It was so far from what either woman was used to that Nicolette still couldn’t figure out why Clara had selected it. When she’d told Nicolette to go in and secure a room for them for the night, Nicolette had thought Clara was joking.
She wasn’t.
She’d thought she’d known everything about her best friend. That there were no secrets between them. They’d been friends forever. The night had shown her that she didn’t know Clara at all.
Not really.
Clara had stayed eerily calm as they’d run from Grid and the other man—the one who had taken a spoon to the eye. Never once while they were leaping and bounding over neighboring fences did Clara look frazzled or worried. She acted like it was something she not only did daily, but had mastered the art of completing in heels and work clothing.
Clara had gone out of her way to avoid exerting herself each time Nicolette dragged her friend along for a walk or run. Seeing Clara turn into a hurdling distance runner had only been the tip of the messed-up iceberg.
Watching as Clara managed to hot-wire a car in less time than it took Nicolette to retie her shoelace had really driven home how much Nicolette did not know her best friend at all.
I’m best friends with someone who can steal a car.
I spooned someone in the eye.
She put her hands on her thighs and tried to wipe away the nervous sweat on her palms. It didn’t work. At least her pulse had stopped racing to the point it had been all she heard.
This was all too much.
The entire week had been far from her normal. Sitting around and crying over a man wasn’t something she usually did. Yet that was the chunk of her week. Go to work, come home, put on comfy clothes, order takeout, and then watch sappy movies that only served to make her cry more.
She was pathetic. She spent a week feeling sorry for herself and trying to make sense of where and why Garth had run off minus his clothes. Clara was right. That was crazy.
Not as crazy as the whole he’s-a-shifter thing, but it was up there. The entire world had gone insane around her. That, or she’d had a nervous breakdown, and none of this was actually happening.
There was no evil twin after her who could turn into an animal. She’d never brought home a Viking hunk who ran off sans clothing. Clara wasn’t an expert car thief and Landros wasn’t a vampire.
Vampire.
The very idea her uncle was a creature of the night was nearly laughable. Until she had concrete proof, she was still holding out hope Clara was wrong, or it was all an elaborate scheme or prank. Maybe there was a hidden camera somewhere, watching her reaction to the ridiculousness that had been presented to her.
“Exciting” wasn’t a word she’d use to describe herself. Things like this simply did not happen to her. The most thrilling thing she’d ever done in her life prior to meeting Garth had been skydiving. Even that seemed tame in comparison to recent events.
Garth.
Her thoughts drifted back to him. Her fingers went to her lips as she remembered the feel of his kiss. Had she really been kissing an animal?
No.
Deep down, she knew he wasn’t an animal. If what Clara told her was true, then Garth could turn into one, but that didn’t mean he was one. He was a flesh-and-blood man. A man who had given her so much pleasure. A man she’d felt a deep connection to. A man she’d been unable to stop thinking about the entire week.
Strangely enough, within an hour or so of Garth vanishing, she’d seen Wheeler walking down the street. It had been late, very late, but there he’d been, strolling along like he didn’t have a care in the world. She’d been standing at the front window, peeking out between the slats on the blinds for hours, thinking Garth might resurface.
He never did.
She had spotted Wheeler more than once in the evenings throughout the week since Garth had come in and out of her life in the blink of an eye.
As she thought harder on it all, she tensed. When she’d first seen Wheeler in the square, she could have sworn his eyes filled with black.
No way.
“Am I the only person who is not a total freak?” As the words left her mouth, she remembered Clara’s words.
They’d been made in a lab and they weren’t human.
Nicolette stared down at her hands. There was nothing supernatural about her. She wasn’t special. She was just her. Just a boring girl making her way through life.
She closed her eyes, doing her best to make sense of it all. People who could turn into animals were supposedly real.
So were vampires and apparently, Uncle Landros was one of those. But that couldn’t be. She’d seen her uncle go outside during the daytime before. Vampires couldn’t do that. Could they? And he ate. Vampires didn’t eat, did they?
