Over the Moon (Gemini Book 6) Read online

  “He was impersonating your meemaw at the time,” he pointed out.

  “True.” That was not the way to get on my good side. “But having spent time around you both, I know I landed the better brother.”

  “How do you figure that?” He sounded doubtful.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re no slouch in the aspect game either. You may not be able to mimic people, but you can replicate fae and all kinds of brain-meltingly fantastic creatures. Including wargs. How can you do that and still find room to be envious of your brother?”

  “Practice?” He rolled a shoulder. “I’ve had our whole lives to work on my grudge.”

  “I can’t Monday-morning quarterback your brother’s decisions,” I said, and I meant it. Whatever had prompted Theo to embrace the drifter lifestyle and leave his family at home was his business. “But you stayed. You helped give Cam the family unit she needed to survive. You helped your mom run her businesses. You gave up on travel, on all the things you wanted, to be there for your family. I understand why Theo left, and I would never want to make that call and live so isolated from my own family, but you could have gone with him. You could have done a lot of things that you didn’t.” I pressed a kiss to the underside of his jaw. “I think you’ve got a lot more sticking power than either of us ever gave you credit for, Mr. Cahill.”

  “I never thought of it like that.” He wrapped an arm around my waist. “Must have been practice for the day I met you, Ms. Preston.”

  Maybe his unusual upbringing had bent him enough he wouldn’t break being with me. If that was the case—fae or not—I owed Cam and Dot thanks.

  “Want to help me check my equipment?” He trailed his fingers over my hipbone. “I packed it away in anti-magic boxes, but it might be all the tech we have available to us for a while. We ought to salvage as much of it as we can.”

  “Sure. We need to comb the RV for supplies and pack as much food, water and equipment as possible.”

  Leaving him to keep watch for Tiberius, I swung my legs around and leapt back into the RV’s darkened interior, grabbing our backpacks from Faerie out of storage and upending them. We needed to pack smart and light.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” I called while sifting through the remaining MREs and nutrition bars for the more edible flavors. “Prison breaks wait for no man.”

  “What about Lorimar?” He landed beside me a heartbeat later and cupped my face between his hands. “They’re your family.”

  “You’re my mate. Your brother is family too.” I pushed out a heavy breath. “Branwen will lead her army to Butler. Even if we left now, they would still beat us there. Our combined forces aren’t much compared to the ground support she’s bringing.” I searched his expression. “Thierry is in Butler too, which means Theo is alone. She can’t leave the front line to help him, and odds are good she can’t get word to her friend to help him either. Busting him out of Macon is up to us.”

  As Gemini twins, the brothers’ lives were connected. Protecting Theo protected Isaac. Simple math, really.

  He rested our foreheads together. “Thank you.”

  The urge to tease him out of his somber mood surfaced. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to thank—?”

  He cut me off with a soft press of his lips to mine, and my heart swelled to painful fullness.

  “Thank you,” he said again when we came up for air.

  “Keep saying that, and I’m starting you a tab.”

  “What if I can’t pay?” His eyes sparkled. “ATMs may be down too.”

  I tapped my bottom lip. “Then you’ll just have to work off your debt.”

  “I am a hard worker, and I’m willing to put in long hours.”

  About to say something inappropriate about the length of his hours, I almost swallowed my tongue when Tiberius popped his head into the RV.

  “You’ll want to see this.”

  We climbed out to get a better look, and I noticed people abandoning their ruined vehicles to walk in clusters down the highway. Safety in numbers, herd mentality at its finest. This time, that instinct might be all that saved them from what was coming.

  “Look.” Tiberius pointed in an easterly direction. “See that?”

  The sun blazed overhead, but tucked away in the sky, sheltered behind an expanse of darkening clouds, courtesy of Bea, I spotted the cause for his alarm. A second waxing crescent moon hugged the outline of the first. Faerie really was bleeding into this world, too fast for us to staunch the flow. Maybe nothing we did would make a difference. Maybe our actions would only prolong the inevitable. But we had to try.

