Seer: A Werelock Evolution Series Duet (Book 1 of 2) Page 2

  “You’ve seen her. Admit it. Just this once.”

  He hadn’t phrased it as a question. In fact, it had been more of an uncharacteristic, sad plea, but my head shook automatically in the negative, nonetheless. A second later, Emil was directly in front of me, forcing my head still within his grasp.

  “Yes,” he asserted stubbornly, his massive hands squeezing my head to a halt. “You have. Through her clever sorcery, Maribel may have spelled your responses to suit her needs, just as she has every other seer on the planet whose merits are worthy of her attention, but your involuntary responses don’t lie. You admit the truth with your eyes, with each erratic heartbeat, with every shaky breath. I know you’ve seen her. I know she has not fully departed.”

  I persisted in trying to shake my head within his death grip. Not because I wanted to—but because Maribel’s gag order on me automatically prompted it in response to Emil’s line of questioning. I couldn’t have stopped refuting his assertions if I’d tried.

  “I know!” he thundered, squeezing my immobile head between his meaty paws so hard I feared he’d crush my skull. “I’ve seen her in the ether when I’ve teleported. I know she hasn’t moved on. And I know my clever, beautiful girl must be up to something—as surely as I know it every time your mind goes blank on me that it’s your memories and knowledge of her from your interactions that she is blocking.”

  “Get away from my mom!”

  I let out a shriek at the sound of my daughter’s voice. My teary eyes flew to the kitchen doorway to see Barbara’s tiny frame standing there with her hands on her hips, her challenging glare aimed at a supernatural monster many times her size. Jesus. I’d locked Barbara inside her room from the outside with a deadbolt, which meant she’d climbed out her bedroom window and reentered the house through the basement sliding door again. She’d listened to me better at three than she did at thirteen.

  Emil chuckled as he took in the spectacle. “I see your little one has grown up from the first time we met.”

  Barbara had been a baby the first time Emil had come to see me. She had no memory of ever meeting him—because I’d made sure she hadn’t seen him since being old enough to remember.

  “Let go of my mom,” Barbara ordered Emil, much to my horror. “You’re hurting her.”

  I opened my mouth to beg for my daughter’s life, when her next words rendered me speechless.

  “She can’t tell you anything, because the purple-eyed witch trapped between worlds won’t let her. That undead bitch will eat Ma’s soul if she gets angry enough. You have to stop coming here and interrogating her.”

  Emil’s hands dropped from my head, his stunned expression fixed on Barbara.

  I’d known my daughter was nosy. Once or twice, I’d suspected she’d eavesdropped on private conversations I’d had with the other seers I regularly met with at the house. But she’d obviously overheard—and understood—far more than I’d ever imagined.

  “You are a seer?” Emil asked my child. “Already?”

  “No,” I answered as Emil turned and advanced on her. “She’s not. My daughter has not inherited the gift, I assure you.”

  While it varied, most seers displayed some propensity from an early age and came into their full abilities by adulthood, when they would be deemed true seers. At thirteen, Barbara still showed no such leanings. At this rate, I was quite certain she never would.

  “She eavesdrops. That is all, Alpha Emil. She must have overheard some things and misunderstood.”

  Emil wouldn’t take my word for it, though, and had to read Barbara’s thoughts for himself. I was sure that afternoon that my daughter and I were both dead. But whatever Emil glimpsed in my daughter’s mind that day changed everything.

  For the first time ever, Emil teleported from my home with a genuine smile of satisfaction on his face. He was so satisfied, in fact, that he promised never to return—on one condition. Which I agreed to.

  Barbara’s eavesdropping habits persisted for years. And I learned to turn a blind eye, even when I suspected she’d begun keeping a journal of the things she overheard during our seer meetings. It was a risk. But Maribel wasn’t God. She couldn’t know everything. And I’d come to realize my daughter had her own gifts—just not of the paranormal variety.

