“Wait a minute.” Zane moved closer to the camera. “You’re telling me that my eighteen-year-old daughter has been jumping through dimensions and meeting with a sociopathic bastard who wants to kill her as well as all Enhanced females. Is that what you’re telling me, Sam?”
Perhaps this had been a bad idea. But if he had a daughter, he’d want to know if she was meeting with a thousand-year-old psycho. “Yes.”
Now dead silence met his words.
“We need to lock her down,” Talen growled. As a grandfather to Hope, he’d do it himself if they didn’t talk reason to him.
Sam shrugged. “Where? He got to her in the middle of demon headquarters. There’s nowhere to put her, Talen.” Even so, he watched his brother. Zane’s fury could be felt through the screen. “Don’t be angry with her. She had no choice, and she did a good job protecting herself. Protecting both of us.”
“She had a choice about not telling me any of this,” Zane snapped. “A big-assed choice.”
“What would you have done?” Garrett asked quietly. When Zane turned the look of death on him, he held up a hand. “She’s my niece and I love her, Zane. But what could you have done? Even if you slept on her floor, she would’ve been gone.”
Sam grunted. “I didn’t just call us together for the hell of it. It’s time to do this thing. If we could close those portals, then we can open them too. I say we bring the bastard home where we can control where he is and what he does. With a massive amount of pain if necessary.”
“How?” Zane asked.
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “But I’m being pulled through dimensions while being burned by fire I can’t completely control, and my mate is inflicted similarly. I believe our combined energy could do something. That we could somehow get to Ulric.”
“Mate?” Zane asked, his chin dropping.
Sam cut a look at Garrett. “I might’ve forgotten that part.”
Garrett grinned, even though stress lines fanned out from his eyes. “Sam met his mate. Her name is Honor, she is Enhanced to the nth degree, and she’s a gorgeous badass.”
“Thanks, G,” Sam said congenially.
“You bet,” Garrett said.
“Enough!” Zane slammed his fist on the stone table in front of him, and the thing broke in two. “From the intel I’ve gathered, you need all three Keys and a Lock to make this ritual happen. You have two Keys and no Lock. Right?”
Logan scratched his neck. “Hope is the Lock.”
Then Zane lost it. Not a little. Not loudly. But death glowed in his eyes, and a quick look at Talen and Dage showed similar rage.
Garrett tried to stop the oncoming train. “Why do you think we signed up for this gig? Seriously. Logan and I have planned since the beginning to protect her at any cost, and once we realized Sam is in this too, the three of us have been ready. Jesus. Do you really think we aren’t doing everything we can to keep her safe?”
“Including us is necessary to keep her safe,” Dage bellowed. The king so rarely lost his cool that the earth kind of shifted when he did.
“We are including you,” Garrett yelled back. “You’re here now, and there’s not a thing you could’ve done before right now. Hell. You want my take? There’s nothing we can do now that you do know. You’re right. We don’t have the last Key. We don’t have a place for the ritual, regardless of Sam’s shitty Keeper title. And we don’t know how to kill the bastard. Our situation is no different now than it was last week or last year or last fucking century. Yet now you know. Feel better?”
Sam elbowed him.
Talen leaned in. “Yeah. I feel better.” His glare at his son held heat. A boatload of it. “We don’t keep secrets like this, son. Ever.”
Garrett met his father’s gaze evenly. Man, they looked exactly alike. “I took a vow. It wasn’t signing a piece of paper, Dad. It was in blood and bone…and it hurt. Bad.”
Talen’s jaw hardened.
Sam got it. He didn’t have kids, but he did have a younger brother, and the idea of him being in that kind of pain pissed him right off. “I’m not saying we have a place for the ritual or the Keys. I’m not saying we can bring Ulric here and kill him right away. What I am saying is that we might have a chance to bring him home. We don’t have to kill him right away. But if he’s here, we can lock him down and learn how to kill him.”
Logan scratched his head. “He’s dangerous even from a world far away. How dangerous would he be here? We don’t know. He obviously has unbelievable powers.”
Sam rubbed the scruff across his jaw. “Yeah. I thought of that. Any action is a risk, but I thought we should all make the decision together.”
“That’s a nice change,” Zane said, heavy on the sarcasm.
Sam had expected it, so he didn’t reply.
Garrett tipped back his entire beer and set down the bottle. “Regardless, somebody should speak with Hope. We need to learn everything she knows about the portals and what she did to prevent Ulric from taking her or Sam again. Once we have all the facts, we can make a decision.”
Sam scrubbed both hands down his face. “Honor and I will work together to see if we can open up any of these portals or if they’re just going to keep trying to drag us in. I’m hoping once we mate, we’ll be able to control the pull.”
Zane straightened. “Don’t be mating for convenience. I want more for you than that.”
“I like her,” Sam said. “I might even love her. It happened fast.”
“It always does,” Talen agreed.
Garrett eyed him. “I’m not sure she has agreed as of yet.”
“She will,” Sam said, keeping his expression calm.
Logan grinned, but strain showed in his smile. “So you got your marking. Just a plain old K like mine.”
Sam smiled. “No double S’s. Sorry, Zane. You’re keeping the crown.” The empty feeling in his gut was one he’d keep to himself. The marking would appear any minute, now that he’d made the decision. It had to.
Zane exhaled, obviously releasing his anger. “Congratulations. Can’t wait to meet her, and you’d better call and tell Mom. Sooner rather than later. I’m done with secrets in this family.” He looked into the camera. “Talen and Dage? Since you’re just a couple of miles away, would you like to join me for a family meeting with Hope?”
Sam groaned. “Don’t triple-team her, you guys. Just talk to her and be gentle. She can’t help being prophesied or whatever.”