I could still do that. Just later.
I left Dastien to finish his shower and grabbed a fresh pair of leggings and a T-shirt. I was pulling on my shoes when he came out of the shower to get dressed.
Did Claudia say what she wanted? I asked Dastien.
No, and I know you’re exhausted, but it’s better to deal with whatever it is that she wants. She wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t urgent.
I laughed. I was just thinking that I was doing a good job of hiding how tired I am.
He turned to me with his shirt in his hand and raised one eyebrow. It was a look that said Really? Did you really think that? He didn’t say the words or even use the bond to think them at me. But I could hear them anyway.
“Yeah. I really thought that,” I said aloud.
I plopped onto our unmade bed while I waited for him to finish dressing. A year ago, I didn’t even know that werewolves existed. I thought I was just a weirdo who had visions. When I touched something, I could see everywhere that thing had been. When I touched a person, I could feel whatever they were feeling, see whatever was bothering them, and sometimes things got interesting.
I’d always assumed I was a freak. It wasn’t until I moved to Texas eleven months ago, and Dastien accidentally bit me that I knew
that there were more supernaturals out there than I could’ve ever imagined. I was apparently born a witch, and was now also a werewolf. And now, I’d dismantled the whole political structure of the supernatural world.
My family’s coven in Texas had turned evil, and aside from a few exceptions, everyone from the coven was dead. Some charred ruins were all that was left of the abandoned compound.
Although some of the fey had fled to live with Chris and Cosette in their neutral supernatural compound in north Texas, the vast majority were still in hiding in their respective courts and poised to attack us at the slightest hint of provocation.
And the werewolves—well, they were still getting over the fact that I’d dismantled their Council of Seven with one pesky little spell. Most of the weres thought I was too young to rule over them, even though I had enough power to do the job.
They didn’t care that I’d done the spell to stop the apocalypse. The old Alphas were pissed off that now thirteen supernaturals held power. Four fey, four werewolves, four witches, and me—a witch-werewolf combo. It took an archon—an archangel with the power to act freely—to seal our magic together, but he wasn’t around to be a part of our lives. Maybe if he was, everyone would quit their bitching, but that wasn’t happening. No one could predict—let alone control—Eli.
The old Alphas needed to get over it. I didn’t see them running themselves ragged, killing demons for the last seven months. Nope. They didn’t help fight Luciana when she went full-on evil, or Astaroth when he ripped open the portal between our realm and Hell. That was just me, my mate, and our friends.
Okay. I wiped my hands down my face, hoping to erase some of the exhaustion. One more thing tonight, and then sleep. I could get up and do this one more thing.
I walked out onto the porch while Dastien finished getting dressed. Claudia was sitting on the bottom stair. “What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing bad. I just need your help with something, but I only want to explain it once. So—”
“You want to wait for the guys,” I finished for her.
She made a little hmmm noise, and I guessed I’d have to wait.
“Lucas said all is clear on the campus, but the Cazadores and Michael are still going to keep patrolling tonight,” she said, changing the subject.
All right. We could talk about other things if she needed time to work up the courage to ask me for a favor. “Any word about the one that got bit?” I sat next to her.
“He’ll be fine.” She turned to look at me. “Are you okay? You seem…tired. More tired than you were yesterday.”
“That feels accurate.”
For the first few months after we sealed the realm, we kept playing one long game of whack-a-mole with different evil forces. Eventually, we figured out that Astaroth left little gateways open all over the world for his little friends. It took four more months for us to close all of them. Still, some stragglers found their way to me and the site of the now-closed main portal.
We’d figured out that the closed portal might always be a magnet for crazy evil stuff. We’d tried spells and cleansing and a million other things to fix the problem, but it seemed like it might take time for it to stop pulling evil into the area.
And then, as I sat on the porch, I realized that the vampires hadn’t been heading for the portal site. They’d been heading for us. For Dastien and me. For our cabin.
The cabin was set a ways back in the woods behind campus. Nothing ever came close to us. At least not unless it was on the way to the closed portal.
Something had changed. Something was different about tonight.
“Any ideas about why the vampires were coming at the cabin?”