“Of course.”
“Then why would we leave behind slayers to make them stronger?” I asked. “If we cut off their supply to supernatural blood, even if we didn’t find a way to kill them in battle, they’d eventually die from that alone.”
His eyes shifted, as though he could see through the closed door to the wolf pack beyond. “They’ll just find a new supply. For all we know, the Pera Pack might be like some emergency rations or special reserve for them.”
Anxiety punched me in the gut. “Then our mission just became a lot more complex. We rescue the redhead who helped me escape, and any other she wants to bring. And Caleb of course.”
“If he wants to come.”
Fire shot up my spine. “You don’t honestly think Caleb wants to stay, do you? Come on, Vlad killed his family.”
Tobias’s head swiveled back. “What he said to you when you saw him... Maybe he was telling you was that he felt he could protect the slayers in the harem better from the inside. Or maybe... I don’t want to hurt you, Geri, but maybe he was telling you the truth.”
What could I have said to that? That part of me wished it had been true? That if Caleb’s heart could be so easily converted, I’d probably dodged a bullet? Hell, for all I knew, slayers were polyamorous to begin with. A harem might be Caleb’s ideal situation. But something in my gut told me that wasn’t the case. The redhead was pregnant. That room had no other males, and a vampire couldn’t be the father.
“Where are the men?”
Tobias blinked thrice. “What?”
“Somebody fathered Alexandra’s baby. It couldn’t be Vlad or any of the other Ravens.” The wheels of my mind spun. “There have to be male slayers somewhere in the compound.”
The werewolf balanced his scruffy chin on a balled-up fist. “That doesn’t change the pressing issue. If we are able to free them, then what? We’ve never made plans for something like this. ‘Kill the Ravens’ was pretty straightforward and didn’t require any backend tasks.”
“We really need Inga and Igor on this part, don’t we?”
“Wouldn’t hurt.” His massive chest compressed as he pushed out a breath. “I bloody hate being dependent on other people for things. Okay, fine, how do we reconnect with the good vampires?”
“I’m not sure. For the moment, I think we just have to make a plan without them.”
A knock at the door made us both jump, followed by a string of Turkish I was certain had a few choice phrases.
Tobias reached behind me, his body pressing mine into the sink. His lips pressed against my ear. “Thank you, by the way.”
I tried to ignore the way his nearness pureed my insides. “For what?”
“For being here,” he said. “Until I had to think on the spot about why you came along, it never occurred to me that you’re doing it entirely for other people.”
I shook my head. “They almost destroyed the slayers. They’re after wolves. It’s only a matter of time before they come for the hoods. I’m doing this for all of us. Mostly, though, I’m doing it for Kara.”
The name echoes across his face. “For Kara?”
“If I had listened to you when you first came to me, we might have been able to free her. She might still be alive. I know that, Tobias. I know that her blood is as much on my hands as it is the Ravens’.”
His hand drops from the faucet, cutting off the sound of the water.
“She’d have liked you.”
“She did like me, I think. At least, for the short time we had together.”
A moment later, both his hands laced behind me. Tobias and I were already touching, but somehow, he found a way to pull me closer. I blinked my confusion as he lowered his lips to mine.
Moments before they touched, another fierce round of knocking jolted us.
Tobias was out the door before my eyes could open.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Wolves and hood were never meant to break bread, let alone bake it side by side.
Perhaps because I was relinquished, or because the Pera Pack had come to see me as Tobias’s pet, the wolves in the expansive home tried their best just to ignore me. Except for Ayşe, who had overcome her initial distrust to use me as an anthropological dataset. Her fascination with hoods made me feel like I was being interviewed for what would turn out to be a tell-all book.
Markus, however, had a completely different experience.
“They all look at me like at any moment, I’m going to wield my silver into a machete and take their heads. I swear that one with the two little kids wants to rip me up and feed me to her pups.”
I sighed as I put away the last of the freshly-washed tea cups on a shelf over the sink. Guilt had driven me to become obsessed with relieving the burden of their household chores. “Think of it from their perspective. You’re the monster from every one of the bedtime stories they’ve heard. Not to mention, you’re a behemoth. And a foreigner. Basically, the only thing you’ve got going for you is that Serhan is curious about you.”
“Honestly, I’d prefer he was a little less curious about me.”
I dropped the damp towel over a rack to dry. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I feel like he’s cataloging me, like he’s studying me for posterity. I think you and me are the first hoods this pack has ever seen. And since your abilities are offline, he’s using me to figure out the best defensive strategy.”
I hadn’t sensed quite that vibe coming of the alpha. Not that I could say with any certainty anymore. “If I were an alpha, or even if I was matron, I would do the same thing. I wouldn’t hold it against him. In fact, I admire him for it.”
“You would.” Markus snatched a cup–and my ire–from the shelf, pouring himself another portion from the constantly-brewed pot on the stove. “You want to hear my report or not?”
