The rest of the way, Seamus pretends to be helping a tipsy Joana. Once behind a door, he leaves her to stumble ahead of him.
She crouches in her long, peachy dress. 'I don't feel all right,' she groans, clutching her head. 'Water.'
Roughly, so that she gasps, Seamus pulls her to her feet.
'Seamus?' She croaks, afraid, seeming to see him for the first time. Or this side of him. The fear fades into the fogginess of inebriation and she licks her lips. This is definitely her first time being drunk; the sheltered child that she has always been. I wonder how she snuck into the party. 'Water?' She asks again.
This time, Seamus obliges her. He gives her his glass and helps her down all the contents, some of the liquid dribbling across the corners of her mouth to the front of the jeans jacket over her dress. The glass shatters on the carpet. Joana swoons, but, holding her steady, Seamus downs his own glass and sets to work.
***
I round the pool too and wave to Sebastian. Automatically, he raises his hand back, only to frown at me. We have been enemies since that day at Seamus' house, when I almost offered myself to him as worship offering to his ego.
Inside the house, I wince at the music. I escry Kat saying goodbye to her friends. Smart girl. I just need to be a hero and save the dumb, naïve one.
Perry, whose birthday party it is, steps into my path. 'I don't remember inviting you to this party,' she fires, her girls gathering behind her.
I am running out of time, so I advance my plans. My gift of telepathy, palpable only to me as an invisible, elastic bubble, swells outwards. 'I am not here for you,' I hiss to Perry.
Besides her beauty and her parents' money, Perry's lacrosse skills her her other superpower. She is captain of the female lacrosse team and damn good at it too. She is an entitled little princess all right.
But I once humiliated Perry at lacrosse two years ago. There seems to be something between werewolves and lacrosse; any sports actually. I had plowed through Perry and her friends to score a single goal in an amateur matchup against the school's professional team, helping other fellow amateurs score goals while preventing the professional team from scoring any. Of course, we only scored three goals against them, not beating them by much; but I shined in the match and made our defense so airtight that the coach had straight up offered me a spot in the professional team and a chance at Perry's spot: captain.
'Perry, what have I ever done to you?' I ask softly with a mocking edge.
She scoffs, but Ayisha's shouting at the pool, just on time, cuts her off. Princess Perry and her sycophant attendants rush off to see what the business is while I speed towards Seamus and Joana.
Seamus is struggling to get down his trousers when I lay a hand on his shoulder. Joana needs no saving really, I just want to gloat. Heck, I could have done all this from the confines of my room, accumulating ice crystals like motes.
The roofies are already kicking in and Seamus sags in my grip. His whiskey glass was what he had given Joana while downing the gin and tonic himself, I fiddling with his mind all along as if playing Beethoven's 5th symphony, changing the appearance of the glasses.
'Let my face be the last thing you see, sleeping princess,' I laugh as Seamus goes under, succumbing to the drug. Then I set to work.
Joana is limp in my arms when I jump off the window. I hit the ground with a JAR! that reverberates to my skull and rattles Joana, but she is safe in my arms. In the corner, Sebastian is thrashing in the pool, half-drowning as monsters beset him from every direction. Most of the monsters are actually his friends trying to help him. It's a rough fight in the pool as Sebastian, screaming as all his old childhood fears come alive, lays out with punches. Some of his friends are punching back too, as some girls take videos of the scene.
I put Joana in a recliner in the garden, away from the house and all the ruckus; and cover her with a blanket.
Before I leave, I pay a final visit to Seamus whom I have hung from Perry's childhood treehouse by a harness, his clothes in a laundry basket and I AM A PERVERT written on his torso in Perry's most fanciful lipstick: something else for the pictures and videos tonight when he is discovered.
Satisfied, I hum to myself as I start the walk home, not needing to rush as I had getting to Perry's house.
My blood freezes cold. And it has nothing to do with my telepathy.
'Even being alpha, you seem to have a lot of time on your hands to fool around.'
The iciness thaws into some potent Elderwood rage. 'Lauren Lucas,' I growl.
She steps out of the shadows in the garden of Perry's house, as if I hadn't already seen her lurking by infrared vision, or sensed her by her brain waves.
But she knows I saw her. Her eyes are better than my infrared, since they are the eyes of Knowing. 'You are quite the arsenal,' she says, keeping her distance.
'What do you want?' I growl.
Lauren smiles as I focus all my attention on her. She is a lycan of course, full-blooded even, theoretically stronger than my Mason weren't he Augusta Lycaone's bastard son, which, apparently, still counts for a lot.
This means that the illusions and hallucinations fade from Sebastian's mind.
'Let's talk about Mason,' she starts. 'He is mated to me.'
'Is he?' I laugh. 'He is mated to me too.'
'Yeah, a false mate bond,' she hisses.
