Cara resumed bustling around, speaking over her shoulder. “Lucas, do you have a crystal?”
“Yes.”
The Watcher continued. “Okay, Dani, get them out of here. Use my meditation cave in case someone comes looking. I’ll catch up with you later.” Dani headed for the door, but when Aria and Lucas didn’t immediately follow, Cara waved at them. “Go, go. If they find you here and figure out you might be useful... we need to keep you away from the bloody Elders. Oh, and grab Mai on your way out, I’ve called her in.”
Despite her worry over Nikolai, the urgency in the Watcher’s tone got Aria moving. Dani led them out the door, and a familiar figure waited on the steps with her long nose quivering.
Aria bent to scoop Mai up. The little shrew burped as she tucked her beneath her hair.
“She looks well stuffed,” Lucas noted.
“Yeah. Bug burps. Great.” Aria hurried to catch up to Dani, who set a fierce pace through the garden. Her dark hair became airborne as she chose a path that was quite overgrown.
“Are we gating?” Aria asked
“Yes.” Dani didn’t pause her progress as she answered. “Our home is in the human realm, but it is a long ways from here.” She pushed through the bushes that reached across the path. “After we go through, we’ll need to fly.”
Aria shot a look back to Lucas, but although he met her gaze, his swirling emerald eyes seemed abstracted, as though his thoughts were far away.
Dani stopped so suddenly that Aria almost plowed right into her. Ahead of them stood an archway created from stone. The crystal in Dani’s blood spoke to the life energy woven into the gate, and the space beneath the arch glowed like the sun.
The dark-haired shifter extended her hand. “The times through this gate usually align without an issue, but take my hand just in case.”
Aria complied and extended her own to Lucas. He hesitated for only a second before folding his warm fingers around her own.
Electric sensations surged up her arm, so much so that she gasped, her eyes flying to his. For just an instant, his flared emerald. Then his lids dropped, shielding his gaze.
Dani tugged impatiently on her other hand. “Ready?”
Aria was just about to nod when a second pulse swept over her—not from Lucas, this time. Every hair on her body stood on end.
Out in the garden nearby, someone had just come through another gate.
“Exit, stage right, just in the nick of time,” Dani muttered, and yanked Aria into the abyss beyond the arch.
* * *
Lucas’s fingers tingled as he held Aria’s hand, and it had nothing to do with passing through the gate.
It only added to his sense of events spinning wildly out of control. Fate had her teeth firmly embedded in his throat. Every step they took redefined his world in alarming new ways.
He had no doubt that Fate was involved. No matter how he retraced his steps, he ended up right where he was now, holding Aria’s hand and stepping through a gate to nowhere. That was a sure sign that the universe was conspiring against him.
His mind spun and his body ached—after effects of the piercing pain he’d felt from Nikolai, just before all hell had broken loose.
Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been good.
But then Nikolai’s presence had vanished. Lucas thought maybe the big guy had just fainted, but he couldn’t be sure. Only Cara’s assertion that his father wouldn’t hurt him kept him from panicking.
No, the Watcher hadn’t said that. She’d said that his father wouldn’tkillhim. From what Lucas had sensed, hurt was definitely on the table.
The surge he experienced from Aria took the last of his already tenuous breath from him. His entire body tightened. They stepped through the gate, and it wasn’t, apparently, to nowhere.
They emerged into a jungle.
As Aria gawked at the lush foliage and the birds flitting through it, Lucas gently disengaged his hand. He needed to have his big brain in control. He gazed at the tropical greenery waving in the warm, humid breeze.
“We need to fly from here.” Some tension within Dani had dissipated now that they were through the gate, but a portion of it was likely as natural to her as her skin.
