by S. Young
Kiyo leapt out of the trees at his back, jaw open, and clamped his teeth into the man’s neck. The force of his hit took them both to the ground. He tore out the wolf’s throat, hearing the surprise from his companions as he rolled off to face the others.
His eyes darted to Niamh. She was collapsed in the snow, eyes wide and staring unseeingly at the night sky as her body convulsed.
Rage blasted through him as he turned his attention to the two vampires and two werewolves who bared their incisors and canines at him. Only cowards with no honor would take down Niamh while she was in no state to fight back.
He would enjoy this hunt.
The female wolf came at him first. Kiyo lunged to meet her. She was so distracted by his open jaws, she missed his claws. As she triumphantly punched him with impressive force in the muzzle, Kiyo pushed the change, his front forelegs shifting back to his human arms as he slashed her across the belly with his wolf claws.
As her howl of agony lit the air, momentarily disconcerting her companions, Kiyo made the full shift. Uncaring of his nakedness, he spun back to the female as she dropped to her knees, retracted his claws, and punched through the solid cage of muscle and bone in her back.
The force of the hit shuddered up his arms as his hand clamped around the hot, wet muscle of her heart.
He yanked it out and she sagged lifelessly to the ground.
A roar of fury filled his ears as the remaining wolf and the two vampires sped toward him. Claws out again, Kiyo ran at them, leapt into the air in a spin to give his body enough momentum and force so that when he brought his arm around, his clawed hand out, he cut through the wolf’s neck like his hand was a blade. His teeth rattled with the impact, but the wolf’s head rolled from his body with satisfying results.
The sight caused the two vampires to stare in disbelief.
He doubted they’d seen many werewolves decapitate someone with their bare hand.
Realization that Kiyo wasn’t at all what he seemed flooded their expressions, and the male and female vampire shared a concerned look.
Self-preservation was a typical characteristic of a vampire and they shot off into the woods. Kiyo couldn’t let them get away and back to The Garm.
The less The Garm knew about Niamh, the better.
He raced after them, catching up to the male first. He tackled the vamp to the ground but felt hands wrap around his neck and throw him backward.
Kiyo hit the ground hard but the snow cushioned the impact. He glared up at the female vamp who had surprised him by coming back for her companion. That was something he could respect.
He lunged, canines out, misleading her as he had her werewolf counterpart. She was a blur of movement, lashing out to grab him around the throat and hold off his teeth from her neck.
But Kiyo wasn’t aiming for her neck.
He punched through her chest, up under her rib cage, gripped her heart, and squeezed it until it popped.
She burst into a thick cloud of dust, speckling his face and body.
He grunted in annoyance, stepping back from the ash cloud as a blur moved behind him.
Pain screamed at his scalp as the male vamp gripped hold of Kiyo’s top knot and yanked, pulling Kiyo down toward the ground onto his back. At the last moment, Kiyo thrust his lower body upward and he flipped backward, the movement relaxing the vamp’s hold on him.
He landed with a deadly silence behind the confused vampire and was about to treat him to the same end as his female companion when the vamp suddenly turned, incisors out, and clamped his strong jaw down over Kiyo’s neck.
His long teeth sliced through Kiyo’s throat and the toxins in the vamp’s saliva tickled at his senses, trying to confuse him into believing he was receiving pleasure, not pain.
Goddamn dirty trick, that.
Kiyo gripped the vampire’s head, trying to part him from his throat, but he had the strength of a boa constrictor now that he’d sunk his teeth into him. His arms were a vise around Kiyo’s upper body, and Kiyo knew the vamp had every intention of draining him dry.
It wouldn’t kill him, of course, but it would weaken him.
And mightily piss him off.
Kiyo dug his claws into the vampire’s sides but other than a grunt of pain, it didn’t shift the bloodsucker. As calm as ever, despite his growing anger, Kiyo searched for the most expedient way to kill him.
That’s when he caught sight of the perfectly angled, sharp-ended branch sticking out of the skinny white birch tree in the distance.
