“She didn’t kill me.”
“That’s because she didn’t really try,” Ana snarled.
He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “She didn’t not try, either. You and me both know I wouldn’t have lasted more than a couple of days if it wasn’t for you. I was halfway dead by the time Kendall showed up, and I would have been all the way dead before that if you hadn’t kept intervening. We know that she would have killed me before Kendall managed to find me, if you hadn’t placed yourself out in the open, then led them to me. You didn’t let that happen, Ana. I’m not dead. Brad’s safe. So are you. So yes. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” she shouted. “You know why I didn’t want her killing you. You were Brad’s way out. My way out. I wasn’t going to lose that chance.” She jerked back, tried to get away from the sympathy, the understanding she saw on his face, tried to break away, but he didn’t let her.
“Damn it, you weren’t the first guy I led to her. Didn’t you hear that part? There were others—most of them she just fucked and fed from, then she let them go. Couldn’t go catching too much attention—she was crazy, but she was smart.”
Her breath hitched in her throat as she remembered the night that had all but broken her. The night she’d seen a man cut down in front of her, like he was less than nothing. “The guy I brought home a few days before I found you, he wasn’t so lucky. He didn’t get away.”
Duke narrowed his eyes. “Don’t go trying to get me pissed off, Ana. I’m not some idealistic fool. No, I’m not seeing too much heroism involved in you leading me off into a fucking trap.” He reached out, threaded a hand through her hair and held her steady when she would have pulled away. Dipping his head, he watched her from just a whisper away. Close. So close she could feel the soft kiss of his breath against her flesh. “I don’t idealize what happened. Neither do you . . . I could have died. And it’s just as likely you could have died. Kendall wanted to kill you.”
She flinched, even though it was nothing less than the truth.
The hand in her hair flexed and then he lowered it to her neck, kneading the tight muscles there. “She wanted to kill you . . . and you know it. You would have let her do it, if it helped your little brother. You were scared to death. Scared of her. Scared of Cat. Scared of me.”
“I’m a damned coward, Duke. I’m scared of everything. Hell, half the time Brad scares me.” She blushed hot with shame.
He shrugged. “Considering what I’ve seen the kid do with his mind alone, only an idiot wouldn’t have a few of those moments around Brad.” Then he sighed. “There’s a difference between being scared and being a coward, Ana. I don’t like how you caved for Cat instead of fighting . . . but if you’d fought her, she would have killed you. And possibly Brad.”
A grim look tightened his features and the air around them blasted hot. It shuddered and heaved with suppressed power as she watched, fascinated. He gritted his teeth and snarled, battling back some deep, ugly rage. The kind of rage that threatened a shifter’s self-control.
She could feel it, the power of his beast lurking just under his skin. It glittered in the depths of his eyes as he caught her face in his hands and arched her head back.
“I hate what that bitch did to me,” he rasped. “I have nightmares, where I’m still stuck in that hole, waiting to die, trapped as she comes after me with a silver knife and uses it on my chest like it’s arts and crafts hour. But as much as I hate her for that . . . it’s worse when I think about her doing something like that to you.”
“I didn’t know.” His eyes glowed and even though she knew he wouldn’t hurt her, her heart stopped when the gray of his eyes swirled, like dark clouds in a thunderstorm. His pupils bled from round to elliptical, slitted like a cat’s. His powerful body shuddered. His hands flexed as he skimmed them up over her back. “Fuck, you got any idea how sick I get, thinking about these scars? I didn’t know.”
She wanted to pull away. Wanted to kiss and soothe and stroke him, although she didn’t entirely understand why he was so angry. “You couldn’t know. I never told anybody.”
“But I should have known,” he rasped. He nudged her in his arms, made her turn. Her breath hitched in her throat as he tore her shirt, tearing it apart with his hands. “Damn, somebody should have. Why didn’t you tell anybody what she did to you?”
“There was no reason to.”
“The hell there wasn’t.” His voice took on a hard edge and he demanded, “What else did she do to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he rasped. He hauled her back against him and she shivered at the feel of him pressed so close. “I know she hit you—I remembered seeing it. How often did things like that happen?”
“Duke—”
“Now, Ana.”
He was so mad, she could feel the heat of it in the air all around them. Tell him now? For some reason, she didn’t think that was a good idea. Licking her lips, she said, “Why? What does it matter now?”
He licked one scar, the longest one. That had been the first one. It started just below the nape of her neck and ran eight inches along her spine. Cat had laughed when she did it. Just think, Analise. Go just a little too deep, and you’re paralyzed. Going to be harder to protect that sweet baby brother from the likes of me if you can’t get out of a damned bed . . . you won’t be screwing up again on me, now will you?
Cat’s favorite perversion had been to break the unbreakable, to break good, decent people, like Ana’s mother had been. Like Duke. But the first time Cat had sent her out to bring back a man, Ana had brought somebody far too flawed in Cat’s eyes. A thug, somebody who stank of drugs, blood and money. Already corrupt, and already a coward, he’d broken for Cat, all right. Too easily—she’d been so disgusted with the man, she hadn’t even fed from him.
Then she had taken her anger out on Ana.