  “How do you eat a bear?” Isaac wrapped his arm around my shoulders when the weight of what we faced pushed them down.

  “Very carefully?” I hazarded a guess.

  “One bite at a time.”

  I laughed softly. It was bad as far as jokes went, but I got it.

  “First we hike from central Alabama to west Texas.” His finger drummed against my arm once. “Then we break into a maximum-security prison within spitting distance of a marshal outpost.” Two more taps. “And then, if we’re still feeling adventurous, we hustle up to Butler in time to watch the first wave of Faerie insurgents crash against our defenses.”

  “One bite at a time,” I agreed. “Easy-peasy.”

  Suddenly, I had a taste for bear.

  Chapter 2

  We packed all the tech we could salvage, splurged on a single change of clothes, then topped off our bulging packs with nonperishable foodstuffs. Fresh meat would be easy enough to come by on the trip west. Any warg worth their salt ought to be able to provide for their pack. Isaac could shift to wolf and eat dinner raw. Considering Tibs was half bird, he could handle a few kills of his own.

  Aware any wrong decision I made now would cost us precious time we didn’t have, maybe even our lives, I turned a slow circle in the belly of the RV to make sure we had claimed all the best survival equipment.

  “We’ll travel faster on four legs,” Isaac said, intruding on my mental check-listing.

  “What about the packs?” I shook my head to regain focus. “They’re too heavy for Tibs to carry all three.”

  “Tiberius can tighten the straps after we shift so we don’t lose them.” His brow puckered as he stared at the prince. “He’ll have to stick close. Otherwise, we’ll end up shredding them off each other if we have to defend ourselves. It’s too dangerous giving an enemy that kind of handhold for grappling.”

  The unasked question hung there between us. Could we trust the prince to have our backs? Or would he run to his girlfriend now that the spell binding him to the RV had been broken? The simple answer—I didn’t know.

  “You’re a free man now,” I called up to the prince sunning on the side of the RV. “What are your plans?”

  “I wasn’t aware I was allowed to make my own” came his tart response.

  “You’re a smart kid.” Too smart for his own good. “You realize with the spells broken, we can’t hold you here. We can’t force you to stay when we all know where you want to be.”

  Leandra, his bean-tighe girlfriend, was bound to a stone house in Butler. Right in the middle of the war zone. I wasn’t sure how much damage the structure could sustain before the connection between a bean-tighe and their home ruptured, but I did know it would kill them.

  Tiberius would never let that happen. He had defied his parents, risked his crown and damned his people to save her. And he would again. In a heartbeat. Theirs was that kind of love. The big kind. The kind that encompassed your whole heart and soul until you bled when the other pricked their finger.

  “I’m sending Bea to Leandra.” His voice drifted down to us. “She’ll give us a status report. I owe you both that much. Depending on the news she brings… I won’t hide for my own sake—or yours—while Leandra is vulnerable.”

  That was more aid than I’d expected him to willingly offer. “Understood.”

  Isaac and I hauled all three bags out
of the RV with us and set them on the ground at our feet. Tiberius leapt down and waited, his eyes on the horizon, heart on his sleeve.

  How could such a decent kid be the future king of Faerie? He lacked the killer instinct to wipe out those who opposed him, to unravel court intrigues before they snared him. Tiberius would push for reform, protect the weak and hobble the powerful, and he would do it all because he had fallen in love with a kitchen maid and promised her the moon on a string. That goodness in him was why I couldn’t look at his back without seeing the target painted there by all his potential.

  “We need to get moving.” I searched the sky for roiling thunderclouds and a pesky streak of purple feathers. “It’s a long run to Texas.”

  “Bea will find me,” Tiberius assured us. “There’s no need to wait for her return.”

  “Strap us in tight after we shift, but don’t cut off our circulation.” I rolled my shoulders to loosen up for what came next. “We can’t afford the packs to hinder our mobility.”

  The prince nodded. “I understand.”

