by Marie Hall
George’s bite had definitely infected her, and the way she’d been eyeing the rodent…it wasn’t just for the blood that had now congealed inside its body.
It made him curious as to what she truly was. She was a very rare hybrid species; what were her limitations and strengths? He’d never heard of another vampire/shifter mix ever, since the two classes had a violent distaste for one another. What could she do? That was a mystery he desperately wanted to solve.
As she closed her eyes, he knew the fight had finally left her. Slumping in his arms, she nodded slowly. “You have to understand. This isn’t easy for me. I took an oath and I took it seriously. Telling you, it breaks every promise I ever made.”
Tucking a stray curl of hair behind her ear, he waited until her molten gaze met his before saying, “You died. That vow you made, it broke the moment it happened.”
A loud scraping, like metal on metal, raked through his ears. George was moving a small fold-out table into the center of the room.
“Dinner is served.” He spread his arms and, with a large smile, pointed at the charred remains of the body that no longer resembled a rodent so much as a black stick.
Grabbing two fold-out chairs, Frenzy jerked his chin to the one sitting in front of the blackened food. “Sit.”
Swallowing hard, Mila pulled the chair out and took a seat. She delicately toyed with the tip of the black lump in front of her.
“Eat it,” George whispered. “It’s okay, I cooked it.” His smile was full of crooked teeth.
“Clearly, it’s been a while since last you cooked, old friend.” Frenzy snorted.
Shrugging, the monk covered her hand with his own, his slightly bluer than hers. There were obvious differences between the two of them. Pale as she was, she still looked more alive than him. Not like a walking corpse full of veins and riddled with damage to the flesh.
Apart from the scars across her cheeks, she looked flawless. Frenzy’s heart raced.
“As I’ve tried to tell you before,” George said, “you are not sired. In fact, you are not even a vampire.”
That statement caused her brows to drop. “What?” Holding out her wrists, she rubbed her fingers along the smoothness of her flesh, along the places on her body that had been most savaged while the vampires had been on her. “They bit me. Everywhere. They turned me.” Touching one of her cheeks, she inhaled deeply. “They’ve ruined me.”
Ruin was a matter of debate. The scars were nothing to Frenzy; he’d seen worse, and in fact it gave her a macabre appeal he found oddly exciting. The flaws on her intrigued him in a way that the classic perfection of his kind failed to do.
“They’ll come looking for me. They’ll find me.”
“Without a sire bond, it will be next to impossible.” Frenzy tapped his fingers on the table. “Why do the vampires want you?” he asked again, trying to be patient, but his patience was definitely beginning to wear thin.
Jaw clenching, he read the internal debate waging in her head as clearly as if she’d spoken it aloud. Whatever she’d done in her previous life, the brainwashing had been absolute. Even in death she didn’t want to crack.
“Tell me how you know I’m not sired.” Her voice trembled.
“No.” He shook his head. “You first. No more games. Start talking.”
Closing her eyes for a second, she nodded. “But you’ll tell me what I need to know, right?”
Lifting a brow, he didn’t answer.
With a defeated sigh, she began. “Do you know what the CIA is?”
George looked blank, but Frenzy nodded. “A branch of your government?”
Wiggling her hand, she nodded. “Yes. An elite branch and incredibly secret. I’m not CIA, but I’m the equivalent of them. CIA deals with human threats, terrorism, drug cartels, gangland type of things. I do too, but with monsters instead of humans.”
He smiled, but it lacked warmth. “I’ve met Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer—do not doubt that there are monsters within your kind as well.”
“Obviously. But that’s not the type of monster I was referring to.” She huffed impatiently. “I’m talking about the others. You guys.”
George cocked his head. “That is how you knew me on sight, and knew what Frenzy was?” He jerked his thumb at the reaper.
“Frenzy?” She said the name like a question, tasting it, sounding it out, and the way she did it made his pulse throb.