She had no clue. Her knowledge of vampire mythos wasn’t up-to-date. And the knowledge she did have came from movies Clara had forced her to sit through. Another thought hit Nicolette.
Did her uncle sparkle?
She sure in the hell hoped not.
“Stop overthinking this. You need facts. Not guesses,” she said, talking to herself while the shower continued to run.
She recapped her week. She’d collided with a hot guy, smashed her cupcakes to bits, took said hot guy home with her, banged his brains out, only to have him run off naked and into the night. Then, as if that couldn’t get any weirder, his evil twin showed up and turned out to be anything but human. Then again, neither was she, evidently.
Nicolette had far more questions than she had answers. Clara had been tight-lipped as they’d run from the house, made their way to the coffee shop they loved, and then stole a car.
Normally, Clara couldn’t shut up.
Nicolette wasn’t sure what freaked her out more: finding out supernaturals are real, or the fact her friend could stay quiet that long.
Both were far-fetched.
The shower cut off and Nicolette made a mental list of all the questions she had.
As the bathroom door opened, Clara appeared, dressed in the same clothing she’d been in earlier. She ran her fingers through her long wet hair. “There isn’t any conditioner.”
Nicolette stared at her friend, waiting for answers she knew Clara had.
With a sigh, Clara covered the distance between them and sat next to her on the bed. “Still trying to process everything?”
Nicolette snorted. “I haven’t been told everything to process, have I?”
“I need you to listen with both ears,” said Clara, using a phrase her mother often used.
“I’m listening. I’m all ears. What in the hell is going on? I stabbed a guy in the eye with a spoon. I’m not a violent person, yet I went all spoon ninja on a guy. Not to mention we can leap over six-foot fences with no real effort. Shifters? Vampires? And what do you mean we were cooked up in a lab? I’m a preschool teacher! I don’t change into an animal or suck people’s blood. There is nothing remarkable about me. I’m boring. You tell me that all the time.”
“Sweetie, you’re not going to listen with both ears if you’re freaking out,” stated Clara, seeming astonishingly calm considering the circumstances.
No amount of deep-breathing techniques or sounds of the ocean were going to help Nicolette at the moment. She was as calm as she was going to get. She wanted answers and she wanted them now. “You’re a stranger to me.”
“No. I’m not. I’m the same person you’ve always known,” said Clara, taking ahold of Nicolette’s hands. “I only learned the truth about us and everything else about a year ago.”
Nicolette watched her. “You were promoted a year ago.”
“Right. With that promotion, or should I say recruitment, since I was pulled from a normal office to one that was anything but normal came access to information I wasn’t supposed to find. I stumbled upon it by accident. And when I did, I lost my shit big time. Had Cody not been meeting me that day for lunch, I’m not sure what I’d have done. He helped me process it all.”
�
�Cody knows about all of this?” asked Nicolette.
“Yes. He’s like us to some degree. He’s the one who told me to keep what I know a secret, even from my employer. I listened.”
Nicolette glanced to the side. “You didn’t fly to Colorado for your work trip, did you?”
“No,” answered Clara. “I was in the Middle East.”
Nicolette huffed. “I feel like puking.”
“It will pass,” assured Clara. “I felt the same way.”
“What are we? Can I change into a wolf?”
“No, you can’t change into an animal because you’re not a shifter. From what I found out about us, you do have a bit of shifter DNA in your mix but just enough to keep you from leaning too far towards the vampire side of things.”
If Clara thought that explanation was going to be in any way reassuring, she was wrong.
She kept going. “We were made in a lab. We had mothers. I don’t think they were part of the testing willingly, but information on them is harder to come by. What I do know is that they were artificially inseminated, and while we were growing within them, additional testing and genetic manipulations were done on us to make us more than your average supernatural.”
Nicolette soaked in what she’d been told. “Our mothers were test subjects?”
Clara nodded. “They were brood mares, for lack of a better word. There’s this huge organization that is like the baddest of the bad. They’re referred to as The Corporation by the good guys.”
