“We knew binding your powers would turn them into something else because we’ve done that with true criminals before, with men and women who have done things so terrible, you, Raphael, would kill them on the spot. We released one, a man who served a thousand-year sentence for a crime I don’t want to discuss today. His lupus dux reported the way he diligently helped the others in their pack, how he never made a violent move toward anyone, and after all that time, we decided to give him another chance.
“He committed the same horrific acts as before, only there were no survivors the second time. His powers went from being simple control over earth to the ability to cause earthquakes. Before he was finished, he sunk a city underwater and split mountains apart. We beheaded him, knowing those kinds of powers in a mind as sick as his would only bring more deaths, deaths that were on our heads as the Elders who agreed to free him.
“We would not take that risk again. We had to give that level of capability to men who were good, but who also committed some kind of crime so that we could put you in a clan prohibitum to start with. I’m sorry so much time was taken away from you, but because of it you’ll give every werewolf so much more time to find love, to dote on children or to simply enjoy the ebb and flow of the word as time goes by.”
By the time Nathaniel finished talking, he’d drained his third drink.
Raphael was floored. So much had been taken away from them, been done to them, all without their knowledge or consent. Who did these Elders think they were, tearing all of their lives apart and heaping the responsibility of defeating the “apex predators” on their shoulders?
He couldn’t deny it had brought him to Mary, who he couldn’t imagine his life without, just as it seemed to have brought all of them their mates, no matter the situation between Alex and Leila, or Cael and Aiyanna. Even if they weren’t mated, Raphael knew his pack would have taken up arms against the warlocks. They threatened all creatures, and probably humans too.
What the Elders did was, without question, fucked up.
But that wouldn’t stop Raphael and his pack from doing what they would always do: fight for those they loved, for those innocents who deserved no harm to come to them. They would complete what the Elders wanted of them, not for the Elders, but because it was the right thing to do.
Damn those Elders, anyway.
“You wronged us, no matter your justification” Raphael said coldly. Not one of the Elders lost a wink of sleep from what they did to him and his friends, and that made Raphael want to burn down Nathaniel’s house, which reminded him of a question Nathaniel had skated around. “Why do you have a house here? Do you live here?”
“Yes.”
Crash.
A birdbath standing in the center of Nathaniel’s yard split in two, falling sideways in opposite directions. The Elder was lucky it was only the concrete lawn ornament he’d broken, and not Nathaniel’s head. Raphael’s energy had built up to be too much for him to rein in, and when the birdbath fell, he felt no remorse for his inability to control it.
He’d been able to keep himself from harming Nathaniel, and that was enough.
“You can’t do that.” Raphael met held Nathaniel’s gaze, refusing to waver.
“I wanted to monitor your powers once you all started to regain your freedom. It’s important that I—”
Raphael hit the glass table between them so hard, the glass shattered, breaking a ceramic bowl, the decanter, and the glass cup Nathaniel had been drinking from as well.
“You can’t watch what we do, knowing what danger we’ve been in these past few months, and not help us. Were you going to let us all die, back when we fought the warlocks at Full Moon Brewery? Because we may have, if not for the deal we made with Alexandre. And then where would your plan be?”
The sting in his palm barely registered.
Silently, Mary got up and disappeared inside Nathaniel’s house, her posture rigid.
“I wasn’t there at the time, but I had scouts who saw enough to alert me to the situation.” Nathaniel nodded, breaking eye contact with Raphael to look down at the broken glass at their feet. “I should have sent in help.”
“What could you have done? What kind of help?” Mary spoke from the doorway, her hair flying back from her face as a strong gust of wind blew cold air in her direction. She had two white rags in her hand. Making a trilling sound, pieces of glass followed the wind, right into her path.
Raphael stood, unafraid of the glass cutting through his thick-soled combat boots, stalked over to Mary, and picked her up in his arms. It got blood on her sweater, but he’d rather her have stains in her clothes than hurt feet. Ignoring Nathaniel’s eyes boring into his back, he carried his mate to her chair and sat beside her.
She wrapped his hands tightly in the rags, glancing up at the Elder when Nathaniel said, “I could have sent any size army here, with some of the strongest weres in the world. There still would have been a fight, but your side would have outnumbered theirs.”
Mary beat Raphael to speak. “Don’t ever do that again,” she murmured low, enough of her banshee powers coming out in her voice to make Nathaniel cringe. A blood vessel burst in his eye. “You made them what they are. Now protect them.”
“I wanted to see what Alexandre would do,” Nathaniel insisted, his mouth twisting. At this moment, he seemed older than ever before: the lines on his face were deeper, his eyes tired and shoulders hunched. “I had to know whether he would step in.”
“Now you know.” Raphael created his own wind to scoop up the glass pieces. He brought them to a bucket a few feet behind Nathaniel’s chair, and stood once it was safe for Mary to walk in her paint-spattered Converses.
“I assume you know our peace with the warlocks is temporary?” Raphael asked.
Nathaniel nodded.
“Then give us backup when that truce ends.” They already had some help—a dozen soldiers or so from Halifax and Inverness—but he didn’t know if it would be enough, and he wasn’t willing to risk everyone’s lives when it wasn’t absolutely necessary.
