“And we’ll be with you. What time?” Emerald asked.
“Dawn,” said Annette.
Emerald pushed herself back from the bar with a grimace that clearly revealed her aversion to early hours. “I was afraid of that. That means we’d better get moving to the sheriff’s station.”
“Both of you have gone way beyond the call of duty in helping Jared and me out,” Erin said. “Why don’t you drop me off at the station and go home and get some sleep while you can? I want to be where I can get to Jared quickly just in case something goes wrong, but you don’t have to stay up all night with me.”
Emerald shook her head and gently pushed Erin toward the door. “Sorry, luv. We’re partners in crime. I’m camping out at the station with you. Jared and Sam will muck things up without us.”
Annette followed, already seeing the sparks fly. Sam and Jared were in for it. Hell was about to descend on them via a red Mini. “You two tackle the men. I’m soaking in a hot tub and then sleeping in my own bed tonight.” For the past few nights she’d slept at Emerald’s.
She waved them off from the porch and stood absorbing the night. Though no lightning flashed or thunder rolled at the moment, the brewing energy of a storm hovered in the mountain-chilled air. The wind had picked up its pace, briskly twisting through the trees as it bullied the sun-weary leaves.
She’d try and call Celeste Rankin again to make arrangements for her to come in and have more blood drawn. She couldn’t tell the woman at this point how off her red blood cell count was, since the lab hadn’t given an “official result,” but she had to tell her enough to get her to come in quickly.
She also wondered if she should say anything to Rob about Sno-Med. Thousands of people worked for the company worldwide. The corporation had a philanthropic reputation akin to Mother Teresa’s. Funny. Spelled backward, the firm was nothing but a bunch of deM-onS.
Would Rob Rankin even believe her? Hey! You work for a company that uses free health screening to find special blood to feed vampires. They employ unsuspecting people to help kill innocent people.
Doctors were sworn to heal and protect, not to prey upon the innocent. She was sure that most of the people who worked for Sno-Med, like her sister Stef, were unaware of the evil, but there had to be many who were willingly helping these horrible creatures.
How could they even begin to stop this group or discredit Sno-Med?
After a long while, she realized that she was staring out at the night, letting her thoughts roil, because she was hoping to see something. A movement in the shadows, a crackle in the air, a primal energy, something—
Was she crazy? Hadn’t she been frightened enough? Erin trusted Jared with her life. But it was obvious Jared didn’t trust himself. He’d had Sam lock him up. And wouldn’t a man know himself better than anyone else?
She needed to forget about the amulet and the Blood Hunter for tonight and face it all tomorrow.
Turning from the darkness, she checked and locked all of the cabin’s doors and windows twice, then made her way to the kitchen, where she poured three fingers of Bailey’s Irish Cream in her second cup of coffee—the only cream she ever used in coffee, and only at bathtime when she indulged herself. Coffee in hand, she headed to the tub.
When the Rankins had mentioned the cabin was on the market, Annette had at first been completely against living anywhere beyond a stone’s throw from town. But then she’d seen it, and bought it for two reasons. She’d always lived comfortably in the city, with people stacked as tightly as layers of colored sand in a terrarium around her. Coming this far out from the small town of Twilight was like a punishment in some ways. If Stef was lost in the forest, then Annette would be, too. The second reason was the jetted, freestanding Roman-style tub in the center of the bathroom, big enough for two.
The only indulgence she’d allowed herself over the years was a luxuriant bath. It had been a once-a-week ritual when she’d lived in the grind of hospital life. Since coming to Twilight, she guiltily took one every night.
Within fifteen minutes she’d polished off her Bailey’s-enhanced coffee and filled the tub with steamy water drenched to a milky white with gardenia bath oil. Her clothes hit the floor and she sank into the welcoming heat, letting her senses absorb the heavy perfume. She closed her eyes, ignoring the garish contrast between her red towels and the pale lavender wallpaper, and let her body and mind relax from the rigid confines she kept them in throughout the day.
After a moment one eye popped open, then the other. She couldn’t relax. She kept thinking about the amulet.
