by Amy Faye
He stayed still for a long, long time. And then he pushed himself up off the ground, careful not to make a sound. He waved her to follow and started on a diagonal route back the way they'd come. Towards another false peak, she saw. She started to move to follow, careful with where she put her feet. Careful with every sound she made, careful not to let her clothes rustle up against each other.
Every sound was amplified a hundred times by their relative silence and by the pair of bites on either shoulder, slowly healing up but still painful to touch. She kept her hips low, moved her feet slowly. The path was only a few hundred yards but it took her five minutes to cross it. Five agonizingly slow minutes. Five minutes of waiting to hear someone behind her any time, waiting to be seen by someone approaching.
By the time she had made it as far up the slope as possible, Nick was already laid out flat at the top, looking out. She waited for him. She waited because he knew what he was doing, now. He was in his element. This was what he did. She hoped he was less naked when he usually did it, but it only added a certain strange mystique to it. A mystery.
She checked that she still had her pistol tucked away in its holster and waited to get the go-ahead from Nick. A noise behind her, so quiet she thought she was imagining it, made her turn. In the stillness of the forest, with the people who were chasing them, she didn't want to take any chances.
"Nick, I need you," she said, her voice tense. An instant later, and it would have already been too late.
Thirty-Eight
Nick seemed to be moving before she'd even spoken the words. Yet, it was impossible that he'd heard the approaching wolf-man behind them before she did, and she'd reacted in an instant.
He was already transforming as he ran, his body shaking and shuddering and expanding, and yet it didn't seem to have the remotest effect on his stride. As if he were in complete control, even as his body went through wild changes.
And then they clashed, and they went tumbling to the ground. Nick was on his feet again in an instant, rolling and shifting and catching himself before the collision had even brought his momentum to a stop. Powerful hind legs clawed at the dirt, still loose without years of foot traffic.
The other wolf snarled and thrashed as Nick turned on him, claws gripping hard and tearing a gouge out of the thing's chest. The other wolf was bigger, she saw. Bigger, and his fur was darker. She wouldn't have realized that Nick's fur wasn't pitch black without seeing his brother at this distance–close enough to smell the sweat on their bodies.
Nick came around again, quick. He ducked under a swiping swing and hit the bigger werewolf around the knees, and they tumbled to the dirt again. Not the knees, she saw. The knee. The leg where she'd hit him. Nick twisted and rose once again, catching his brother as he turned back.
Ryan took the blow on his face, howling out in rage and pain, his lips pulled back in a furious, doglike snarl, but by the time he tried to return the favor the blow was already struck and Nick was moving past. Too quickly, she saw. The bigger wolf stood on unsteady legs and prepared, loading all the weight onto his good leg. If Nick was going to try the same trick, he'd have to notice. She had to trust that he would.
'Leave them to me,' Nick had said. If something changed, she had to be ready, but eight shots wasn't enough to guarantee that she could take him down. Not the way that he'd reacted to it more like an unpleasant punch than a gunshot wound. And if she could, then she couldn't guarantee she wouldn't need to use the pistol again. So she held the gun ready and waited for something to change.
Nick whirled past his brother again. Something about the route he took was unusual. Something hard to explain, except that it all felt 'off.' He was doing something strange and the minute she figured out what it was, she'd know whether or not to be worried.
She realized it a moment after he sent the pair of them slamming into the trunk of a massive Oak. They hit so hard that Brianna thought she could feel the ground shaking. That was when she realized. He was avoiding her. She'd thought, at twenty or thirty feet, she wasn't in the way. But she was, whether she liked it or not.
Brianna moved slow. If she moved fast, then Ryan would notice, and he'd move. Something deep down inside her told her that she couldn't afford to be noticed. He was wrapped up in the fight against Nick, and as long as he stayed that way, they were safe. If he didn't…
She shivered. No use in thinking about it right now. She was only going to risk getting herself hurt, risk distracting herself. Nick blew past his brother again. Ryan was slower getting up this time. A whirling, thick knee slammed into his jaw, and the bigger wolf growled, the rage inside him mounting.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, she knew. Ryan was the one in charge. Nick was younger. He was smaller. He shouldn't be able to win. But, as she watched, as she prayed that nothing changed, he was.
The problem was, he wasn't winning enough. A stray swipe caught Nick along his flank as he ran past. He'd caught a chunk of his brother's body and yanked on it hard, and he'd done damage. But the way that he hesitated after, she wondered how much damage he'd taken to get it. What the cost was. He whirled again and charged.
Brianna could see in his eyes the cold rage that Nick was feeling, could see the plan already forming in his head, and she could see that what he had planned was an extremely bad idea.
He crashed shoulder first into his brother and sent the pair of them sprawling to the earth. The littler of them started scrambling immediately–scrambling to hold his weight on top of his brother's. Scrambling to attack. His teeth gnashed, his arms moved in powerful ripping motions. He'd decided, hoped, that he could finish it all at once.
If this was going to be their last stand, though, then Brianna could see what Nick couldn't see. Or what he'd chosen not to see. Whatever the reason, she knew it wasn't going to work. And as she watched, it played out in front of her.