When the time came, the more they overwhelmed the warlocks, the better off they would be.
The Elder held out his hand. “You’ll have the resources of every Elder, not just me, at that time. You have my word.”
Raphael took his hand and held on, his grip punishing.
“There’s something else.”
Chapter 15
CAEL woke up with his legs wrapped around Aiyanna’s. Their hands were clasped together, as if they were both afraid of being separated while they slept. He dared anyone to try and take her away from him.
Now that he had her, he had no plans of letting go.
He shifted to get a better look at her, jostling her shoulder in the process. Aiyanna hissed at him half-heartedly. Lifting her arms and moving her legs out straight, she stretched in a particularly feline manner with her eyes still closed.
“Do you normally make a habit of waking up this early?” She peeked at him narrowly, her full lips pursed.
She couldn’t have stretched like that if she hadn’t healed significantly. Last night, that sort of movement would have re-opened her wound. Now there was no pain marring her expression, only faint annoyance and the same contentment Cael felt welling inside himself.
Nothing held him back from tearing the covers and bandages off her, leaving only the warm skin of her chest, rising and falling rapidly with her breath. All that was left from her injury was a faint yellow bruise he may not have noticed had he not been looking.
When their eyes clashed, hers searing him, she had to be thinking the same thing.
Finally.
“Are you—” he started, unwilling to make an assumption that could hurt her in any way.
“Don’t you ask me if I’m ready for you.” She jerked his hand in hers and brought it straight between her legs, where he could feel just how much she desired him. “I’ve wanted this for so long, I still can’t conv
ince myself this is real.” Her whisper was broken, interrupted by a fat tear rolling down her cheek.
“I know.” He kissed her mouth, her cheek, her ear and her lips one more time, trying to convey his love in every movement. “It seems too good to be true. You are too good to be real. It’s something I realized right after I met you.”
“Well, screw reality.” Aiyanna released the claw on her index finger and held it up. Her grin was wicked. In a few well-placed flicks of her finger, Cael’s shirt and pants, wrinkled from sleep, were in shreds on the bed around them.
With a growl, he gave her sports bra and sleep pants the same treatment. He had to be much more careful than she’d been with him. Her clothes clung to her curves, accentuating the dip at her waist and the graceful bow of her neck. Even so, it didn’t take him long to have her completely naked, and healed, beneath him.
At that moment, if he had the capability to capture the beauty before him, he would have done so.
He’d known she was gorgeous, but imagining her body was different from seeing it. Next time another man looked at her, Cael might gauge their eyes out simply because he now knew what they were trying to visualize.
Their lips met again, and the spell she’d unknowingly cast over him broke. His awe remained, he wasn’t altogether certain he would breathe the same way again, but he could move his limbs. He tangled a hand in her hair, gently tipping her head back, while he felt the curve of her side. He caressed each breast and teased the peaked tips, moving over her faint bruise and lower, until her core was warm against his hand.
Now it was her turn to catch her breath. Her breathing became ragged while he played, reveling in the scent of her pleasure. She came sighing his name, her muscles temporarily going languid while his lips tasted her skin.
Then she pressed against his shoulders, turning him over so she could crawl down his body. Cael stopped her when she kissed his navel, her hands gripping his hipbones.
“No,” he managed, his teeth gritted. If she so much as breathed on his penis, he’d come immediately. “We have millennia for that. Today, I want to be inside you.”
Understanding gleamed in her golden eyes, and she rose over him, her hair falling around them in a shining black canopy. Their eyes locked. She sank down onto him, taking him all the way to the hilt.
She tried to move, but Cael stopped her with his hands at her waist, his control quickly vanishing. Then he released her, rising up to meet her in a deep kiss while they started to move to the same rhythm. His arms around her, his tongue licking hers, he knew they’d make love every way there was, thousands of times, and neither of them would ever become tired of the other.
Aiyanna fit perfectly on him. When their bodies met again he tightened his grip, spilling inside her with a hoarse cry. “You’re my mate,” he murmured, stroking her back, her hair, her face. “You’re mine.”
Moving lazily with him still inside her, she brushed her lips against his. “Back at you, buster, and I’m one possessive cat.”
He laughed, and it was the most carefree he’d felt since before his conviction. Except now he was happier since the missing part of his life, the one he’d been trying to fill with Ava, was filled with his perfect match.
They spent the next half hour or so holding one another, Cael touching the soft spot behind her knee that made her laugh, and Aiyanna running her hands through his hair before lightly touching the corner of his mouth.
“Is that a dimple? It is! Pigs are flying, Orleans Parish has become dry, and you have a dimple!” She laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, while Cael didn’t fully understand what she was referring to.
Listening to her laugh only made his smile widen, which merely sent her into more hysterics.
By the time she calmed down, still chuckling, a loud rap sounded at the door.
“Get dressed. We need both of you.” It was Heath.
“I went to Emmanuel’s to fetch your things, Aiyanna. Get decent, and I’ll bring them in so you can dress.”
Cael looked down at Aiyanna. Their arms were still around each other, and he was loath to change that.
