Tall, Silent and Lethal

by R. L. Mathewson

  “Scream all you want,” Kale said, smiling smugly as he gestured to the men and women moving all around them and making her frown when she realized that they all wore various forms of black combat clothing much like that of her captors. “It won’t do you any good, not in a Sentinel compound.”

  Chapter 25

  “You son of a bitch!” Cloe snapped as he stepped inside the large penthouse.

  Without a word, and because he needed some space to clear his head, he put her down, dropping her beautiful ass on the leather love seat as he passed by it. He kept walking until he found himself standing inches away from the floor to ceiling windows overlooking Central Park. Other than releasing a little surprised squeal that teased a small twitch from his lips, she didn’t say anything about the rude way he’d handled her.

  He knew that he should have pulled her away from the group and tried to explain things to her, at least of what he knew, but he just…..he just couldn’t. Too much shit had happened in the last couple of days and he wasn’t handling it very well. To be honest, he’d rather be anywhere but here. He should be accompanying his sister’s body back to Germany and seeing that she had a proper burial in the family cemetery, but instead he was here in New York making sure that the woman whose life he’d ruined was tucked away somewhere safe.

  Goddamn Marta for leaving him like this, he inwardly raged, grinding his teeth together as he forced his hands to stay by his sides when all he wanted to do was to pull out that damn letter again. She’d fucking lied to him. She’d known that she was dying for a goddamn year and she’d never said a word to him. She’d fucking played him, telling him that she had a serious female problem that needed frequent treatment. It was the only way she’d been able to convince him to drop her off at the doctor’s office and leave her there until she called to be picked up after her appointment.

  He never should have left her there, but he’d wanted to respect her request for privacy. She’d been humiliated enough in that fucking lab and he hadn’t wanted to take away what little self-respect she had left so he’d left her at the medical office and drove off far enough away so that he wouldn’t be able to overhear what was discussed during her appointment. If he had known that she’d been diagnosed with cancer he never would have left her.

  Never.

  She had no business leaving him the way that she had, taking her own life and saying goodbye to him in a fucking letter! He’d deserved to know what was going on, deserved to be there to hold her hand and tell her how much he loved her, but most of all he deserved a fucking chance to try to save her! He would have taken her to every expert that he could find and made them fix her.

  She’d left him too soon. He hadn’t been ready to say goodbye to her, not when he knew that they should have had several more years together. He would never forgive her for doing this to him, goddamn her for leaving him like this and goddamn her for doing this to Cloe. It made him sick knowing that Marta had purposely brought an innocent woman into this mess. She’d put Cloe’s life in danger, and for what? So that he wouldn’t have to worry about being alone for a few more decades?

  Marta thought she was giving him someone to care about and love when all she ended up giving him was another responsibility. He might not have been ready to say goodbye to Marta, but he’d been prepared for it. He’d been prepared to learn how to live on his own, to have no one to worry about, to finally explore the world around him, and to figure out how he was going to manage to live forever without losing his goddamn mind. Now it seemed that he couldn’t even do that, because he was already losing his goddamn mind.

  He had a mate……..

  A fucking mate that he didn’t want and who sure as hell didn’t want him, but none of that mattered, because she was his now and he’d be damned if he failed one more woman in his life.

  “Why haven’t you tried to run yet?” Ephraim asked as he moved to join him in front of the large window.

  “Why do you care?” Christofer asked, staring out the window at what other people would probably call a breathtaking view, but he barely noticed it, lost in his thoughts the way that he was.

  “I’m just curious,” Ephraim admitted.

  “Were you expecting a fight?” Christofer asked, already having noted that this little misfit group had been heavily armed when they’d come to retrieve him.

  They’d probably expected him to fight them tooth and nail and if it hadn’t been for Cloe, he would have done just that. Throw in the fact that they hadn’t resorted to bullshitting them, threats of violence, and he didn’t count Ephraim being forced to shoot him in the back of the head to protect his son, and the fact that they seemed genuinely concerned about Cloe’s safety and he didn’t see a reason to fight them.

  Not yet anyway.

  Once he knew that Cloe was going to be okay and he’d figured out how to keep her safe that was a different story altogether. He didn’t need or want their protection. From what they’d told him, he knew that Masters, demons and shifters were searching for others like him, hoping to use them to make an army or whatever the fuck they were after. He didn’t care what they did, as long as they left him alone.

  He didn’t want any part of their war, wasn’t interested in getting involved, but he did appreciate the heads up about what was going on. He’d be more careful from now on, use a different name, wouldn’t stay in one area for too long, not again. Not that there was a reason for him to stay anywhere now. Not with Marta gone, he thought as he felt his eyes begin to shift. With a simple thought he made his eyes return to their normal blue, refusing to clue this group in on just how badly he was hurting right now.