Nicolette looked at the wall, needing something to focus on while she did her best to wrap her mind around it all. “And who are the good guys?”
“Cody is a good guy,” said Clara with a soft smile. “He’s a shifter too. He wasn’t born that way. Like I said, he’s like us to some degree. His family had a little bit of supernatural blood in it, so when the government sanctioned testing on him, he took to the introduction of additional supernatural DNA, but not the way they’d hoped.”
Nicolette made a time-out sign with her hands. “Hold up. Cody is a shifter?”
“Yes.”
It was official. The whole world had gone nuts. “Is he a werewolf?”
“The term they prefer is wolf-shifter, and no, he’s not one,” answered Clara, going back to trying to get the snarls from her hair. “He’s a shark-shifter.”
A laugh broke free from Nicolette. “Yeah. Right.”
Clara simply stared at her.
“You’re serious,” said Nicolette.
Clara nodded. “Totally. He’s what’s known in the supernatural world as an Outcast. There are a lot of men like him. Ones our government tried to turn into super soldiers but failed on some level. Some are as broken as you think they would be. Many are just men who got dealt a raw hand and who have figured out how to live with what they are. Cody is like that. He fights the good fight. And for a while, he was held against his will and went through some deep shit. If he can survive that, we can survive finding out we’re more than human.”
Nicolette opened her mouth to ask more questions but stopped when the hair on the back of her neck rose. She gripped her friend’s hands tight, her eyes widening.
“Do you sense something?” mouthed Clara.
Nicolette nodded.
Clara stood and went for one of the chairs at the small dinette set near the front window. Clara lifted it like a weapon.
Nicolette searched for anything that might work in a pinch. The only thing she could come up with was a phone that looked to be from the ’80s. She lifted it and ripped the wire from the wall, carrying the monstrosity with her as she neared the door.
“Och, do nae tell me how to pick a lock, Boomer,” a man with a deep Scottish accent said from the other side of the door. “I’ll have you know I’m an expert.”
“Why are you picking the lock?” asked another man. “Why not just knock?”
“Boomer, when I want yer advice, I’ll ask for it,” returned the other man.
Nicolette eyed Clara.
Clara shrugged, looking confused by it all.
“Someone do something because I’m close to shooting the Viking,” said a man gruffly. “He’s close to losing his shit again. I think he can smell her and it’s messing with him. I’m just happy we forced a burger down him or I’d be dinner for him.”
“Duke, you cannae kill Garth. Corbin said it wasnae allowed,” said the Scot.
Nicolette gripped the phone tighter. No one was killing Garth unless it was her. Not that she wanted him dead. She just wanted to inflict some pain on him for running off and not telling her he was a wolf-shifter.
She tensed.
He had said he was. She’d thought he was joking.
The door popped open to reveal a huge burly man in a kilt, a T-shirt, biker boots, and a head of long auburn hair. He turned to face Nicolette, his beard long and wild. He grinned—just as she hauled off and hit him in the face with the phone.
He grabbed his nose and jerked back. “Och! You…dinnae have to…”
She hit him again.
Clara then moved in and went at him with the chair.
The man tossed a hand up, only barely managing to deflect the strike from the chair. The chair broke and fell to pieces on the floor. Nicolette and Clara bent quickly, each grabbing a leg of the chair. They came up fast, holding the wood like weapons.
The redheaded giant put his hands up and leaned against the open door, blood running freely from his nose. “I surrender!”
“How French of you,” said a man with long blue-black hair as he filled the doorway. He looked like he’d escaped a BDSM party. “I come in peace. Landros sent us.”
Clara lowered her piece of wood. “How do we know you’re telling the truth and that you’re not with the evil twin of Viking-Cupcake Dude and Spoon-to-the-Eye Guy?”
Goth Guy lifted a dark brow that had a number of silver piercings in it. “I don’t even know what you just asked me. Someone has a spoon for an eye?”
