Free Wounded: Book 8 (A Rylee Adamson Novel) by Shannon Mayer Page A

then pointed to himself with his eyes round and innocent looking. John scrubbed his fingers under his hat before answering.
    “Not sure. But I always believed there was more than we knew out there.” He gave me a smile and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Always knew you were one of the good ones, though.”
    He led me into the back room of the office. “Use the phone. You’re always welcome here, Ry. You and your … dog.” He smiled and shut the door behind him, giving us privacy. Alex grinned up at me.
    “I likes John.”
    “Yeah, I do too.” I dialed Jack’s place and listened as the phone rang and rang. Fucking hell, this was not going the way I’d hoped at all. As I moved to hang up, a soft ‘hello’ came through. I jerked the phone back up to my ear. “Hey, who is this?”
    “Rylee? It’s Frank. I think there is some serious fighting going on. I think Thomas might be dead.”
    I pinched the bridge of my nose. That was not good news. “Where’s Faris? Is he around?”
    “I don’t know. He left.”
    Shit on sticky toast, this was going downhill fast. “Frank, I need to know if you can open a slash in the veil, are you able to do that yet?”
    “I can, but I’m not supposed to.”
    “If Thomas is dead, then you may not have a choice. And if he’s dead and one of the vampires killed him—”
    “No, Faris tried to save him.”
    Well, that was a fucking shock. “Who killed him?”
    “Berget. It was like her eyes went wonky and then she attacked Thomas, strangled him and … it was bad. She seems to be herself again, but she’s pretty upset.”
    I was betting that was a mild understatement on all counts. “Anyone else right there I can talk to?”
    Turned out that Frank was the only one not in the middle of the fight that was still ongoing. My heart sank with each word he said, knowing that Berget’s control over her adoptive parents, the old emperor and empress, was slipping. Far sooner than we’d hoped for. If she was going to die, though, I couldn’t let it be by someone else’s hand. I was responsible for her—she was my sister—and I would be the one to make sure she didn’t hurt anyone else.
    “Frank, first of all, are Liam and Blaz there yet?”
    “No, they aren’t.”
    My heart thud hard in my chest. I had to believe Blaz would look after Liam. The big ass lizard knew I’d remove his hide piece by piece if anything happened to my wolf.
    “Okay, I’m going to ask you to do something very hard.” I closed my eyes and pressed my head to the desk as tears slipped from my eyes.
    “What do you need from me?”
    “At sunset my time, which is”—I did the math in my head—“eleven your time, I want you to get close to Berget, and open the veil to the farm, right in front of the barn. Can you do that?”
    He didn’t even hesitate. “I can do that.”
    We hung up and I let out a breath I’d held too long. Alex butted up against me, putting his cold nose right into my face, though I kept it on the desk. “Rylee, why are you sad?”
    I wrapped my arms around him, hugging him to me, hiding my eyes from the world.
    “Because I have to kill my sister.”
     
     
     

Chapter 6
    THE FLIGHT TO the farm would take less than an hour, but I wanted extra time to prep. Pamela would grab Berget with her magic and hold her down while I took her head. There would be no other way and we’d have to do it fast. If the opal was failing already, we had very little hope of extending Berget’s sanity long enough to actually help her.
    Of course, as my plans normally did, this one tracked sideways. I stepped out of the hotel room, Erik and Pamela ahead of me, Alex a step behind.
    Erik stopped short and I bumped into him. He reached over and tugged Pamela back. “Rylee, do you feel that?”
    For fucks sake, what now? “What should I be feeling?”
    Alex bumped into my hand. “A disturbance in the force.” That was the second time Alex had quoted Star Wars . But he was right; there was a