  He’d learned long ago that his eyes gave away too much, let the doctors know just how badly they hurt him, pissed him off and frightened him. It had taken some time, but he’d eventually learned how to control the shift in his eyes and teeth. They might have been able to make him wish for death, but he’d refused to let them know just how helpless and terrified he’d really been.

  “I still am,” Ephraim admitted, not really sounding all that worried about it and probably for good reason.

  The man was just like him, a Pyte. He couldn’t even begin to describe his reaction to finding out that there were others like him. All these years he’d thought that he was a freak of nature, a mistake, but he wasn’t. There were more of them out there, a product of a vampire and a human woman in most cases. Unfortunately, it had also confirmed what the doctors had claimed all those years ago.

  Marta wasn’t his sister.

  At least not by blood. Not that he really cared, because the little girl he’d gone through hell with, raised, protected and loved would always be his sister. He didn’t give a damn what anyone said, Marta had been his baby sister and he would always love her and miss her. Learning that his father hadn’t really been his father, however, had damn near killed him.

  He’d loved his father more than anything. More than that, he’d respected the man for his kind heart and his dedication to his family. When he’d been a child, he’d always hoped that he’d grow up to be a man just like his father, but now he knew that was impossible. The man that he’d thought was his father had simply been the man who’d taken over the responsibility and care of raising the child that his wife had left behind.

  Christofer wondered if the man that he’d been raised to think of as his father had known the truth. If he had, he’d never showed it. He’d treated Christofer like his son, accepting him for who he was and never expecting or demanding anything more. His father had given his life to protect him and he would not dishonor him by thinking of him as anything less than his father.

  “Is that why you brought us here?” Christofer asked, forcing his mind away from things that he’d rather not dwell on right now.

  “To this compound?” Ephraim asked, shaking his head. “No, we didn’t bring the two of you here because we were expecting a fight.”

  “Then why are we here?” Christofer demanded, turning to face the man th
at seemed to hold all the answers.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Cloe announced, apparently giving up on trying to “glare” her way to freedom as she joined them, making damn sure to put some space between them.

  A few days ago, that little action would have seriously pissed him off, but today……

  Today, it sounded like a good plan.

  *-*-*-*

  “Why don’t we have a seat?” Ephraim suggested, gesturing back towards the sitting area where the rest of her captors now reclined, obviously waiting to get this over with. Well, all but one. Kale, the bastard that she’d already decided that she didn’t like, was leaning back against the kitchen island, looking bored as he played with his iPhone.

  She pretended not to notice when Christofer turned his back on her, pretended that it didn’t hurt or feel like he was abandoning her when she needed him to help her get through this. She hated needing him this badly. He’d attacked her, changed her into this monster and here she was, hurt because he wanted nothing to do with her. She was pathetic, but she wasn’t going to beg him for anything. Instead, she forced herself to focus on Ephraim. He was the clear leader of the group, which meant that he was her best bet to get out of here.

  “Are you going to let me go afterwards?” she demanded, not really sure that she could handle anything more right now.

  Ephraim shot her a sympathetic smile as he said, “No, I’m afraid that’s not an option. At least not yet.”

  “That’s the only option that I’m giving you,” Cloe snapped back, the shades of red sharpening as her fangs shot down through her gums, cluing her into the fact that her eye color and fangs were tied in with her emotions. It was something that she was definitely going to have to work on if she didn’t want anyone to figure out that she was a-

  “Don’t worry about your eyes and your fangs right now,” Ephraim cut in with a sympathetic tone. “You’ll learn how to control those with time.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” she snapped, lying her terrified ass off.

  “If I promise to answer all of your questions first, will you hear me out?” Ephraim asked, gesturing for her once again to go have a seat.

  “What if after I hear you out, I still want to leave? What then?” she asked, wondering just how hard it would be to get past those security panels attached to the elevator doors and the fire escape she’d spotted at the other end of the small hallway when Christofer, the bastard, had carried her inside.

  “I tell you what,” Ephraim said, glancing over his shoulder at the quickly darkening sky before looking back at her, “if you still want to leave after everything’s been explained to you, then I’ll let you go.”

  She stilled as she considered him, obviously suspicious of this sudden turnaround. “I hear you out and you’ll let me go? Just like that?” she asked, narrowing her eyes on him, looking for a sign that he was lying.

  He met her gaze head-on as he nodded. “You have my word.”

  Nodding, she turned around and headed for the leather chair closest to the door, making her intentions clear from the start. She’d listen to him and then she was leaving, and she didn’t care what she had to do to make that happen.

  *-*-*-*

  “Ow! Ow! Ow! Stop that!”

  Fucking Pytes, Kale thought with disgust.