His name sounded good on her tongue. It’d been a long time since he’d indulged in the fantasy of being with a woman.
“Hmm.” Amber eyes narrowed into shrewd slits. “Why does that name sound so familiar?”
Shrugging, he continued to drum his fingers on the tabletop. “So you are a sect of humans studying us?” Getting the topic back to what was important, refusing to be distracted again. “To what purpose?”
“Just because San Francisco opened its borders to you guys, doesn’t mean that it’s going to just let you run roughshod on them. From the moment your kind stepped out of the closet, we’ve been keeping tabs.”
His gut told him they’d done more than just stay informed. “That’s not all you did. Tell the truth.” Setting his face into a hard, implacable mask, he stared her down, letting her know without words that he wasn’t playing.
Shifting in her seat, she picked at the charred remains of her dinner in front of her. “Look, we did what we had to do.”
“I haven’t walked this earth in some time.” Frenzy quirked a brow. “But I can tell that humans have grown more powerful. They have more knowledge of us than at any other point in history. How?”
Closing her eyes, a look of consternation flashed across her features. His question had hit a nerve and he couldn’t help but wonder why.
“Hmm?” he prompted, forcing her to stare at him again. “How are they learning so much? You knew I was a reaper before you even saw my hand. You knew George wasn’t merely a shifter, but that he was also a lone wolf—how?”
Scratching the back of her ear, she shrugged. “And this is why you found me as you did tonight. I’m very valuable.”
Nodding slowly, he perused her for any telltale sign of anxiety. It was much harder to spot on the undead. Where a human would be sweating or visibly shaken, she was cool and still as only a walking corpse could be. “How?”
“How what?” Her eyes were wide and without guile. It seemed to him she was being as honest as she could be, but he needed to make certain.
“How did humans learn of us? You have knowledge. How much? It’s not easy getting close to us. We tend to be a segregated bunch, preferring our own company as opposed to that of others. What did you do, little mortal? How did you get on the vampires’ radar?” Flinging one question after another at her, he waited to spot the cue. The giveaway that he’d hit on a nerve, but her demeanor didn’t falter.
“I’m a seer.”
George whistled. “And now it all makes so much sense.”
She nodded.
A seer was rare. Humans rarely held the gift; most of the gypsies and fortune-tellers he’d ever come across were nothing more than charlatans. The best he’d ever seen seemed to have a gut instinct when it came to reading a person’s emotions and drawing assumptions based off them. But a true seer, that was a precious commodity many of his kind would kill to possess.
“I don’t believe you.” He licked his incisors. “The lines are rare and few; in fact, so rare there are only two.”
“Aye, you bloody fool.” She spat. “The O’Hares and the O’Fallens. Including me.” Touching the spot above her heart, she raised a brow and his lips twitched, beguiled by the brogue that only seemed to come out when she was having a bout of temper.
The woman had spunk. He kind of liked it.
“If you are truly a seer, then you’d know to toss that knowledge around is tantamount to a death sentence. So what did you do, woman, to let those vampires in on the secret?” Frenzy asked.
“I’m aware of that. It’s why I was so protec
ted. Only very few within HPA knew who I really was, let alone that I even existed. I was perfect in keeping my secret; no one knew and that’s the way it would have stayed, if not for what I did.”
“And what is HPA exactly?” George interjected, lips twisting into a macabre version of a smile that showed slightly rotted teeth along the gum lines. For a four-hundred-plus-year-old lone wolf, he was miraculously well preserved. Without the pack magic to aid in regeneration, most loners died within their first century of excommunication.
Tucking a blond curl behind her ear, Mila wet her lips. “Human Protection Agency. HPA. Not the most creative acronym, but it got the point across.”
“And mortals wonder why we can never take them seriously.” Frenzy rolled his eyes at the absurd name. “So what exactly did you do? If you made it to thirty-two without alerting anyone before, you must have known better.”
