Chapter 3: **Tensions

I swallow hard, a queasy, unsettled feeling washing over me.

Sean's arm wraps my shoulders protectively. "Sandy?"

"I'm fine."

I'm really not 'fine'. Not even a little 'fine'. Doubtless, my mate can tell.

No one knows what I know, as a creature who has lived in the ocean's depths and ranged inland via the waterways and rivers to the chilly lakes of Candlewood territory. No one knows how little the surface dwellers actually understand about what's down there. How much is hidden or how easily.

I should have killed them when I encountered them years ago. Malevolent little monsters. But at the time, I'd naively believed that they were functionally extinct. That with their dwindled numbers, there was no way they'd survive as a species, let alone be able to repeatedly ravage a shoreline of human and Were habitation. Now, I know better. And now the people of Ciudad d'Arena were paying the price for my ignorance and arrogance.

"The missing. Are they ever recovered?"

"Sure, some. That's what we're working on now," Silas replies. "Rescue teams are searching the rubble for survivors."

I can hear the confusion in his voice as my dread steadily increases. "And those swept out to sea?"

"To my knowledge, we've never recovered someone swept out with the water—not alive at least."

'Not alive at least'.

Sweet Arianrhod.

I shudder at the dreadful and genuine omen of the words and know that I need to get there—to Ciudad d'Arena—to find out what's at Demons Tangle Shoals. "What do you need from Candlewood to help, Silas? We'll bring it when we come."

"Excuse me?" Sean's golden eyes glow with outrage and feral heat. "I don't want you anywhere near that."

"Do you really think that Ian and Darby won't go?" I snap back, challenging his authority over me like I always do. "At the very least, Ian will go. Which means you'll go. And if you're going, Sean, then I am going too, and you know good and damn well that you can't stop me."

"Um," Silas says into the gaping chasm of silence that spreads between us as Sean and I stare each other down across the darkness—his pulsing flare of alpha bloodline to my steady gleam of Fae talisman. "I think I'm good for now. I must admit to dearly wishing I hadn't called Ian's desk and left a message too. How about we chat again in the morning? Hopefully with the daylight, we'll have a better idea what happened. Maybe be a bit less—more rested," he adds diplomatically.

With a rough jerk, I pull myself from Sean's grasp. Dragging the blankets up over my shoulder, I lay down again, huddled tightly against myself. There's no way that I can do this alone. I'm simply not powerful enough.

My mate says his good-byes and issues his assurances of assistance on behalf of us as extended family and for the Candlewood pack. Then he tosses his phone on his bedside table with a clatter and lays down again.

Sean doesn't pull the covers that I'm blatantly hogging. Nor does he cuddle closer. "You want to tell me what that was about?" he says softly into the silent dark.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

I do, of course.

It's the same thing we're always talking—or more like arguing—about. Sean thinks he has some authority over me simply because I share his bed. For all the times that I've soaked him to the bone using my element—icy-cold water—for that arrogant assumption, you'd think he'd learn.

Apparently not.

Imagine my shock.

He inhales deeply and sighs heavily. Remarkably, not with annoyance, but with patience. "Little girl, I'm maybe not as smart as Ian, but I do know you. Something about what's happening in Ciudad d'Arena is familiar to you. In my limited experience with your Fae family, that means big trouble. If you don't want me to fight you every step of the way, then you need to tell me what it is."

"You'll fight me every step of the way even if I do." Maybe fight me harder.

My little family collected here in Candlewood epitomize all that's noble in the world. All that's pure. They fight with honor—together—but solely to keep the natural balance in check. To keep the peace for them and theirs. It's truly admirable, and life-changing for those around them.

It's also strangling sometimes for the kind of solitary creatures that Fae—like me—are. Darby chafes under Ian's sometimes heavy hand. The unified front of the Candlewood triumvirate—Sean, Ian and his younger brother, Jack—vexes my brother Leo to no end. It sends us all—even Darby's half-Fae dog, Tessa—into fits of fury and we regularly abandon the confines of werewolf control for the wild country's freedom.

As talisman-imbued Fae, we're bound to additional standards that are difficult to explain. Ones that don't always agree with Were politics.

The families of this recent Ciudad d'Arena 'incident', as Sean so mildly refers to it, right now will be in shock. But come the cold light of day, when the feelings of sorrow and grief, despair and rage, begin to encroach, they'll want answers. Yet they're helpless to get them, exactly like they always have been.

I'm not.

Which is the difference between me—all my Fae siblings really—and the others, shifter and human alike. I can do something about it.

In fact, I have to do something about it.

It was my choice decades ago that allowed this to happen. I'd been gullible, soft-hearted. Self-doubting. And now, I'm guilty and complicit in the murder and likely kidnapping of the people along the coast of Demons Tangle as much as the creatures who perpetrated those atrocities.

If I'm going to live up to the Candlewood standard, then I have to protect those people—the ones who need protection that I alone can provide. I have to seek natural justice for those I failed to protect. I have to atone for the mistakes in judgment I made in the past. Even as I set my will towards that end, my heart races and my skin has turned clammy, despite the blankets over me.

Sean doesn't roll towards me this time. He doesn't coax or coddle. Instead, he works his enormous hand under my body with unerring accuracy and tender care, wrapping my nipped-in waist with a sure, iron grip. I can feel the powerful flex of his biceps as he drags me against his side, covers and all, and it sets my pulse fluttering in the same way his strength always does.

His head turns, and he nuzzles the crown of my head, inhaling my scent the way Weres are quite wont to do. Especially with their mates. Absolutely anytime the faintest notion to do so hits them. I freeze, going completely still like a prey animal in the grip of a powerful predator, which isn't far from the truth in our pairing.

"Alright," he whispers in a frustratingly reasonable tone. "Then we'll fight each other until you help me understand. After that, you'll bend me to you, like you always do."

I snort. "Says the man who seconds before physically moved me to him."

"Only on the outside, little girl. I'm not so foolish as to think that a fiery-tempered, obstinate Fae with a will like yours can be brought around so easily." Sean's massive, warm body curls around mine and he inhales deeply of my hair again. "Go back to sleep. This is all going to get real all too soon."