I couldn’t stop the grunt of pain that escaped me as I pushed to my feet again. Too many fights and too few hours of sleep had left me slow and sore. I rubbed my jaw, trying to ignore the headache that was throbbing in at the back of my skull. The two lycanthropes were slowly untangling themselves and getting to their feet.
The older of the two lycanthropes pulled a blade from where it had been held in a sheath attached to his belt. The silver knife flashed as it reflected a fragment of light from the car’s headlights. I reached behind my back and drew my own knife from my lower back and smiled. I had been content to keep this limited to a brief scuffle in the dirt, but if they wanted blood, I’d give it to them.
To my surprise, the other lycanthrope pulled a small gun and held it trained on me. The sight of the gun wavered slightly as the young man’s hand shook. My heartbeat picked up its pace and a cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck as I held my body perfectly still. This fight was taking a turn that I wasn’t expecting.
“Shawn!” Nicolai snapped.
“I’m just making sure that this fight stays fair!” the young man shouted back with a tremble in his voice. “I’ve heard things. Heard he’s got powers. It’s the only way that he could possibly survive going up against Mira. I’m just making sure that he keeps things fair.”
Fair? Two on one was fair? I kept my comments to myself as the older lycanthrope started to circle me to the right, stepping carefully over bits of broken rock and crushed beer cans. I moved within him, struggling to keep my attention fully on the man with the knife and not on the man with the gun.
He lunged at me first, using his amazing speed to his advantage. Instead of jerking backward, I slid to the side with ease, which allowed me to slash the blade along the man’s rib cage. The blade cut though the man’s coat, shirt, and skimmed his skin to give him a minor flesh wound, but it was enough to get his attention. With a growl, he pivoted on his left foot and stabbed at me again, but I was gone from the spot before he could make any kind of contact.
I had been fighting with blades for close to two millennia. They were an extension of my body. He hadn’t a hope in the world of defeating me. I was just hoping that the other man didn’t try to put a bullet in my temple when I finally brought his friend down. I inhaled slowly as the man made his attack and exhaled as my blade slashed across bare skin, taking my opponent down one notch at a time. As I flowed to my right, I stabbed the man in the side, sliding the blade through vital organs for a split second. The man cried out and tumbled to his knees. The blade fell out of his hand as he clutched his side in pain. I had no doubt that he would easily heal from this minor wound with a little time. However, I still had his companion to worry about. This dance of knives was over, quicker than I had anticipated, and now it was time to deal with the man with the gun.
In a flash, I darted behind downed werewolf. Grabbing his short brown hair in one hand, I placed my knife against his Adam’s apple, pressing just deep enough to allow a trickle of blood to slip down his throat. Shawn held the gun with both hands, the weapon shaking violently as it was trained on us.
“Drop the gun or I’ll slash his throat,” I growled. “I haven’t seen Mira. I don’t know where she is.”
“Are you looking for her?” Nicolai asked from his spot by the car. The blond lycanthrope hadn’t moved more than two feet during the entire scuffle. I hadn’t expected him to.
“No,” I said, and then frowned. “I wasn’t, but now it seems as if it is in the best interest of all those involved if I find the nightwalker.”
“Then why are you here?”
“The dead girl.”
“Put the gun away. This has gone too far already,” Nicolai declared. “Go open the doors. Let’s get out of here.”
“Nicolai!” Shawn cried, but he was already lowering the gun. “We’re not done.”
“We’re done,” Nicolai snapped. “He hasn’t seen her.”
“How do you know he’s not lying?”
“He’s not. He had no reason to.” A new wave of power brushed against my back for the first time, the smell of it darker and richer than the other two werewolves. I turned to see Nicolai’s eyes glowing a deeper copper and I tensed. “He hunted Mira and survived. If he had killed her, he would have admitted to it and then killed the three of us for the trouble. We’re done.”