'No less authentic,' I say. 'I understand the nature of bonds better, becoming alpha. I couldn't have formed a mate bond with Mason if your bond with him was really inviolable. It would seem that Mason loathed having a mate bond with you in the first place, even if he just doesn't know it. He hates schemes, Lauren.'
That strikes a nerve, but Lauren reins in her rage. 'Watch yourself, child,' she threatens.
'I am not afraid of you.'
'Because you are merely a cub who grew a set of overgrown fangs? A cub is still a cub to her betters.'
I flex and extend my clawed fingers. 'This cub is alpha, Lauren. The strongest alpha.'
That gives her pause. 'You are not the strongest,' she argues later but I see it in her mind: I am barely mature—as werewolf lifespans go, yet I am strong enough to give her second thoughts. I may not be the strongest alpha yet, but I am not far. In a few years, the werewolf community may need to look for a different delineation for me: a new category just for me.
And there is the likelihood that there may no longer be any lycan ruling class at the time.
Lauren gaurds her thoughts and smile. This is after she wonders if I can combine Olligrander's bond powers and Vanessa's telepathy to unhinge her mind forever.
I smile coldly back.
She frowns. 'You are not the strongest, Claire. You are not even the strongest telepathist.'
Searing lightning suddenly flashes through the tips of my hair to the rungs of my spine. It is a different feeling from the comforting, icy coldness of my telepathy; from my White heritage.
But that was also telepathy: a different kind—a burning kind; seemingly the opposite of my White kind. There is another telepathist somewhere. I unleash a town-wide scan, and push the limits of my bubble. I stretch, but I can't go farther yet. Either someone is pushing my bubble back or they are adept at hiding. Or they could also just be beyond my range while their range is greater than mine.
Or all of those, I realize with a sick feeling.
All the same, fiddlefart.
'Do you honestly think you are the first aberration?' Lauren mocks, pacing a little. 'You are neither the first, nor will be the last. Some of them—the aberrations of old—really were special, like Frankenstein—or they thought they were. But most of them are history now, mere stories we tell the humans to entertain them.
'Step beyond your bounds any more, and you will find that the next step is an abyss, Claire. I have more than enough evidence against you to summon an Imperial inquisition; against you and all of your pack. I can ruin you and Dean and Vanessa once and for all. And Mason will thank me for it.'
I laugh. 'Mason has genuine feelings for me, Lauren, or my false mate bond wouldn't have been in the first place. This is what I have been trying to explain, Lauren. And whatever you think you have against me, it won't be enough.'
'Really?' Lauren questions as the shadows behind her wobble. Wilhelm Wade, the infamous vampire of vanishing, joins her.
Side by side.
***
My heart goes aflutter. Is Wilhelm working with Lauren?—on equal terms or as a captive? Will they attack me together, or is my family in danger? Can I get home faster than Wilhelm can blip between shadows?
That last part seems unlikely.
Drat.
I step forward, splice into four, and fuzz the real me. I get into a fighting crouch. But Lauren just tsks, tapping the bridge of her nose between her eyes. 'Oh, my eyes can tell what's real and what's fake,' she says boredly.
Yeah, right. Time for a little bluff then.
'I can do more than just tricks, Lauren. Do you know why the Whites of old were feared? I can show you. I can not only make you doubt your existence, I can unravel it: no more lycan, no more eyes of Knowing, no more Lauren Lucas.'
That shakes her up a bit, but she says, 'Maybe that's true, but it would take more than just you to accomplish that. You'd need another White to do half of that to a lycan.'
I laugh genuinely, truly genuinely, this time. 'Who says I am the last White?' I ask.
'Do you mean that child with Dr Simone?' Wilhelm asks pleasantly. Belatedly, I recall the telepathic explanation I gave him earlier. Drat. Drat. Drat.
'I will find this Dr Simone,' Lauren promises. 'And I will end her abominations. This, my eyes promise you.'
Dread settles over me like a fog. Lauren's eyes are capable of that. Eventually, she will find Dr Simone; unless Dr Simone has exceptional senses like Olligrander and can see someone coming from a state away, or she can vanish like the vampire of vanishing.
All the same, Lauren's eyes can't stop Wilhelm from being elusive as always.
I face Wilhelm. 'You are not the real Wilhelm, are you? Wilhelm never calls me Alpha, but Alpha Claire.'
I connect to Wilhelm's mind, only to find a long telepathic trail to my mind and Lauren's. Someone is broadcasting Wilhelm to our minds, but they truncate the broadcast before I can trace the link back to them. Wilhelm fades like a fog.
Turning back to Lauren, 'So you are not alone,' I say. 'I promise I will hunt this telepathist, and make sure they get lost in their own mind.'
'Enough threats have been made tonight. Let's make good on them instead,' Lauren says, leaving. 'Watch your back, alpha child.'
'As should you,' I say. 'Farewell.'
But don't fare well.