  He watched Caine and Chris force Cloe’s hand beneath the stream of cold water while Danni did her best to hold Cloe near the sink when she clearly wanted to bolt away from Ephraim and that damn bag of blood that he was trying to get her to drink. Letting Ephraim take the lead on this one had been a mistake, one he wouldn’t be making again, he decided, sighing heavily as he shut off his iPhone and shoved it in his back pocket.

  Not that he could fault Ephraim with the way he’d handled retrieving the Pyte, he couldn’t. He’d gotten everyone in and handled a situation that you couldn’t pay him to touch. He didn’t do emotional bullshit, didn’t have time for it, so when they’d realized that one of the heartbeats in the house was slowing down and who it belonged to, he’d been more than happy to leave it up to Ephraim to deal with.

  It had given him the distraction that he’d needed to see what was going on in the basement. He’d have to admit that he hadn’t expected to find a vampire, one of the Sentinel’s blood deliverers, switching out a bag of blood for the unconscious woman lying on the bed. He sure as hell hadn’t expected to find a freshly turned Pyte on his first retrieval mission for the Council.

  He’d come for one Pyte and had instead discovered two. While Chris had been playing twenty questions with the vampire and checking to make sure that the woman was okay, Kale had stood by the bed, gun in hand while he’d struggled against the urge to kill her before the turn was final. He’d had a chance to rid the world of one of them, he’d been tempted, oh so fucking tempted to take it.

  If Chris hadn’t stepped in his way and picked the woman up, he would have killed her. If it had been anyone else who had taken up the responsibility of protecting her, he would have killed them just to get to her and kill her before it was too late, but Chris was untouchable for a reason.

  Izzy.

  She loved her mate, adored the annoying bastard so when Kale was on patrol with Chris or on a mission, he made damn sure to return the bastard to Izzy without so much as a scratch on him. So, for Izzy, he hadn’t gone through Chris to get to the woman. The fact that he’d doubled his pay without lifting a finger should have comforted him, but it didn’t.

  He had no problem wrangling in the Pytes that were already in existence, especially if it meant making sure that they were kept out of Masters’ hands, but he had a real fucking problem with creating new Pytes. If it was up to him, he’d rid the world of every last one of them, but since it wasn’t up to him or evenly remotely possible, he’d settle for making a few bucks by delivering them to the Council….

  As long as the Council didn’t try to build its own army that is.

  If they ever tried that bullshit, Kale would make every last Sentinel pay for unleashing that horror on the world. But, for now he was going to content himself with being paid to hunt Pytes, retrieve them and deliver them to the Council. This way he would know how many of them there were, where they were and of course, bring him that much closer to his goal.

  At least he didn’t have to worry about these two Pytes creating any little bastards that he’d eventually have to put down before they hit their immortality, he mused, shaking his head in disgust at Ephraim’s attempts to explain their world to this woman. He really should have saved the whole “we heal from everything” part of the speech until the end. Even Kale knew what the woman was going to do as soon as Ephraim had made that little announcement.

  Sure enough, as soon as Ephraim had finished explaining how Pytes could heal from absolutely everything, and he would know, the seriously pissed off, but curious, woman had stormed into the kitchen to find out for herself. He’d known exactly what she was planning when she’d eyed that large butcher knife and he could have easily stopped her, but….well, he really hadn’t cared enough to try.

  “Lying bastard!” Cloe yelled, struggling to get away from Ephraim, who was still trying to get her to drink some blood.

  He probably should have explained that Pytes only heal quickly if they’d fed recently or drank blood after they were injured. Otherwise it could take a while for their injuries to heal. Since this woman had only been turned a few days ago and refused to drink blood, she didn’t have enough blood stored away to handle even a tiny scratch never mind that huge gash on her palm.

  “Get the hell away from me, you bastard!” Cloe snapped at Ephraim as she continued to struggle to get away. The trio, who were only fucking this up more, were trying to slow the bleeding down before Cloe could slip into bloodlust from blood loss and they had to deal with more bullshit.

  A small chime brought his attention back to his phone and the job that was waiting for him. He didn’t have time for this bullshit. He had a job waiting for him and he need
ed to get going. He looked over at the Pyte who should be handling this and sighed.

  The bastard sat on the loveseat, looking bored. Christofer’s focus was on the floor to ceiling glass window and his eyes were a calm crystal blue instead of the fiery red that he’d expected. Kale was curious how the Pyte managed to control that reaction, looking as though he didn’t give a rat’s ass that his mate was being manhandled by three other men, but he knew the truth. The Pyte was just barely holding himself back. The scent of fury poured off him in waves. His heart was pounding against his chest even as he appeared relaxed, bored.

  Interesting…..

  Curious to see if he could break through that façade, and admittedly a little bored himself, Kale walked over to the small group, keeping his attention on the Pyte in front of him, reached out and with the very tip of his finger. He’d barely touched Cloe’s arm when he suddenly found himself soaring through the air courtesy of a seriously pissed off Pyte.