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  Copyright © 2016/2020 by S.M. Gaither

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  Ascendant

  Book Four of The Shift Chronicles World

  S.M. Gaither

  Contents

  a dedication

  prologue

  1. takeoff

  2. followed

  3. dormant

  4. help

  5. seconds

  6. diversion

  7. sides

  8. mine

  9. detours

  10. buried

  11. sorry

  12. clean

  13. follow

  14. imprint

  15. dance

  16. converging

  17. jumping

  18. torture

  19. heroes

  20. leading

  21. inherited

  22. saved

  23. okay

  24. quicksand

  25. desperate

  26. trapped

  27. force

  28. heaven

  epilogue

  Afterword

  a dedication

  Dedicated to all of the readers who faithfully waited for me to find my way back and finish this story the way I meant to

  prologue

  Dear Lora,

  Vanessa told me I could write basically whatever I wanted to in this letter, and then she’d see to it that it got safely and discreetly to you someway, somehow.

  Of course, there’s a decent chance she was lying about that.

  She might have just been trying to make me feel better. Probably because she caught me staring at your picture the other night—you know the one: Grandma’s house. Christmas. You had a ridiculous, mushroomy-shaped haircut and no front teeth, in case you’d forgotten (haha, yeah right, like I’m ever going to let you forget about basically the only time I was cuter than you).

  But anyway, so, yeah. I keep thinking about that picture. And Vanessa might be lying, but just in case she’s not…well, I figured I’d write this letter and just hope it gets to you.

  I can’t sleep, anyway.

  So…

  What’s up, dork? How’s the werewolf witness protection program going? Are they treating you and mom okay? They better be. If not, take names, and I’ll beat the crap out of them when we meet up again. Wherever you are.

  I hope that ‘wherever’ is somewhere warm too, by the way. It’s been a hell of a winter here. Not sure why it’s so cold (cold enough to cure heartburn, as grandpa would say). I mean, we technically live in the south, right? I guess the weather’s not really important, though. I’m just kind of rambling. Avoiding what I should probably be telling you. As for what that is, well…Vanessa suggested that, if I did write you, that I could at least give you an idea of what’s going on, in case I…I don’t…I mean there’s a chance that I

  I guess I don’t really know what happens next for me.

  Here’s how I got to this place, though: What I do know (now) is that we were fighting the wrong enemy. Now we know who the right one is, though.

  They were here, Lora.

  And I tried to stop them, but they got away.

  They won’t next time.

  Oh, and also? Joseph Valkos is on our side now (I know, I basically still don’t believe it either). He’s the aforementioned wrong enemy, of course. The real enemy—we’ll call them the feral, because most people do—had been controlling him the whole time. They’d been pulling the strings from behind the scenes. They’re basically the reason our whole lives got screwed. They tried to screw me over even more, too, by turning the rest of my friends against me. It’s insane, the way they get into the minds and souls of their victims…I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself. Don’t worry, though; Valkos and I pulled off some of our own magic, and we managed to take the others back. I think they’re all safe from that particular trick, anyway…

  Although I guess it’s hard to know for sure.

  That’s the worst part: I’m still afraid that part of the feral might be sleeping in any of them.

  And I’m worried that, if it were to wake up, I wouldn’t have enough left in me to save anybody. Because magic is incredibly draining, turns out. Especially the kind you’re trying to make permanent.

  Wow. I was just reading back over what I’ve written.

  Seriously— this is all a mess, isn’t it? I know you’re probably still pissed at me for not letting you stay, but I’m glad you’re not here in the middle of all this crap. And yeah, it’s probably stressing you out, reading this—but I’m not going to erase any of it, I don’t think. I want you to know the truth. I feel like we’ve both been lied to our entire lives, and I’m tired of it. For both of us. And, let’s be real: I’m also telling you all of this because I miss having you to talk to. So it’s all just sort of flooding out now, I guess. But don’t worry about me! Honestly.

  I’m going to be okay.

  That much I do know.

  My hand shook. My pencil slipped.

  Liar, I thought to myself. You don’t know that.

  And my concentration on the words I was writing—an extreme, mechanical concentration that was keeping my pesky, overwhelming emotions away—slipped with it. A sniffle escaped me. The noise was quiet. Nearly silent, actually.

  But damn it if Kael’s hearing wasn’t perfect, even when he was asleep.

  He stirred from his place beside me on the bed, lifted his face a couple inches from the pillow, and glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Then he looked at me. Blinked a few times. “Have you been up all night?” he asked, voice soft and sleepy.

  “Sorry if the pencil scratching woke you up.”

