Either that or she’d already been swept away by someone else.
Tanner charged at Quentin again, and the two of them crashed together, claws and teeth snapping. Quentin rolled away, into the remaining small crowd of confused shifters. Shifters scattered like bowling pins after being struck by the ball. Tanner leaped to his feet, shifted back into human form, and rushed into the house.
When he burst through the back door, there was no lightbearer to be found. “Son of a—”
“Tanner, over here!”
He whirled around and only just leaped out of the way of the SUV bearing down on him. The vehicle came to a screeching halt. Freddy was at the wheel, and Lisa was in the passenger seat.
“Get in.”
“I can’t. I have to—”
“She’s in the back.”
Tanner glanced into the SUV. Olivia slumped in the backseat, next to little Sofia, who stared at her in fascination, clearly unaffected by the stress of the moment.
“What did you do to her?” Tanner demanded, instantly bristling.
Freddy shook his head. “Nothing. She stumbled out onto the back porch and collapsed there. I figured you had some kind of plan, so I grabbed her and stuffed her into the car.”
“How come you’re able to see?” he asked Freddy.
Lisa answered. “We were already sneaking away, around the back of the house, when that light-bomb or whatever it was went off.” She glanced at her mate. “Freddy said you made him nervous when we talked to you, and he was worried something like this would happen.”
“I need to go get my mother,” Tanner said.
Freddy reached out the window and grabbed Tanner’s arm. “You can’t. If you go in there, you won’t come back out again.”
Tanner turned toward the house and lifted his eyes to the third level. His mother’s bedroom suite. She was up there, lying in bed, probably nervously wondering what was happening below. She’d done so much for him, and now she was dying, and Freddy was right. He couldn’t go back inside.
A lone figure came jogging around the side of the house and skidded to a halt when he saw Tanner, standing next to the SUV. Finnegan Hennigan. His shaggy hair was lighter than the majority of shifters and had a touch of copper in it. His face was scruffy, and his pale blue eyes were far too observant for Tanner’s taste.
Tanner heard Freddy swear softly, and he knew it was because Finn was one of Quentin’s guard dogs, one of the best trackers in the pack. Tanner had always liked Finn, had always been a little jealous of Finn because he and his siblings and parents were a tightly knit—and happy—family.
Now, he wondered if he’d have to kill Finn.
Finn stared at him for several heartbeats, and then he suddenly turned away and disappeared around the corner. Tanner distinctly heard him call out to his fellow pack mates, suggesting that Tanner and the lightbearer had run toward the woods—in the opposite direction of where he stood next to the SUV. Not everyone, it turned out, was loyal to Tanner’s father.
“Get in,” Freddy commanded, and after one last longing look at the manor house, Tanner did as he said, sliding into the backseat next to the lightbearer. Freddy pressed the gas pedal and the SUV lurched forward.
The lightbearer’s eyes fluttered open. She turned and struggled to focus on Tanner. “Cici,” she whispered.
“Duck down,” Lisa commanded from the front seat. Tanner grabbed Olivia and pulled her down onto the floorboard of the backseat.
“Cici,” she whispered again. “I need Cici.”
“What’s cici?” Tanner asked.
She appeared to be struggling to stay awake. “Cousin,” she finally managed. “Left her…in Vegas.” She slumped against him, unconscious.
Chapter 3
I’m alive.
Olivia assumed as much because she felt reasonably certain that the Summerlands would not appear to her as a little girl’s bedroom with purple walls with pink and purple hearts drawn all over them. She didn’t even like the color purple. Surely the