LIAM (The Rylee Adamson Epilogues, Book 2) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  PRAISE FOR THE RYLEE ADAMSON NOVELS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  NEWSLETTER

  ALSO BY SHANNON MAYER

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  COPYRIGHT

  PRAISE FOR THE RYLEE ADAMSON NOVELS

  “Shannon Mayer’s Rylee Adamson paranormal romances keep me glued to the page. Rylee is a kick-ass character who loves with her whole heart and reminds me of my own Rose Gardner—a collector and protector of lost and broken souls. Every new book is better than the last and I always finish her latest book hungry for more.”

  -Denise Grover Swank

  New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author

  “The Rylee Adamson Novels are filled with a wonderfully detailed and rich paranormal world with engaging characters, a fast paced plot and lots of action. A must read for urban fantasy lovers.”

  -Eve Langlais

  New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author

  “If you love the early Anita Blake novels by Laurel K. Hamilton, you will fall head over heels for The Rylee Adamson Series. Rylee is a complex character with a tough, kick-ass exterior, a sassy temperament and morals which she never deviates from. She's the ultimate heroine. Mayer's books rank right up there with Kim Harrison's, Patricia Brigg's, and Ilona Andrew's. Get ready for a whole new take on Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance and be ready to be glued to the pages!”

  -Just My Opinion Book Blog

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  You’d think I’d run out of people to thank after this many books but the reality is each book takes a team, and a support network to bring it about. From my amazing editors (Tina Winograd, Shannon Page, Stephanie Erickson) to my fantastic ARC team (who always manage to find a few more typos for me to fix!) to my always amazing right hand gal, Lysa Lessieur, you all make this writing job continue to feel like an adventure of epic proportions.

  Thank you from the bottom of my heart for sticking out the rough patches with me, you all deserve medals for laying in the trenches beside me as we fight side by side with the characters we all know and love.

  Here’s to teamwork.

  And my very own pack of kick-ass women.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE DAYS BEFORE the triplets fell ill were quiet, so quiet, without Rylee there and nothing but thoughts of her haunting my restless sleep. Wondering if she would come back, and if so, in what condition? Would the fear that hid behind her eyes be wiped away, or would it have burrowed in like a parasite that would change her forever?

  Kav, Bam, and Rut had seemed to pick up on my worry, as they were increasingly quiet, sleeping longer, playing less. All of my concerns had made me a fool not to see that the triplets were growing pale, and I’d let Louisa’s words of calm reassurance make me ignore my instincts.

  I knew something was wrong, and yet I’d kept my blinders on. Hoping I was mistaken, that I was seeing things that weren’t there . . . but I hadn’t been.

  The new recruits Rylee had brought with her, Belinda and Levi, siblings with a hint of elemental blood in them, had gone with Rylee to get groceries and that’s when it happened. Almost as if the triplets had been waiting for Rylee. With her home, it was as if a light switch had flicked off within the triplets and they went downhill in a matter of a single hour.

  Almost as if they knew I wouldn’t have noticed, so caught up as I was in my worry for her.

  So they waited for their mother to be near, knowing she would save them. Knowing she was the one who would find the cure to their mysterious illness.

  And then Rylee had sent me after the one thing that could save the babies. A female ogre, one willing to be a wet nurse for three babies.

  I ran for my weapons in our bedroom, listening to Rylee give orders, listened to her call Doran and her grandparents to come and help her. I grabbed a bag from the closet and shoved in several knives, and a thick woolen coat. There wasn’t much else that would do me any good.

  I looked around the room, breathing the space in.

  Sending Rylee away on a salvage brought her back to me whole, at peace with her own nature. For her to stay home with the babies and send me on my own, I wondered . . . did she see the fear in my own eyes? I shook my head. No, I knew she hadn’t. I’d done everything I could to keep it from her. To give her the space she needed without her having to deal with me and my shit.

  I slung the bag over my shoulder and ran through the house. Rylee had Kav in her arms. His eyes were closed and his heart beat at an unsteady rate. I didn’t stop, though, not even to kiss them all goodbye. Because I knew that if I thought about the triplets dying, I wouldn’t be able to move, I would freeze in place and hold them as if my love alone would save them.

  If I stopped now, I wouldn’t be able to do what I had to do.

  Time to put all the emotional shit on the back burner and get the job done. Time to put back on the visage of an FBI agent on a case.

  Hurry, Liam . . . hurry.

  Rylee’s words echoed in my ears as I ran along the driveway and jumped into the new Jeep I’d bought her only a week before. I jammed the keys in the ignition and turned them. Nothing. The engine made a vain attempt at a rumble that sounded more like it was laughing at me than actually trying to turn over. “Piece of shit.” I slammed my hands on the wheel, cursing my own stupidity. More than any other supernaturals, I tended to have that kind of effect on technology, shutting it down by just being within a ten-foot proximity.

  Just another curse of being a Guardian who’d taken over a vampire’s body, I suppose. I shuddered, my skin all but crawling with the need to get away from itself. This was not the time to consider the fact that my body was not my own. That I had basically become a body snatcher. That I was no longer the man I once was, that the mirror didn’t show me a face I knew other than as someone I’d hated.