  He shook his head, yawning. “To your sister?” He nodded at the half-finished letter.

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s it going?”

  I gripped the pencil tighter and tried to cover up another sniffle with a cough. “It took me a long time to decide where to start,” I said quietly. “And I’m still not sure I’ve gotten the words right.”

  He hesitated a moment, then hooked his arm around me and pulled himself closer, nuzzling into my side. His movements were heavy, exhausted; it had been a long day of making preparations for both of us. He’d fallen asleep in my bed while we’d been talking earlier, and honestly, he’d looked too good there for me to think about waking him up. Plus, he needed rest. We both did, really.

  “Can I make it better?” he asked.

  “Tell me something happy to put in this letter, how about?”

  He gave me a little squeeze. “I love you,” he said, voice still mumbly with sleep. “That’s happy, right?”

  Warmth flooded over me, tingling down to the tips of my toes, same as it had every time he’d said those three little words over these past few days.

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.” It was so happy that I was getting kind of addicted to it.

  “Well there you go, then.” I could hear the sleepy, satisfied little smile in his voice. “Glad I could help.”

  “Mmhm. Now go back to sleep. You’re distracting me.”

  He laughed softly and cuddled closer as I put my pencil back to the paper once again.

  There were things I still could have told Lora about. Bad things. Things like the curse that the feral’s magic had left over Kae
l and the others’ hearts. Stuff like how I’d had to lead an army into battle just last week. How many we’d lost already. How there was a bigger battle to come, and how I wasn’t sure I could keep being the leader I needed to be.

  But when the pencil started to move, I kept it steady enough that the words looked solid and confident on the paper.

  On a lighter note, remember that time you bet me fifty bucks that I would die a lonely old lady with like fifty cats? Well it’s too early to say for sure, maybe, but I’m going to go ahead and call that bet. You owe me fifty bucks. I’m not alone. I’m in love, and for that—and for you—I’m going to keep fighting. So I have to wrap this up. I have to sleep.

  But I’m going to see you soon, and things will be different for us.

  Because I’m going to win this fight.

  I promise.

  Love you to the moon and back (times infinity),

  Alex

  One

  takeoff

  “So, what’s sending you to Ireland?” The airline attendant glanced up from her computer and eyed my red hair and pale skin. “Visiting family?” she guessed.

  “Um, something like that. Sort of.”

  Behind me, I heard Kael cough to cover up a laugh. Either at my continued inability to make confident small talk with this way too perky woman checking my bags, or at the idea that the ones we were going to see might be considered family. Probably the latter. I mean, some of us were tied to the feral in a roundabout, familial sort of way, I guess.

  But we weren’t really going to visit them so much as going to kill them.

  Hopefully.

  Since I couldn’t exactly tell her that, though, I just flashed the woman my best cheery smile. I tried to ignore the way her gaze jumped so obviously over my scarred, blind eye as she handed me my boarding pass, and I gathered up my purse and carry-on and marched over to Vanessa and Will, both of whom had already been through the line.

  Kael joined us a minute later. And he tried—as I’d expected him to—to immediately usher us toward the security check point.

  “Don’t be rude,” Vanessa said, grabbing the sleeve of his jacket and jerking him back, like a mother keeping her kid from darting away in a busy parking lot. “He’s here because he wants to help. And do I really need to remind you that we need all the help we can get?”

  “I know we do.”

  “Good. So we’re waiting on him.” She nodded back to the baggage check line as she spoke.

  Joseph Valkos, my former sworn enemy and basically the biggest tyrant the shifter world had ever known—or thought it had known—was patiently waiting there, chatting with the attendant and looking for all the world like someone’s loveable, polite grandfather about to head off on vacation to see his grandkids.

  I thought it was kind of funny.

  I mean, in a weird, didn’t-see-that-coming sort of way.

  Kael was considerably less amused by it.

  I think he was still waiting for his pseudo-father to shout just kidding! and start being that tyrant again—the one that he’d more or less grown up with, who had tricked and used and abused him while under the feral’s control, and who Kael had been trying to escape for years now.

  They needed to have, as Vanessa put it, “a warm and fuzzy heart-to-heart to clear the air.” But unsurprisingly, that hadn’t happened yet. Because A: we hadn’t exactly had time to focus on that, and B: because Kael didn’t really do warm and fuzzy, aside from the few rare moments when I managed to trick him into it. Although those moments were becoming more common lately...

  “He’s perfectly capable of making it through security alone,” Kael said, pulling his arm from Vanessa’s grasp. “And I never said I didn’t think it was a good idea for him to help. I just said I’m not sitting next to him on this ten-hour flight, is all.”

