The Night of Shadows: Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE - Kiernan

+++ PRESENT DAY +++

“Do you think I could maybe talk you into making breakfast in just the apron one of these mornings?” I mused while sipping my coffee at the island counter. I leaned on the counter and let my back arch down, my weight shifting to one leg. Bran shot me a look over his shoulder from the stove where he was making omelets for everyone.

“Only someone who never cooks would suggest that of someone standing at a stove working with grease,” he rolled his eyes and shook his head at me as he went back to prepping the food. I wasn’t sure if I should thank Ivar, Isidora, the Moon Goddess, or to get really blasphemous and thank The Morrigan herself for bringing Bran into my life, and not just for that ass he could crack walnuts with (that was an amazing perk, though).

“The apron would cover the important bits from grease, babe. I mean, as long as you didn’t turn around.”

“Good to know you don’t think my impressive arms and shoulders are ‘important’ bits,” he retorted as he tossed a cherry tomato to me. I caught it before it landed in my coffee mug and popped it into my mouth, that sweet tartness bursting out as my teeth broke the skin.

I licked my lips. “You know damn well I enjoy your impressive arms and shoulders just as much as your face, your chest, your thighs,” I walked around the counter and up behind him, running a finger along the waist of his jeans, “ along with other things about you.” I grabbed him through his jeans and ground my developing hard on into his ass.

“Christ,” Bran hissed under his breath. “How are you hard again already?”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked as I playfully bit the back of his neck. “I’m pretty sure my job is to make you perpetually barefoot and pregnant.”

“I swear to god,” he laughed, “you werewolves are absolutely incorrigible.” Bran turned around and pulled my head back by my hair so he could lick up my neck. “I clearly didn’t work you hard enough earlier. Also, I’m not the one bottoming most of the time.”

He smelled so good. Like fresh jasmine in the rain.

“You know I need to be taught a lesson at least two, three times to really get,” I slapped his ass, “it.”

He brought his mouth down to mine, just close enough to tease it with his tongue. I pulled our bodies closer so I could smother his mouth with mine, our tongues entangled languidly as he moved his hand from the back of my head down to around my throat. I rubbed myself up against his thigh because I honestly had no shame when it came to this man. I would gladly be the barefoot and pregnant one if I could be.

He pushed me back into the counter, hard, and caused a moan to creep out of my throat into his mouth. His hands moved down to grab my hips and roughly pull them into his so we could grind against each other, the friction both delicious and painful. Our breathing quickened, as did our need for each other. Hands started pulling and pushing, our mouths hungrily working at the other’s.

And, then, someone behind us cleared their throat.

“Hostia puta,” Nox sighed out, exhaustedly, “are the two of you in a constant rut or something? What is your deal?” The sat down at the island counter and poured themselves a glass of juice. “You know we all eat in here, right? Food is stored, prepped, and served in this room?”

“Good morning, Nox,” Bran smirked, and turned back to finish his cooking. “Do you need to eat or have you already?” I walked back around the counter and sat next to them. Despite their usual snarky tone, they seemed a little off, a little nervous about something.

“I would love something to eat, please,” they swiftly answered. They were actively avoiding eye contact with me, which made me feel a little feisty, maybe a little bitchy, if I’m honest. But I kept my mouth shut to see if they would divulge what was bothering them before I tried to pulled it out of them. I passively watched them talk to Bran as they picked through the omelet.

After what felt like an eternity, I finally lost patience and blurted out, “What’s wrong? Something’s wrong. You’re acting weird and not your normal weird.” Nox kind of slumped down in the chair they were sitting in and furrowed their brow.

“How were you ever a manager for artists and writers, Kier?” Bran laughed. He pushed a plate filled with omelet, sausages, and fruits in front of me. “You have zero people skills sometimes.” He picked up one of the sausages off the plate he had just given me and took a bite of it.

I rolled my eyes and sighed dramatically. “I tried to wait, but they took too long, and there’s clearly something wrong, and I hate waiting!” I threw my hands up and turned back to Nox. “So…?” I waved my hands about. “What’s going on?”

Nox took a deep breath in, looked at me and then at Bran, and then made a face like she had to accept her fate.

“We need you in the studio. Dora’s doing the time-slip thing again and neither Kann or I can get close enough to her to snap her out of it. Dutch and Dillion wouldn’t let us touch her,” they finally admitted, slumped forward defeatedly.