  “There’s more privacy on the other side,” Isaac said, taking my hand and leading me into a patch of cool shade behind the RV. His fingers slid through my hair, tugging gently. “Can you handle this?”

  “I won’t know until I try.” I let him tip back my head. “Maybe it won’t be so bad this time with some of Earth’s atmosphere diluting the fae magic.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed as he dipped his head and feathered his lips over mine. “But if it hurts, you stop. Understand?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” The change always hurt, like giving birth to a beast who devoured you the second its paws cleared the womb. “Got it.”

  “You’re a bad liar.” He huffed out a laugh. “But I appreciate you trying to comfort me.”

  “I love you,” I murmured against his mouth. “More than anything in this world or the next.”

  The hand in my hair tightened until Isaac’s grip skirted the edge of pain. “Don’t tell me goodbye.”

  “I’m not.” Probably. I hoped. I nipped his chin. “I just had to get it out of my system before we go wolf and can’t talk for the next few hours.”

  The pack bond worked fine between my alphas, and they were a mixed couple. One day, when we had time to worry about such things, I would like to give it a try between Isaac and me.

  “I’ll stand watch.” He eased back and gave me room to strip and then sit on the grass. “You got this.”

  “I got this.”

  The wolf lunged to the forefront of my mind. Isaac’s worry grated on our nerves, and her protective instincts roared until her fury burned away the thin barrier keeping us separate. A quarter of an hour passed while I writhed in the grass, but the scent of Isaac in my lungs kept me sane, kept me whole, as I purged the aftereffects of the magic surge and emerged as wolf on the other side.

  A slightly ridiculous-looking wolf, given the pendant had expanded along with my neck, but still.

  “You’re gorgeous, Dell.” Isaac knelt beside me while I panted through the last twinges. “Both of you.”

  I would have licked his hand if I’d had the energy. Or maybe bit him. Just a little.

  The wolf liked the way he tasted, and I did too.

  It took a minute to get my legs steady under me and rise, and by the time I was on all fours, a tawny wolf with strawberry-blond tips stood watch at my back. Isaac brushed down the length of me, allowing me to borrow his strength while I recovered from the stressful change.

  The worst part was knowing the Lorimar wolves had never experienced the effects of fae magic on their feral other halves. Their shifts would be slower, more painful, and it could cost them their lives learning what I had picked up firsthand while in Faerie.

  I wished I had warned them, but who could have anticipated this?

  Feeling steady, I nipped Isaac’s shoulder, which earned me a glare through narrow, golden eyes.

  “Are you ready?” Tiberius landed in front of us. “Or do you require more time to acclimate?”

  The only way to communicate with him while I was in this form was to bob my head in an exaggerated nod, so that’s what I did. It took Tibs five years to strap me in, and my sensitized skin had me snarling at him by the end. Then again, that might have been Isaac, who pressed his flank against mine until the rumble in his chest rattled through mine too. His instincts were heightened in this form, and a wolf hated nothing more than to see his mate suffer.

  “Your turn.” Tiberius held the second pack out to Isaac. “I need room to work.”

  Grumbling under his breath, Isaac put a few inches between us, just enough space for Tiberius to hook the straps on his front legs and adjust them so the pack nestled against his spine.

  “I’ll scout ahead.” A gust of air rustled my fur as Tiberius greeted the sky. “Take care.”

  The now-invisible prince could ditch us at any time, and we would be none the wiser. This was where trust factored into the equation.

  All suited up, we gave full-body shakes to test how secure the packs were tied and also because they itched. When neither pack sailed off into the grass, I licked the corner of Isaac’s muzzle and yipped once. We set off shoulder-to-shoulder, careful to avoid the road. Miles of asphalt stretched like a never-ending buffet line. Fae predators in search of an easy meal would gravitate toward the meandering humans, which meant we were safer the farther we ranged from them.

  An adult wolf could travel up to thirty miles a day at speeds topping out around forty miles per hour. Wargs were bigger, stronger and faster than their lupine cousins, and their endurance was easily twice that. Wink was still about a thousand miles from here, easily a two-week trek if we couldn’t find alternate transportation.

