around the corner, just waiting for a moment to pounce.

In recent years, these woods have become known for the rampant daemonic fire ravaging through them, but before that, there were plenty of other things to fear. I grew up with the tales of Colorado cryptids, our own versions of the bogeyman.

Except, unlike what humans tend to believe, they are real.

Maybe extinct—or in hiding now, from all the flame and soot—but definitely very real.

Nora and I creep along, and I feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising as I think about nymphs in the water, grabbing your hair and pulling you in to drown. Men with faces like tree knots, stepping away from the bark and turning you to wood, too.

So when we step into a small clearing and something appears in our path, I’m ready, raising my hands and saying loudly, “We cause you no harm. We are only passing through.”

It’s what my grandmother always told us to say if we came across a cryptid of the wood. They’re natural protectors and might let you go if you make it clear that you’re not a logger, not a poacher.

“Oh, isn’t thatrich?” a deep voice rolls through the little space, and I look up to find Dallas Sorel—all three hundred lumbering pounds of him—staring down at us.

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