Why they felt like they couldn’t tell me about this was beyond me. All four of us were committed to taking care of Dora, even if she didn’t realize the extent. We should be working as a team and we shouldn’t feel ashamed if we needed help. Especially when it came to Dora.

I got up and headed out the door to the studio without a word. I could still hear Nox telling Bran that this was happening more often and we needed to do something about it before I tuned out their conversation.

It didn’t take me long to get to the studio to see what had Nox so anxious. I immediately stopped in my tracks after I flung the door to the studio open. I told Bran over our mind-link that I needed his help before I walked up next to Kannon and put a hand on her shoulder. She jumped a little at the contact, but breathed out a sigh and let her shoulders relax when she turned to see that it was just me.

Her eyes had switched to a yellow-green, with the pupils flipping from round to vertical as she was fighting not to shift into her nogitsune. I nod my head towards the door to indicate that she should leave before I try to get Isidora back in her body. She nodded once and walked out of the studio just as Bran was walking in.

“Shit,” he whistled out when he got to my side.

“Yeah,” was all I had in return.

Dora was on a stool working on sculpting a giant wolf figure in an attack stance. More accurately, her body was there doing the work like it was a machine running in sixth gear. The sculpture itself was a life-sized rendition of Ivar in his shifted form, and it almost completely finished. I knew for a fact this wasn’t something she had been working on for months, and it should have been something that would have taken her months to get done on her own, even before the car wreck.

I slowly walked around to the side of the table so I could get a look at Dora’s face. She wasn’t in there running her body. Her eyes were milky white and her face, which was also deathly white, had no expression on it. Her body was empty of anything we would recognize as or call a soul. No one was behind the wheel, it was on auto-pilot, and it had been that way for a number of hours from the looks of the work it had finished.

This explained why the dogs were gathered around her and not letting anyone near her. They were making sure she had something to come back to. Unfortunately, she didn’t know she was gone and needed someone to snap her out of it.

“I’m gonna need you to do your thing with the dogs, babe,” I whispered to Bran as I walked back over to his side. “They listen to you better than me.”

He nodded and started to walk towards them. “Okay, but I think we need to game plan sooner rather than later, yeah? And by that, I mean today.”

“Yeah,” I agreed grimly. I had been in Bran’s shoes almost two decades ago, telling Ivar the same thing, and having him talk me into not doing what I thought we should have then. I cursed my dead alpha for the umpteenth time for leaving me with this mess/

I waited while Bran negotiated with the dogs, knowing that Little Bit was going to be the tough one to turn (it’s always the terriers), and decided to look through the mail on the table I was standing next to. I needed a distraction from how it kinda bothered me that the dogs would listen to him, a disciple of the Phantom Queen, over me, a fucking werewolf. I knew it would be better to be a bitch about that at a more appropriate time. Like later tonight. Possibly when some leather could be involved…

That’s when I noticed a large black document envelope with silver text, that included the name “Mr. Dezsö Novak”, on it. Shit. There goes my plans for tonight, I thought to myself as my chest tightened. That was a name I hadn’t thought about in almost fifteen years. As Bran walked by me, Little Bit in his arms and the rest of the dogs following him, I touched his shoulder lightly and stopped him.

“We’re definitely going to have to game plan later today, Love.” Bran just looked in my eyes and knew things were more serious than Dora’s powers leaking out without her knowledge one too many times. I didn’t know if it was because he was just that intuitive or if it was his connection to his patron goddess that gave him that edge on knowing things.

Something flashed quickly across his eyes that gave them the illusion of sapphires in sunlight. He shifted Little Bit into the crook of his left arm, and used his right hand to cradle my face. He used his thumb to rub under my eye gently, almost like he could tell it was going to start to twitch, and then pulled me into a quick, gentle kiss.

“They said she’s just sad,” he barely whispered, resting his forehead against mine. “She heard us this morning,” I tried to pull away from him, irritated with myself for being such a greedy shit. Bran’s grip on the back of my neck tightened so I couldn’t turn away from him. “Hey, no. No. You don’t get to do that.”