Irritated, she rose, dripping silky suds across the floor as she fished the medallion from the pocket of her lab coat. Her fingers were hotter than the metal now, and she carried it back to the tub, sliding deep into the water, closing her eyes. What would have happened if Emerald hadn’t interrupted when he’d appeared outside her cabin?
Aragon fought against the sensation pulling at him again. Head bowed, he strained to stay on track, chasing the trail of Pathos’s scent that he’d just picked up.
Did Pathos sense that Aragon was after him? Aragon hoped so. He hoped the vile being was just waiting for Aragon to catch up to him. Though with the company Pathos now kept, he might be hiding like the coward he’d proven himself to be.
Teeth clenched, he forced himself forward as another wave of energy pulled harder against him. What in Logos’s name was going on? Earlier he’d been racing through the forest of the mortal ground, feeling his essence hover between that and the spirit realm, when suddenly he’d shifted across the land and found himself running toward a mortal woman sitting beneath the stars. Something about her was drawing his being her way as strongly as Logos’s magnetic core spun the world. And something was causing his essence to solidify within the mortal realm in a way he’d never experienced before, as if he were actually becoming more mortal than spirit. He sucked in air, absorbing the smell of the damp forest, feeling as solid as a rock.
He wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that he’d thrown his amulet upon the mortal ground. He always thought he’d lead with a mighty and sure sword of truth, never causing another to falter, but he’d failed.
He wouldn’t fail now. He’d restore the Blood Hunters’ reputation and the honor that Pathos had blackened so long ago. This was his one chance, and he couldn’t let the mortal woman’s witchery distract him. The trail he chased suddenly intensified, telling him he was very close to his prey. Pathos’s unique scent was now rotten with the stench of evil. After a millennium of waiting, Aragon finally had the chance to face his old mentor and put an end to the traitorous existence.
Raising his sword, he barreled ahead with a Blood Hunter’s howl meant to cower all of the Fallen’s craven cowards.
“Hell.” Annette clutched the amulet in frustration, irritated that she couldn’t get her question about its owner or the impressions the beast left with her out of her mind enough to enjoy her bath. Who was he? She wanted to see his mortal form, not his werewolf form.
The amulet instantly heated, and a howling yell echoed off the bathroom walls as a naked, sword-carrying, enormous man suddenly appeared, barreling right at her.
She screamed and stood frozen, totally terrified. Her mind demanded that she run even as she registered his long black hair and harsh features. She saw his dark eyes widen in shock, as if he was as horrified as she. He lowered his sword and appeared to try and change the direction of his charge, but he hit the patch of oiled water she’d dripped on the floor and hydroplaned. His sword clattered across the tile floor as the side of the tub wiped his feet out from under him, and he plowed right into her chest face-first. She lost her breath and precarious balance, sliding to smack her ass hard on the bottom of the tub. Water erupted everywhere. The amulet fell from her grip and wedged hotly against her hip beneath the water. His body was as heated as the amulet and connected with hers…everywhere.
At that moment she knew she should be feeling outraged. But her enti
re existence boiled down to the feel of a scruffy jaw planted between her breasts and her hands clutching the broadest shoulders she’d ever seen. That her legs were splayed wide with a hard body intimately between them was too earth-shaking to even register on her Richter scale.
Chapter Three
A T THE BLOOD HUNTER’S howl, Pathos swung around with his fangs and claws bared, aching to rip the world apart. His long black coat whipped in the rising wind, and his leather-and-steel-booted feet dug into the soil, bracing for a fight. When the enemy was suddenly sucked away, cheating him of even that small satisfaction, Pathos’s rage boiled even hotter.
The incompetence surrounding him had reached an intolerable level. No one could find Cinatas or Shashur, the Vladarian he’d been seen with last. If his idiot minions weren’t already dead, he’d murder them himself and take Heldon out as well. The conceited fool was the worst of the lot, sitting upon his craven throne, letting demons and underlings and subpar shifters go wild, sure that the more chaos and mayhem they created, the more easily he would win the battle for the world. In Heldon’s book, as long as every man was looking out for himself and screwing everyone else, figuratively and literally, then Logos would lose.
