Sofia wasn’t sure where she was or how she’d gotten here, but she was certain that here was the right place to be. “I had to find you. My gut tells me—”
“Your awakening psychic ability tells you.”
“—that this is all true. Cathy needs my help. I need your help. She’s in danger, and it has something to do with werewolves.”
“I do believe you are correct, my darling. What does your cousin know about werewolves?”
“Pashta said that he tried to get hold of both of us to explain our heritage. She knows less about our Romany background than I do. We never discussed werewolves in our e-mails, but—”
The world twisted and changed before she could finish.
“Dreamscapes,” she complained upon suddenly finding herself standing among a group of people in a fire-lit cave.
Jason stood in front of the group. He seemed younger. He was pale and thin to the point of gauntness, all cheekbones and shadows and burning blue eyes. The people around her were thin as well, their clothes threadbare and hopelessly old-fashioned. There was something familiar about each face she saw in the flickering light.
“Your people,” Jason said. No one seemed to hear him but her.
She realized she was somewhere long ago, when her great-grandfather was that tall, grave man to her left, and her grandfather was the strikingly handsome teenager beside him.
“You’re giving me a past I never knew I had,” she said to Jason.
“Yes, but that’s not why we’re here.”
“Why are we here?”
“To save the world from Nazi werewolves. Your attention, please,” he said to all of them.
She’d been through basic training; she knew when to listen to a drill instructor.
“Somewhere deep inside every moonchanged creature there is a human mind. If you think you should feel compassion for them, then you are dead wrong. Or, I should say, you will be dead. Show anything but strength and dominance and you will rightfully end up with your throat ripped out.”
“How can you know this?” the youthful version of her grandfather asked.
“Do you think my kind start out as sane and reasonable beings?” Jason shook his head. “Our males go mad when we come of age. We crave violence, blood, and females. We live to hunt. We seek out combat. We delight in fighting our brothers until the strong win and the weak die. Civilization has to be imposed on us with a will and hand of iron. The moonchanged are no different than our young.” He smiled. “Except that they are easier to control.”
One of her relatives snorted cynically and spoke up. “Teach your revered granny to suck blood, Prime.”
“Right. You guys already know how to control crazy werewolves.” Jason turned his intense blue gaze on her. “But you don’t.”
The world rippled and changed again; she and Jason remained the only constant things in it. The link that bound them together circled around and through them. It filled her with bright hot sparks that pooled in her heart and her soul and set her insides ablaze.
“That feels—wonderful,” she told him.
He held her close. “I know. But it’s not helping.”
“Depends on what you want to help.” She traced her fingers up his back and through his hair. “You feel so good.” Sofia touched her tongue to the base of his throat. “You taste good.”
“Sweetheart, you have no idea how good I taste, but I promise sometime soon, you will. I want you,” he told her. “All of you, body and soul—but right now it’s your mind I need to pay attention to me.”
“Isn’t this attention enough?” She continued to kiss a line across his throat and felt the pulse racing beneath his skin.
He made a small, needy sound that triggered the strangest urge to sink her teeth into his neck. Animals growled behind her before she could give in to the impulse.
Sofia glanced back to see the snarling George and Gracie. “Shoo,” she commanded them. “Who invited you into this dream?”
“I did.”
“I’m not getting naked in front of your mutts,” she informed him.
“It’s nice to have your attention back on business.”
Before she could ask him what he meant, the world changed again.
Damn it, I wish you’d stop doing that! she thought.
“Pay attention,” he replied.
From that point on, the concept of words disappeared altogether.
“You do realize that you’re in a lot of trouble, don’t you?” Cathy Carter asked the younger of her captors.
She sneezed as she finished speaking, which lessened her statement’s dramatic impact. She was having a terrible allergic reaction to whatever they were spraying on her and themselves.
The beefy teenager laughed, but she sensed his unease. He looked toward the locked door. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
She’d been working on this one’s fear from the moment she’d been kidnapped. “Then listen, and remember that this is not a threat. It’s not long until the full moon. Come the change, you are going to get your throat ripped out.”
He sneered. “Not by you.”
She could feel the moon madness creeping closer to the surface. A taste for blood was starting to burn the back of her throat. She licked her lips and fought back the anticipation.
“Maybe it won’t be me,” she agreed with him. “But your pack is still going to die.”
Handcuffs fastened her to a chair. The chair was inside a sturdy cage. The cage was in a warehouse that also contained trucks, vans, and motorcycles. She’d woken up in the cage after a trio of ferals snatched her outside her apartment building as she was leaving for work. Her captors had been coming and going all day, mostly ignoring her except for the kid they’d left to guard her. She didn’t know how many of them there were, and it bothered her that they seemed to be getting ready to leave town.
She hoped the Bleythins showed up to save her soon, or that she figured a way out of here herself. Wherever the bad guys were going, she didn’t want to go with them.
“When my pack—”
“You don’t know anything about your pack!” the boy shouted. “We’re your real family.”