The standoff lasted for only a few heartbeats but it was long enough to tense every sore muscle in my tired body. At last, Shawn dropped the gun on the ground and took two steps backward away from it. I quickly pulled the knife away from the neck of the lycanthrope that I was holding and backpedaled toward the car, leaving the man holding his side and rubbing his neck while he sat on the ground.
There was no doubt in my mind now. Nicolai had been the alpha of his last pack and Mira had forced him into an existing pack. This was not good. No pack was strong enough to hold two alphas. It always resulted in the death of one.
“Get in.” Nicolai’s low voice jerked me from my thoughts. I walked around the car and fell into the front passenger seat as Nicolai slid behind the wheel. Shawn jogged down and opened the steel doors. The older were had yet to move.
Squinting and blinking against the morning light, we rode back toward the city, leaving Nicolai’s fellow pack mates behind. The blond werewolf said nothing as we entered the city and he pulled the car back up to the curb where he had stopped me. By the clock on the dashboard, less than an hour had passed, but I still felt like I had been dragged behind a truck.
“If I find her, I’ll have her call you,” I offered as I grabbed the door handle.
“Just tell her to call Barrett,” he said, his hand rubbing his forehead. His eyes were closed and lines of strain dug furrows in his young face. Hunted by an Ancient vampire and trapped in a pack that already had an alpha. In the end, he wouldn’t be able to hide what he was. I didn’t envy Nicolai.
Wordlessly, I climbed out of the car and started walking back toward the hotel I was staying in. My eyes lingered over the spot where I had seen the girl just before the werewolves had stopped me. She said that there had been nothing like this in Savannah before. Did she already know about the vampires and the lycans? A part of me wanted to go track her down and find out what she knew, but it would be nearly impossible. One small human in a city filled with humans and angry dark creatures.
Shoving my hands into my pockets, I lowered my head against the wind that whipped down the street as I headed back toward the hotel. I didn’t need to look any further—the peace was starting to pull apart at the seams and Mira’s disappearance wasn’t helping. I needed to pry some more information out of James before I could continue.
FOUR
The little Themis weasel had his phone turned off, sending me directly into his voice mail. However, he left me a message stating that he and Ryan were already on their way to Savannah. My instructions were to stay put until they arrived later that afternoon.
This was not the news I had expected, nor was I relieved. Ryan didn’t take little jaunts around the world on a whim. He had discovered that it was far easier to direct people if he remained in a single, central location—at Themis—and let everyone come to him. And they did.
It would be a few hours before they touched down and finally reached the city. I took advantage of the rare lull to shower and slip into bed. Despite all the chaos surrounding me, sleep came quickly, sucking me down into a swirling vortex of nothingness.
Not nearly enough time passed before I felt my thoughts surfacing again, pulling above the fog of sleep toward consciousness. Something or someone had wakened me. I lay there with my eyes closed, floating somewhere between sleep and consciousness, trying to remember where I was and why I needed to wake up. Someone was close. Where was I? Slowly I remembered that I was in the hotel. I paused. Had someone checked into the room beside me, the noise drawing me from sleep? That had to be it.
Exhaling, I let my mind drift back toward sleep. And then the bed moved. My breath caug
ht in my lungs and my muscles stiffened, waiting for a sign that I had imagined it. I hadn’t. The mattress dipped and shifted under the weight of someone crawling into bed next to me. Adrenaline raced through me.
Slowly I reached out with my powers just to get a feel for whom or what was now lying next to me. It didn’t take much—the feel of the energy I brushed against was unmistakable. Vampire. Holding my breath, I stretched as if relaxing, reaching my right hand up under my pillow. My fingers closed around the hilt of a small knife. I wouldn’t be able to kill the monster with it, but it might buy me enough time so that I could grab one of my swords on the other side of the room.
Had I been asleep so long that it was night again? Where the hell were Ryan and James?
A small, cool hand lightly touched my ribs and slid up my chest to settle over my heart.