“They matter,” he whispered, his voice guttural. “Tell me.”
“Some of them happened because I didn’t do what she wanted,” she said on a shaky sigh. “So she did that to remind me what would happen if I failed to obey her again. As afraid as I was, I was more afraid of not being there for Brad . . . and she knew it.”
“That’s how she kept you in line.”
Ana shrugged, staring at the counter in front of her. “It wasn’t so much about keeping me in line. It’s not like I ever really tried to run, never tried to stand up to her. But when I did anything less than what she demanded, she reminded me of the cost of failure. I couldn’t let her hurt Brad.”
Duke’s hand flexed on her back, fingers spreading wide. Then, carefully, he turned her back around and eased her body against his. His eyes glowed as he stared down at her, so alien set against his mortal skin, but it didn’t bother her.
“So you let her hurt you.” A low rumble of noise escaped him and then he closed his eyes, lowered his head. His long, lean body shuddered and when he lifted his head to look at her again, his eyes were once more human. Or at least they appeared to be.
She could still glimpse that wild, primal power in him, feel it dancing along her skin.
She swallowed as she stared up at him, trying to understand everything she sensed coming from him. It was like she was in the middle of a room, with ten different radio stations blasting at her. Nothing made sense, nothing connected.
Desperate for relief, she slammed additional shields up. She didn’t think anything from the outside was leaking in on her, but right now, she couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t sure of anything, other than the fact that Duke, once again, had managed to rock the foundation of her world.
Her heart stuttered and tripped along within her chest and her lungs felt tight. When he reached up and pushed his hand into her hair, she felt tears sting her eyes.
She didn’t even know why.
Then he dipped his head and rubbed his lips across her shoulder. “Are you hiding from me again, Ana?”
“Hiding?” she asked, after licking her dry lips. It was a
miracle she could even talk. Her throat felt like the damned Sahara.
“You’re pulling back.” The words were a low, frustrated growl. “I felt it. Just now.”
“I’m not pulling back.” She lifted her head and looked at him, held his gaze. “You’re just . . . my head’s too full, Duke. I’m having a hard time telling where I end and you begin. I can’t have shaky control. I reinforced my shielding, that’s all.”
Lids drooping low over his eyes, he tugged on her hair, arched her head farther back. “Okay. I don’t like it. But okay. Just don’t hide from me.”
Hide? Half hysterical, she wondered whether it was even possible to hide from him.
But she didn’t say that out loud. Instead, she just leaned in and pressed her lips against his throat. So many times, she’d wanted to touch him. By some weird twist of fate, now she had the chance.
His arms came up, surrounded her. Sighing, Ana cuddled against him.
“You really should hate me,” she whispered absently.
“No. I really shouldn’t.”
CHAPTER 8
IT pulled him from his dreams.
That low, deep burn, gnawing at his gut, teasing the beast that lay just below the surface. Run, the cougar whispered. Run. Hunt. There’s prey . . .
Emerging out of sleep, Duke rolled out of the bed silently and stood, staring out into the night with his head cocked. Hands curled into loose fists at his sides.
Run. Prey.
He cast one lingering look at Ana. She was asleep, lying on her belly facing away from him. Her silvery blonde hair lay in a tangle around her head and shoulders, hiding her face, hiding the scars on her back. He didn’t bother waking her as he slipped out of the bedroom. Barely even thought to pause in the living room to gather up his clothes.
Walking bare-assed down the street wouldn’t much bother him, but if he got his butt arrested, it would interfere and Duke didn’t want interferences.
Run. Hunt. Blood . . . there’s so much blood. No time.
No time.
The whispering voice grew louder with each second and Duke was all but growling as he emerged from Ana’s apartment. No. No time at all. The air was thick with blood, even though the death came from miles away.
Even his altered senses couldn’t truly scent the blood, not yet. He felt it, felt it in his bones. Sensed the pain. Sensed the blood. Sensed the death.
The earth was heavy with it. Shuddering and screaming in denial. Weeping. Blood had been spilled. Innocence destroyed. Life lost.
Too late. The cry for help had come too late and now a life had been lost.
Where . . . when . . . why? Why was he too late?
DUKE wasn’t there when she woke.
Ana blinked gritty eyes and rubbed them with the heels of her hands before lowering them to stare at the empty bed for a few more seconds. He didn’t magically appear and she blew out a harsh breath. Climbing out of bed, she headed into the kitchen.
He wasn’t in there, either, but she’d already known that.
Even with her shields up fast and tight, there was a tingling, razor’s edge awareness of Duke. How he watched her, how he moved, how he breathed. If he was anywhere in the apartment, she’d feel it.
No, he’d managed to slip away in utter silence, without waking her as he left. Ana wasn’t the easiest of sleepers. Too many years of sleeping with one eye shut and the other on Brad, she rarely slept well when there were others around. This was the second night in a row that she’d managed to eke out a decent night’s rest in the presence of another.
She’d slept well enough, but she didn’t feel all that great. Not sick, exactly, despite the headache that pounded behind her eyes, throbbed at the base of her skull. Her skin felt tight and itchy and there was a vague sense of restlessness pulling at her. It tugged and twisted at her conscious thoughts as she got ready for work. Breakfast, shower, clothes, all of it done quickly and without much thought. Good thing, because she was having a hard time concentrating, and that was a bad thing.