Pushing his hand between the tight compression of their two bodies, Kiyo dug his claws into the vamp’s chest around his heart. It was enough to make the vamp loosen his hold.
With a roar of power, Kiyo broke the vampire’s cage, feeling part of his throat come away with the pressure of his removal. Warm blood spurted down his neck as he watched the vampire soar through the air and hit the tree with accuracy.
The vamp stared down at the branch sticking through his chest with a look of abject disbelief.
And then he exploded into a burst of ash dust.
Hot pain throbbed at Kiyo’s throat and he muffled his curse as he dropped to a knee.
Despite the icy wetness surrounding him, sweat soaked his naked skin. Blood ran in rivulets down his chest as his wound slowly knitted together. The blood loss made him slightly woozy, but the thought of Niamh, vulnerable in the clearing, had him pushing to his feet.
When he stumbled out of the woods, he found Niamh staring in confusion at the dead werewolves surrounding her.
Her eyes flew to his, widening at either his nakedness, his injury, or both.
“Vision over?” he croaked out, clamping a hand over his still-bleeding, gaping wound.
Niamh nodded, blinking rapidly. Then she observed, “You’re butt naked. In the snow.”
“Yeah.”
“You have a gory tear in your throat.”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes dropped to the werewolves. “You saved me.”
“Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t have needed your help if I hadn’t been weakened by the iron.” When her eyes flew back to his, there was irritation in them.
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“You’re a man of few words, huh?” At his answering silence, Niamh sighed and pushed to her feet. She swayed, and he noted her skin was paler than usual. At his frown, she waved him off. “The visions take it out of me. We better get going.” Her eyes dropped to his throat. “How long do you take to heal?”
“Faster than the average wolf.”
“That’s your favorite saying.” Her eyes flickered down his body, and he saw a satisfying tinge of red crest her cheeks as she averted her gaze. “Where are your clothes?”
“Had to shift fast. They got ruined.”
With a nod, she marched over to the largest wolf, the one Kiyo had taken by surprise first, and began to remove his jacket.
Seeing what she was about to do—and not too happy about wearing a dead man’s clothes but knowing there was nothing else for it—Kiyo helped her undress the corpse.
“I think this might be the lowest moment of my life thus far,” she said, but there was a hint of humor in her voice.
Kiyo raised an eyebrow.
She huffed. “What? You want me to feel sorry for the supernatural arsehole who had every intention of killing me?”
“Rose said you were the sweetest soul she’d ever met,” he replied. A sweet soul wouldn’t find humor in stealing from a dead man.
A pucker appeared between her brows. “Rose knew me … before.”
Realizing she wasn’t about to elaborate, Kiyo merely grunted and changed into the dead wolf’s clothes. Despite the slimness of Kiyo’s waist, he had a very broad chest and shoulders, so the material of the wolf’s shirt strained against his muscles. The jacket didn’t even fit. The jeans would do, however.
Niamh had averted her gaze as he changed but now she stared at his chest. Her eyes flew to his, that pretty blush still staining her ch
eeks. “Well, you are an impressively proportioned individual, aren’t you?”
He hadn’t known a fae could blush. He found he enjoyed the notion. A smirk tickled Kiyo’s lips, but he didn’t respond. Instead he marched back into the woods. “We need to move.”
Her light, crunching footsteps sounded behind him as she hurried to follow. “What about shoes?”
Finally feeling the cold seep into his feet, he shrugged. “My boots are in here. We’ll find them. Then go. The sooner we get the hell out of Moscow, the better.”
“I guess I’m stuck with you, then.”
“I guess so.”
“About the getting out of Moscow part …”
If she was about to argue about that, Kiyo would lose his patience. He didn’t have much of it to begin with.
“I know where we need to go next. That’s what my vision was about.”
In all the fighting, he’d almost forgotten about the vision. He glanced at her. She was so tall, they were nearly on eye level. “Oh?”
“Tokyo. We need to go to Tokyo.”