“Don’t leave me again. Please.” The memory of her disappearing, her bag in her hands, stung worse than he could have ever imagined. If he was destructive before, it was nothing compared to what he would do if she disappeared now.
He wasn’t altogether sure he could take that again.
“Never,” she whispered, kissing him softly. She grinned, her eyes twinkling. “Not that we won’t fight, because we absolutely will.”
Her smile faded when they broke apart. She wrapped the sheets around her, muttering darkly about how much of a cliché the act was.
“If you hadn’t taken your clothes away—” Cael started seriously.
“If you hadn’t shredded my clothes, I’d have something to wear!” she interrupted, trying and failing to frown.
Beyond the door, both Sophia and Heath were laughing.
“Heath, if you look at my mate, I’ll slit your throat,” Cael warned.
“Noted,” Heath choked, the sound something between a laugh and a cough.
That said, Cael gave Aiyanna one last lingering kiss before he sent a wave of air to bring him to his room, where he planned to take all of Aiyanna’s things Sophia currently carried. Until they had their own place, something he’d think about once Pureblood was out of their city.
It was the quickest shower Cael had ever taken, not because he was actually concerned about Heath looking at Aiyanna while she wasn’t clothed, but so he could be near her again sooner. He was like a teenager with a crush, craving her presence, but it was more than that.
Danger hovered over them all, and Cael wasn’t about to let it touch Aiyanna again. The question was, who would it affect?
He had his answer five minutes later, when he, Aiyanna, Heath, Raphael, and Mary stood before the vampires’ house in Metairie. He didn’t hear a sound, and the morning’s strong winds marred his sense of smell, giving him scents from the lake and a nearby bakery rather than an indication of what was going on in the house.
Sebastian and Briony were on their way. Cassidy had requested to be driven, having greatly disliked travel by air. What surprised Cael was that Aiyanna agreed with the human.
“I get that,” she’d said when Raphael explained back at the firehouse. “It’s useful, but it sure is uncomfortable. Like, forgetting you had a date with a guy and thinking his number was the pizza place calling you back uncomfortable.”
Sophia had gawked at her. “You’ve done that?” she exclaimed.
“Twice.” Aiyanna winked at Cael. “I’ve only met one truly unforgettable man.”
Heath had made a gagging noise, causing Cael to shoot him a look that promised violence if he said a word.
“We’ve waited long enough for them to answer the door,” Raphael declared. Having arrived and knocked about five minutes ago, the vampires were either not home…or something had happened inside.
Their small group stepped back, and Cael placed himself between the door and Aiyanna in case any debris from the door accidentally went flying in her direction. Cael and Raphael held out their hands. Cael nodded for Raphael to break the door, and he created a type of shield to keep the pieces of wood within a foot or so of the house’s entrance. With a few snapping sounds, the door was forced open, wood sprinkling down around it.
Now he smelled the blood, stronger than during the Tucks parade.
All of them raced inside the silent house, headed for that smell. The problem was, it wasn’t concentrated to one place. The scent was downstairs and upstairs, pointing them in every direction away from the lit portions of the home.
They stopped in the living room, confusion written on all of their faces. “We’ll take downstairs since there’s only one bedroom down here.” Raphael’s expression was grim. “The rest of you go upstairs.”
Heath nodded and brought Sophia and Cael to th
e second story using air before he turned around to get Aiyanna. Cael wanted to curse at him for leaving her alone, if only for a split second; although, he understood his friend’s reasoning. It was in their best interest to keep her safe, and it was less dangerous where they’d already been than someplace they hadn’t yet checked.
The moment Heath Aiyanna arrived upstairs, she took Cael’s hand and ran to the nearest bedroom, where Sophia was jiggling the door handle. “It’s locked,” she said, taking her Zippo out.
Aiyanna turned into a panther, all of her claws extended to break through the flimsy door. It looked as if the door were made of butter, the way she leapt through, landing on her feet as a human with only a few flecks of white paint in her dark hair.
“I might be a healer, but I’m no china doll,” she shot over her shoulder.
If the scent of blood hadn’t increased, Cael would have smiled. He followed Aiyanna into the connected bathroom, where a scene reminiscent of Psycho awaited them.
Charlie was curled up next to a small space heater, her head leaned back on the side of the bathtub, and a towel pink with blood wrapped around her. Rags covered in blood were piled next to her, and she had two more pressed against her wrists.
“Thank God for you werewolves and healers,” she whispered, tears running down her face at the sight of them. Her hair was dried in clumps around her face.
Even if he’d wanted to, Cael didn’t think he could have kept Aiyanna from helping this woman who had pain etched into her open, kind features. He didn’t like vampires as a general rule, but he never would have hurt Charlie or any other woman, and the fact that someone did angered him.
But while she’d lost a lot of blood, it wasn’t enough to explain the amount that permeated the air. Her friends were hurt too.
“Go see the other rooms,” he told Sophia and Heath. He didn’t have to tell them he intended to stay with Aiyanna.
Five minutes later, there were only pink scars where the slashes had been. Obviously more aware now that she was healed, Charlie blushed, and Cael turned away so she could go into her room and change.
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