If she’d still been human he knew her cheeks would have pinkened. Notching her chin high, she gave him a withering look that caused his pulse to stir. “Look, I didn’t pick the name. Fact is, we’re learning a lot about our backyard neighbors, most of it bad. You all may feel you have the final say on power structure, but Earth belongs to us, and we’ll defend what’s ours. As to what I did, it no longer matters. What matters is that my cover is forever blown.”
Snorting, Frenzy shook his head. “‘Us’? Dear girl, you are one of us now.” He waved his thumb between them, intensely curious about what she’d done, but recognizing her show of temper to be nothing more than camouflage for embarrassment, he suffered a rare moment of sympathy and decided not to press that. She was right: what she’d done was inconsequential to the matter at hand.
Nostrils flaring, upper lip curling back, her look was savage and volatile. The air danced with the electric energy of her emotions.
“I’ll never be one of you. Even if you don’t kill me now, they will—they’ll find me and take me out.”
“The vampires?” Frenzy scoffed. “You can fend off a couple fangers now.”
“I’m not talking about those parasites. I’m talking about HPA, about the shadow. Pick your poison. Either one will have a go at me.”
Brows forming a question mark, Frenzy’s lips thinned. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. HPA…because I know too much, I don’t doubt they’ve already sicced a tracker on my arse.” She shrugged as if that one were inconsequential. “As to the shadow, well…that is the seer’s greatest enemy. The O’Hares and O’Fallens never did learn of its origins; everything about the creature is steeped in mystery. The only thing I know to be fact is that it will not stop until it has consumed every last seer left.”
“What? Why?” George’s heavy lisp grew more pronounced, each word more a puff of breath than anything.
“I don’t know.”
Frenzy rubbed his jaw. “So are HPA and the shadow connected?”
She shrugged. “I doona know. But I doubt it. The creature has haunted my people down for centuries. It’s why my life is a constant game of hide and seek. I never lay roots, and rarely stay in one place long enough for anyone to even learn my true name. It’s the only way to escape it, to always stay one step ahead. I was doing fine, until recently. Did you hear of the Candyman killer?”
He frowned. “Candyman?”
“Aye.” She nodded. “The killer leaving bodies of women contorted into grotesque positions with a candy ring on their ring finger?”
He had heard of something like that. “I may have. Why? What does this have to do with either the shadow or HPA?”
“Everything. It’s why I was leaving the organization. I was set to flee again; if the vampires hadn’t found me I’d have been gone tomorrow morning.”
He frowned, still not connecting the dots.
Sighing, she tossed up her hands. “The bodies bore the shadow’s killing stamp.”
“And that was?”
Her lips thinned and he could read her indecision, that there was more to be said but she wasn’t willing to say it.
Switching tactics, he approached from another angle. “How do you know it was the shadow? Are you implying the Candyman and the shadow are the same?”
“No, I’m not…” Her words trailed off before pinning him with a hard glare. “I’ve told you all I will about that. Make no doubt, the shadow will find me and it will take me out. So either give me a knife now or not. But it will kill me and you won’t be able to stop it from happening.”
This wasn’t making sense. Did the woman have a death wish? Or was she speaking the truth? In all his years he’d never heard of a killing shadow. He was death; he should know of anything death-related, and yet the unmistakable quiver in her voice led him to realize that at the very least she believed what she was saying.
Her lips thinned and she turned her face to the side. Clearly she was done speaking, but he wasn’t done asking.
“What did you do to make the vampires aware of you?” Yes, he said he wouldn’t ask, but now with this shadow thing in the equation, maybe what she’d done was tied in after all.
She jutted her jaw out, something cold and raw flashing through her resinous gaze. “I did something I shouldn’t have, betrayed years of silence and blending in by one stupid, stupid…” Sighing, staring heavenward, she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Frenzy suspected that maybe it did. He was just about to badger her more about it, but George cut in first.