  Pushing aside those grim thoughts, I settled into a ground-eating lope that Isaac matched. We ran without incident for as long as the sun held out, sticking to back roads and only stopping for water breaks until we hit Pascagoula, Mississippi. That put us ninety miles from our starting point, which should have been impossible. Faerie was all about the impossible, though.

  In Faerie, the more you wanted to be someplace, the faster you got there. The reverse was also true. Our burst of speed wasn’t Faerie-fast, but it was damn close. Yet another sign the fabrics of our worlds were meshing at a blistering rate.

  Tiberius materialized inches from my nose in a flash, and I had to sit down and skid to avoid clobbering the kid.

  “There’s a band of looters ahead.” He gestured toward the west with one wing. “We need to cut south and stick to the river.”

  Sure enough, we passed a group of seven men armed with rifles about ten minutes later. Each carried a sack over his shoulder, heavy with stolen goods if Tiberius was to be believed. With his eagle eyes, who knew how long he’d watched them before warning us?

  The fact humans had turned to theft and violence so quickly didn’t surprise me. Any kink in the norm thrust them into survival-of-the-fittest mode. I wished them luck. These were strange days, and their fittest wouldn’t be fit enough by a long shot if their bravado led them into a confrontation with one of the newly revealed supernaturals of this world.

  Four miles later, a sign welcomed us to the town of Gautier, and I lost the ability to put one paw in front of the other. We stumbled across a golf course closed for the night and made ourselves at home in the lush forest lining the pristine grounds.

  Shifting felt like having my skin sliced with a potato peeler, but I made it back onto two legs and flopped down on the bed of pine straw nature had provided. I found Isaac, still on four legs, standing nearby, watching over me while I was vulnerable, and little bubbles of happiness fizzled in my chest.

  “Come here, boy.” I reached out a hand, and Isaac wandered closer. “Come keep me company until I decide if I’m hungry enough to hunt.” I had my arms around his neck, scratching his thick fur, when he licked me from chin to hairline. “Gack.”

  Huffing out a wolfy laugh, he trotted off into the trees.

 
“Tibs,” I called. “Report.”

  The prince appeared on a tree limb several yards away. “The area is clear. We should be safe here tonight.”

  “Good.” I pulled panties and tee from my bag and dressed. “Did you spot a fresh water source nearby?”

  “There’s a natural pond about a quarter of a mile to the north.” His talons sank into the wood until it creaked. “Would you like me to fetch some?”

  “I would appreciate that.” I located two large plastic bags meant to fold flat when not carrying water. “I’ll get started on dinner.” Already I scented delicious bunnies in a nearby den. “Can you eat raw meat?”

  “It’s not my preference, but I’ve learned to appreciate the texture.”

  Times had been tough on the prince and his girlfriend before we busted up their attempt at playing house. I was unsurprised to learn he’d been forced to hunt to feed his adopted brood, even considering all the supplies they’d swiped from town.

  “I’m glad to hear your time on Earth has expanded your culinary horizons. We shouldn’t risk a fire.” Fires attracted as many predators as they deterred in my experience. “There’s no telling what’s out there now.”

  Unsurprisingly, Tiberius shrugged. “Then we don’t risk a fire.”

  He swooped down from his perch, claimed the water bags in his clawed feet and launched into the sky.

  The smart thing to do would have been to let the wolf hunt, but she was tired, and the pull of magic on my skin stung. That left me with my bare hands, which I had used plenty of times as a kid when Momma’s benders forced me to fend for myself.

  Before I finished digging out the utility knife in the front of my pack, I spotted movement in the brush. Muscles tensing for trouble relaxed as a gold-and-russet wolf large enough to saddle and ride trotted into view with four rabbits dangling from his mouth.

  The decision to ignore the fluctuation in his form snapped into place before I opened my mouth to draw attention to an obvious sign of his brother’s distress, and I lowered my gaze before my expression told on me.

  “Showoff.” I kept rooting in the pocket until I palmed the knife. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”