I opened my mouth to interrupt him, but he didn’t give me the opportunity to get any words out. “Nope. She doesn’t even have all the information she should have, and she still wouldn’t let you get away with blaming yourself for living your life around her. You know that. Hell, I know that. Now, look at me.”

I kept my face scrunched up in frustration, eyes closed tight, for a few seconds more, and then finally gave up and looked at him. He was right. Of course he was. He was always right.

“Yes, I am,” he smirked at me. I made an irritated face. I really hated that mind reading shit sometimes. He continued, “Now, go bring her back so we can start doing what yous all should have done the instant you found her.”

I couldn’t argue with that, even if I wanted to.

I watched him walked away, wondering what it was about me that the Moon Goddess thought deserved someone like him. I don’t think that I will ever feel like I actually deserve him. He may deserve me as some kine of test from his Phantom Queen, if what they say about her is true. He suddenly stopped and turned back to look at me.

“Focus,” he said sternly, with a twinkle in his eyes for a flash, and then promptly turned on his heels and continued out the building.

After Bran and the dogs left the building, I walked over to sit next to Dora’s body. Her body was moving with a speed and fluidity that was inhuman. And then there were her eyes. Closer up, I could tell they were completely white with a dull glow behind them. Even without pupils, I could tell she was not looking at what she was working on. I set the envelop I was still holding down on a stool that was adjacent to where we were sitting so it was out of the way but within reach.

“Well, Isidora,” I started with a sigh and rolled my sleeves up to my elbows, “looks like we can’t push this off any longer. Fuck, I hope you don’t hate me after we come clean.”

With a practiced hand, I wrote the word RETURN across her forehead in the same script the prophecy about her was written in eons ago. Her hands immediately fell to her lap and her head dropped to the side like a drunk ready to pass out. So far, so good.

Then something happened that hadn’t happened before. Her head slowly turned toward me, her eyes were a blazing gold surrounded by a midnight blue. The colours swirled in and around each other like the storms of Jupiter. The way she locked on to me made Séamus, my wolf, howl in pain loud enough that I physically reacted. I had to grab on to the table to keep myself from doubling over.

When she spoke, it was even worse.

“She is running out of time, pup,” the sound said. Because it wasn’t a voice. No, it was like a thousand voices being ground in metal all at once coming out of her mouth. In all my 268 years, I had seen and been through some shit. None of it made my heart stop the way this did. Séamus was losing his shit as I was slowly losing consciousness.

Whatever was in Isidora must have realized I was dying because it reached out her hand, placed it over my heart, and stated, “You cannot hide her any longer. The prophecy must be activated. You need to save her.”

It was like I was back in the training yard of Sanguine Moon and I had just gotten punched in the chest by Digby. My hand slid off the table as I doubled over, and sucked in a hard breath before I went right into coughing. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up. Isidora was looking back at me with concern.

“Are you okay, Kiernan?”

“Yeah,” I coughed out, still trying to catch my breath as she rubbed my back. “Just choked on my own spit. Give me a minute?” I continued to cough as she nodded her head while pulling away from me. That’s when she looked back over her shoulder and saw what her body had been working on while, essentially, her soul had been on a trip.

“Holy shit,” she whispered.

“Yeah, bitch. You’ve been hiding this work on me or what? I thought you had gotten boring in your old age and were just doing bowls and plates only now,” I said, a little rushed out. I hoped she just thought it was me still recovering from “choking” and not me trying to recover from whatever the fuck it was that just happened and redirect her attention away from me..

“I, uh, I wasn’t hiding it,” she stood up and stretched her back out. She had probably been sitting there for hours, just looping whatever moment in time she got herself stuck in. I looked at her, trying to gage if I wanted to bring shit up now or wait, when she turned to me with wide eyes. “I did all this this morning?”

“I think so?” A question for a question as I shrugged. There was a pang of guilt there as I realized I didn’t really know what they were up to back here anymore.

I really was proving to be an unadulterated shit of a friend today, I thought to myself as I looked down and shook my head.

That’s when I saw the envelope and picked it back up. I began to open it when Isidora started talking to me again.

“I think I want to try doing personal work again, Kiernan.” I looked up from the letter that was in the envelope to her. She was looking at the smaller bust of a snarling wolf on a lazy Suzanne stand, spinning it around like she was studying someone else’s work.

