Guardian’s Bond

by Morgan, Rhenna

  He couldn’t blame either of them. More than anything, he’d wanted to be there when she woke up. To see the marks he’d left behind and tend to every tender ache. “And the things that happened in your dream...how did that make you feel?”

  Heat blossomed in an instant. So fast and powerful he felt it like a flame against his bare torso. Lower than before, she voiced her confession in a sultry rasp. “I liked it.”

  Fuck it.

  He thunked his mug to the counter and stood. “That’s good, kitten. Because you’re right. It wasn’t an ordinary dream.” He pulled her off her stool, slipped his hands around her lithe waist and smoothed them along her spine, one ending low and the other loosely fisting her hair. Where he’d managed a steady tone before, now the undercurrent of his beast was in every word. “It was me guiding you. Showing you what it will be like between us.”

  Her gaze dropped to his mouth and she licked her lip, an invitation he took a second later, tracing the path with his own tongue before delving deeper. And damned if her taste wasn’t sweeter today than when he’d left her at his bedroom door last night. Richer and more addictive. A flavor heightened by her growing emotions.

  He forced himself to ease the kiss. To focus on the slow burn instead of the flash fire she offered. Resting his forehead on hers, he traced her jawline, her neck, his medallion back where it belonged at the base of her throat. “This is what it means to have a mate. To feel what you’re feeling now, only deeper. Stronger. To be protected. Always.” He skimmed his lips against hers, remembering all too vividly how she’d arched and cried his name as she’d come around his fingers. “And, Kateri, it’s good you enjoyed what I gave you last night. Because your dream will be nothing compared to when I take you in the flesh.”

  The front door opened then closed with a resounding thud, and quick footsteps clipped down the hallway. More than one set and lighter than Alek or Tate’s heavy strides, which meant Naomi and Jade were about to intrude at a seriously inopportune time.

  Sure enough, Kateri tried to push away, but he held her fast. “This isn’t over, mihara. You’re mine. You know it. You felt it. Your fear is the only thing keeping you from claiming what’s yours.”

  His last word hadn’t even died off when the troublesome seer duo rounded the corner, Naomi in the lead. Though she came to such an abrupt halt that Jade nearly plowed into her from behind. “Oh.” Her hand went to her throat, and in the two seconds that followed, she assessed Priest’s possessive hold, the scowl he made no pretense of hiding and Kateri’s dumbfounded expression.

  Another woman might have scampered right back out of the room. But not Naomi. She smiled huge, then sauntered into the breakfast nook. “I’d ask if we’re interrupting, but I think that’s a forgone conclusion.”

  This time when Kateri pushed against his chest, he gave way and let her face them, but kept her anchored at his side. “We were just talking.”

  Jade snickered, but caught Priest’s answering scowl, rolled her lips inward like that might better fight back the growing laughter and averted her face.

  “Mmm.” Naomi paused at the kitchen table and cocked her head. “Should we let you finish your...talk? Or are you up for a new development with the primos?”

  Not surprisingly, Kateri lurched forward and pulled out a chair. “What developments?”

  If Priest hadn’t already zeroed in on Kateri’s thirst for vengeance against Draven, his ego might have taken a hit at the sudden change in focus. As if their kiss and talk of dreams had never existed. Instead, he chalked the shift up to her giving her emotions more room to flow.

  Naomi met his gaze, a silent check-in to make sure he was on board with the interruption.

  He moved in behind Kateri’s chair and squeezed her shoulder. “Go ahead. Pretty sure my mate could use the distraction.”

  Whether the scowl Kateri shot him was based on the go-ahead coming from him instead of her, or the fact that he’d driven home her place as his mate in front of the other two women, he couldn’t say. What he could say was he liked the fire behind it.