  By the time Barbara was twenty-one, she still had not displayed any indication of possessing even the slightest psychic ability—which confirmed she never would. While it made me relieved for my daughter’s sake, it also made my heart uneasy about the future. I came from a long line of powerful seers. I knew how strongly clairvoyant tendencies ran in my bloodline, and the ability had never skipped a generation in my family before. Elder seers had confirmed that while it was rare, every few centuries, psychic ability had been known to skip a generation. And when it did skip one, it often doubly gifted the next.

  Years later, when Barbara gave birth to my only grandchild, Lauren, I knew it the moment I laid eyes on her that Lauren had been doubly gifted—or cursed, depending on how one viewed it.

  By the time Lauren was four, I’d warded away as many of the unruly undead as I could from her, while beseeching those spirits whom I trusted most to look after my granddaughter when the time came that I no longer could.

  Emil was right: Maribel was up to something. And clever was an understatement. The undead werelock Maribel was brilliant. What’s more, she was madly, insufferably tenacious. No matter how long it took, how many beings she had to manipulate, or how many souls she had to sacrifice to amass sufficient power, I knew Maribel would find her way out of the ether one day—or destroy the world trying.

  Thus, we seers’ days were numbered. Centuries ago, our ancestors had prophesied that a decade of no light would one day fall upon the world. A decade absent our gift of second sight. We now knew who would be the one to stamp our lights out—to thrust the world into figurative darkness. Because we knew Maribel’s greatest folly was her vanity. Appearances were paramount. While she hid in the ether, Maribel gagged us to retain our silence. Inevitably, she would destroy us all in order to preserve whatever final image of herself and her time in the ether that she deigned to relay for posterity.

  Hers was a malignant narcissism fueled by the most profound, deep-seated of insecurities. The very core of Maribel’s celestial essence was self-loathing.

  Some seers thought it was her imprisonment in the ether that had made Maribel this way, believing her immeasurable self-doubt to be rooted in rejection. They blamed it on the agony of her interminable mating bond to Kai, the cursed White King who had failed her.

  I disagreed. I’d sensed enough of who Maribel had been in life to believe that the self-contempt haunting her had less to do with her time in hell than it did her time on earth. In life, Maribel had craved love and adulation above all else. Yet no matter how many loved her, it had never been enough. Her heart had been like a bottomless container—a useless sieve that would never be filled. Deep in Maribel’s soul, the breadth of emptiness was so vast even her true, fated mate’s love could not bridge it.

  My granddaughter Lauren was almost eleven years old when Maribel annihilated the seers—killing every one of us: every important psychic, clairvoyant, and necromancer with any meaningful talent and proven ability to commune with the dead and foretell future events across the globe. After ninety-eight years in the ether, Maribel had finally obtained the dark power source needed to sever her mating bond connection to Kai: a revenge-greedy, defective blood curse, which she’d procured from a newly turned werelock through less than ethical—and utterly macabre—means.

  It would be ten more years before my granddaughter Lauren’s full seer abilities emerged to relight the world. But far less time before Maribel was reincarnated—as the beastly, well-prophesied Rogue, hampered by the same dark curse she’d once harvested to sever her connection to the living.

  Naturally, we seers had warned Maribel of this very possibility, knowing her ultimate goal was to cross over and never return. Yet she’d proceede
d with her plan anyway, recruiting two rival sibling werelocks, both destined for greatness, to destroy her before the decade of no light’s end should she be reborn as the Rogue abomination.

  But they had failed her.

  And it didn’t take a seer to guess that the ironies weren’t meant to end there—with Maribel back amongst the living and having no memory of her former self, while the scores of seers she’d once slaughtered to save face were now counted amongst the dead.

  Though Maribel may have bent the laws of the universe to suit her means, ours was a universe of duality, where every action sparks an equal and opposite reaction. As with all things, in time, power shifts. One way or another, balance would have to be restored …

  2

  Lauren

  Present Day

  The snow crunched beneath my knee-high, wedge-heeled UGG boots as I ran.

  Holy shit, I was going to die.