Shock hit him first.
Then anger.
Because surely this fae woman was totally and utterly yanking his fucking chain.
4
Although Niamh was grateful the werewolf had come to her rescue, ultimately that wasn’t why she’d decided to stick with him.
Part of her vision had been about him. His name had tickled her mind as images of Tokyo came at her. The mountain was Mount Fuji so the garden must be in Tokyo … and it all had to do with Kiyo.
Unable to return to either her hotel or Kiyo’s apartment, Niamh had used her steadily building strength to conjure a backpack Kiyo had described that was in the dingy flat. It had his passport and a change of clothes inside it.
Niamh conjured the emergency bag she kept ready to go in her hotel.
“So this vision … it’s about me, right?” he asked as he reluctantly drove toward the airport. “That’s why you want to go to Tokyo and all of a sudden, you want me to come with you.”
She sighed, knowing it was too obvious to hide the truth. “Yeah. There’s something there about you, and it’s important. I don’t know what. My visions don’t work like that. They come in waves … almost like chapters in a story. Each chapter provides a little more information and usually it happens the closer I get to my destination or quarry.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
Niamh remained stubbornly silent. She didn’t know why this new flood of information in her vision included Kiyo, but she knew she didn’t trust him enough to confide in him. About any of it.
“Are you kidding?” His voice was worryingly calm and low.
Glancing at him, their eyes met as he took his off the road to glower at her. She wondered what his smile was like.
“Seriously? You want me to haul my ass back to a city I haven’t been to—” He cut off abruptly.
Interesting. “You haven’t been to …?”
“You tell me nothing, I tell you nothing.”
“Can you really blame me?” Her tone was conciliatory. Niamh wasn’t the type to be at loggerheads with someone. It wasn’t in her nature. And it seemed she was stuck with the werewolf for a while. “Think about it from my perspective. You kidnapped me using the only weapon on earth I’m vulnerable to. For a start, not many folks know what I am or what can hurt me, so you’re immediately in my ‘be wary of’ category.
“Plus, when I came out of my vision, there were dead bodies everywhere, hearts ripped out, and one of them was decapitated. When you appeared in all your naked glory, you had no sword in hand—actual sword, I mean.” Her cheeks bloomed hot and she cursed the nonsense blushing this man incited in her. She’d rarely ever blushed in her life before. Damn him. “So, one can only conclude that you ripped a man’s head off with your bare hands.”
The werewolf didn’t respond. Instead he gestured to a gas station. “We can change here.”
Niamh rolled her eyes at his evasiveness. “Fionn wouldn’t hire just anyone to watch out for me. He’d hire the strongest supernatural he knew that he could trust.”
Kiyo flicked her a considering look as he glided the car into a parking spot.
“He trusts you, but that doesn’t mean I do. I only started to trust him a few months ago, for goodness’ sake.” She sighed. “It’s going to take a lot more than a bloody fight in the snow to assure us of one another’s intentions. I can’t tell you about the vision. Not yet. If ever. But I promise you that we absolutely should go to Tokyo. I feel it in my gut. And my instincts about these visions have never let me down. I’m the reason Rose and Fionn are together. Did they tell you that?”
“They’re together because they’ve become Fate’s bitch. True mates.”
Niamh raised an eyebrow. “You have a low opinion of the bond?”
“I have a low opinion of anything that tries to control me.”
“That’s a funny way to look at love.”
Apparently done with the conversation, Kiyo moved to get out of the car.
Niamh grabbed his arm to stop him, and he cut her a bored, questioning look.
Feeling a strange tingling sensation running up her arms from her fingertips, she released her grip. “I just need you to know I’m not messing you about, taking you somewhere you don’t want to go for the hell of it. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”
His beautiful upper lip curled into that irritating sneer of his. “I don’t get upset.”
She grinned, mostly just to annoy him. “Well, you do a wonderful impersonation of it, then.”
The wolf’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly on her smile. “Please tell me you’re not one of those ‘I can make sunshine and roses out of piles of shit and pools of blood’ kind of people?”