  “Right.” Naomi dug in her purse, pulled out a journal and slid into her own chair. “The last few days our group has broken up into three teams, one for each of the primo families we need to find. Up until today, everything’s been limited to images too hard to narrow down outside of regional generalities. For instance, with the descriptions those focused on the seer family have described, I’m inclined to think they relocated to Colorado, or someplace similar, like our family did.”

  “It could be southern Wyoming, too,” Jade said as she circled the table to point at one page over Naomi’s shoulder. “I’ll swear this sketch Rada made from her vision looks right out of a paper I did in high school on Medicine Bow National Forest.”

  Naomi nodded. “Maybe. Both would be a good place to target going forward.”

  “But no cities or more distinct clues to go on?” Kateri prompted.

  Naomi shook her head. “No. Not for the seer family. Not yet. But we did get a lead on the healer family.”

  She flipped a few pages, turned the book around and tapped just above a rough sketch of what looked like a mom-and-pop cafe, or an old-time convenience store. A tall sign stretched across the top of it with the name Mary’s on Butte La Rose painted in easy cursive. On either side was a seagull and a patch of cattails and tall grass. “For days, all we’ve been able to glean from the healer medallion has been shallow water, an old, but unique-looking bridge and a street sign with the name Yellow Street on it. But today one of the ladies saw this.”

  “Butte La Rose is in Louisiana,” Priest said.

  “Exactly!” Naomi said clearly on a roll. “Which is just south of the Atchafalaya Wildlife Refuge. A perfect place for a shifter family to pick if they wanted to hide.”

  “Is there a Yellow Street in Butte La Rose?” Kateri asked.

  Jade chuckled and ambled toward the fridge. “According to Google, there is. Yellow Street, plus about ten others and that’s it.” She pulled out a grape Gatorade and cracked the lid. “Not exactly a big network to work through.”

  “Still, it’s a lead,” Kateri said. “And if you think about it, a smaller population ought to make tracking families in the area easier.” She swiveled in her chair and locked gazes with Priest. “I’ll call David and see if his contacts can come up with any names. If they can find something that fits, Louisiana’s close enough we could drive there and scout them out.”

  “I thought we’d established my brother’s looking for the primos.”

  “Right. So, we have to find them before he does.”

  “No, I have to find them. You have to stay the hell away from him.”

  Her frown whipped into place, a ready argument obviously cuing up behind her blue-gray eyes.

  So, he cut her off at the pass and zeroed in on Naomi. “Anything on the sorcerer family?”

  He sensed more than witnessed Jade’s apprehension behind him, but the concern that clouded Naomi’s expression confirmed he’d unintentionally struck a nerve with his ward. By the time he turned to assess Jade, she’d paced into the kitchen, intentionally avoiding his study by making far too big a deal out of selecting a glass from the cabinet. “Jade?”

  She kept her silence.

  Naomi’s soft voice drifted from behind him. “You should tell him, Jade. You may not trust your gifts yet, but the rest of us do. Especially Eerikki.”

  Shit.

  Another vision. As if she hadn’t already been indoctrinated to her magic in the worst way possible. “What did you see?”

  She huffed, turned and braced her hands on her hips. “It was probably a fluke. Bad timing with memories.”

  “A memory or a vision?”

  “A vision,” Naomi said the same time Jade answered, “A memory.”

  Priest leveled the same don’t-fuck-with-me glare on Jade tha
t he’d used to keep her and Tate out of all kinds of trouble through their teenage years. “I thought you were working with the seer team. What happened?”

  “I was.” Jade sucked in a long breath, shot a glower at Naomi that said she wasn’t at all thrilled with what she’d been cornered into sharing, then refocused on Priest. “But one of the girls asked me to hand her the sorcerer medallion. When I did, I remembered the vision I had before. The first one.”

  Fuck.

  As news went, the development wasn’t just bad, but worst case. Especially with the sorcerer house.

  “It wasn’t a memory,” Naomi said, clearly on the same page as Priest. “Visions don’t work that way. Yes, we can mine for them as we’ve been doing, but usually they’re triggered. Either by objects or events. I saw you, Jade. We all did. That was a vision.”

