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For the first time, I saw Ophelia’s serene façade crack as she shifted in her chair.
“She’ll use them, all of them, head hopping until she’s built up support for her way of doing things, until she has everyone exactly where she wants them to be.” A thread of fear now coloured Arelia’s voice.
“She doesn’t need to, not when she possesses the priestess here. The four of them broadcast their hijinks to the whole community before,” Flora said. “Made me feel things I thought I was well and truly too old to. Why bother persuading individuals when she can sweep up everyone to orgiastic heights?”
That’s where the power comes from. Branwen’s words came back to me. Give this to me, and I w
ill make your existence one long libidinous dream. No pleasure will be out of reach. I’ll make you experience things beyond your wildest dreams.
That was what she intended—to keep us all swooning with pleasure, too horny and swept up in what was going on to care about anything else. That was exactly what had happened to me. What had I done since I’d gotten here but get off? Over and over, caught up in the ways the guys came together, the way we did.
“So what do we do?” Ophelia asked the table, a shade below a demand. “We do not drive one of our own out of Sanctuary.”
“Except we did,” Flora replied. “We did at some point. Someone, some alpha forced Bec’s forebears from the community. Why, alpha?”
“Why, indeed,” she muttered, an echo of my own thoughts previously. “I must consult with the other matriarchs and search the records.”
“You do that,” Flora said almost patronisingly. “In the meantime, I’ll take missy here and her merry band to the shrine.”
“No!” Arelia said, shooting to her feet. “You’re arming her, not neutralising her.”
“And I’ll need young Kailee too.”
“No.” Arelia’s hand went to her daughter’s shoulder, clamping down, but the little girl rose to her feet and pulled free without too much effort.
“Mother, you know I have to.”
They used the term mother in a formal sense as well as a personal one, so it was hard to tell in which context Kailee was using it, and then I realised it didn’t matter. I’d been familiarised with the triple goddess and her forms by my nan and understood what this meant. In some ways, we were all the maiden, the mother, and the crone at different periods of our life, after different experiences. Right now, Arelia was every inch of the mother. She looked down at her preternaturally strong little girl and wanted to protect her with everything she had, invested emotionally in a way the more dispassionate crone, Flora, couldn’t be. Flora was watching her life slip away, knowing she had one more thing to achieve before she could rest—resolving the situation with me.
“You are always welcome to join our workings, Arelia,” Flora said gently.
“I…I can’t. You know that. It has never been my strength, only Kailee’s.”
The old woman shook her head and then rose to her feet, casting an eye over us. “Pack your gear, my pretties, because you’ll be residing at the shrine until this is resolved.”
“The shrine?” Shaun said. “Where the hell is that?”
“I lived here my whole bloody life,” Axel said. “I’ve never even heard of such a place.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?” Flora replied, her lips thinning. “It’s a place for women, not you, but we’ll make an exception this time. Needs must and all that. Now gather your stuff, because we will be going somewhere you won’t be able to nick home and grab something.”
“We’re…we’re going through the portal?” Ethan asked.
She snorted, then nodded.
“Just a little foothold we keep on the other side. Well, that and the mines we use to keep this place running. Come along, those that are coming.”
I followed the guys up the hallway to the rooms we’d been staying in, watching them put stuff into their bags, when suddenly, my Tirian relinquished her control of my body. I came back to human form blinking.
“Goddess, Bec…” Shaun said, rushing over, then peering closely at me. “Are you OK?”
“Am I Bec, you mean,” I replied, glancing at the lot of them.
“You are,” Shade said. “I can feel it when you change, when she’s here. She…fluctuates. Her power is not absolute, not yet.”
“Not yet?” Axel let out a harsh bark of a laugh that was completely mirthless. “Gods above, what…? What the fuck is going on?”
“You’ll remember,” Shade said. “When you surrender, it’ll all come back then, all of it. You’ll wish it didn’t.” His expression became one filled with longing, and not for the first time did I wonder what the hell was going on with him. “All of you.”