  Something I would deal with another time.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe I’d just ignore it and hope it stopped bothering me. Yeah, that sounded like the way to go. Stuff those thoughts as deeply as I could, away from the front of my brain where they would do nothing but distract me from the task at hand.

  A task I refused to think about failing.

  I jumped out of the Jeep and slammed the door hard enough to bend it inward. I didn’t really know why I’d even tried the new one other than the fact that I’d bought it for Rylee to replace the old clunker she’d been driving for years. I thought, stupidly, that a new toy would help draw her out of her head, help her see that there were still good things in the world.

  That she was one of those good things.

  It hadn’t worked.

  And now, I had no choice but to take said clunker with its multitude of dents, bangs, and bent rims. With a leap, I slid across the hood of the new Jeep, scratching it, my bag of weapons and extra clothes dragging behind me. In seconds, I was in Rylee’s black, beat-up hunk of metal. The seat sagged under my weight and I shifted it backward to accommodate my long legs. Longer than before. I shook my head, not for the first time getting hung up on the details of my new body.

  “Liam, wait!”

  I twisted in my seat and stared at the kid running out the door. Levi was tall and gangly like so many teenage boys who hadn’t found
their stride yet, who hadn’t started to fill out. His messy brown hair and light brown eyes reminded me of Alex. He stumbled on the bottom step as he yanked a heavy winter coat on. He had a woven cap he pulled down over his ears. Like he was going somewhere. “I . . . I’m coming with you.”

  Oh, this was not happening. The kid wanted to help. I could appreciate that. But not today, not on this run.

  “No, you’re not.” I turned my back on him and rolled up the window without even considering his request. The kid had only been with us a few days, and while I knew he was a good kid, he wasn’t really a supernatural. He was a half-breed elemental that could barely touch his abilities. Or maybe he couldn’t touch them at all, which made him just a body to be in the way. Cannon fodder on a good day. The other part of it was he was far from solid in another way—his past had broken him from what Rylee had told me, making him an unknown when it came to a crisis or scenario that would require snap decisions and bold thinking. I only knew a little bit about the abuse he and his sister had suffered at the hands of their father, but I didn’t need to know more.

  I’d seen it with too many kids on the streets, the perpetual hunch in the shoulders, the flinch of muscles if you made a move toward them. The darting eyes. They weren’t shady; they were like dogs that had been beaten down, chained and starved. There would come a point where the break would happen and either he would lash out, or totally fold in on himself. I couldn’t afford for either to happen on this job.

  He didn’t slow down. “Rylee said I should come with you.” I could hear him even with the doors shut and the windows rolled up. Wolf ears were incredibly strong even when I was in human form. Not that I’d been able to shift since I’d been in Faris’s body.

  Again, a problem for another day.

  Not today.

  Levi hurried to the other side of the Jeep as he zipped up his coat against the constant blowing wind here in North Dakota. “She says she has a feeling you’re going to need me. And maybe you’re going to need this.” He opened the door and let himself in as he held up a cell phone attached to a long cord. He plugged the cord into the lighter.

  A cell phone. Damn, that was a good idea. There was no way I could handle a cell phone without it shutting down on me within seconds of touching it. This would give me access to Rylee. I could get information to and from her without trying to find a landline, something that was becoming increasingly more difficult.

  I bit back the words that spilled up my throat and then swallowed them. If Rylee wanted him to come, there was a reason, more than just the cell phone. Even I was smart enough to know that. I trusted her more than I trusted myself some days, so it looked like Levi was coming along for the ride. I locked down the irritation of my tagalong.

  “Fine. Get in. But you do what I say, when I say it. This is no Sunday drive to Grandma’s house, and I can’t be pulling your ass out of the fire, got it?”

  He nodded and shut the door on the passenger side of the Jeep, his face a careful blank. From what I knew of his father, Levi had learned to deflect a lot of abuse, verbal and physical. But I didn’t have time to feel bad for laying the truth out. The kid had to get used to things done my way. And I had to hope he didn’t melt down along the way.

  I stuck the key into the ignition and threw my bag of weapons into the backseat.

  The engine rolled over with a thick grumble that sounded like at least two pistons were sticking, and a third ready to blow up. Again. I shook my head and backed out of the driveway so quickly, the Jeep rocked on two wheels for a moment.

  Levi gripped the armrest on the door, his eyes shut tightly. But he didn’t say anything.

  I slammed the Jeep into drive and hit the gas. We needed to get to the farm on the outskirts of Bismarck as fast as possible.

  The ogre tribe that Rylee had seen, the first and only ogres we’d run into in the six months since the battle with Orion, had been in Seattle.

  Taking a flight to Seattle was an option, but only if I managed to not cause the plane’s engines to fail. Something I’d done in the past. On top of that, between booking and waiting on a commercial flight, I was sure Ophelia could get me to Seattle faster, and today it was all about speed.

