“They don’t think, exactly, but all living things have some feeling, though you wouldn’t recognize it as actual thought,” Bris explained.
I knew it. I couldn’t wait to throw that in my vegan friends’ faces. They were eating carrots and the carrots probably felt that shit. At least my burger was dead before I took that first bite.
Marcus started walking. “She’s in danger. She shouldn’t be alone.”
“Marcus, we don’t know who she is,” Bris said, sounding far more reasonable than either Marcus or his host. “I know Devinshea believes she is the child Daniel and Zoey created when they primed the transference box, but there is something off about her. She’s not the magical creature she should be.”
I had to run to keep up with them. “What is a transference box and how the hell is that chick a vampire’s child? Did the queen have a secret baby before the king turned? I need deets, guys. And I also need to know how we’re going to get home. My son is there.”
“My children are there, too, Hunter,” Bris said. “And my host is panicked about it. As for the transference box, it is a container in which the Fae place their tribal magics to share with other tribes. The tribe receiving the box works a sort of communal magic and creates a magical creature that will bless the tribe for many years. Usually they create a cat or a dog. More often than not it is a tree that is formed, and the tree becomes sacred.”
“How did the king end up…” The answer hit me. “Ah, Zoey stole it.”
“She did indeed,” Marcus replied. “According to what Daniel told me, it was the night they wed, and they managed to prime the box from sexual magic. They created a magical child but didn’t truly understand she was theirs. They allowed the faeries they’d stolen the box from to take her back to their plane. It was only later they understood who she was, and that was when they began looking for her.”
That kind of blew my mind. They’d made a magical baby? It made me think of my own and how I needed to get back to the one I had and tell my husbands about the one I was carrying. I couldn’t fight effectively if I was pregnant. I needed to protect my child. I got my ass kicked regularly. Even when I won, I usually took some serious damage.
Bris simply kept walking. “We have to keep a cool head about all of this. We made it to this plane. We can make it back. I believe we will find Summer is the key to why we were brought here, and she will be the key to getting back.”
Marcus stopped suddenly, rounding on Bris. I have rarely seen Marcus get truly angry, but it looked like my former trainer was having a day. “You need to understand that Summer is mine. I agreed with Devinshea about Evangeline. I allowed his fear that I might one day take his daughter as my companion to push me out of a family I loved. I would never have taken Evangeline as my companion. I attempted to make sure I couldn’t. That was how sure I was.”
I winced but couldn’t get too upset. I knew what he meant. When we’d first started our Hunter/trainer relationship, there had been a whole lot of nasty, glorious sex, and it had felt like love to me. What I hadn’t realized at the time was the love was all coming from Marcus, and it was more like deep affection. At one point he’d even declared he was ready to marry me when I wanted to.
But my human self had been in love with Gray Sloane and my wolf had wanted Trent Wilcox. As I’d gotten stronger, I’d pulled away from Marcus, though I still cared deeply for him. He’d tried so hard to use me as a shield against one day falling for a woman he’d known as a girl.
I’d always known I wasn’t the one for Marcus. Marcus had a prophesized love—one woman who he would love so much their souls meshed and he would die with her. He’d known it would be a woman of the queen’s line, and I’d heard at one point he’d thought it might be the queen herself. Turns out there was another Zoey walking the planes, and Marcus was going to claim her.