“Okay, what kind of work were you thinking?” I asked slowly, not sure where this was going. She had tried to jump right back into writing after the car wreck, and that was the most spectacularly wrong move if ever there was one. It was also how we found out how bad her traumatic brain injury actually was.

Unfortunately, it turned out, my quick witted and sharp tongued friend now had a difficult time stringing together a sentence to ask for a bowl of cereal if the circumstances weren’t just right. The circumstances were rarely ever just right.

After that, we discovered that she might not be able to write long form ever again,  but she could still make art. Sort of. It just took her about five times longer than it used to from all the damage her hands, arms, legs, and feet took in the wreck. It was frustrating for her, but keeping the designs relatively simple, and having help in the studio, kept her making things. It kept her getting up in the morning.

I was anticipating this incident giving her a false sense that she could suddenly do things like she used to. And maybe she could, once we told her the truth about herself and her powers? I didn’t know. Everything was gonna hit all at once, apparently and that didn’t seem like a great situation to me.

She turned to look at me again. “This,” she pointed back at the full-sized wolf, “this is what’s in my dreams every night.” That shocked me. She had never said anything about whatever was stalking her in her dreams being a gigantic wolf that looked exactly like Ivar.

“Maybe if I started making my own art again,” she continued, “these dreams would stop. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like I’m just wasting my time here.” She sat back down like she was ashamed to admit that out loud.

“I think that might be a good idea, Dora,” I answered back quietly. I looked back down at the letter in my hand and clear my throat. “But first, I think we might want to look into this request you got in the mail the other day.”

“A request? It’s not another restaurant, is it?” She put her head in her hands. “I just told you I was burnt out on dinnerware, you ass butt! Were you even listening?”

“Oh my god, bitch! Yes, I was listening! Read the letter!” I playfully tossed the letter over to her while laughing. The letter was from the “offices of Mr. Dezsö Novak”, stating that they had recently purchased a space that they were setting up a high end lounge/night club in. They specifically wanted her to do a number of installations (water, foliage, and light) pieces for it. No dinnerware mentioned.

This was very suspicious to me for one major reason.

“Oh!” She looked back up at me, perplexed.

“Yeah,” I smiled at her and playfully slapped her knee. “Before you decide, though, let me look into him. That name sounds familiar and I want to know what we’re walking into, if you want to use this as a trial run.” A nice ruse that would give me some time to figure out what was going on and how he found her after all these years. I didn’t appreciate having this part of my life popping up to surprise me like a pimple on my ass.

“Okay,” she nodded in agreement. I could tell that she was tired from her little excursion. There was no way she would normally be this agreeable. “That sounds like a good idea. If you look into this Novak guy, and you think it wouldn’t hurt to meet with him, I’m curious. I would like to know why he would request this kind of commission from me. Especially now. See what kinda guy he is. You know, the usual type of thing?”

I took the letter and the envelope back and stood up.

“Alright,” I spun on the balls of my feet to head towards the door, “I’ll get started, darling. You get the last of those bowls finished for Rush Limited so those beige nightmares can stop sucking the life out of all of us.” That got a laugh out of her and I felt the tiniest bit of tension lift.

“Right? We can never do something like this again. Ev. Er.” Her head fell back in exasperation. “Where are Kann and Nox?”

I spun back around, walking backwards towards the door, “Bran is feeding them. I told them I wanted to talk to you about business stuff and that he had made enough omelets to feed an army. Do you want me to send them back out here to help finish this order?”

“Yes, please,” she replied. Then, after a slight pause, she said, “Thank you, Kiernan,” a small smile on her face.

“Always, Isidora.”

I got back into the kitchen to find Bran feeding Nox and Kannon. More so still feeding Nox. I didn’t understand how they could eat as much as they did and still be as tiny as they were. It had to be that weird brujería metabolism. They were constantly eating like they were starving. The whole group of them were talking about something that they immediately stopped talking about when they heard me walk in.

“Oh, that’s not making it obvious or anything,” I said dryly, rolling my eyes as I walked up next to Bran at the island counter. Bran pulled me in closer to him, so that our hips collided. He kissed me on the top of my head while placing my coffee mug, now refilled, in front of me.

“So,” Bran starts, not wasting any time, “Game Plan Day?” I take a sip of my coffee before we start because I’m gonna need all the caffeine I can get before we start in on this. Once I put my mug down, I look at each of them.