His reaction startled her. Surely the blond biker types she’d seen coming and going all day weren’t the Romany relatives she and Sofia had been exchanging e-mails about? This bunch had a kind of Aryan Nation vibe going for them. Several of them sported shaved heads and swastika tattoos, one of them on his forehead à la Charles Manson. Creepy.
“You’re not my family,” she said.
“You’re a werewolf just like us,” he snarled.
“That will do.”
Cathy shifted her attention to the man who had spoken. She hadn’t seen him before, but she knew a pack alpha when she saw one. Instinct told her to avert her eyes and submit to his least whim, but she wasn’t about to give in to instinct.
“That’s right,” he said, stepping forward and looking deep into her eyes. “The moon doesn’t control you yet.”
Cathy was furious at the heat that shot through her. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Your destiny.”
She made a gagging sound.
He laughed. “Call me Eric. I’ve been searching for you for a long time.”
“And why is that?”
“Because we are meant to be together, Catherine, my love. I’m the reason you are what you are. It was because of me that you were turned.”
Hatred seethed through her, along with complete disbelief. “The feral that turned me is dead.”
Eric nodded. “He was a good friend and a loyal follower. His sacrifice is greatly appreciated.”
This was sick and weird, and sent a chill through her. “Sacrifice?”
Eric smiled at her gently, but the look in his eyes was possessive. “There’s so much you have to learn about our kind. It’s important to know that incest is taboo. We never mate with one that we have turned. I wanted you above all others, so a friend brought you
into the pack.”
Cathy’s free hand flew to her throat, to the spot where she could still feel hot breath and sharp teeth sinking into her flesh. She remembered bright gold eyes, soft fur, and a heavy body pinning her down. She’d thought the wolf was going to kill her, but what had happened had been infinitely worse.
At least for a while.
Mike Bleythin had rescued her, from the terror and from the moon madness. He’d given her a pack, and protection. She still couldn’t control the monthly transformation into a beast, but at least she no longer dreaded the change quite so much.
She focused every bit of hatred she could summon on the smiling Eric. “You deliberately forced me to become a werewolf?” He nodded. “You bastard.”
He shrugged. “We should have been mated a long time ago, but the natural-born Tracker interfered with my plans for you. Now we only need one more thing before we can abandon this stinking mortal world and return to the wild, where we belong.”
Cathy had no intention of running off to live in the woods like an animal. She had to find out all she could, think of a plan. “What thing do you need?” she asked.
“Your cousin Sofia, of course. Once she’s turned as well, we’ll have both of the Hunyara females bearing our offspring. You can’t imagine the strength that will bring to the pack.”
She didn’t want to imagine it. She wanted to be sick. Even more than that, she wanted to rip out this smug asshole’s throat.
Chapter Thirteen
W ho would have guessed Cathy had a secret life?” Sid commented as she peered over Eden’s shoulder at the computer screen. Eden had easily cracked the security on Cathy’s laptop and now they were sitting at her kitchen table going through her e-mail.
“You’re not referring to the secret life where she’s a werewolf, are you?” Eden responded.
“That secret life isn’t secret from us,” Sid pointed out. “But we didn’t know about Cathy’s having a family.”
“We all come from somewhere—with baggage,” Eden said.
Sid nodded. “You speak truly, my sister. But Cathy has never talked about where she came from before Mike saved her from the feral that turned her. It’s strange to find out that she’s kept up with her relatives. I thought we were her family,” Sid added a bit forlornly.
“Maybe you should think of Cathy as a little sister who hid her diary from you. We all need privacy, werefolk and vampires even more than mortals.” Eden gave Sid a very discerning look. “We all have secrets. Some more dangerous than others.”
Sid knew that Eden wasn’t at all psychic, but she was far from stupid or unobservant, and all the vampires, werewolves, and mortals at the firm’s office spent a lot of time interacting with one another.
“I have no secrets,” she said as lightly as she could.
“Oh, no, a daughter of the Wolf Clan like yourself is too noble and forthright to ever scheme, lie, conspire, or connive to get exactly what you want, while denying yourself the one thing you don’t think you can have.”
“There are a lot of things I know I can’t have. Vampire females have to tread very carefully and you know it.”
“And yet, you are a career woman with all the perks of a Prime—in most things.”
“In most things,” Sid echoed hollowly. “And I shall continue to scheme, conspire, and connive to get what I want—for all the good it will do me in the long run.”
Eden shook her head. “You don’t have to be a prisoner of your gender.”
“For the sake of the continuation of the species, and the honor of my Clan, in the end, I will be. I’m just trying to put off the inevitable as long as I can.”
“And you’d never openly rebel?”
“You know I won’t.”
“You Clan folk are such hopeless, selfless romantics. Not that I’m complaining,” Eden went on before Sid could argue. “If you hadn’t decided to go searching for your long-lost brother, neither he nor I would have ended up as part of the Bleythin-Wolf menagerie. He was terrible at being a villain and I made a lousy vampire hunter, so Laurent and I have a lot to thank you for. You and Joe, and Mike and Harry and Marj and Daniel, and Cathy, our lost feral sister.”
