Page 113 of Hybrid Heroics

“I’m sure she did plenty of little shit over the decades to get her vengeance, but it wouldn’t change the outcome. After I was born, Anahein switched her focus. Neither she nor any of Alric’s mistresses could produce the child of prophecy, because I was already here. And she couldn’t split Amelia and her mates apart.”

She stopped pacing to glance at her parents as she rambled on. “In the spirit of second chances and all that shit… Alric conned his way into the good graces of the new generation’s parents, which is how he found out who my mates would be.

“The only reason anyone knew is because the Fates told all of you. There was something precise and insightful about how they hand-picked each of us. Something only they could understand. Then Anahein tried and failed to keep us apart as the time to meet neared.”

Sloane spun her finger in a circle. “Which brings me back to Belfast, where we found Rig, and Anahein lost him. She followed us to Amelia’s estate, suffering a foretold death instigated by her father. Before that happened, I found the care package Rig left me with the Pith tokens.”

She pointed at her boots to emphasize all that he’d left her as she continued. “I’m assuming that was the last place he was before they captured him. They wouldn’t have been powerful enough to move him without losing him.”

Rig smiled at Sloane, nodding his agreement, but she didn’t notice. She was on a tangent, voicing all the pieces of her abstract mosaic until everyone got the full picture.

“Once Palmer and I cleaned the council up, Alric knew he was in a tight spot. Everyone he threw our way was dying. But then he sacrificed Anahein and used her death as an excuse to see Alania, to break the news to her. That’s how she knew we were coming to the fae realm, and why she had summer soldiers on their way before we arrived. That’s also why she was so pissed at me.”

My Kitten snorted, amused for a split second. The words wouldn’t stop tumbling from her mouth. Pacing helped her think, though it wasn’t enough. She began braiding her hair, too.

“But she wanted to play nice and make me suffer for killing her daughter. She had Amelia and Nate. She arrested Vaughn within hours of crossing into the realm. And with him being home, she had three out of four children of the seasons. Five children of prophecies in her palace once Ruby showed up.

“Her intentions were to kill the Winters and take their power the same way Alric had done. But she wanted more without realizing you can’t steal a prophecy from another. You can assert yourself into it, but that’s it. If the main character dies, so does the prophecy. Before she did that, she wanted me to watch her kill Nate and Amelia. Then she would make Vaughn and Freya watch as she killed their mates.”

She blew out a heavy breath. “Then I undermined her in her throne room in front of the fae people, because I knew it would force her hand, force her thoughts. I broke my privacy rules, letting her thoughts flow through me, while feeding them straight to the hellhounds for safe keeping.

“There was someone in my head, and I couldn’t risk whoever it was knowing anything more than they already did.” She shrugged to herself, no longer paying us attention. “The Winter parents being alive threw us off, though they didn’t change the plan. They altered the timeline, but Reagan had a lot to say about what happened five years ago.

“That, plus connecting certain memories with York, led me to force a stasis. I used the magic I felt surrounding the Winters when we found them, but I shouldn’t have been able to use it so easily. It had been crafted by an old god.”

Sloane shook her head before completely digressing from her topic. The action brought her back onto the track of… her babbling train of thoughts. Her lengthy confessional was slightly confusing, yet somehow enlightening. She had figured out so much of the puzzle while needing to keep all the pieces hidden from her own mind.

“Once I was in the stasis, I taunted Alric. I picked apart his movements and what made him tic. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but still… I fed those thoughts straight to the hounds. Alric was already beginning to see his failures for what they were before I kicked him out of my mind.

“All I really had to do was discreetly plant the seed of doubt in his mind. The doubts were already there, but they were covered in a god complex from all the stolen power. The invasive kudzu smothered his confidence, rooting in said god complex. It spread doubt faster than he could kill the thoughts.”

“Kudzu?” I mouthed to the guys, getting a round of shoulder shrugs.

Palmer waved his hand to get her attention. “How were you funneling thoughts into the hounds?”

“Mnemonics,” she quickly answered. “I have a different type of connection with them, one that can’t be closed. They think in images and colors, so I improvised. I wrapped all the important things I learned into pictures that would help me remember the thoughts later.”

I pressed my thumbs to my temples as I digested her words. My brain wasn’t working on her level right now. She was moving at light speed… The rest of us were stuck on a congested freeway, wanting to go the speed limit, but stuck bumper-to-bumper as the information piled up.

“Yesterday—today?—Thursday morning,” she finally settled, no longer caring of the time or day. “I had them play back all the images they’d seen in my mind since before we left Belfast… So like ten days? Maybe a few more. Or less… My sense of time is fucked right now. But…” she drawled, shrugging. “All that leads me to dinner. I told Alric to show up at seven sharp, and I knew he would.

“For all his bitching, he loved games as much as I do. He wouldn’t miss the opportunity to size me up in person. The only difference was… I masked my power, just like I do in Hell. He came in with the volume turned up, wanting to appear like more than he was. I had already made my mind up about him before dinner. But he was still trying to figure me out. Especially after being so deep in my mind.

“On the outside, I was calm and conversational. A complete one-eighty to what he saw inside my head. There, I was still calm, but he started second-guessing what he knew about me. Which was nothing accurate. And I’m assuming Palmer had something to do with that. Alric was under the assumption that I mourned the childhood I could have had, but I don’t—no offense.”

“None taken,” Rig mumbled, and Amelia nodded, both of them totally engrossed by her explanation of… fucking everything.

She was blowing my mind, too.

I hadn’t pieced together half of this shit. None of us had. Though now that she was spelling it out, lining everything up, I wasn’t surprised that we hadn’t caught it. We each knew something different, and we hadn’t stopped to talk it out like this. In full.

“I had nothing to mourn because I was too young to remember. Had Sam, Nate, or Charlie told me about Raguel or more about Amelia, then maybe I would think differently. But it’s good that they didn’t. If they had and I’d bumped into Alric posing as Rig… Wanting to go with him for coffee or some shit would have left me alone and exposed. Amelia was a little different, because I did know a few things about her, and I had seen a couple of pictures.

“I don’t think anyone expected Anahein to have such powerful glamor.” She let go of her hair to tap her chin. “I think that would have been used against me as a child—”

“I did stop her once,” Franklin admitted. “You were five.”

Sloane flourished her hand at the ancient vampire. “Case in point. The older I got, the more reclusive I became. Until it was just a handful of people around me. The problem with Anahein glamouring herself to get close to me was she couldn’t trust that I wouldn’t read her mind.