“And after they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.”
Because Christian believed every little thing had some kind of meaning, that all the seemingly inconsequential details and coincidences of life are quite the opposite, the sight of those young men dividing up his stolen clothes on the street sent a shiver of cold, black premonition straight down into the darkest corners of his soul.
“Everything is going to be fine,” he murmured to Ember. “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be just fine.”
But even to his own ears, it sounded like a lie.
Doctor Maximilian Reiniger—also known as the Doctor, Agent Doe or simply Thirteen—was a man with a plan.
A former German Special Forces soldier who’d lost his mother in a gruesome animal attack when he was a small child, he’d developed a hatred for cats that was the very definition of pathological. It had been a cat, after all, that had taken his beloved mutter, a Bengal tiger that had suddenly decided during a traveling circus act that it was finished with jumping through hoops—and was also in the mood for a snack.
Under the yellow and white striped big top, little Maximilian and his mother had been sitting in the front row of the bleachers. He’d seen up close what those long, sharp fangs could do when applied with vigor to vulnerable human flesh.
By the time the tiger had sated its hunger, there was nothing recognizable left of his poor mother but a few bloodied shreds of floral print dress, and a single patent leather shoe.
After witnessing such a horrific mauling at such a young, impressionable age, little Maximilian’s mind warped like wood exposed to water, and he became obsessed with only two things:
Killing cats. And saving people.
So after he was grown and finished with his secondary education, he entered medical school, where he excelled. Not satisfied to merely go into private practice or work for one of the government-run hospitals where he would spend his life tending to the sick, but doing nothing to protect people from the multitude of threats they faced from enemies human and otherwise, the newly minted doctor decided to round out his medical education with a stint in the army. There he learned to shoot, blow things up, operate with a clear mind while under extreme physical duress, and obey commands from higher-ups without question.
That last one would prove his most valuable asset of all.
He rose through the ranks and was recruited by the Special Forces Command. Only forty percent of new recruits are able to pass the initial three-week-long psychological training regimen, and only about eight percent of those pass the subsequent physical endurance phase. Reiniger passed all with flying colors and was sent to El Paso, Texas for his three-year special instruction cycle in desert and bush training. With more than twenty jungle, desert, urban and counter-terrorism courses at seventeen schools worldwide, it was pure chance he was sent to the one where he would be introduced to the man who would eventually change his life.
He still did not know this man’s real name. No one did. He was known simply as the Chairman, or One.
To Reiniger—who would later be named Thirteen when he was recruited to the Chairman’s organization and advanced near the top—the Chairman was only ever a voice on the other end of a telephone line. There were no face-to-face meetings, no videoconferences, no emails, or even a physical address that could be traced to him by any one of the thousands of people who worked under his umbrella of multi-national companies, most of them in the bioengineering industry. The Chairman was a shadowy figure who, according to legend, had learned on a trip to Africa of an old, old local myth about the Ikati, creatures with superhuman powers that could manipulate their shape.
Who could turn into, of all things, cats.
Panthers, to be specific. Big, black ones.
The Chairman, whose wife had died of a rare neurological disease that his daughter had inherited, had made it his life’s mission to find a cure. He believed the answer lay only partly in medicine and science…the other part lay in capitalizing on the abilities of the nonhuman life forms he wholeheartedly believed lived alongside man, hidden in plain view.
Like the Ikati. Creatures he knew were not just the stuff of local legend, but real.
He’d found enough proof over the years to convince him of their existence.
So he funneled the considerable resources available to him into his ultimate goal—capturing one of these supernatural creatures and learning exactly what made them tick. He had his very personal reason for his goal, of course, but the Chairman was also a businessman, so naturally there was another reason: money.
The profits that might be made from the medical and scientific breakthroughs garnered from the study of such creatures would undoubtedly be huge.
But the Chairman needed a certain type of hunter to pull off such a feat. A hunter who was not only smart, dedicated, trained in medicine, unsqueamish about conducting experiments on live, sentient subjects, but most importantly…loyal.
Money can buy a whole lot of loyalty, but it can’t buy the best kind. The strongest kind of loyalty is only found in those who have dedicated themselves, heart and soul, to a cause.
A cause like killing cats. And saving people.
So Maximilian Reiniger was an ideal recruit for the Chairman, and a man he met in a dusty El Paso bar one sultry summer evening didn’t hesitate to tell him so. He’d overheard the story a half-drunk Reiniger was telling his friend: the story about what made him go into medicine and the army.
The story about his mother, mauled to death by a tiger under the big top, in front of his very eyes.
“Join us,” said the man, whose name was Doe, “and get your revenge.”
Reiniger had never heard six more beautiful words in his life.
So he quit the Special Forces Command and joined the Chairman’s organization as the head of Section Thirty, in charge of investigating supernatural phenomenon in Western Europe. He and each of the leaders of the other twenty-nine sections around the world—all called Doe, as in John—were fanatics to the cause and unquestioningly loyal, but only he had actually caught one of the creatures they’d all been searching for.
He’d experimented on her, too.