“Yeah. Game Plan Day.”

Game Plan Day was the day Bran and I had started calling the day we knew would eventually come up where we would have to figure out how we would handle telling Isidora everything Ivar and, by extension, I had been hiding from her about her heritage. We had come up with it after I had been having one of the many nervous breakdowns I would have following Ivar’s death over wanting to come clean about everything to Isidora or following Ivar’s wishes to keep her safe by keeping her hidden (even from herself).

Bran showed up in our lives just in time to keep me from letting Séamus take over and running off into the Rocky Mountains and never coming back out. He was surprised by us just as much as I and my wolf were surprised by him. At first, I was highly suspicious of him and was convinced that he was sent intentionally by his Phantom Queen to collect Isidora for her. I thought I was going to have to fight him for her.

Thank the Goddess he wasn’t and I was just gonna end up fucking him (a LOT) instead.

However, having a disciple of The Morrigan show up to help me figure out what to do with the crux of a prophecy older than most elders I had ever encountered was extremely fortuitous. Him being my fated mate was an even better, and bigger, surprise.

We had agreed that the main focus, at first, would be to get Isidora back to as healthy as she could be. We (Bran and I) were under no illusions that she would ever get back to how she was before the car wreck, physically, mentally, or emotionally. Isidora, on the other hand, had to get to that realization the hard way. It wouldn’t be any help telling her she was something called the “Purity of Fear” in a prophecy called “The Night of Shadows” while she was struggling to relearn how to walk and talk and eat and a million other little things that people of a certain age take for granted every day.

So. We waited. And we planned.

We started making contacts within our own groups first. We had to keep who knew what we were doing small, move in the shadows. Just like doing a crime, the more who knew about what we were doing, what we were hiding, the bigger the chance things got out of our control. Once we made the contacts we could in our own pack and coven, we moved out to other immortal cohorts, factions, clans, legions, hordes, swarms, etc. It’s how we found Kannon and Nox.

Kannon was a happy accident. A half kitsune that was already old friends with Dora, so it was easy to bring her in. Nox was a surprise sent to us by her bruja abeula. She sent them with a note that told us Nox was a “young” nagual and they had an integral part to play in the prophecy. Nox had no idea what their abeula meant by that, but they were more than willing to help out any way they could.

From there, it became trying to decipher the prophecy. Embarrassing, I know, that I never really asked Ivar for details on what the prophecy actually was about. To be fair to me, though, I didn’t expect him to ever be killed by a single Woodsman. Ivar had been centuries old. He’d led armies in hundreds of wars throughout all those centuries. I felt better about not knowing much about it when I discovered that Bran couldn’t get straight answers directly from his patron about it either (it was the only time I’d seen him get frustrated and angry - it was hot).

Things started to make more sense once we expanded our little team, unsurprisingly. Unfortunately, that’s also when Dora started to have these time-slips and we really needed to start thinking about how we were going to tell her about what was going on. Kannon and Nox wanted to tell her immediately, just rip the bandaid off, so to speak. I wanted to wait, out of fear of what it would do to Dora to tell her. Not just about the Veil, not that she wasn’t just mixed race (which was something that we had talked about multiple times had been a source of isolation in her childhood), but that she was not fully human.

And, if that wasn’t enough of a mindfuck, how about the absolute trust breaker that  the love of your life was the king of all werewolves and lycans and knew what you were the entire time, and kept it from you on purpose.

Oh, and your supposed best friend also knew all this the whole time, too.

I felt like such a gigantic asshole.

“Before we tell Dora her entire life has been a lie, we need to figure out what the shit is going on with this.”

I slapped the letter down on the counter top so all four of us could look at it. Bran took one look at the name on the return address at the top, and let out an exasperated sigh as he collapsed down on to the counter. Kannon picked up the letter so she and Nox could read it over.

“What’s the big deal?” Nox asked, looking back up at Bran and me in confusion. “Why would a business commission request be an issue? Is this Mr. Novak guy someone we should know about?”

“That name feels familiar, but I can’t place why…” Kannon mumbled while scanning the text.

“Yeah, so,” I started, trying not to give away how nervous about everything I actually was, “Dezsö Novak is Ivar’s brother.” Nox choked a little on the juice they were in the middle of drinking and immediately started coughing.