Her shields felt off. Pressed in, somehow. Like an unseen hand was pushing down on them. Her headache probably had something to do with the problem with her shields, she realized as she slipped out of the house and saw Carter heading toward his bike.
Thoughts whispered along her skin. Nothing defined, nothing concrete—she couldn’t even make sense of them, but they were Carter’s thoughts. She recognized the feel of them.
“Not good,” she muttered to herself. He was a psychic null—between that and her own shields, she shouldn’t pick up anything from him. The only way for her to pick up clear thoughts was through close physical contact or a close bond. Without that, all she could pick up were those annoying whispers. Her shields were meant to keep those whispers out and her own thoughts, and her gift, locked inside in her head.
Unshielded, her psychic skills did nothing but annoy her. Being surrounded by whispers and unable to make heads or tails out of them without physical contact—very annoying.
She used the short walk to the bus stop to bolster her shields and try to figure out why they’d slipped enough for outside thought to filter in. Didn’t make sense. Once she’d learned how to really shield, it had come easily, like breathing. Those annoying whispers faded into blissful silence and her “blocking” no longer affected those around her.
Nothing in. Nothing out—and it had been the nothing in part that had been harder to learn, harder to control.
The bus groaned to a stop in front of her and she climbed on absently, settling in a vacant seat near the front and staring outside. If her shields had slipped during the night, had she unconsciously used her other gift?
Ana cut that line of thinking off before she could even really start. It hadn’t happened. If she’d been blocking, she would have felt it, sensed it. The blocking was more a chameleon trick than anything else, an instinctive, passive sort of defense. It made her blend in, kept her psychic gift from showing to others unless she was actively using it.
Gifted people, mortal and non-mortal, tended to recognize each other. They felt different, and to the altered senses of a vamp or shapeshifter, they smelled different.
Being a chameleon didn’t seem a bad thing in Ana’s mind, but she had a hard time limiting her range and it ended up paling out the traits of others. It was why Cat had exploited her back when she’d been younger. Ana’s gift had kept Cat from showing up on the Hunters’ radar.
Because of that, Ana didn’t allow herself to use the gift. She kept it locked down good and tight. Even though no active Hunters lived in Alaska, and few gifted individuals, keeping it lashed down just seemed best.
Locked down, good and tight, behind the same shields that kept outside stimuli from tripping up her psychic gift.
Except those shields were slipping.
Irritated, distracted and a little worried, she nibbled on her lower lip and wondered what had happened. Building shields was a mental exercise. As simplistic as it might seem, shields were established with a slow, annoyingly necessary mental trick—the visualized building of a mental wall. Building that wall was something that could take a psychic weeks to finish. Sometimes months.
Ana’s wall was “made” of creek stone, and it was an image she could bring to mind effortlessly, easily. As the bus rumbled along its route toward downtown Anchorage, she did a mental examination of her wall, searching for chinks, missing stones and weak spots.
What she found was a place where the wall bowed in, just the slightest curve. Like somebody had leaned in and pushed. It needed to be fixed—now that she had “seen” it, she could feel the weakness, could feel where whispers of thought managed to filter through minute cracks she couldn’t even sense.
But she couldn’t take the time away right now to do it— zoning out in public for extended periods of time wasn’t what she’d call a wise move. So instead of rebuilding that part of her shield, she did a quick fix. Envisioning a big boulder, right at the spot where her shield bowed in. Crude
and it wouldn’t work in the long run, but it would get her through the day.
And it only took a few minutes, as opposed to the days, weeks or months that building elaborate shields could take. It wasn’t particularly strenuous or tiring, either. Still, when she climbed off the bus at her stop on West Fifth Avenue, she was hot, sweaty and out of breath.
She riffled through her bag until she found a clip and then she twisted her hair up off her neck. The kiss of cool air felt good and she let herself enjoy it for a minute, let her breathing level out and her pulse calm.
The break didn’t last long, though. She had to get to work. Automatically, she looked around for Paul. The area by the mall seemed to be a favorite.
He wasn’t there. With a mental shrug, she headed toward work. She was going to have to work through lunch, try to get done early. Her boss was laid-back, especially since they were right in between the major tax days of the year. If she finished up, she’d ask to leave early. Hopefully, she could do just that. She needed some peace and quiet to fix the weakness in her shields.
With Duke here, she couldn’t risk having anything off. Even though she knew nothing had happened with her blocking, if those shields slipped and too much outside stimuli bombarded her, it would be too easy, too natural, to slip back into old habits.
That wasn’t anything she wanted to risk. She didn’t want to affect his judgments or instincts in any way.
Ana worked straight through the morning, although keeping her mind focused on work was another exercise in frustration. Her head just wasn’t into working today, or much of anything else that required focus, probably. She finally fell into a rhythm, though, waving off Darlene’s invitation to lunch, returning phone calls, copying and mailing out paperwork, dealing with email, the thousand and one small details that fell under her job description. It looked like she just might finish in time to cut out a good two hours early.
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