That had surprised him a little—that the creature was female. Also that it looked so…well, human. Probably because he had such tender memories of his mother, he’d imagined these vile creatures would be male, or even non-gendered, like some kind of alien life forms that procreated through osmosis or mind-melding. Either way, he’d been laughably wrong. For all intents and purposes, when these creatures were in their human form, they were human.
That was probably what angered him the most. Filthy copycats.
The creature he’d caught had managed to escape, but not before Reiniger had sustained a few injuries in the process. He’d lost his left eye, and now wore a patch. His left leg didn’t work well, either—there’d been an explosion, and unfortunately he hadn’t gotten away unscathed.
His devotion was unscathed, however. So when the news came that these creatures had been sighted again, this time in Barcelona, he was tagged to go.
He had the cooperation of the local police because the Chairman had greased many, many palms. Unfortunately, the Chairman didn’t waste money on things like luxurious lodging, so he’d been ensconced in a budget motel not far from the Sagrada Família. It was late by the time he arrived, so he didn’t bother to begin that first night. He would wait until morning, after he’d had a good sleep.
And then Reiniger—aka Thirteen, Agent Doe and the Doctor—would begin the hunt once again.
He knew just where to start.
The bedroom Ember had chosen in Christian’s mansion in the woods was on the second floor, with a view over the rambling, unkempt rose garden in the back of the property that led right up to the thick, dark line of the trees.
The trees were tall and old, the forest very dense. When she looked out the window on a night like tonight, awoken as she had been by some st
range noise she couldn’t identify, even the moon that hung like a great shining pearl in the black dome of the sky didn’t cast enough light to penetrate the thick canopy of branches. All she could see as she gazed into the dark line of trees was…the dark line of trees, opaque as obsidian.
She could see, however, the naked figure striding slowly through the rose garden.
“Christian.”
She whispered his name. Her hand rose to rest against the cold panes of beveled glass.
For the last three days since she’d arrived, he’d been careful and courteous, almost solicitous, inquiring how she’d slept—poorly, though she didn’t admit it—what she wanted to eat—nothing, but he insisted—and what he could do to make her more comfortable. She wasn’t uncomfortable, exactly, but she still hadn’t quite gotten her head around the situation.
She was here—in Christian’s house—because someone wanted to kill her.
Or him. Or, in all likelihood, both of them.
They’d skirted around that terrible fact during the long conversations they’d had during what was becoming their habitual morning walk. Ember arose early, almost always by six. Christian, due to the nightly excursions that took hours and hours, and sometimes longer than that, arose much later, groggy and handsome with a shadow of beard on his jaw, and a tired, dull look in his eye.
A look that transformed whenever he saw her.
She was beginning to get used to it—to look forward to it, the way his eyes lit up when they rested on her. She thought more than once that just the memory of the heat and tenderness in his eyes would be enough to sustain her through whatever darkness the future might hold.
She wasn’t spending too much time thinking about the future, however. She was taking this whole mess one day at a time.
On their walks, they talked of books, music, and family, of food they hated, of movies they loved. He told her about his brother, Leander, and sister, Daria, and the place where he grew up in England, a place he said was not so unlike this little slice of heaven in the woods. She told him of the sprawling adobe pueblo in the middle of Taos that was built a thousand years ago, and the palomino horse she’d had when she was ten, and how she and her parents would go up to the roof of the old La Fonda hotel and watch the electrical storms far off in the distant hills while they ate albondigas soup and homemade tortillas slathered in mole sauce. How the color of the sky there was the bluest blue she’d ever seen.
And how much she missed it.
She also told him about Dr. Flores, and his eyes grew so soft they shone. He was glad she was talking to someone, glad Asher had forced her to go.
There were only two things they never discussed. The accidents, and what was going to happen after he found what he was looking for in the woods.
And somehow, though they talked about almost everything, they’d become physically shy around each another. It was as if by being in such close proximity, an invisible wall had been erected that they both felt but were pointedly trying to ignore. Or maybe not a wall, exactly, but an electrical fence. Because all the crackling, dangerous energy was still there, the tension and awareness of heat and intensity and how easy it would be to simply slip into his bed in the middle of the night, or he into hers.
But neither one did. They barely even touched. He gave her a chaste kiss on the forehead each night before walking away from her bedroom door to his own room, far at the other end of the mansion.
She wondered if, in the few hours he had to sleep, he stared up at the ceiling just as she did, wretched with longing.
It was actually worse than mere longing. It was an ache, a vast, pounding emptiness, a hole that grew larger and harder to fill every day they were so close, yet so far apart.
As she watched him stride off through the rose garden now, nude and breathtaking in the moonlight, the ache grew just that much stronger. He melted into the trees, disappearing as quickly as a stone dropped into dark water, and Ember sighed, not realizing she’d been holding her breath.
He’d probably be gone until morning. Her stomach growled; she decided to go downstairs to the kitchen and forage for food.
Corbin had his own quarters on the ground floor, as did the housekeeper, the groundskeeper, and the cook, but they were far off in another wing and it was half past one, so she doubted very much she’d run into anyone. Only Corbin had given Christian an odd look when he’d been informed Ember would be staying with them; the others didn’t seem to have an opinion either way.