Pathos had figured out long ago that Heldon would lose too, and that’s when he began his attack on the throne. Using the Vladarian Order was just part of his plan, but the schizophrenic sect with delusions of grandeur was fast becoming a thorn in his side. Especially if they’d cost him Cinatas.
Before long, Pathos would have the means to put the Vladarians in their place. Soon Pathos would activate more of the seeds he’d spent decades planting. He’d supplied sperm to a great many sperm banks around the world as well as making fruit-bearing use of every mortal woman he could seduce. The first of his offspring he’d brought into service had been Cinatas, and everything had been going well until Ashoden ben Shashur, the pissant vampire king of oil-rich Kassim, had arrived at the Manhattan Clinic for a transfusion.
Pathos would bet his fangs that Shashur had something to do with Cinatas’s disappearance. Shashur, along with several other oil-rich Vladarians, Vasquez and Samir to name two, had been sowing seeds of dissent among the order. Pathos knew it, but had chosen to ignore their little games.
Now he was faced with two burned-out centers and a host of Vladarians demanding to be reassured about their next fix of Elan blood. And his son was missing!
If he didn’t get answers soon, he’d raise hell from Heldon’s putrid bowels and unleash it upon the mortal ground.
Before Annette could do more than blink and gasp, the man wedged his hands on the side of the tub and reared back enough to look her in the face. He was similar enough to Jared in his presence that she had little doubt she was staring at a Blood Hunter, one that she’d called to her by the amulet. Nothing else could explain what had happened both times she’d concentrated on the owner of the amulet while holding the disk.
The dynamic alphaness of the man matched Jared’s, except that this man was rougher. The only thing that softened his warrior-sharp features was the black silk of his long hair and the luxuriance of his water-spiked lashes. Dark-coffee eyes flashed with irritation and confusion above a nose that, though perfectly straight, seemed so bent with badass attitude, you’d swear it had to have been broken in a fight or two. His full mouth and the knock-’em-dead cleft in his chin were set too grim to ever be sensual, but that didn’t stop the stomach-clenching thought of feeling his lips on her. Or was it the rising hardness between their intimately pressed bodies that sent her thoughts south?
Breathe! She sucked air into her burning lungs.
His nostrils flared as he too breathed. Then he leaned down just a fraction and inhaled deeply, his gaze dropping. From the chill of the air upon her breasts and the teasing lap of water against her ribs, she knew without looking what he found so interesting. He looked like a bull choosing between two targets he’d never seen before.
She gasped and dropped her hands from his shoulders to cross her arms over her breasts, an act that brought his gaze back to hers. He moved back even more; confusion etched deeper into his frown as he shifted his weight to his knees. Her relief at gaining some distance from his hard body was short-lived because as his thighs widened to balance his weight, he spread her legs wider apart, pinning them to the sides of the tub. Though the milky water hid her exposure, the vulnerability of being so splayed and trapped by Mr. Rough and Ready rendered her incapable of…almost anything.
“What magic do you wield upon me, mortal woman? Are you a witch?” The depth of his voice vibrated everything that he hadn’t already shaken. “How am I here in a fleshly form that’s more mortal than spirit with such desires pulling upon me?”
She swallowed, her mouth too dry and her mental and physical synapses too overloaded to ask any questions or make any confessions. She, who’d handled hundreds of medical emergencies during her career and who had the balls to operate on people’s hearts, couldn’t even get her tongue rolling.
“Wh—?” she croaked, trying to ask him who he was.
He frowned.
She pulled against her trapped legs, trying to sit. “M-m-move,” she whispered, forcing a coherent word from her lockdown.
He grunted before gripping the tub’s rim and standing. His frontal assault below the waist was just as powerful as above. There was nothing soft about the sculpted six-pack, jutting erection, and granite thighs facing Annette. Droplets of oil-slick water slid along the trail of hair bisecting his abs, around his sex, and down his long legs.