  I could hear the beast snarling behind me. Even with the adrenaline fueling me, I could feel myself slowing down, my thighs growing numb despite my exertion as the cold, wet air battered my bare skin.

  Why, oh, why, had I worn such a short skirt?

  Why was I in a spaghetti-strap tank top?

  I was going to be mauled to death. How much would be left of me, I wondered? Would they have to rely on dental records? Would they call my mom to come ID my teeth?

  God, I’d carry the guilt of her trauma with me for all eternity. I could hear the sound of her screaming in the morgue as surely as I could hear my own screams now.

  What had possessed me to take a stroll through the woods alone in the middle of the night? Why hadn’t I thought to grab a jacket?

  Or a taser?

  A phone with a compass app would be wildly useful right now as well. I had no idea in what direction I was running anymore. How could I have strayed so far from campus so quickly?

  I heard a warning growl a second before the animal’s maw clamped around my right ankle and I went flying forward to the ground, snow filling my mouth and silencing my scream as razor-sharp teeth sank through the material of my boot, through flesh, to pierce the bone that lay beneath.

  Tears sprang to my eyes and I flailed my limbs, trying to breathe amid the pain and fear choking me. Right as I managed to lift my face from the snow and inhale enough air into my lungs to scream again, the huge white hound from hell unclenched his jaw just long enough to reposition his dagger teeth, fitting more of my lower leg into his mouth along with my ankle, before clamping down again, harder than the first time.

  My vision went black. I was sure he’d bitten clean through my bones.

  Good God, the pain! This couldn’t be real.

  When the wolf unclenched his vicious maw and released my ankle for a second time, I breathed through the overwhelming agony and utilized all of my adrenaline to attempt a mad, desperate scramble to get to my knees.

  But I didn’t make it. The beast’s mammoth, unforgiving jaw closed over the fractured bones in my ankle for a third time, and I screamed until my vision narrowed and my face tingled with that unpleasant, telltale nauseating heat that always seemed to precede loss of consciousness.

  No, no, no—don’t lose consciousness now. Not now!

  When the devil relinquished my ankle for a third time, I was too drained and disoriented to move—all of my effort focused on remaining conscious as my weakening body braced itself for the next horrible crunch of pain to come.

  But it didn’t.

  The killer wolf made a somber baying sound instead—as if he were the injured, distraught party. And he began licking my bare toes.

  What the—he’d gotten my whole boot off somehow. When and how had he done that?

  Fuck, he was going to start eating me … commencing with my destroyed ankle.

  Face down in the snow, I began to sob as my tormentor’s rough-textured tongue licked over my broken, open flesh and mangled bones. The licks stung like hell, and yet, at the same time, they felt strangely healing—as if the pain was beginning to lessen the longer he licked. I knew it was my mind playing tricks on me.

  Or perhaps hypothermia setting in.

  The beast made a sad whining noise as he licked up the back of my bare leg.

  Oh, God.

  I willed my body to move. To crawl. To roll—to do anything to get away.

  But my body ignored me. Failed me. I couldn’t even feel my face anymore. Nor could I feel my hands.

  But I could hear the sound of my own weeping into the snow.

  I felt warm fur brush against my arms, felt a snout pressing into the back of my spinning head. Then I felt my body being rolled over in the snow.

  No, no, no—I wanted to stay face down!

  Face down was no safer, I knew, but I was terrified of the animal attacking my face next.

  And as my terrible luck would have it, the beast’s tongue was on my face before I’d taken my next ragged breath, the heat of his licks making my frozen skin tingle with pins and needles as it came alive with sensation once more.

  Great. Now I’d feel everything when he tore the flesh from my skull.

  I didn’t dare open my eyes. The memory of the hungry look I had seen in the white wolf’s glowing blue eyes when I’d first spied him silently stalking me through the trees sent an awful shiver through me.

  I was certain he intended to eat me.

  I racked my brain trying to recall what approach people said was best when confronted with an enormous killer wolf in the wild.