They were human, Christian had explained. Hired help who came with the house.
It had been rented, but the astonishing collection of books in the library were his own. He said he’d had most of it shipped over on a whim when he’d first arrived, when the thought of sitting alone in the house with nothing to read became so depressing he couldn’t stand it.
Before he’d met her, and forgotten about books altogether.
It brought a faint smile to her face, remembering the way he’d said that. The way he’d looked at her when he said it, a sideways, penetrating glance from beneath sooty lashes as he walked beside her on the stone path in the garden, his hands clasped behind his back. She’d bitten her lip and looked away, and he’d changed the subject.
Ember padded down the curved staircase from the second floor and reached the foyer landing. Passing the drawing room on the right, she came upon that lovely library and paused at the entrance, looking around.
It was truly magnificent. Not only the glass cases with row after row of leather-bound books, but the marble fireplace, the huge potted palms, and the grand piano. All was quiet and cool, the outlines of the room sketched in pale moonlight.
She stood arrested for a moment, staring at the enormous Steinway. She didn’t know how to play the piano—her lessons had always only been cello—but it had been so long since she’d even touched a musical instrument that just looking at it struck a chord of yearning somewhere deep inside her.
She crossed the room, sat down on the glossy black bench, flipped open the cover, and lightly set her hands on the keys. Unexpected anguish rose up in her throat, and she yanked her hands away and curled them to fists in her lap.
She closed the cover and leaned over, resting her head on her arms on the dark wood. She was suddenly tired, so tired, and she closed her eyes for a moment, allowing her heartbeat to slow and her breathing to follow. She drifted into sleep.
And when she opened her eyes again sometime later, she wasn’t alone.
She felt him first. He was a dark presence behind her, a tangible, burning heat. She sat upright with a gasp and whirled around, her hand at her throat.
Christian stood over her, staring down at her face with eyes incandescent as stars.
“What are you doing?” His voice was low and throaty, a whiskey-deep growl, as if he’d been swallowing rocks.
“I’m-I-I couldn’t sleep—I was hungry—I was—”
“Are you all right?” His gaze raked over her, hungry and hot, and she noticed he was breathing deeply, his nostrils flared, his hands just slightly trembling by his sides. He looked to be barely holding himself in check.
He wore a half-buttoned white cotton shirt rolled up to the elbows and a pair of faded jeans. His feet were bare. His hair was mussed. There was a vein throbbing at the base of his throat.
Beyond her surprise at his sudden appearance, her brain registered danger. Her mouth went dry.
She swallowed and said, “Yes. Are you?”
It took him several moments to answer, in which his throat worked and a muscle flexed, over and over, in his jaw. His hot, unblinking gaze never left hers.
“It takes a while after I Shift back…I’m not…I didn’t expect to see you.”
Her brows lifted. She waited, blood pumping hard through her veins.
“The animal,” he whispered, his teeth gritted. “It’s not…completely…” His gaze drifted over her, lingering on her mouth, her breasts beneath the T-shirt she’d worn to bed. His eyes flared
hotter.
“Oh,” she breathed, understanding in a heartbeat. “Ah, should I…” she glanced at the doorway.
“No,” he said immediately, a little too loud, then closed his eyes and moistened his lips. After a few deep inhalations, he said, “Yes. Probably. It’s not entirely…safe. The way you smell—it’s difficult to—argh! Fuck!”
He broke off and turned away from her in one swift pivot, his hands clenched in his hair, and stood there with his head bowed, silent, his entire body tensed.
The adrenaline that surged through her body was electrifying. She knew what was happening, her body knew what was happening, and it was responding in every way it could.
He wanted her. And he didn’t want her in a roses, poetry, and violins kind of way. He wanted her in a violent, animal, starving way. A possessive way.
An owning way.
Instantly, she wanted him that way, too.
As if he sensed it, he let out a soft, agonized groan. “Go back to your room,” he whispered. His broad shoulders rolled forward in a way that accentuated their breadth, and as she watched, fascinated, pinned in place, as a tremor ran through them. He said her name on a growl when she stayed where she was, and when she still didn’t move he spun around, advanced, and towered over her, glowering and shaking, molten hot.
“Go back to your goddamn room!”
His voice had dropped even lower than the register it held before, and Ember heard the unraveling edge of restraint in it as clear as if someone had struck a bell. But it didn’t frighten her. It excited her. It turned her inside out.
Slowly, with trembling hands, keeping her gaze locked on his, she reached out and touched him, flattening her hands over his chest. At the same time, she whispered, “No.”
He stiffened and made a sound that was part snarl, part hiss, and utterly primal. His nostrils flared again, and his eyes grew flatly dangerous.
Slowly, slowly, Ember slid her hands down his chest, over his abdomen, to the waist of his jeans, feeling his muscles twitch and flex beneath her fingers. As softly as she could, she said, “You’re not going to hurt me. I know you’re not going to hurt me.” Then she slid her hands up and under his shirt.
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