Niamh chuckled and pushed open the passenger-side door but she didn’t answer him.
Her lack of response to his curtness seemed to perturb him. He grabbed their bags out of the back and handed over hers. His eyes scoured her face, as if he couldn’t quite figure her out.
They separated inside the twenty-four-hour gas station to their respective restrooms. Despite lingering weariness, Niamh’s mind turned over and over at the recent developments. Kiyo’s anger at returning to Tokyo only validated the vision. And he was angry. He was good at hiding how much, but Niamh sensed it. It pulsed beneath his skin. There was something important there, though not just to the werewolf but to her, and possibly others. It was maybe even about the bigger picture. The rest of the vision certainly had been.
For weeks she’d wanted her visions to have a coherent direction and mission. Like the visions before when she was trying to save the other fae-borne.
Well, wish granted. The visions had returned to the fae-borne.
And now Niamh bloody wished they hadn’t.
Despite her turmoil, or perhaps because of it, as Niamh changed into dry clothes, she imagined Kiyo changing in the men’s restroom. Heat bloomed on her cheeks, and other places on her body tingled in delight at the thought. When he’d come rushing out of those trees naked and wounded from defending her, she wasn’t going to lie—a very deep thrill moved through her.
The werewolf might be a brooding pain in the ass who’d tried to coerce her into accepting his guardianship, but all that beautiful fawn skin wrapped around taut muscle made him very fun to look at. Granted, she was somewhat wary that he was powerful enough to remove someone’s head from their body with his bare hands.
Also he moved faster than other wolves. He’d caught her completely off guard back at the club. And only someone fast and powerful could have taken down five members of The Garm by himself.
The airport was only forty minutes west in the light, early-morning traffic. They were both tense, on guard for The Garm in case they’d sent more than one unit after her. Once they abandoned the car in a parking lot, they strode determinedly toward departures.
“Why are you doing this?” Niamh asked as they reached the entrance.
“Acting as my bodyguard. I mean, a fairly terrible one who breaks my neck and all, but … yeah, for lack of a better word, my bodyguard.”
“Terrible?” he asked in his bored tone. “I saved your life. I wouldn’t call that being bad at my job. And that’s why: It’s a job I’m being paid to do. Extremely well paid.”
“There’s more to it than that. Someone who is secretly seething underneath at the thought of going to Tokyo wouldn’t go, not even for money.”
With a sigh of irritation, he gripped her arm and pulled her toward the airline desks. “It’s called an unbreakable contract. Basically, a spell. If I fail to protect you, the spell brings me to Fionn. He’s promised retribution.”
Niamh’s brow puckered. “Why on earth would you sign up for that?”
“Because I was bored.” He gave her a hard smirk. “Believe me, I’m regretting it.”
“Why?” she said. “Nothing about the last twenty-four hours has been boring, has it?”
Then she saw it … a definite twitch of his lips and a slight glitter of amusement in his eyes.
Something swelled in her chest at the sight, and she found herself grinning like a moron. “Thought not.”
“Shut up,” he said gruffly. “And let’s book this flight.”
Having the ability to make humans see what she wanted was one of Niamh’s less honorable tricks, but it had come in very handy over the years. She changed the name on Kiyo’s passport, which was currently Ryan Green.
“Very imaginative,” she muttered dryly.
He really could cut the most delightfully dirty looks.
And she presented a piece of paper that the desk staff would see as a passport.
They had no bags to check, so it was a fairly quick business. Kiyo attempted to pay for the tickets but Niamh didn’t want to give anyone a chance to track them. She paid in cash.
Their first flight was to Istanbul, and they had over six hours to wait until takeoff. The thought left Niamh feeling antsy for more than one reason. Six hours was too long to be in one place after being attacked by The Garm. Worse, she hated hanging around airports. Airports seemed to exist on some plane of existence where time slowed to a painful, sloth-like crawl. Her boredom always increased tenfold.