“Oh, yeah! He’s the Alpha of Black Bear Moon out in Washington,” Kannon said as she passed a paper towel to Nox. “Is this letter in some kind of code? It’s written like Dora isn’t his brother’s widow.”

“That’s because he doesn’t. Or, he’s not supposed to,” Bran cut in, giving me a side glance. “He’s not supposed to have known about Isidora at all.” He took my coffee from me and downed the rest of it in one gulp.

“This could potentially be a huge issue,” he said when he finished.

“I agree.” I looked back at Kannon and Nox, who both looked very confused. Actually, Kannon looked at me confused. Nox just glanced up from their phone quickly, brows knit together hard.

I explained, “Ivar didn’t tell many about The Night of Shadows, especially in more modern times. Not because he didn’t trust Dezsö or anything like that, necessarily.” I rubbed the back of my head in frustration. “I just think he wanted to play things close to his chest as the time of the prophecy got closer? Kinda like us?”

Prophecies made the simplest things in life ten times more convoluted and complicated than they needed to be.

“Ooooooh, shiiiit,” Nox exhaled and slapped the counter as they whipped their eyes up from their phone screen. Then they just looked at us like they expected us to have also come to the same mysterious conclusion she had.

Kannon looked around at all of us and finally asked, “What?”

“Ivar and Dezsö weren’t blood brothers, were they?” I shook my head, still not sure where this was going. “Oh my god. You all are so dense,” they rolled their eyes in frustration. “I’m gonna also guess that he’s not a natural blond like Ivar was…?” They turned their phone screen toward us so we could see that they had been searching for pictures of Dezsö on the internet.

Nox looked at us for a minute like that would also clue us in. I looked over at Bran because if anyone should have figured it out by now, I would have expected it to be him. Of course, he had that little smile on his face that said he knew what Nox was talking about but was enjoying watching Kannon and me struggle. I looked back at Nox, with an irritated look.

“We don’t have time for this. I’m clearly a dumb bitch! Just spit it out!”

“Dezsö is ‘The Dark Brother Who Isn’t’.” Nox sat up straighter, clearly very proud of themselves for figuring that out. “When the Shadow extinguishes the Light, the Dark Brother who isn’t will determine which crown the Purity of Fear will wear: a veil of stars or a halo of arrows. It makes perfect sense why Ivar wouldn’t tell him,” they put their phone down and went back to stuffing omelet in their mouth.

“How would you feel if you knew for hundreds of years that you only had a limited amount of time with your fated mate, who was also your ‘brother’s’ fated mate, and it was your ‘brother’ that was going to get to spend their entire lifetime with her.”

They paused, fork halfway to their mouth. “Well, if he’s successful in not turning her Dark Side and all.”

“Goddess,” I blew out the breath I didn’t know I was holding, “I really am a dumb bitch.”

“Kiernan,” Kann started in that soft manner of hers, “you have to stop being to hard on yourself about this. How could you have known any of this when Ivar kept you in the dark?”

“We’ve been working on this long enough, I’ve been working on this long enough,” I brought my fists down on the counter in frustration.

“I should have pieced something together by now,” I mumbled out as I looked out the sliding glass doors toward the studio. I had spent almost twenty years with Dora in my life, and I felt as uninformed about how to protect her, or what I was protecting her from, as I did on Day One. I felt humiliated and frustrated.

“Bro,” Nox bluntly said, “for reals?” They stood up on the rungs of the stool to lean over the counter and put their dishes in the sink. All I could do was look at them, my jaw clenching and my nostrils flaring I could hear Seámus chuff in the back of my head.

“No, no,” they continued, sitting back down, arms crossed over their chest, “you definitely have the right to feel your feelings, that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what are you saying?” I asked flatly.

“You’re one dude, my guy. And you had your Alpha, THE Alpha of Alphas, keeping information from you for years!” They hopped off the stool and wiped their hands on the backside of their pants. “No wonder you and Dora clicked so easy. You two are practically the same person. ¡Joder, tío! I don’t know if you’re just drama queens or you both just have way too high of expectations of yourselves.”

Kann laughed. “It’s both,” she stood up off her stool to join Nox.

I stood there with my mouth hanging open a little and just nodded as Kann patted me on the shoulder as the two of them headed off.