My eyes flew open when I rolled over to plunge the dagger into the creature’s chest. But the low growl lodged in my throat when I saw Mira lying beside me, an amused smile lifting her full lips while her red hair spilled across the white pillow beside me like a river of blood. In my surprise, she was able to easily grab my wrist and push me onto my back. She slithered on top of me so that she was straddling my hips, her luminous lavender eyes glowing faintly in the darkness. Holding my hand out over the edge of the bed, she gave it a little shake to get me to release it. I allowed the knife to fall. If Mira had wanted me dead, she would have killed me already.
Her powers flowed over me like a cool, summer rain. I fought the urge to let my eyes drift shut as the energy that poured from her washed away the last of my tension and anger. I knew she was a heartless killer, but there was something so clean and soothing about the caress of her powers. And to touch her was intoxicating.
“Oh, good,” she purred. “You want to play. James said you’d be too tired.”
“Get off,” I snapped, lying still beneath her. I tried to ignore the way her dark red hair fell around her pale face and over her shoulders. I tried to ignore the feel of her thighs pressed against my hips. Anything to keep my body from hardening beneath her. Her playful mood didn’t need to be provoked.
“I plan to. How about you?” she said with a wicked grin. She released her hold on my wrist and slid her fingers along the length of my arm back to my chest. Her other hand was splayed on my ribs and slowly moved higher to rest over my heart, pounding like a thing gone mad. Even without her keen hearing, I’m sure she could hear it.
With a gentle shove, I pushed Mira off of me and rolled to my feet, fighting the urge to shake my head. Mira couldn’t use her power to fog my thoughts or coerce me into doing something I didn’t want to do. Call it a natural immunity. Unfortunately, it didn’t make me immune to Mira herself. After three months apart, I had forgotten what it was like to be around her, and now I was drowning. Somehow the memory of her smile, her smell, her touch had all faded with time, but now that I was faced with her again, I found myself aching to touch her.
I turned to face her, grateful that I had pulled on a pair of boxers before climbing into bed, not that they did much to hide the fact that the brief scuffle had left me rock hard. Mira smiled appreciatively up at me and stretched on my bed like a contented cat lounging in the sun. The lithe vampire lay on her side watching me, the white sheets tangled about her feet. She was dressed in a pair of tight-fitting, faded blue jeans and a plain back T-shirt.
“What vexes you, hunter?” she whispered when I frowned. I had forgotten how soothing her voice could be, like a cool balm over an angry wound.
“I’ve never seen you in jeans,” I muttered, before I could catch the words. Leather, yes. Mira’s closet had to be filled with leather. I’d even seen her in a business suit, but never in a pair of ordinary jeans and T-shirt. She looked so casual and relaxed, not like a killer who had witnessed more than six centuries of life.
For this rare spark of time, I could just see Mira as a young, vulnerable human woman lying in my bed with beckoning arms. How long had it been since I had fallen into a pair of soft arms like that? At this point, the face and name was lost to time itself, but the girl had managed to get me to forget about the bloody fight for my soul and to briefly escape the endless battle.
However, Mira wasn’t a vulnerable woman, but a cold-blooded killer with more than six hundred years of experience under her belt. But then, I was no novice foot soldier either. Time had taught me that a pair of welcoming arms could be just as deadly as a man with a gun. I might want to escape the world for a time, but it always managed to find me.
“Don’t you like them?” she mocked, rolling onto her back. “I can take them off.” Digging her heels into the mattress, she lifted her slim hips and undid the button. I managed to clamp my eyes shut when her nimble fingertips picked up the zipper pull.
“Enough, Mira,” I growled, earning a sultry chuckle from her. Her laugh was almost physical rubbing against me before dissipating into nothingness. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Come back to bed.”
I opened my eyes to find her facing me once again. She rubbed her hand over the spot where I had lain just moments ago. “We can snuggle.” Her nose wrinkled and her voice was teasing. “I’ll behave.”
“I thought you wanted to kill me.”
“I’m sure we’ll get back to that eventually.” She flashed me a wicked grin just wide enough to reveal her fangs. “Come back to bed. You’re tired.”