The bigger wolf shifted his hips. Lifted them up and off the ground and twisted. Nick roared and howled in anger and scraped to change their positions back, to hold on to his position of dominance, but all that happened was that he twisted under his brother and avoided the rain of blows that came down on him for a moment. The bigger wolf's claws grabbed flesh and tore. The scream was Brianna's, this time.
'Leave them to me,' he'd told her. There was no plan B to fall back on if he lost. He was the one who took care of these things, and if there was a problem, it was his problem. Not a problem for her to solve. Not a problem that she could solve, he'd told her.
Now the only plan they had was trying in vain to scramble some more, to free himself. The bigger wolf dug his nails into his brother's arms, and Brianna watched him take a hard bite on his arm and shake his head. Nick yelped in agony–closer to a dog's sound than a powerful wolf.
Brianna had to do something. She had to be tougher, stronger, faster. She couldn't possibly fight Ryan the way she was. Eight bullets in her gun, that wasn't enough. What if there were more? What if there were two?
Her heart pounded. There was an option. One option. She didn't want to take it, but it was like Nick had said–it wasn't a matter of 'want.'
Thirty-Nine
"Don't do it." The words repeated in her head. Her hand strained, wrapped around the butt of her pistol. What was she supposed to do? Had he even thought of that? What was she supposed to do that was going to turn this all around?
Her gut told her that things had a lot of room to get worse before they got better, and they were already too bad for her to know what the fuck she was supposed to be doing. It wasn't like she wanted to disobey him. It wasn't like she was just screwing around.
"Fuck it," she growled, and raised the pistol. Her arms felt heavy, but she lifted it, set her weight forward, and pulled the trigger, absorbing the recoil that hit her shoulder like a punch. The bullet smacked into Ryan hard. To her surprise Nick didn't take the opportunity to do anything. He clutched at his ruined arm and yelped again.
She pulled the trigger a second time, taking a half an insta
nt to adjust her aim. Another bullet smacked into the big guy, and he slipped again. Then he turned and looked at her, and Brianna realized how much of a mistake she'd just made. But she'd already made her bed, and now she was either going to get killed or she was going to figure her way out of it, and she wasn't about to accept 'get killed' as the only viable option.
She raised her aim as Ryan rose from his brother and fired again. It caught him high and he stumbled back a step. He made an awful hacking, coughing sound, but then he lowered his head and charged her.
No more waiting to readjust her aim between shots. Three shots of eight gone already, she fired the other five in the space of a heartbeat, as fast as her finger could pull the trigger. And at her feet lay a big man, almost seven feet tall, and built like a bodybuilder. He coughed hard. Blood fell onto the leaves beneath them.
"I think you got me," he said. His face had a wicked wound in it, but he still moved, just a little bit.
Brianna's skin crawled at the look he was giving her. She thought, dimly, that he was dying. They might have unique powers of recovery, but nobody could lose blood the way he was losing it and make it out alive. Could they?
"I had no other choice," Brianna said. Her hands shook and the gun fell from her hands, useless, in the dirt.
"No," he said. His voice was low and weak. He looked weaker than he had a moment ago. His arms fell limply at his sides. "Come closer."
"Can I trust you?"
Ryan's stoic expression shifted like the plates of the earth into something like a smile. "He's marked you. I can smell him on you. It's–I won't hurt you, girl. I can't–"
He coughed again, blood spilling out from another hole in him that should have killed him outright. Brianna decided, against her better judgment, to lean in and kneel beside him. If he was going to kill her, then he was going to kill her. But she wasn't going to deny a dying man's request.
"I need you to–to know. I need someone to know. I had no choice. I don't blame you. Not him, either."
She heard his confession. It wasn't long. And then the forest was silent again, and she was moving slow and as silent as possible. Nick was on the ground, his own body transforming back. It wasn't sudden, like it usually was. It was slow, like it was ebbing out of him.
"Nick?"
His body jerked hard and then he was all human again. And naked, she noted. Quite naked.
"Jesus. My fucking arm. What in the hell–I think I passed out."
"Your brother–"
Brianna pointed. It wasn't something that she wanted to say out loud. Ryan wasn't moving, his eyes staring, hard as stone, off at something in the distance that neither of them could see.
Nick winced, forced himself upright on his one good arm. The other one hung there like a lump of useless flesh. Brianna thought she probably had more control of her breasts than he did of that arm right now.
"Are you hurt?"
She shuddered. "No. I'm not hurt."
"What happened? Did you–"
"I didn't. Not yet, anyway." She tried to help the big man up, but he didn't seem to take to it. Maybe because he was over a foot taller than her, and twice her weight at least. "There's always next time."
She swallowed hard. "We should go. Someone will have heard the shots. They'll be coming."
He looked at the body another long minute. Weighing his options how to carry it away, no doubt. But there wasn't really any option available.
"Come on, soldier, we've got to go."
She set a hard pace. Well, a hard pace for a walk. Nick kept up, though she could see the fighting had taken something out of him. He looked empty, drained, his eyes staring off at something that neither of them could see.
