War Of The Alphas: Alpha - War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 4
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War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 4

She had just murdered a man and was surrounded by fugitive shifters.

And she was giddy.

-III-.

There were stables in the basement underneath Chadwick Hawfinch's high-rise. Each stall held a single gaunt, sickly horse whose muscles had atrophied from long weeks trapped in the basement, its flesh pocked by needle marks.

When Stark and Deirdre entered the stables, most of the horses shrieked, reared onto their hind legs, and beat at the insides of their enclosures with blunted hooves. A few of them lifted their heads weakly and then went back to staring blankly at the walls.

The basement smelled like droppings and sweat and copper pennies. Worse, it smelled like perforated intestine.

Vidya had killed Trilby messily. Violently.

The valkyrie stood among her remains, reaching over one of the stable doors to pet a horse that seemed to have lost the will to fight back.

"My gods," Deirdre said, staring around the squalor in the basement. "What is this place?"

"It's a farm," Stark said curtly.

She shot a sideways look at him.

Stark had never been friendly. Not exactly. But he and Deirdre had been growing close in their sick way. He had trusted her, divulged secrets to her, leaned on her for support as his Beta.

He'd even killed everyone on an airplane to save her life, and then kissed her.

Deirdre assumed that kiss had meant something. Probably something like "Stark hates me slightly less than he hates everyone else."

But ever since they'd left the asylum, he had become distant. He barely spoke to her. Deirdre chalked it up to brooding over his ex-wife, who was rebelling against the unseelie queen without his help, but she was afraid that his mood might have been more personal than that.

She was afraid that he knew the truth.

Deirdre approached the nearest stall. Its thick walls shielded her from the wild flailing of hooves, but allowed her to see the equipment on the inside.

A pump was mounted on the interior of the stall. Tubes hung from hooks, tipped by rusty needles. Medical tape was piled on the shelves. Dirty milk jugs were scattered around the door.

"What exactly is this farm producing?" Deirdre asked.

She answered her own question when she spotted a jug sitting against the back wall, beyond all the stalls. Deirdre hooked a finger in the handle and lifted it to look. The fluid inside was sludgy, almost black in the darkness. Horse blood.

"Do vampires actually drink this?" she asked. "I didn't think horse blood would be a close analog to human blood."

"Chadwick Hawfinch told them it was the real thing. And it's cheap enough that people will go along with it to enjoy the idea that they're really drinking blood." Stark's upper lip curled. Deirdre suspected the disapproval wasn't directed toward Chadwick Hawfinch for deceiving his vampire clients, but for the OPA laws that forbade vampires from consuming human blood.

The horses grew more agitated as Stark entered the empty center stall, still carrying Chadwick Hawfinch's charred and severed hand.

Stark bared his teeth in a growl, golden eyes flashing.

The horses in the adjoining stalls skittered away from him so quickly that they slammed into the opposite walls. Amazing how Stark's aura of fear worked on herd animals just as well as human beings.

He pressed Chadwick's hand against the rear wall. A rune Deirdre hadn't noticed flared with magic.

A door appeared where there had been nothing but smooth concrete before, and it swung open to reveal a set of stairs leading underneath the first basement level.

Vidya moved to enter, but Stark stopped her. "Watch the shifters upstairs. Keep them under wraps until sunrise."

She went to the elevator obediently without hesitation.

That left Stark and Deirdre alone.

Her stomach knotted as she moved downstairs into the sub-basement, leaving the thrashing horses behind. Stark tossed Chadwick's hand into one of the other stalls before going downstairs.

The bomb shelter was spacious and well lit, with several cots along one wall and cabinets of food along the other. The rear was cordoned off to be a shooting range. And the guns-there must have been at least three dozen different kinds of guns racked along with melee weapons, like swords, whips, and silver chains.

Stark shoved the door shut behind him. It locked automatically with a heavy thump.

It was quiet in the bomb shelter. Very quiet.

Deirdre stood near the weapons racks as Stark engaged the wards, hands moving over the runes confidently. He wasn't trying to lock anyone out. He was trying to lock Deirdre in.

She had died and come back from the dead.

Again.

Stark was assuming this was a trend, not a coincidence. And this was the first full moon since she'd come back to life.

It was brave to lock himself in with the woman who had just accidentally incinerated a man with her questionable new shapeshifting powers.

She licked her dry lips. "How long should it take before I start to transform? I've never shifted before, so it should be like any other first-time shift, right?" He prowled around the room, checking the cabinets. He found maps rolled up in one and spread them out on a table. "Stark?"

He weighed the edges of the maps down with pocketknives and the sidhe rune stone.

Deirdre went to the opposite side of the table.

The maps that Stark had pulled out didn't display state boundaries, cities, or even topography. She recognized the vague outlines of forest and mountains as being local geography. But the other colorful splotches on it didn't make sense, nor did the seemingly random radiating lines that reminded her of cobwebs.

"Is this a map to the Middle Worlds?" she asked, starting to turn the maps in her direction. She poked at it gently with her forefinger to make sure that she didn't set anything on fire. "Ley lines, I mean?"