I motioned to the nearby table. In the week since we’d fled our rental house near the Bazaar, we’d had the same routine. The pack went about their normal business. Most of the adults, and even a few of the older teenagers, had jobs. The mothers of young wolves used the night to take their pups out. Anywhere else, little kids running around on city streets would have drawn judgement, but not in Istanbul. Anytime of the day, the population trafficked all the avenues, alleys, and byways, almost as if each citizen had a shift to report to for that distinct purpose. If a pack had to live in an urban center to stay off hood radar, Istanbul may have been one of the best places for them to blend into abnormal huey traffic patterns.
Markus alternated between spying on the Raven compound, and looking for life at our old rental. He hadn’t seen either Inga or Igor, though I told him that wasn’t unexpected. I was certain they’d been trying to call us, and since the only one of us with a phone was Markus (who refused to call them, since it would tip off my mother about his having been discovered), they must have suspected the Eminönü house had been compromised. I suspected by now they’d also ditched their burner phones and phone numbers for new ones.
After getting myself a matching cup of tea, I took a seat at the table. “Give it to me.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Markus, I know you’re my cousin. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hate you.”
“There’s something going on at their compound,” he said, getting serious. “Lots of deliveries being made. The fact that they’re coming in after dark tells me it’s something they’re concerned about overseeing personally.”
“And the slayers?” I stared into my tea, its waters a whirlpool.
Markus shook his head. “Other than the one you said was named Alexandra, no sign of them. She’s outside frequently, either alone or with that other one who took you from Galata.”
“They must trust her then,” I concluded. “Odd, since she was the one who stunned blasted Timur with a solarium that let me get away.”
“Yeah, about that...” My cousin rubbed the back of his neck. “Are you sure it was a solarium, and not, like, a flare gun or something?
I’m not as much of an expert as Igor and Inga are. I mean, obviously, right? But I’ve never found any stories of a vampire who was able to survive one of those things.”
I hadn’t thought about it before, but now that he’d mentioned it, it did seem odd. “Maybe they can change the intensity somehow?”
“What, like on Star Trek?” Markus mocked holding up a communicator to his mouth. “Slayers, set solaria on stun. I repeat: stun only.”
“Fine then, ass. What’s your idea?”
“That the vampire wasn’t really hit. They can move fast, Geri. Wicked fast. Your huey eyes might have thought you saw that guy take the brunt of the solarium, but he might have ducked out of its path long enough for it to miss him. But, getting back to Alexandra... She has a pattern.”
My eyes widened.
“Every night, about an hour after sunset, she’s driven a few blocks from the house and takes a walk at a park on the water. There’s a dock there. She walks out to the end of it and spends ten or fifteen minutes just sitting, meditating or something. Then, she gets up, walks back to the car, and goes back into the compound.”
“Any escorts?”
Markus leaned back. “Just one. Not that guy, Timur, and not Vlad based on your description of him. It must be one of the lackeys.”
My hands gripped the tea cup as resolve filled me. “I have to talk to her.”
“Are you insane?” Markus belts out a laugh. “Out in the public, where anyone can see you? And here your mother always said you were the best hood when it came to sneaking around that she’d ever trained.”
The reminder of my mother sent a shiver through me, one that left a fleck of doubt at the back of my brain about my ability to pull off this plan. “Camouflage is all about not being noticed, not not being seen. Conservative women here wear full veils. Even does when she’s on the street at night. I’m sure she’d let me borrow it. I’ll be just one of many hueys on that dock. The vamps won’t even know I’m there.”
“If that’s what you want to do, let’s do it. Or do you need another day to plan out the details?”
“I’m already operating on borrowed time here.” My eyes drifted to a calendar hung on the wall over the tiny kitchen table. Even though the labels of days, weeks, and months were in a foreign tongue, members of the pack had circled full moon nights. Half of the time Tobias could be away from the pack without consequences had already fled to the historical record. Moon madness could begin to peak around the edges of his behavior at any point. So far, there’d been no sign of it. Perhaps staying with wolves slowed the descent, but our luck wouldn’t hold out forever. Neither, for that fact, would Caleb.
“We go tonight. Which means... I better get some sleep.”
“I can’t believe you’re sleeping in the same room as Tobias.”
I couldn’t ignore the hint of jealousy in my cousin’s voice. He’d made no secret of the fact that, as far as wolves went, my best lupine friend would be a pretty sight to wake up to every morning.
Heat flared in my cheeks, but I turned to hide it. “We slept in the same room together in Chicago for almost a year. It’s no big deal.”
“That was before he outed how you feel about him to an entire foreign pack.”
I lowered my voice. Just because I didn’t think any of the pack were near us in the house didn’t mean they still couldn’t hear us if we didn’t take care. “It was a lie, a story to explain why I would act unlike other hoods.”
“A lie?” I didn’t think I’d ever seen Markus wear a wider grin. “You keep telling yourself that. You look at him now the same way you used to look at Cody Ryland.”
Any semblance of amusement melted from my face as I turned to the sink to rinse out my cup. “And look how that turned out.”
MY COUSIN’S WORDS REPLAYED in my mind like the cries of an annoying crow, building a border to sleep. I lay next to Tobias on the bed, staring at the back of his head as cycles of breath moved his body in a gracious arc: rise, fall, rise, fall. We’d been permitted a room usually reserved for newly mated couples–a fact that only made our presence in it all that much odder. Amy had been given the option of setting up a pallet on the floor, but decided instead for a spot in the pup room.