As a doctor, she’d thought she’d seen it all. Had been there and done that many times over when it came to the body. She was wrong. She’d never been here, and she sure as heck had never seen anything like this before.
“Can you not move?” he asked.
When she didn’t promptly respond, he grasped her arms and hauled her up to her rubbery knees. His hands slipped a little from the gardenia-scented oil drenching her, but he managed to hold on, and she finally regained some of her cognitive abilities. She grabbed a towel from the nearby rack and wrapped the red Egyptian cotton around her body, then stepped onto the bath mat.
She pulled another red towel from the bar and handed it to him as she determinedly kept her gaze on his safest feature, his badass nose. “Here,” she said. “Get out of the tub and then we’ll talk.”
He took the towel, and she put a safe distance between them by walking to the door of the bathroom. When she turned to speak to him, she found that he’d dropped the towel on the floor and had retrieved his sword. He studied the sword as if checking it for damage, then glared at her. “You must send me back. I have an important task to complete, and no time to talk.”
“Me,” she yelped. “Back where? Who are you?”
“I am Aragon Hun—just Aragon. I must return immediately to the forest from which you summoned me. Much will be lost should I fail in my quest before my time upon the mortal ground is over.”
Before his time was over…What did that mean? “Aragon, what quest are you on?”
The phone rang. Aragon spun adeptly with his sword raised, looking for a threat.
“I’ll be right back,” she said and exited the bathroom, quickly reaching the phone in the hall. She would have let it just ring except that Emerald or Erin might need her help.
“Hello,” she said as she pressed the receiver to her ear. The caller ID flashed “unknown,” making her frown. No answer met her greeting, though she could hear the rasp of breathing. “Hello? Who is it?”
“Don’t hang up, not if you want to know where your sister is.” The muffled whisper was nearly indistinguishable.
The blood drained from Annette’s head and she gasped. Her back hit the hallway wall as she sought support to remain upright despite the swirling dizziness. “What did you say? Who is this?”
“Meet me in the Infectious Disease Department of the Sno-Med Center at midnight. She’s in the computer there under ‘X-files.’” He chuckled
as if he’d heard a great joke. “Tell no one and come alone, or I won’t show.”
“Wait!” she cried. “Where is she? Is she aliv—” The blaring dial tone cut off her question. Was Stef alive? Where? Midnight was hours away yet! She cried out in frustration.
Suddenly the receiver was snatched from her hand, and Annette screamed before she realized that it was Aragon. She’d momentarily forgotten him. He’d followed her to the hall, naked and holding his sword at his side.
“Does this harm you?” He shook the receiver, glaring at it, looking very much as if he’d gladly subject it to the blade of his sword.
She pressed her hand to her chest, forcing herself to a calmness she did not feel. Her distress had disturbed him. “No. The phone did not harm me. The message I received upset me.”
“Why?” he demanded.
She made the split-second decision to keep the call a secret. She wanted answers, and to get them, she might have to take a few risks, but she didn’t have to be stupid about it either. She’d get there well before midnight and find what she could before Mr. X made an appearance, maybe even get the data from the computer herself. Until then she wouldn’t even let herself consider what this meant about Stefanie. Infectious diseases ran the gamut from a cold to the plague and worse.
“It’s nothing,” she said, taking the receiver back from him and hanging up the phone. She was probably the first woman ever to look at a naked hunk like Aragon and wonder how fast she could get him out the door. Well, maybe not, considering he was an armed naked hunk…and not exactly human either. She had to remember that.
He lifted a brow and slid his thumb beneath her jaw to shift her gaze to his. “Why the need for untruths?”
She winced at the pure honesty in his voice even as the gentle warmth of his warrior’s touch did something inside her that outrocked everything that had already happened between them. She wrapped her hand about his wrist, not even covering half its circumference, but enough to feel the throb of his pulse and the penetrating heat of his skin. If there was something inhuman about him, she sure as hell couldn’t feel it.
The Lure of the Wolf Page 4