I sighed, my eyes briefly flicking over to my alarm clock. It was almost 2:30. And then my eyes slammed back to the harsh red numerals as understanding clicked in my sluggish brain. It was almost 2:30 in the afternoon and Mira was awake. I turned around to my left and jerked open the heavy curtains that hung in front of the window. Beside me, I heard Mira hiss and launch herself off the bed. I looked away from the window to find her curled in the shadows of the far corner near the bathroom. Her eyes were wide and her teeth were clenched.
“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted at me. “Close the curtains!”
I glanced back out for a minute, just checking that I hadn’t lost my mind and that it really was afternoon. The sun-drenched morning had given way to gray, overcast skies as a storm system moved into the area, leaving the heavens looking as if it would start raining at any moment. There was no sunlight to be seen, but Mira wasn’t willing to take any chances.
I pulled the curtains closed, but she didn’t visibly relax again until I took a couple steps away from the window. She slowly stood with her arms crossed over her stomach.
“How is it you’re awake?” I demanded.
“A gift from a friend,” she said, regaining her grin.
“Ryan.” The warlock’s name rumbled from somewhere in my chest and crawled up my throat, coated in frustration and anger.
“Your warlock is proving to be useful.” She sounded indifferent, but I knew better.
“How? What has he done?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
I frowned at her, which only caused her smile to widen. I didn’t trust either of them and it didn’t bode well for anyone if they were suddenly working together. “You’ve been with Ryan all this time.”
Mira chuckled, leaning against the corner of the wall. She shoved her hands into the front pockets of her jeans and stared at me. “You make it sound so sordid. Jealous?”
“You’ve been missed. The lycans stopped me today in their search for you.”
“Yes,” Mira frowned. “Barrett was kind enough to leave a somewhat scathing voice mail on my phone today. Apparently, you’ve been busy. I spent the better part of an hour reassuring him that I hadn’t been kidnapped or killed.”
“You disappeared without a trace,” I reminded her.
“I’m a nightwalker; it’s what we do.”
“Did you even bother to take Gabriel with you?” Previously she had not traveled without protection, but following the death of her other bodyguard, Michael, I sensed a hesitance to bring Gabriel along on her travels.
; “I’m not helpless.” Her narrowed eyes began to glow again, but this time it was from anger. I had no doubt Mira would tear out my throat if I pushed her too far. She wasn’t known for her patience.
“But Tristan is. Did you even bother to tell him that you were skipping town?”
“He’s not helpless!” she snarled. She pulled her hands out of her pockets and pushed off the wall toward me. “She just taught him to be that way.” There was no question as to who “she” was. Sadira had made Tristan more than a century ago and Mira before that. She had kept Tristan weak and dependent upon her, as if to ensure that he never left her the way Mira had.
“I never asked for this,” she continued, her eyes darting away from me for the first time as her hands balled into tight fists. She hadn’t. Mira valued her independence, her lonely existence. She had told me once that she had never made another of her kind and that she never would. Yet, she was now saddled with another’s child because she couldn’t bear to see Tristan tormented by her peers. And to make matters worse, she had started a family with at least two other nightwalkers in an attempt to protect them and add some more security to the city.
“Doesn’t matter. You’re his mistress now.”
“Who are you to lecture me about my duties, hunter? Tristan is mine and none shall harm him.” Her powers suddenly filled the room like a cool wind sweeping in laced with the scent of lilacs. We stared at each other, the tension building to the point where the muscles in my jaw began to tic. I was waiting for her to twitch first. I wouldn’t strike first.
And then just as suddenly, the energy flowed out of the room. Mira took a couple steps backward and shook her head, looking somewhat confused. I knew her thoughts had to be the same as my own. How had we pushed each other so quickly to the point of each nearly tearing the other’s heart out? She looked up at me and her grin seemed sheepish. She had almost lost control. Mira had come in here to seduce me, not kill me.
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