I questioned her motives.
Markus slept under a makeshift canopy on the roof; both he and the wolves thought it best.
Late in the morning, sleep used me as its play thing. The pack’s commune had no air-conditioning; wolves had methods of coping with excessive heat ingrained in their bodies. No such luck for ex-hood hueys. Early afternoon licked at my chest, at my neck. The only options for cooling off were to either go jump in the shower, or to lose the few articles of clothing I had on.
It’s no big deal, my hood brain said. Wolves don’t think about nudity the way non-wolves do. You know this. Remember that one time Rick caught you and Cody out in the woods and you had nothing on your top half but your bra? The two of them thought it was no big deal. If your boyfriend didn’t get all crazy about it when the two of you actually had been fooling around, Tobias won’t even notice now.
But you will, the female part of my brain countered. Now that you know you love him, you want to make things more awkward? He’s a widower, for goodness sake! Keep your shirt on and just sweat it out.
Ten minutes more, with the perspiration pooling in the hallow of my neck as I laid on my back, staring at the ceiling, and I could take no more. I sat up and began to unplaster the drenched cami from my body, only to pause, the bottom half the shirt covering my face, when the weight of his eyes settled on me.
“It’s hot,” I muttered. “If it makes you uncomfortable, I can keep it...”
When Tobias rolled over and his hand pulled down my shirt, a tiny part of me shriveled, chastised for the audacity. When he draped his hand over my waist, hooked my hips, and pulled my body flush to his, spooning me, that same tiny part of me stuck its tongue out and blew raspberries.
His lips hovered over my ear. “The key to overcoming heat...” His mouth trailed down my neck like a vampire and is sizing a juicy vein. “...is not to fight it. It only makes you that much more flustered.”
“Flustered?” The word came out as a laugh. “What a British thing to say.”
“It wasn’t a lie, was it?”
I didn’t have to ask him to clarify. “No, it wasn’t.”
“I knew. I can feel you, Geri. It never stopped, just softened a bit. These last few days, though, it’s back, full force.” He laughed against the back of my neck. “You really are one fucked up hood, aren’t you?”
In the miasma of his psyche, flecks of every emotion I felt swirled, but the dark ones pulled at him heavier. So wrapped up in the wash of what came over me, it took me a moment to reflect on what he said and truly hear it. Only then did I realize the truth.
“I can feel you.” I turned over on my back so I could look him in the eyes. “Like I used to. Like I could before my mother stripped me of my powers.”
“About time you figured that out.” Tobias ran a hand through hair moist with perspiration. “Anything else occur to you?”
“Yes, actually.” I leaned over him, putting a hand to his cheek. “I’m in love with you.”
My lips had barely come down on his when the door crashed open, and something that truly impossible walked in the door.
One of the slayers I recognized from Vlad’s harem, Konstantina, holding Amy by the hair.
The man beside me disappeared, a wave of fur and tooth and fury taking form, all while I wrapped my hands around the handle of a blade I knew I would never wield against a slayer.
Amy dropped to the ground, calling out as Konstantina’s foot prodded her further into the room.
“Did you really think we couldn’t track you down?” the dark-haired vixen asked, stepping over the crumpled mass of my friend weeping on the ground. “Did you really think you could hide from us?”
Tobias lunged forward, but a wolf wasn’t as strong in the day. With a l
ash of the slayer’s arm through the air, the wolf went flying. His body surrendered to the ground, motionless.
“You bastard!”
My foe grinned at my outlandishness. “Caleb will find it so interesting that I caught you in the arms of a wolf. Almost makes me want to drag you back, just so you can see the reaction of the man who cried from guilt after we made love last night, all because he felt like he had betrayed you.”
Realization unfurled in my stomach. If she wasn’t here for me, who was she here for?
“The werewolf, Kline,” the slayer said, as though she could work out the question burning through my mind. “Though on second thought, he’ll be much more compliant if we have you to dangle over him.”
At a snap of her fingers, two thugs ran in. That the Ravens had hueys on call during the day was something I’d foolishly never considered. Before I could believe what was happening, a hog-tied Tobias whimpered and yelped and their eyes turned toward me.
Ravens were one thing, but I refused to take out hueys, and harming a slayer would be like cutting up a bald eagle. Trapped in a corner, there was no solution for escape that wouldn’t leave the carpet soaked with blood.
The blade crashed to the floor, the sound echoing against a backdrop of pandemonium in the rest of the house. This was no random crash and grab; this was a coordinated campaign, one to instill terror and seed confusion.
The slayer beamed at me with approval as her two thugs stilled. “Surrender, then?”
“I never surrender. I just know when to cause a distraction.”
All three perpetrators’ eyes bulged moments before they swung around, just in time to catch Markus’s silver whizzing through the air. The lemon-sized pellets knocked the two huey’s skulls, rendering them unconscious. The slayer, however, could move as fast as a vampire, and did so. Markus fell back into the hall from the force of her impact as she rushed past him.
Taking Tobias along with her.
TWENTY-NINE
Ravening Hood Page 19