He planted his hands on the paper to hold it down. "Niamh said that you were planted in my pack by Rylie Gresham," Stark said.

There it was.

He knew. He knew what she had done, where she had come from, and why she had been sticking around with him.

Stark knew she was a traitor.

It was amazing he hadn't already killed her a third time.

"It's the full moon," Deirdre said. "I could change at any moment. Don't you want to talk about what's going to happen?"

"Niamh says you're a traitor. That's what I want to talk about."

A hard lump formed in Deirdre's throat.

If Niamh knew that Deirdre was a traitor, why hadn't the swanmay told her that she knew? Deirdre had suffered in the wake of Gage's death alone, concealing the truth from everyone-including her friends-when she could have had Niamh's help the entire time.

Because Niamh was a traitor, too.

A traitor for a different faction, but a traitor nevertheless.

Deirdre wasn't sure if it hurt worse that Niamh had killed her, or that Niamh had been lying to her the whole time. Either way, she had wasted so much time watching Jacek that she'd missed the real threat.

And now Stark knew.

"Niamh stabbed me," Deirdre said. "I don't know that she's the most trustworthy source of information on all things Deirdre." Stark rounded the table. Deirdre fought the urge to back away, shoulders tensing as he grew nearer by the inch. "Plus, Niamh is kind of a bird-brain. She's not much brighter than the swan she's supposed to turn into." It wasn't the nicest observation to make, but she wasn't going to bandy words when the woman had stabbed her.

Stark grabbed Deirdre by the elbow and turned her to face him. He might not have been afraid Deirdre would burn him, but she was-she tried to step out of his grip. He didn't allow it. "Tell me you aren't allies with Rylie Gresham."

She set her jaw. Swallowed hard. "Yes, I was allied with Rylie Gresham. She asked me to join your pack and report back on what you did...with Gage's help."

Stark's hands tightened. "Give me a reason not to kill you right now."

"The fact you're asking for a reason means you're not going to do it," Deirdre said. "If you wanted me dead, you'd have already killed me."

"Traitor," Stark said. His tone was soft. Dangerous. "You called the OPA tonight, didn't you? You told them that we would be at the safe house. You've been informing them about my movements."

"No, I didn't," Deirdre said. "And I don't plan to tell them another damn thing about you. I regret everything I did for them in the past."

"Then what are you still doing here? You'll get nothing else from me."

Deirdre was surprised by the question.

What was she still doing with Stark?

When she didn't respond, he continued. "I made you Beta, and you had the OPA sent to the asylum. They would have arrested many of my closest allies if the unseelie sidhe hadn't killed them first."

"Yeah, but I also tried to give you the Ethereal Blade. I've killed people for you, and I'm with you now. Doesn't that mean anything?"

Stark's fingers dug into her arms.

She visualized the Alpha consumed by flame, the same way that she had imagined consuming Chadwick Hawfinch. She had been afraid when he had done that. Afraid that the criminal kingpin would hurt Stark. Now she was afraid that Stark would hurt her.

Yet the flames didn't rise. She didn't glow, much less catch fire.

He released his grip on her.

"Get out of here," he said harshly.

Deirdre would have loved him to banish her days earlier. But now it felt like a punch to the gut.

Why hadn't she already left Stark?

Because she believed in him. Because she believed the world needed him and his vision for the future.

Because they weren't done yet.

This time, when Stark walked around the table, it was Deirdre who pursued him. "Hear me out. Rylie Gresham had the Ethereal Blade, right? Who wields the Twin Blades?"

He straightened out the map, uncapped a marker, started tracing some of the ley lines.

Deirdre took a deep breath. "I think Rylie Gresham is the Godslayer."

She expected that announcement to have some impact on Stark, but he didn't even blink.

He'd spent ten years seeking revenge for Genesis. Deirdre had just told him that the woman responsible was his rival Alpha, and he didn't seem to care. Not at all.

"If Rylie is the Godslayer, then that means she's responsible for even more than I realized. She's not redeemable. I was wrong to have ever helped her. But by announcing this election, she's given us a tool to remove her without causing innocent deaths among the gaean and mundane populations. We need to focus on making you win the popular vote."

Stark exploded with motion, flipping the table over with a roar.

The weapons on its surface crashed to the floor, taking the maps with them.

He swung a fist at Deirdre, so fast that she couldn't react in time. His knuckles connected with her cheek. She smashed into the table. Her head rang, and flames leaped over her skin, echoing the healing fever.

When Stark approached her to strike again, she swept out a leg, hooking it behind his ankle.

She jerked him to the floor.

He shifted his weight to throw himself over her. Stark's hand clamped down on her throat.

Deirdre grabbed a fistful of his shirt.

And her fist leaped with flame.

"Stop it!" she squeezed out, struggling to breathe through his grip. "I'll incinerate you!"

"You don't have enough control," he growled.

His weight pressed down harder. Tighter. Cutting off her oxygen supply. There was so much hate in his eyes.

Deirdre could barely speak. "Want to bet your life?"

She pressed her flaming fist to his chest. She heard sizzling, smelled the meat cooking, saw his face flush with the healing fever as his body rushed to repair the damage she inflicted. But Stark didn't draw back.