Sid noticed the slight emphasis Eden put on Joe Bleythin’s name, and her heart pricked just a little with knowing that here was one more person who shared the knowledge Sid could never share with him.
“Let’s concentrate on Cathy.” She firmly called their attention back to the far more important subject. “Read on.”
Eden opened up another saved message in the Sofia file, but Daniel Corbett came into the kitchen before Sid could read the e-mail.
“See anything?” Sid and Eden both asked.
He blinked from behind his glasses and ran a hand through unkempt blond hair. They’d left him sitting in Cathy’s bedroom doing his psychic thing while they searched the computer.
“I doubt it,” Daniel answered. “I’m not sure if what I caught was glimpses of the past, or scenes from a horror movie set in World War II.” He scratched his jaw, where faint stubble of a beard showed how long he’d been up. “Somehow I don’t think Cathy’s disappearance has anything to do with rescuing gypsy werewolves from evil Nazi scientists.”
Sid looked at her retro-psychic mortal cousin in disbelief. “What did you eat before going into your trance?”
“My gift’s obviously no use this time,” he said. “I think I’ll see if Joe and Mike need help. Has Laurent picked up any news from his sources?”
It sometimes came in handy that Laurent Wolf had not always walked on the good-guy side of vampirekind. He knew a lot of dubious characters out on the streets who wouldn’t talk to anyone else at the Bleythin agency.
Sid tapped a finger on her forehead and held up a cell phone. “Not a word so far.”
Eden sighed, in the way of a female missing her bondmate. “I really hate not going along for backup when he’s dealing with scum.”
“I’m sure he wishes you were there, too,” Sid said.
Laurent was probably the only living Prime who didn’t object to having a mortal female as a fighting partner. Eden and her brother were definitely the black sheep of the Wolf Clan.
“Try checking for temporal connections at the office again,” Sid suggested to Daniel. “You might have more luck without the rest of us around contributing psychic white noise.”
He nodded and left. This time her cell phone rang before she could read the e-mail. It was Joe.
“Still not a trace of a scent,” he reported.
“Could a vampire be involved?” Sid asked her werewolf partner. “You know how we can mess up your sensing.”
“What would a vampire want with a werewolf?”
What indeed? “I have no idea. But there was a Family Prime at Lady Juanita’s tonight. I’ve got a feeling he’s involved in this somehow.”
“But what is this?”
“I don’t know. But my senses tell me that there’s somebody out there who wants Cathy for a really evil reason.”
Joe growled. “You think it’s this vampire?”
“I think he’s involved, but I don’t know why. Not yet.”
“It’s best to let vampires handle vampires,” Joe said. “Mike and I will keep looking for the werewolf connection.”
Eden gave Sid a skeptical look when she put the phone down. “I was under the impression you liked this Cage guy.”
“I like his genetic potential,” Sid answered. “That’s not the same thing.”
Finally, as dawn neared, she started reading Cathy’s e-mail correspondence.
Chapter Fourteen
T o save the world from Nazi werewolves,” Sofia murmured as she woke up from the long and complicated dream.
How did the subconscious come up with stuff like that? She chuckled and stretched out along the comfortably warm length of the man in the bed beside her.
The man in the bed beside her?
Wait a minute.
Her head rested on a bar
e shoulder, and an equally bare arm was wrapped protectively around her. When she opened her eyes she saw Jason Cage, and for a moment joy flooded through her.
Then she recalled that she’d gone to bed alone and sat bolt upright. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He opened one eye and grumbled, “Trying to sleep.”
She didn’t remember him arriving in her room. She knew she hadn’t answered a knock on the door and let him in. Yet, she had the impression of having welcomed him into her…
Into her what?
Sofia rubbed her temples. Her mind felt stretched, and different. There was a lot of jumbled-up information swimming around in there and—
“You’ll have a migraine if you try to make your conscious mind straighten it all out.”
“Confusion seems to be turning into the normal state of things, and I don’t like it,” she told him.
“I don’t blame you. But let it go. Relax.” His deep voice was oh so soothing.
He sat up and began to knead her tense shoulders with his strong fingers. She couldn’t help but close her eyes and lean back into the pressure.
“What am I going to do with you?” she asked. “I didn’t ask you to be here. I don’t know how you got here. I—”
“Don’t want me to be anywhere else,” he finished for her.
His hands moved down to cup her breasts and her nipples went instantly hard against his palms. As desire pulsed through her, Sofia knew she couldn’t argue with what he’d said.
Making love made more sense than the sorts of conversations they had, anyway.
She turned in his arms and drew his mouth down to hers. Her tongue explored and grazed across sharp canines. For a moment she tasted the metallic tang of her own blood, bringing her to the brink of orgasm. Then his hands on her took her over the edge.
He’d known he couldn’t keep from making love to Sofia again, but he’d sworn that he’d keep from tasting her. That promise flew right out the window when he accidentally drew blood merely with a kiss. Her pleasure resonated through him. He’d never known a sharing of desire and fulfillment to match this. He needed more. To give her more, to take more.
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