  Should I play dead now? Should I muster whatever strength I had left and try to act intimidating? The latter was laughable. I wasn’t doing well with the former either, since I couldn’t stop crying. And my tormentor knew it—he was lapping up my tears as if my eyes were leaking candy.

  Was he messing with me before he tore my head off, I wondered?

  I was so cold and in so much pain I couldn’t think straight. So I simply lay there, quietly crying, immobilized by fear, enduring the wolf’s attentions to my face as I fought the pull of unconsciousness threatening to take me under.

  I must have lost the battle, because I came to with an internal start as a large, warm hand wrapped around my wrist and two fingers honed in on my pulse.

  “Dying,” I managed to whisper through frozen lips.

  “Relax,” a firm baritone voice instructed as fingers palpated my neck next. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  I’d been saved?

  Was I in a hospital?

  No, I could hear the wind and other quiet noises of the night. I was in the forest still.

  But I’d been found. I’d been saved!

  I felt my facial muscles tremble convulsively, my features scrunching up as I released a soft sob of relief.

  I was going to live.

  “Shh—there, there,” the stranger soothed impassively.

  He didn’t sound like a student. He sounded older. More … worldly. Sophisticated. Maybe a member of the faculty who lived near campus had heard me screaming and rushed to my rescue.

  “I’m a doctor,” he told me as his fingers brushed away my freely flowing tears that the white wolf had been lapping up moments ago.

  The wolf! He’d be back in no time to kill us both.

  “Danger,” I managed to croak in between sniffles. “Wolf,” I warned my rescuer.

  He hummed in acknowledgement, in an odd manner that managed to be both reassuring and yet somehow … patronizing—almost the way a parent might acknowledge while dismissing a child’s claim that a monster lay beneath their bed.

  Did he not see the damage the wild beast had done to my ankle? I’d be lucky to be able to walk on it ever again.

  “Is it terribly painful?” he asked, his voice smooth. Calm.

  Eerily so.

  “Yes,” I sobbed.

  Was he kidding?

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said in an even tone. His cultured voice was deep and soothing as it poured over me, making me feel safe. And yet … there was s
omething else in his tone that I couldn’t quite reconcile.

  I opened my waterlogged eyes and saw bright blue ones staring down at me from a gorgeous male face that belonged on a billboard model and not on a doctor who made forest calls in the middle of the night.

  Jesus, where had this guy come from?

  What was he doing here in Bumfuck, Washington, coming to the aid of a screaming coed getting mauled by a rabid wolf?

  Wait—why was he looking at me like that? Why wasn’t he inspecting my half-chewed ankle?

  Oh, my God. Was he—?

  He seemed somehow … turned on … by my current condition. Aroused by the fact that I was injured and scared and in distress. Excited by the notion that I was utterly helpless—stranded in the woods and liable to die of hypothermia if the white wolf didn’t come back to finish me off first.

  I wasn’t sure how I knew this. But something about this beautiful man claiming to be a doctor was off. Maybe it was the fact that his pupils were dilated and his lips were parted as he stared down at me.

  Or maybe it was because he wasn’t wearing any clothes.

  Dear Lord, he wasn’t wearing clothes!

  Or … it might’ve been the fact that his warm hand was swiftly working its way up between my semi-frozen, parted thighs now.

  I realized that my skirt had ridden all the way up and my thong-clad ass was directly against the snow, my ass cheeks all but frozen.

  “Are you very scared?” he asked as his hot fingertips slipped the snow-soaked swath of thin fabric covering my crotch aside.

  I wanted to say no, knowing the right thing would be to deny him the pleasure of seeing my fear. Instinctively, I knew my fear was what he wanted, what he hungered for as his nostrils flared and his pupils dilated further—his mouth all but salivating as he awaited my answer, his fingers poised against my freezing, smooth lower lips.

  I knew I should defy him and say that I wasn’t scared, even though he’d know that it was a lie. But some dark, deviant part of me wanted to feed this stranger’s sinister desire—to give him a taste and see what it felt like.