  The fear that I was not going to make it in time to save the triplets roared up in me, rolling my stomach in one giant knot. I grimaced and drew in a slow breath. My training as an FBI agent kicked in hard, and I let it take over.

  There was only one way I was managing this trip. Boxes.

  I took my emotions and shoved them into a box next to all the other fears hidden in the depths of my heart, locked it tightly and threw it to the back of my mind. Tasks were what I had, and what I would deal with. I focused on that and put the image of the babies away.

  Slowly the fear left, replaced by a growing determination and a single goal set in a series of steps. But ultimately, it came down to one thing.

  “So we’re really going to an ogre tribe?” Levi asked.

  I glanced at the kid. “We have one job, and one job only, and that is to find a female ogre. The ogre mob Rylee dealt with in Seattle is extremely territorial. They have humans working for them, and they kill any supernatural who shows up on their turf without question. From what she said, they are smarter than the average ogre too, or at least, they think they are.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Levi frown. “How are we going to convince them they should help us? I . . . I’ve found violent people aren’t really prone to reason.”

  He had a very good point, one I’d seen over and over as an FBI agent. The more violent a person, the more buried they were in their own twisted logic. Snapping them out of it was rare. I didn’t answer Levi right away because I didn’t know the “how” of what we were doing, only that we were doing it. First step was to get to Seattle as fast as possible.

  Convincing the ogre tribe to help would be no easy task. Then to further convince an ogre female to come back with us . . . I’d be begging the gods to help on this one. But without a female ogre, the ogre triplets would die. Their bodies shutting down as each second passed. That was not an outcome I was willing to consider, and again, I pushed those thoughts away.

  “Mother Nature is a bitch, Levi. Just like some animals can’t be fostered before a certain age, ogre babies are the same. Without the specific nutrients from an ogre mother’s milk, the triplets will die. We aren’t letting that happen, which means between here and Seattle, we’re going to come up with a plan. There has to be at least one female ogre that would be maternal enough, and willing, to help.”

  He slowly nodded. “Okay, so we’re really just going in on a hope and a prayer.”

  I ran a hand through my hair and glanced in the rearview mirror as I sped down the highway. “Yeah, something like that.”

  A hope and a prayer. That was Rylee’s style, though to be fair, she usually involved more than a bit of sword swinging and f-bombs. That wasn’t my style.

  Even though I said I didn’t have a plan, the seeds of one were sprouting. The quieter we were, the better. Slipping in on the outskirts of Seattle and keeping clear of the ogres until we scoped out the situation would probably be best.

  Maybe we could cut one from the herd and do an interrogation.

  I glanced at the speedometer. The farm was a couple hours away, and we were making it in record time. The image of the three ogre babies, limp, unmoving, their normally colorful skin pale, and their tiny hands clenched as though in pain . . .

  No.

  My jaw tightened. I would not allow it to happen. They were my boys as much as Marcella was mine. As much as Zane was mine. I would fight with everything I had, down to my last breath, to save them.

  “Um. Liam. The airport is the other way,” Levi said.

  “We aren’t going via plane. Ophelia is going to help us.”

  “The dragon?” he blurted, excitement all over him like a puppy teased with a bright, shiny new toy.

  I nodded. “Yes.” I didn’t elaborate that Op
helia was the reason I doubted I was going to need Levi’s help. Dragons were naturally immune to magic, and they were as tough as they came. Though, it had been ogres who had taken out Blaz, Ophelia’s mate and one of Rylee’s closest friends. I had to believe she would be willing to help. She was, after all, a mother herself and bonded to Rylee so she knew what the ogre babies meant to her.

  The highway was mostly vacant, dotted here and there with vehicles or the odd tractor moving like a plodding green or red speed bump.

  I wove the Jeep around vehicles, and as beat-up as it was, the clunker was still responsive in handling.

  Levi grunted as we skimmed next to a car. “Um, that’s a bit close.”

  Two vehicles in front of us blocked the way, but I didn’t slow. That wasn’t an option. I jerked the wheel hard to the right and hit the gas pedal, taking us up the shoulder, spitting gravel behind us. Levi’s face paled. The gravel tugged at the Jeep, pulling it toward the deep ditch. I kept the wheel steady, muscles tense as I kept us from rolling over altogether.

  Barely.

  Signage for the posted speed limit raced toward us in our improvised driving lane. The space between the sign and the large truck on my left was going to be tight. I held the Jeep steady and kept the gas pedal down as far as it would go.

  “Hang on, this will be close.”

  “Holy shit, man!” Levi yelled as we shot through the tight space, the Jeep’s right side mirror ripping off against the sign pole with an audible tear and ting of metal on metal.

  “Hold on to your panties,” I said as we sped down the shoulder of the highway, finally passing the blockade. I pulled the wheel to the left, once more on the main road. I didn’t look at Levi, but I could feel him staring at me.

  “I thought you were a cop?” he breathed.

  “FBI,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I won’t break the law if I need to.”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen that before,” he whispered. There was pain in those words I didn’t like.