Wild Night Road(29)

“Yeah, that means he’s probably already sent his guys there.”
“They’ll be waiting for us when we drive up.” Tasha turned and looked at the sleeping woman in the passenger’s seat. “What about Erin?”
“It’s probably good for her to sleep it off,” Lilith said.
“Well, we can’t stay in the car all night.” Keeping her eyes on the road, Tasha fished in her purse with one hand, finally lifting her cell phone. She handed it back to Lilith. “Call the spa and ask for security. Tell them about Gideon’s men.”
Lilith exhaled forcefully to prevent the laughter that threatened. “Tasha, do you remember the third man accompanying Gideon’s men when they were searching the parking lot?”
“Tall guy, handsome, dark hair?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“I remember him. He was with Owen in the bar.”
“His name,” Lilith said, “is Remy Lemarchal. He’s the head of security for all of Lost Legacy.”
“Oh,” Tasha said in a small voice. “But he was with Gideon’s men…”
“Yeah.”
The car rumbled over a bridge and took the curve around the bay south of town. Ocean waves crashed on the right and the slopes of the Coastal Range loomed on the left, massive and dark as a primeval forest.
“I have an idea,” Lilith said. “Someplace we can go until things quiet down and we can figure out what to do.”
“Is it far?”
“It’s about an hour away. Up in the mountains,” Lilith said. “I have a cabin.”
Tasha slowed the rental to a stop at a red light.
Crossroads were supposed to be metaphorical, Lilith thought. It represented a time when you thought things over, the critical factor being time. The luxury of days to consider your options, make tidy lists of pros and cons and brainstorm all the possible ramifications of each choice.
She wasn’t afraid of risk or of making decisions. Knowing precisely how much to risk and when had kept her alive down the years. She also knew it was foolish to pass on golden opportunities.
It was what she’d done after she’d learned that Lost Legacy’s alpha was going to be laid up for awhile, leaving Owen nominally in charge. That was a laugh, and the reason she’d called him to talk. He’d been so attracted to Tasha McNeil, she could have laid a Grand Mal hex on wolfie-poo without him noticing. Only the joke was on her now that her neatly laid plans had gone kaflouey in the space of a few hours.
That was one of the pitfalls of an extraordinarily long life; you tended to take time for granted. She was out of time, not to mention running low on options.
Gideon Black wouldn’t wait long.
A few clouds scudded over the surface of the moon. Gibbous phase. Growing and fat and nearly, but not quite full. There were only a few days left before the full moon. Whatever Gideon had in mind, he’d launch using the power of the full moon.
She needed to plan, and Tasha needed a speedy education in all things werewolf in order to have a prayer of surviving whatever mayhem Gideon was about to unleash.
“What do you think we should do?” Tasha asked.
Lilith knew what she should do:  push Tasha out of the way, take over the wheel and steer the rental north to town and drag the woman back to face Gideon Black and Owen White. It was beyond belief that Tasha’d allowed a were to mark her, spent at least one night in bed with him and claimed not to remember consciously agreeing to the whole thing.
Lilith might have been more understanding if Tasha were younger. But she was a woman grown with enough spare cash lying around that she could afford a healthy five figures for ten days at the spa. Dahling.
Okay, that wasn’t fair; Tasha wasn’t that sort. She had come back for Lilith when the move for self-preservation would have been to hightail it to civilization and pretend the high strangeness had never happened.
Consent.
It was the one factor where Lilith was in total agreement with the weres. She had the skills and power to bend Tasha McNeil to her will. If she’d wanted to gain access to the Council of the Kinraven through sheer force, she could have done that decades ago. She wanted her freedom, and she wanted a seat at the table of great powers, and she wanted to win it fair and square. It was such a New World sort of ideal that it made her want to snicker, but if she did that, she’d be lying to herself.
Consent mattered.
It was what Gaebryl had denied her since she’d become his upon her mother’s death.
“The choice is yours,” Lilith said. “Turn left here and we can go to my cabin. Or you can go straight back to Lost Legacy.”
Tasha’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel. “What if there’s something seriously wrong with Erin?”