  I could see the exasperated sigh building in Vanessa’s expression.

  “You two wait here,” I suggested to her and Will. “We’ll go on ahead.”

  We made it to our gate with barely a word between the two of us—which was basically a lifetime achievement for me, since silence wasn’t exactly my forte. Once there, though, and with the other three nowhere in sight, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore. Still, I tried to keep my tone as light and non-accusing as possible—because it wasn’t like I didn’t understand what he was dealing with. We’d both been through our own share of family stuff that would probably require a lifetime of therapy, after all.

  But it would have to wait.

  “You can’t just keep ignoring him, you know,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “This is going to be a long, awkward trip if you do.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “How about a new subject?” he interrupted, his voice remarkably, almost scarily calm. “Or better yet, let’s just keep moving.” He nodded at the gate’s door, which had just been opened by a short, squat little woman in a Delta uniform. “They’re boarding already, looks like.”

  “Already?”

  It wasn’t my frustration with Kael that was making my hands shake, all of a sudden.

  He glanced at his phone. “Eleven thirty-five…” he said. “Security took longer than I realized.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I—Yeah. I’m fine.”

  Well that sounded completely unconvincing.

  The truth was, I hated flying. Hated. It. I’d only been on three planes in my life, and on the first two trips I’d ended up passing out as soon as I stepped into that little tunnel thingy that connected the plane to the airport. The third trip, I made it all the way onto the plane and to my seat before I became so dizzy that I could barely see straight. Then, at takeoff, I’d proceeded to get sick all over this sweet old Chinese lady who, to her everlasting credit, had refrained from freaking out when I deposited my breakfast all over her shoes.

  So.

  I wasn’t really looking forward to this.

  Somehow I’d thought that, with Kael and everyone else around me—and with more important things to worry about— that I might be able to pretend flying didn’t bother me.

  But my knees had already gone weak. And my grip on Kael’s arm was tight enough that he was looking at me with a mixture of bewilderment and amusement.

  “Alex.”

  “What?”

  “Are you afraid of flying?”

  God, I couldn’t stand how easily he read me sometimes.

  I bowed my head. “Go ahead and make fun of me, I know it’s coming.”

  He laughed softly. “I’m not going to make fun of you.”

  I glanced up in disbelief.

  “But…”

  Oh, here it comes.

  “You realize that you’re a lot safer in the air than on the ground, right?”

  “Yeah, I know the statistics,” I said. “You’re a billion times more likely to be in a car crash than a plane crash, and blah blah blah—”

  “Maybe. But I actually wasn’t talking about car crashes.” He frowned. “I just meant that I’m personally looking forward to being suspended in the air for the next ten hours…” He glanced through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and I followed his gaze, watching a plane gathering speed along one of the runways. “Because at least, for a little while, we’ll be high above all of the people who want to kill you.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  I was safe from that, at least.

  But what neither of us mentioned just then was that he wasn’t safe, no matter how high we flew.

  None of my friends were.

  They all had the same curse—the same mark over their hearts— from the last encounter we’d had with our new, true enemy. And Kael was right, maybe: the feral couldn’t reach us when we were up in the air. But the curse’s clock would continue to count down all the same. Joseph had called it luna fascinus —that is, magic that was tied to the moon. The upcoming blood moon, we were guessing. Hoping, actually
, because at least that gave us a few weeks to work with.

  Nothing was really certain at this point, though.

  I kept expecting to close my eyes, reopen them to find them all dead and gone, and to find myself fighting this battle alone.

  I made it onto the plane mostly by reminding myself that I wasn’t alone at the moment, and that I should probably follow Kael’s line of reasoning and be happy about being suspended with him for these next ten hours. It could be a much needed, relaxed pause before we touched down to face who knew what on the other side.

  Unfortunately, my anxiety still disagreed with this logic.

  The plane’s engines seemed like the were roaring abnormally loudly. The tiny window in our assigned row was getting even smaller, shrinking and spinning away from me as I fumbled my way into my seat and struggled to fasten my seatbelt. When I finally heard it click, I wrapped my arms around myself, tucked my chin down against my chest, and closed my eyes.

  Don’t get sick, don’t get sick, don’t get sick—

  Kael slid an arm around my waist and pulled me as close as my seatbelt would allow. I pressed my cheek against his chest, and he kissed the top of my head. “You’re okay,” he said, voice muffled against my hair.

  “I want off of this plane,” I mumbled back.

  I felt his lips curve into a slight smile before he pulled back so he could look at my face. “And then what? Are you going to swim instead?”