Six.
My gaze flew over to Austin and found him staring back at me just as intently but with that infuriatingly unreadable expression. Was he one of my dianoch? He must be. When I’d been shot, barely a handful of hours earlier, he’d been able to help me heal with just a kiss. Okay, a pretty amazing kiss, if I was being honest with myself, but... Austin? He hated me. Oh God, now he’s going to hate me even more.
“I think that’s a situation that can work itself out in time,” he said softly to his twin, but his gaze remained locked on mine.
“So, back to Seattle then?” Wesley clarified, pushing his glasses up his nose and accepting the phone Caleb was holding out to him. “I will arrange us a seaplane back to Anchorage, seeing as the mountain road is, er, blocked. Then we can split up from there. Sound good?”
“Perfect; let us know when it’s all booked and what our E.T.D. will be, Wes.” River nodded. “Let’s clean up Victor’s house a bit before we go.”
“God forbid we never be allowed back here,” Vali snorted in his dark, smoky voice, and I wasn’t sure whether to be amused or turned on. Damn men were messing with my common sense.
River had a good point though; we should definitely change the sheets in the spare room.
3
The trip back to Seattle was over in a flash. Except for the changeover in Anchorage, when Vali left for Las Vegas and Austin for San Francisco, the whole journey had passed in a blur. Most of the time I had kept to myself, tucked up in a chair at the back of the jet while I turned this new information over and over in my head. It was a lot. Like, really a lot to have just suddenly learned about myself. Nothing I thought I knew about myself was true. Not my name, not my age, hell not even my damn species.
Why hadn’t we stayed and questioned Vic further? At the time it had all seemed really logical; there was nothing else to ask. But the second we were airborne, my mind started clamouring with unasked questions like they’d been sitting there waiting for a door to be opened.
“Sweetheart,” Wesley murmured, running a gentle hand down my arm. “We’re here.”
I jerked my head up and saw the guys standing in the aisle, waiting for me. “Sorry, I was...”
“Thinking. Yeah, we know.” Wesley smiled at me gently and held out his hand. “Come on; we’re better off facing Director Pierre sooner rather than later.”
Taking Wesley’s hand, I followed the boys from the jet and down onto the tarmac where a black SUV sat waiting.
“Can’t believe I’m only just now asking this, but where do you guys all live? Do you have a place here in Seattle?” I buckled my seatbelt as I took the window seat in the very back. Without Austin or Vali with us, there was a bit more room to move, and I didn’t end up squashed into the middle seat again.
“No, we move around for work so much that we don’t really have a home base, as such. We each have homes in different cities, but those are mostly just for holidays and visiting family,” Caleb answered, taking the other window seat in the back with me. “Aus and I have an apartment in San Fran that he’ll be staying at while he’s there, but we’ve probably only been there, maybe, twice in the last year? Had to give away all our potted plants.”
“You had potted plants?” I asked, surprised, and he snickered.
“No. Can you imagine me and Aus keeping damn plants alive?” He grinned, and I couldn’t help following the curve of his lips with my eyes.
“Aus managed to keep that damn cat alive,” Cole commented from the row ahead of us, and I raised my eyebrows at Caleb.
“Austin has a cat?” I was a bit shocked. He didn’t exactly seem the type to snuggle on the couch with a purring ball of fluff.
“This is no ordinary cat. You’ll see when you meet him. Aus gave him to our neighbour, Mrs. Flores, when we got accepted into Omega Academy, and she has been keeping him healthy,” Caleb informed me with a mysterious sort of look. What the hell did that mean, anyway? No ordinary cat.
“What about the rest of you?” I asked, curious to learn more about these men who were suddenly looking like seriously permanent fixtures in my life. Could I call it a life? What I had? Ugh, philosophy hurt my brain.
“I’ve got a place in Switzerland that my mom and brother live in.” Wesley nodded. “There is an experimental spinal surgeon living there that my bro wanted to try out, so I got them a place to live nearby, seeing as it’s a pretty long process.”
“That’s why you weren’t super-concerned about Dupree coming after them?” I clicked. Back when Dupree—the mad scientist hell-bent on restoring magic to supernaturals through any means possible—had kidnapped and beaten Lucy within an inch of her life, threats had been made against the guys and their families. At the time, Wesley was the only one that I’d known had direct family who could have been at risk. The fact that they were half a world away made his lack of concern make a whole lot more sense.
“Yeah. Also, their place is not far from the Omega office in Zurich, so we have some pretty top notch surveillance in place for them.” He shrugged, like it was no big thing, but the fact that he’d gone to such lengths for his mom and brother was incredibly sweet.
“How about you, River?” I asked, and he looked back at me from the passenger seat where he sat beside our driver, who the guys had recognized and greeted as Frank.
“Family estate in England.” He grimaced. “Haven’t been back there for years though.”
He didn’t seem to want to elaborate, so I didn’t push him any further and instead prodded Cole in the shoulder.
“And you, big guy? Where’s your house?” I deliberately said house and not home, seeing as these guys clearly didn’t think of the property they owned as home.
“Montana,” he replied, turning in his seat to look at me with a half smile pulling at his lips. “I have a little piece of land out in the middle of nowhere there.”
Caleb snorted. “A little piece of land? Cole has six hundred acres. It’s a fully functioning horse ranch.”
“What?” I exclaimed, looking back at the lethal weapon of a man wrapped in a leather jacket, with colorful tattoos peeking out at the neckline. Somehow, I was finding it hard to picture him in cowboy boots and a hat. But hell, it’d be hot as fuck.
“I like horses,” he muttered, a little sheepishly.
“Cole set up one of the most well-respected horse ranches in the whole damn country,” Wesley explained. “He has people from all over the world clamoring for his horses.”