Kelsey nodded. “Move it or I’ll pick you all up and carry your asses. I want to see Trent. He’ll fill us in on everything.”
Daniel turned and jogged to keep up with Rhys, Devinshea moving in behind me.
“Evan, stay close to me,” Dev said, reaching out to take his daughter’s arm.
Fenrir growled, his hackles coming up.
“Stop it, you jealous wolf. He’s my father,” Evan said, rolling her eyes. “He’s not trying to take me. Sorry, Papa. You have to forgive his bad manners. Fen has trouble with his animal instincts when he’s in wolf form. And he has a lot of animal instincts. You better be nice to my papa or I won’t give you any treats.”
“She won’t give you any treats at all,” Dev swore under his breath. “She’s a child.”
“Fenrir is, too,” Kelsey shot back.
Fen made a grumbly sound like he wanted to argue all those points.
I was numb again, jogging through the halls I’d once known so well, following the children I’d born and now barely recognized. It was a dream. It had to be. There was no way that Olivia Carey had used her powers to try to choke the life out of me, no way my home had been taken over by my worst enemy. No fucking way I’d missed my children’s formative years. They weren’t warriors. They were coddled and protected.
Rhys was an eleven-year-old with a cocky grin who wouldn’t ever think to order his parents around. Rhys was a good boy who followed the rules. He was every teacher’s pet.
Evan played with dolls, not bows and arrows.
I was going to wake up. I had to. I would wake up and be safely in our bed at Summer’s palace. I would be in between Dev and Daniel, and I would tell them all about this awful dream and they would laugh at me. I would go through the portal again, but this time we would find ourselves back in Danny’s office and everyone would be so relieved to see us. We would take down Myrddin and move on with our lives.
I didn’t have to believe that prophecy. I could control this.
If I could only wake up.
“Evan, to your left,” Rhys yelled as he moved by a connecting hallway. He didn’t even look back. He simply tossed the words over his shoulder as he jogged along.
Evan zipped past her fathers and was firing down the hall before either could protest. She had two arrows off and landing in her targets as Fen leapt to her side. He growled and the third shadowy figure who’d been coming down the hall took off running. But not before Evan got off another shot, and I watched the last attacker go down even as Kelsey hustled me along.
“I think the kiddos know what they’re doing,” Kelsey assured me. “Let’s follow their lead. This is their world. They know it far better than we do.”
It was their world. Not mine. It couldn’t be mine.
We ran, the ground still rumbling under us, and suddenly we found ourselves moving through familiar doors into a dark place. Ether. But not Ether.
“What the fuck did he do to my club?” Dev stopped and stared at the changes the years had wrought.
Ether had been a high-tech nightclub where all of the supernatural world came to play. It had a light-up dance floor and a sleek bar. It had been modern and energetic.
Someone had decided to give the whole place a Hell makeover. It had been redone in shades of red and black.
“I win!” A muscular man walked from behind what used to be the bar. It had been exchanged for what appeared to be some kind of shrine. I didn’t have a chance to really look at it because Lee was right there. He held every bit of my attention.
He was so changed, but when he high-fived his brother and then grinned my way, I could see my little boy.
“I bet Rhys that Papa would be way more upset about Ether than he was about how old we are,” Lee admitted.
“I assure you, Rhys wins that bet,” Devinshea promised. “I’m upset about many things. The atrocity they’ve done to my beautiful club is merely one of them. I don’t want to see the penthouse, do I?”
“According to our spies, you do not,” Rhys replied. “Get in a circle. Olivia’s going to try to overpower the bomb we deployed, and if I’m right about it, we’ve got maybe three minutes before our window closes.”
“Bomb?” Daniel asked.
“Think of it like an electromagnetic pulse for some very specific wards, Your Highness.” Eddie stood in front of one of the walls that was now draped in black and red velvet. They’d covered the ultramodern dance floor with heavy hardwoods. “My mistress, it has been such a long time.”
Eddie was Kelsey’s butler, a small, red-skinned demon with the cherubic face that marked his particular class of demons. He was a satan. Normally they were the Hell plane’s lawyers, the keepers and arbitrators of contracts, but Eddie had chosen a different path.
“You, too, Eddie.” Kelsey was wiping away tears, her hand on Fenrir’s back, smoothing his fur down.
Lee started to come my way, but Rhys put a hand on his twin’s chest. God, they weren’t even close to identical anymore. Rhys’s face was still perfect, and Lee had so many scars.
“No, brother. We have to go. Now,” Rhys said.
Lee gestured my way. “Come on, man. It’s Mom. We’ve waited forever.”
“And we can wait a bit longer. There was something we didn’t account for. We’ve got extra passengers.” Rhys nodded our way. “I don’t know who the male is, but he’s not the only one. I just sensed the others. Pregnant women. We need to move.”
I put a hand to my stomach. Rhys had come fully into his power while I’d been gone. He was a Green Man now if he could tell Kelsey and I were both carrying children. He hadn’t even come close to us.
Lee’s eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open as he turned to the wolf. “Fen, you fucker. You said you would wait until she was eighteen. We had a deal.”
Fen was suddenly a broad-shouldered young man with dark hair that hit well below his shoulders and a body that…well, it had changed since he’d been a baby boy running around the Council house without any pants. He needed pants now. Extra-large pants. “We cuddle. That is all.”
“I’m talking about Mom,” Rhys corrected. “Mom and Kelsey.”
Lee made a vomiting sound. “But she’s old. Sorry, Mom. I thought maybe you and Papa would get over that. And Kelsey? Trent is going to be heartbroken. He’s been faithful all these years, and he’s had some good shots. There was a really hot mermaid on this one plane we went to, and she was all over him.”
“Lee, I didn’t cheat. I’ve been gone for four days,” Kelsey complained. “And I want to know where that mermaid is. I know I’m not supposed to have sushi in my condition, but I’ll make an exception.”
“I want to know what the hell you’re doing with my daughter that my son would think she could be pregnant.” Devinshea didn’t care that Fen had a large man part out in the open.
“Dev, maybe we should have this family session somewhere else.” Daniel was trying to be the reasonable one.
Fen’s eyes narrowed, his body going predatory. “What have I been doing with your daughter? I’ve been protecting her. I’ve been bleeding for her, watching over her. Never abandoning her. And she’s my mate. Get used to it, Your Grace. And if that vampire is still planning on coming for her, you should know I’ll pull his heart from his chest.”