The redhead took a step towards Nicolette, and she lifted the wood in her hand in a warning manner. He froze. “Christ, let the Viking go so he can come and get his woman. The lass scares me.”
“Striker is a wimp,” said Goth Guy. “Two girls took him out.”
Clara narrowed her gaze on Goth Guy. One second he was standing there, and the next, a massive gust of wind hit him and knocked him backwards, out of the doorway and out into the parking lot of the motel.
Gasping, Nicolette ran to the door and stood next to the man named Striker, who she didn’t think was going to hurt her. “What was that?”
Striker grunted and held a hand to his nose. “Fae magik. The other lass dinnae like his words and showed him what she was capable of.”
Other lass?
Nicolette turned slowly to face Clara, her eyes wide. “Clara?”
Clara blushed. “I was getting to the part about us having magik. The bit about us having a good amount of Fae in us. That was before Scotland invaded.”
Striker grunted.
Nicolette looked out and past the Goth Guy, who was being pulled up and off the ground by a man with long brown hair and deep blue eyes. The man was watching her, not Goth Guy. For a second, it felt as if there were a tunnel linking her to the man. He was confused, worried, excited, scared. All of his emotions swept through her, becoming her own. She swayed and strong hands gripped her upper arms, keeping her from falling from the onslaught of emotions.
Suddenly Clara was there, touching Nicolette’s face, drawing her attention away from the man with blue eyes. Clara looked at him. “Stop. Pull back on your emotions. She can feel them. How is she linked to you? No other vampires can do what you did to her. Who are you? Who are all of you? If you even think of trying to hurt her, I’ll blast your ass and turn you into a puddle of nothingness.”
Nicolette reached out and caught Clara’s hand. “No. It’s okay. I think they’re friends. And he won’t hurt you or me.”
Clara took a deep breath. “Nicolette, I’
m new to learning how to sense other supernaturals, but everything radiating from him tells me he’s a very old, very powerful vampire. With the way he’s focused on you, I’m not taking any chances.”
“Let go of me, Duke!” shouted a voice Nicolette knew well.
Nicolette gasped. “Garth?”
He appeared from the other side of a large black van. A large, pissed-off man with brown hair was with him.
The man pointed at Garth. “You nearly lost control and shifted again in the van ride here. You want to scare the shit out of your wife before you accidentally try to eat her? Huh? You thought Auberi fought with you before? Try to kill his daughter and see how that goes. It’s not bad enough you claimed the girl already. Explain accidently eating her.”
Wife?
Clara gasped. “Nicolette?”
“Yes?”
“When you banged the brains out of Viking-Cupcake Dude, did he bite you?” asked her friend in a low, even voice.
Nicolette let out a nervous laugh and began to say no, and then stopped. Her hand went to her neck, near her shoulder. To the spot Garth had kissed aggressively during sex right after he’d shouted the word “mine”. Nicolette paled. “Yes. Ohmygod, am I a vampire now? Wait. Am I a shifter now? Is that contagious?”
Garth’s green gaze was moist as he stood near the van, being partially held back by the guy named Duke. “Nicolette.”
The next thing Nicolette knew, Clara had the broken chair leg and was running at Garth full force. “You fucking claimed her!”
The vampire Clara had been so worried about twisted fast and caught Clara around the waist. He turned her, Clara’s back pressed to his front. It didn’t look like he was hurting her or exerting much in the way of energy to keep her. In fact, he looked to be going out of his way to avoid harming her. “Shh, no killing him.”
“He claimed her,” ground out Clara, losing some of her fight. “She didn’t understand. He didn’t ask. He just did it. I’m going to ram this piece of wood through his man parts.”
The vampire seemed to consider letting her go to continue her mission.
Nicolette gasped. “Clara, stop! What are you going on about? What do you mean, claim? And why did that guy say wife? Garth told me he’s not married. Did he lie?”
Act of Brotherhood_Paranormal Security and Intelligence_PSI-Ops an Immortal Ops World Novel Page 25