  Kateri stood and padded to the breakfast counter, meeting Jade’s stare head-on. “I don’t get it. What was the vision about?”

  Jade went back to pouring her drink, but her hand was nowhere near as steady as it normally was. “It started in a house. There were people, but the images were too blurred to make out. Kind of like a hazy filter on a slow-motion action flick. But the blood was crystal clear. And I heard them, too. Screaming.” She set the Gatorade aside, but the plastic crinkled from the brutal grip she kept on the bottle. “It ended with a mist. Or maybe a fog. Someone was running. Panting really heavy.” She turned and faced them all. “I’m pretty sure whoever was in the vision was being hunted.”

  One beat.

  Then another.

  “You touched the medallion,” Kateri muttered, quickly putting the same pieces together the rest of them already had. The quiet grew thick and supercharged, the deeply buried anger he’d sensed in his mate blossoming fast and furious. She looked to Priest. “Tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it does.”

  “I can’t,” he answered, but wished like hell he could. “With what Jade’s seen, especially with the connection to the medallion, odds are good Draven’s already found the sorcerer family.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  SARATOGA, Wyo. (AP)—Authorities are searching for suspects in the death of a 65-year-old woman. Evidence at the scene indicates the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head, but investigators are not yet releasing any details found at the scene or persons of interest.

  Not exactly the MO Draven had used with her parents or anything similar to the vision Jade had described, but Katy flagged the location on the map she’d printed, jotted down a few notes and punched the back button on her browser session. As research options went, Google probably wasn’t the most sophisticated method out there, but at least she was doing something. Which was more than what she could say about how she’d spent the last week.

  Some daughter you are.

  She clicked the next link down in her search results and scanned the news article for any nuance that might resemble her mom and dad’s murder. After what Jade had shared, she’d been shocked she managed to talk Priest into her leaving the house, but she’d needed a new environment even more than she needed to blow off steam. Finding out Priest had the whole floor above his shop tricked out as an office and art space? Well, that was just an added bonus. Especially with a birds-eye view of the main drag on a Friday night and unfettered high-speed internet access.

  “Did you get ahold of David?”

  Startled at the sound of Alek’s booming voice, Katy jolted a good two inches out of her chair and nearly knocked over the mega Starbucks she’d never finish. “Jesus, Alek. You’re as bad as Priest.”

  He grinned, clearly taking the comment as a compliment, and sauntered toward her. “So? You give David the info the seers found?”

  “I gave it to him, but he said tracking the kind of data we’re after would take at least a week.” Not seeing anything worth capturing on the current search result, she backtracked again and went to the next one on the list.

  Alek peeked out the open window beside the desk and scanned the street below. “It takes whatever it takes, but we’ll get what we need when we need it.”

  “Says the once irritable and fight-ready guy who’s suddenly found his inner Zen.” The next article wasn’t even a homicide. More of a homicide report for Wyoming as a whole. “What are you doing here anyway? I thought you were running down some possible leads with some of the other guys.”

  “Katy, it’s ten o’clock. I left six hours ago.”

  The clock at the top corner of Priest’s laptop confirmed it. Although, now that she thought about it, it had been a while since Jade and Nanna had been by with dinner. “Shoot. Is Priest still downstairs?”

  “It’s Friday night on Main Street in a town known to be a biker hangout and Priest owns a tattoo shop. So, yeah. He’s downstairs.” He cocked one hip on the edge of Priest’s desk and crossed his arms. “A better question is what the hell you’ve been doing up here all afternoon and most of tonight.”

  She shrugged and scrolled down on the page. “I thought I’d see if I could come up with something.”

  “Come up with what?”

  “I don’t know. Anything.”

  Before she could track what he was up to, Alek shifted the laptop to face him and toggled the cursor. “You’re searching homicides?”

