Pas by S M Reine Page A

she’d gone into OPA custody.
    Deirdre squeezed it. “Brother Marshall?”
    The rainy courtyard beyond the collapsed windows vanished, replaced by a towering gray brick face that was covered in runes.
    Holy Nights Cathedral didn’t fit into the dimension right. There was no way a cathedral that size could have occupied the same space as the asylum. Yet its four walls were snugly sitting within the courtyard, as though it had been built there all along. As long as Deirdre didn’t try to look at it too hard, trying to understand its dimensions, it looked normal.
    Vidya stepped up to the stained-glass window. The candlelight from within reflected on her razor feathers, casting her damp flesh in shades of orange and red. “Unseelie magic. Cool.”  
    Deirdre edged into the courtyard. The overhang of the cathedral’s roof sheltered her from the rain. She could hear it tapping against the stone bodies of the gargoyles high above.
    She managed to reach the door, fitting just barely between the cathedral’s wall and the asylum’s wall.
    The door swung inward, and there he was: Brother Marshall backed by one of his biggest gargoyles, which tracked her movements up the aisle as she approached.
    “I need your help,” she began.
    But then another person stepped out from behind the gargoyle.
    It was a short, thin man—more of a boy, really—with dusky skin and black eyes. He wore ill-fitting jeans and a t-shirt with holes in it.
    He looked so unassuming that Deirdre immediately mistrusted him.
    She stopped a few rows back, and Vidya flanked her, as ready to fight as she always was. “Who’s that?” Deirdre asked sharply. “I expected you to be alone, Brother.”
    “Oh, gosh.” The boy’s voice was surprisingly high and feminine. “I forgot.” He touched his face, as though checking the arch of his nose, the dimple in his chin, the shape of his cheekbones. “It’s me. I’m in disguise to make it harder for Rhiannon to follow me. Marion made this. Looks pretty good, huh?”
    Deirdre still didn’t understand. Not until the boy slid his thumbs underneath the skin on his jaw and lifted it like a hood.
    Rylie Gresham’s face appeared underneath.
    The Alpha herself.
    Anger blazed within Deirdre. “ You . This is your fault! You almost got me killed!”
    “You almost got yourself killed,” Rylie said. “You can’t challenge Rhiannon publicly. An execution was the inevitable outcome.” She let the magical mask fall back over her features again, concealing her golden eyes and pink lips.
    “It might have been the inevitable outcome for me, but not for you,” Deirdre said. “You knew there’d been election fraud. Brother Marshall told you. And you did nothing!”
    “I told Brother Marshall not to tell you,” Rylie said.
    She shot a look at the monk, who only shrugged. The gesture wasn’t embarrassed or even apologetic. “Yup,” he said.
    “What Brother Marshall did is not the problem here,” Deirdre said. “The problem is your cowardice.”
    “The oath might render me immune to Rhiannon for the time being, but it doesn’t spare all of my loved ones. Not everyone I care about is part of my pack. My son, Benjamin—he’s mundane. The oath wouldn’t have protected him. I couldn’t risk Rhiannon retaliating against him.”
    “So you decided you’d give Rhiannon the whole country to save one boy?”
    “I decided that direct confrontation would be a bad idea, yes,” Rylie said.
    “Cowardice.”
    “Practicality. I know you think that you can change the world by crossing your fingers and wishing hard enough, but there are real lives on the line, real people who matter, and people who need me to protect them.”
    “Gaeans need you to protect them! Thousands of other peoples’ vulnerable sons and daughters,” Deirdre said. “If you couldn’t subvert her safely, then you should have gone big. Gone public. She’s the one whose head should have been on the chopping block for cheating.”
    “She won,”