Val Westover Burns Novels & Stories

Theo turned to wave, clutching a cookie in each hand. And I stood frozen behind the counter. Heart thudding. Head spinning. Because if what Vivienne said was true… Then Damien lied. To Theo. To me. To all of us. And everything I’d built in these past five months? Everything I thought I knew? Might have been made of smoke.

“There’s a good place in California?” “Yeah. Sam’s buddy from med school works out there, said that he’d find a bed for you. It’s probably one of the best burn victim centers in the country and it ain’t free, but don’t worry about payin’ for anythin’. The club would cover. I mean, if you want to go out there, but I don’t see why you would. We’re all here. Zoe’s here. Denver has good burn clinics, your brother told me. Right?” “Damn,” Scars said quietly, not answering the question. “I didn’t realize, I don’t think. This is way worse than the first time.”

A sea of fire. It swallowed the full length of the horizon, a roaring wall of orange and violent deep red that had consumed everything below the ridge line. Villages. Pack territories that generations of wolves had bled and sacrificed to build and hold. Homes. Gathering grounds. All of it burning. And beyond the flames, sitting on a high stretch of raised ground where the land leveled off before the coven walls, Morvanna's stronghold glowed completely untouched. Calm. Satisfied. Like a woman who had just gotten everything she asked for. "She burned them," Alexie said, the words leaving him like air from a wound. "She burned her own territories."

No one put his mate in danger and lived to talk about it. Three college-aged kids stood off to the side of the cabin, pointing and laughing as the wall near Wes' bedroom roared in flames. Wes smelled gasoline, realizing they had used an accelerant to cause the most damage quickly. Putting the fire out of his mind, he charged the younger men, his giant body barreling down on them as he closed the distance between them. He roared at them as he charged, his heavy paws pounding the earth as he raced toward them. He recognized two of the kids from Everglades, Prescott's grandson and his weaselly little friend. The new kid, he had never seen before, but the boy would regret joining in the madness.

Then he sat very still for a moment. The message was from a name he recognized — not personally but from the operational architecture he'd spent years mapping. A name that appeared in the Meridian's secondary network, one of the surviving structural elements that had persisted after Viktor Solen's arrest by reorganizing under different operational identities. Not directly Meridian. Adjacent. A name that had been in Vandermeersch's proceeding files as an associated entity but had not been formally charged. Konstantin Vael. The message was three sentences.