  “In Wyoming.” She pulled the map of Colorado she’d put together after her talk with David out from underneath the new one for Wyoming and handed it over to Alek. “It’s probably not the most scientific way to go about it, but I thought if I mapped out other violent murders, something might pop out at me.”

  Alek shut the laptop, took the map and tossed it aside. “You know we’re already working on this stuff. Several of us actually.”

  “So, what? One more won’t hurt. It’s better than me sitting around doing nothing.” She shoved to her feet and paced to the wide art table set up at the far end of the room. Like Priest’s desk, it was anchored near the window with loads of natural light and ample inspiration from the comings and goings of people below. Given the number of pencil sketches tacked on the wall around it, he’d spent considerable time there.

  “You’re not doing nothing. You’re learning. And considering how little we knew about who we are less than two weeks ago, I’d say that’s pretty damned important.”

  “I didn’t come here to learn about who we are. I came here to find the man who killed our parents.”

  “You can’t do one without the other. And has it occurred to you we might need the things you’re learning about our clan once we get a solid lead?”

  She had. But the logic didn’t do much to ease her guilty conscience. And why the hell was she so antsy? Like a living current had been piped into every muscle and circled her body in an endless loop. She braced her hands on the window sill and leaned out. The temps had dropped since she’d ridden to the shop with Priest, easily hovering in the lower fifties with the promise of even colder temps before the night was through. A stubborn reminder of winter on the last day of March. “Something’s wrong with me.”

  The confession slipped out as little more than a whisper, but perceptive as ever, Alek caught it. “Something’s wrong with you, or something’s changing?”

  On the street below, a trio of men ambled down the street, their deep laughter bouncing off the old buildings. They reached the pub just catty-corner to Priest’s building, pushed the door open and let the live music underway inside filter out into the night. The answer to Alek’s question was as elusive as knowing anything about the strangers she watched. “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do know. You’re just not ready to admit it yet.”

  She pushed back from the window and met his steady gaze. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He hung his head, scratched his jaw and studied the floor for a handful of heartbeats before he sighed and lifted his head. “Look, the only person I can spe
ak for is me. But I can tell you that—pre-soul quest funk aside—I’ve processed more emotions in the last month than I know what to do with. Losing Mom and Dad was brutal. It still is. But I’m mad as hell, too. Every day I wake up pissed off that Dad stole our heritage from us. Then I remember he’s gone and feel like a giant ass for getting pissed. It’s like an out of control emotional Tilt-A-Whirl.”

  That was exactly what it felt like. Only for her, the onslaught of feelings had her mired in a swampy place so thick it gripped and sucked her in like quicksand, and the only response that felt right was to fight. “I don’t like how it feels.”

  “Of course, you don’t. I don’t either. But here’s the thing, Katy. I can either let that guilt rule me, or I can own it and let it go. Because once you get through the shitty part of feeling, you get to the good part. The part that makes you feel alive and makes all the mundane bullshit worthwhile. I like this new life. I dig the hell out of our heritage and I’m proud of the things I can do. But most importantly, I’m embracing who I am. Not what someone told me I’m supposed to be.”

  “I’m not afraid to be who I am.”

  “Really? Because, I watched you with Dad growing up. I heard the lectures about leading with your head and not your heart. About responsibility and logic being the wiser course. But for the life of me, I never understood why you listened to it. I remember what you were like when you were little and the things you wanted. Do you?”

  For some stupid reason the injured bird she’d found walking home from the bus stop when she was eight came to mind. The weather had been horrible, the front line of a predicted blizzard just starting to dump fat snowflakes on their small suburb and making the temperatures miserable. She’d shucked her coat anyway, cradled the poor thing in the center of it and carried it all the way home—only to get the mother of all lectures about the diseases she could have contracted through such an act. Whatever happened to the bird, she never knew and had been too terrified to ask. “He just wanted me to have a career that would support me.”