“But what I don’t understand is why the vampires were trying to kill you. If you truly are a seer, and they knew that, why did they not keep you?”
Her smile was small and bitter. “Because there is only one part of me worth keeping; the rest is dispensable.”
Finally he understood. Why she’d hesitated earlier and sealed her lips, looked away. Because it was her one weakness. “Your eyes.” Frenzy waited until she turned that familiar gaze on him. The look in them heated every nerve ending inside him. So similar to Adrianna’s, and yet, there was a hardness and rawness in these he’d never seen in his lover’s.
Nodding as if reluctant to do so, she said, “Yes.”
But something was nagging at him. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. Things still weren’t adding up completely. A seer was rare, exceedingly so. Such a gift was invaluable to whoever possessed it, and yet by her own admission, not only were the vampires coming for her, so was this shadow creature. Why? Keeping a seer seemed the better route than simply taking her eyes and hoping to make sense of the visions on your own. Without a seer to decipher the truth, reading the future was a lot like trying to watch a blurred satellite image.
“What aren’t you telling me, Mila O’Fallen?”
Lips pouting prettily, she shook her head. “How do you know my name anyway? I never gave it to you.” Rubbing her forehead, she seemed deflated, defeated. As if this was merely a change of subject but not an answer she was particularly keen on learning.
“Lise gave it to me,” he said, intently studying her features. What was she keeping from him?
“Yeah.”
He had no idea what that “yeah” was for. It was almost as if she wasn’t even listening, not really.
“But why kill you? That smacks of counterintuitiveness,” Frenzy blurted out with frustration. “A seer is vaunted, treasured. They should have done anything to take you.”
“They were pumping me full of venom. I do honestly think their intention in the beginning was to take me, but I”—she twisted her lips—“I goaded them to a killing frenzy. It was my one hope of them not getting what they wanted from me. You don’t technically need a seer around to see the future, so long as you have our eyes. Though it’s definitely easier to keep us than to kill us. I’m pretty sure they didn’t much care by the time I was done taunting them.”
He snorted. That he could believe.
She poked at the squirrel, a heavy sigh spilling from her. “I hate to admit this, but I’m starving. Could I…” She swallowed. “Could I hav
e a knife? Just to cut it up?”
“Use your fingers. You’re no longer mortal, so stop trying to hang on to human conventions.”
She hissed. “You think I don’t know what sort of abomination I’ve become?” A stiff wind to blow through her hair and she’d remind him of Medusa with her poisonous locks.
Getting up, George walked over to a wooden shelf where he kept his plates and cutlery. “Sometimes hanging on to any vestige of our old selves helps to keep us sane.” While his words were directed at Mila, his censorious gaze was directed at Frenzy.
Returning a moment later, he sat the sterling silver butter knife in front of her. Thanking the shifter, she took the knife in hand and tapped the body of the blackened meat.
Jerking his head to the side, George shambled off to a corner of the room, in clear invitation for Frenzy to join him.
After one last glance at her, Frenzy walked over. “What, monk?”
“I suspect she’s lying.”
Frenzy’s lips thinned. “About which part? Are you claiming all she’s said isn’t the truth?” Because he didn’t honestly believe it. Frenzy was pretty sure she’d told them mostly everything.
“No.” George shook his head. “Most of it was true. HPA does indeed exist.”
“If it exists, then why did you ask her what it was?”
Wringing his hands together, he sighed. “To test her. HPA is a human watch group, and they do learn about the society of others. They keep eyes and ears open on us and know much.”
“And you know this how?” Frenzy growled, casting a quick glance at her. She was still tapping on the meat.
“I’m old; there isn’t much for someone like me to do. I cannot live among the mortals, I’m a target on all sides. So much time on my hands, I learn things. I keep my ears and my eyes open. I first heard of HPA twenty years ago.”
Rubbing the bridge of his brow, Frenzy shook his head. “Stop circling the wagons, George, and just spit it out.”