"I couldn't–"
"You did what you could do, Nick. You did what you had to do."
"I couldn't get Grant."
"No, you couldn't," Brianna confirmed. "You win some, you lose some, right?"
"I lost more than I won," he said. His voice was low and gravelly and it would have been sexy if she didn't hear the despair in his voice that he was trying to pretend wasn't there.
"You've got to keep your head up," she told him. For a moment, she thought about telling him. She thought about telling him everything. But there would be time for it later. She didn't need to tell him anything at all, right now. Not until she could prove what Ryan told her was all true.
She'd need to call in favors. Favors from people who would almost certainly not be happy about paying. But if it was true, then somewhere out there, there were ten more Black Hearts who needed someone to be in charge. And right now, Nick was too tired to be that man.
Once she'd found them–that was when she'd tell him. The other news, too, if he hadn't figured it out, by then.
Epilogue
Brianna set the phone down in her cradle. Nick Roe had no family, not on record. Last seen was Ryan Roe—he'd been found shot to death with a handgun, the serial numbers filed off, found at the scene. Someone had left him where he lay, in the woods.
There were four younger siblings—a pair of twins, both of them formerly deployed in Iraq, Ace and Jared. Cade was a Navy boy. Adam, like Nick, hadn't been deployed abroad. He had at least two standing bench warrants that anyone knew of.
The problem with serving those warrants, and with her entire search, if they were being honest with her, was that she was looking for people who couldn't be found. Four months ago, they were supposed to come back from a camping trip. None of them did.
That met up with her timeline well. She'd seen the blood stains. Someone must have found the bodies. The way that Nick had sounded so certain, there must have been photos. Something.
But the bodies weren't there any more, and nobody had reported their deaths. There were five empty graves in their hometown, a township in the U.P.—one of them now filled.
Ryan had told her something that was hard to believe. Too hard to believe to tell Nick. Not until she was absolutely certain that he hadn't been mistaken, hadn't been crazy, hadn't been lying. He had no reason to, and yet she couldn't believe for a minute. Not without proof. And she wouldn't be able to ask Nick to believe until she knew for certain herself.
She marked an X in the next item on the list. One of them had an alias. They had to. Something that she could use to find them. Because if Ryan was to be believed, they hadn't died. They'd lived, and somewhere out there, the remaining Black Hearts were pretending not to be whoever they were.
Somewhere out there, Nick Roe had a family to go back to, and she wasn't going to give up until he was with them all again. She'd already taken enough from him. Until she had proof, she wasn't going to give him hope. Not when she had to take it away.
Brianna set a hand on her stomach. The bump was getting harder to deny. She was tired—too tired to be doing any of this. But she knew what she needed to do. It wasn't usual, but it would be an excellent baby shower present to be able to give her lover the thing he wanted most in the world.
She laid back, her hand rubbing a little circle. She had a time limit, then. One that was approaching fast. But she'd always been best, Brianna thought with a cool satisfaction, when she was under a time limit.
It was when she felt the most alive. This time was no different. She flipped the pad over.
"What you doing?"
Nick came in without taking his boots off, like he always did. And they tracked mud in, like they always did.
"Nothing. Just catching up with some old friends at the department," she lied. But she couldn't hide the smile on her face, and with a little luck and a lot of work, she wouldn't have to hide anything else for much longer.
Ice Cold
Paranormal Vampire Romance
Amy Faye
Published by Heartthrob Publishing
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Here’s a preview of the sexy love story you’re about to read…
Her fingers touch
ed his shaft and it twitched. Sarah looked up to gauge his reaction. His eyes were closed, and he leaned back. He seemed to be struggling to keep control of himself. What could he be thinking?
Sarah wrapped her fingers around it, gave it an experimental tug. Jason's face lost the mask of composure for a moment and he inhaled sharply. She moved her hand again and he sucked in a breath. Was she doing this to him? Such a powerful, attractive man, brought to his knees by her?
She kept her eyes on his face as she ducked her head in, kissing the tip. His skin tasted salty on her lips. His body jerked when he felt her mouth on him, but she ignored her doubts. Her lips had to stretch just a little to accommodate his size, perhaps too generous, but she pushed past her discomfort.
This wasn't about her, this was about him, and making him feel good. Making him feel like it was worthwhile. She looked up again to gauge his reaction. The way that his hands searched for anything to get ahold of, the way that his expression was forced into that same neutral mask, all said that she was doing something right.
Sarah started moving slowly. As she began to move back on she enjoyed the way that his hips jerked ever so slightly, trying to meet her movements, an uncontrollable thrust to try to get deeper. It filled her throat and for a moment she was afraid that she was going to choke—and then he relented, pulling back until he was nearly out of her mouth completely.
She ran her tongue along its length, enjoying the movements of his hips as she pleased him. She couldn't resist asking, "does that feel good?"
His ragged breathing was her only reply, so she took it in her hand, giving it another experimental tug before she took it back into her mouth. She enjoyed the way that he moved, the way that she felt as if she was the center of his world as she sucked his cock. If this was how all women felt doing this, why would they ever want to stop?