by Mason Sabre
It didn’t stop that thrill of awareness, though, as she approached Cade.
He stood up straight when he saw her, and she wasn’t blind to miss how his vibrant blue eyes raked over her exposed body. His eyes remained on her even as he reached over for her clothes sitting on the roof of his car—it seemed she had wrongly accused her stalker.
“I thought you might want these,” he said huskily, quickly clearing his throat.
“Thank you,” she said, wondering why it was she sounded so breathless all of a sudden.
He smiled at her, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. His dark hair was standing up in every direction as if he had run his hands through it several times. His tie had been loosened and was hanging part way down his chest, and the top button of his shirt was unfastened so that the smooth bronze muscle underneath was visible where his collar gaped open.
She stifled the surge of desire that rose unbidden.
“Is everything okay?” she asked as she approached him, trying to mask her sudden worry. “I’m sure you didn’t just come here to help me dress.”
“No,” he agreed.
As she waited for him to continue, her eyes automatically scanned the car park for her follower’s car. He did have one; she had seen it. It was something dark, but she didn’t know enough about cars to be able to distinguish it to a specific make. He had to have come back here to get it, though.
Lost in her thoughts for a moment, she didn’t realise Cade wasn’t talking or offering any explanation as to why he was there. Her eyes darted back to his once more and green clashed with blue. Her heart missed a beat when she saw the hunger that lay in their depths. The way he was staring at her stirred things deep inside, right down to her core. She sucked in a breath and averted her gaze quickly, hastily pulling her jeans and sweater on.
“Where have you been all evening?” Cade’s voice jolted her back to the moment. “Here?”
“Here, and home before that. Why?”
He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and waved it at her. “I’ve been calling you for hours.”
She pulled her own phone from the pocket of her jeans. Three missed calls and a couple of texts—all from Cade. “Oh …”
He scowled, then, with a heavy exhalation, pushed himself off the side of his car and walked to stand a few feet away, staring into the darkness with his back to her.
She didn’t speak, just waited. Something was definitely wrong, she thought uneasily. He ran both of his hands through his hair and then slowly turned to face her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t hear it.”
He rubbed his face and breathed in deeply before looking back at her. “I couldn’t get hold of you. You need to listen for your phone. What if something happened to you?”
“It didn’t. I was just here.” She tamped down the annoyance that always sprung to the surface whenever she felt she was forced to defend herself. “Did something happen?”
His gaze shifted away from her.
Her heart started to race.
“Cade? What is it?” Gemma wanted so badly to reach out to him and calm not only herself, but him, too. Instead, she fought with the concern that began to bubble away in her chest as she waited for his answers.
He lifted his eyes and looked straight at her. “We’ve found a body. We—I need you to come and sign off on it.”
She let her shoulders relax. Of course … it was just work. Always work. She was second to her father. It was part of her job and training to sign off on things such as dead bodies and crimes before they could be moved. It was like having a witness countersign something. It was the shit that Humans pulled to make Others’ jobs harder. Otherwise, the Humans would find some way to dismiss things. Even murder.
Gemma wasn’t sure at first if she wanted to ask who it was, but the question leapt right into her mind. The fact that he had come to find her personally worried her. She swallowed hard. “Is it someone I know?”
She almost missed the flit of emotion that crossed his face, but she couldn’t dismiss the sound of his heart as it sped up. She could hear that as loud and as clear as an alarm bell.
“Who is it?”
There was a short pause. “It’s Jessica.”
“Jessica? As in Evie’s Jessica?” Gemma couldn’t control the surge of panic that rose inside her. “Evie? Is she—?”
“Evie’s fine,” he quickly reassured her. “She wasn’t there. No one else was.”
Evie was Gemma’s younger sister, and Jessica was Evie’s friend. Guilt threatened at the relief she felt that her sister was okay.
“There was another body, though.” Cade’s face turned hard. “A baby. Someone gave Jessica a custom caesarean.”
Gemma couldn’t contain her shock. “She was pregnant?”
He nodded and looked like he was fighting to keep his distance. Then, as if unable to stop himself, he took a tentative step forward and reached out to gently take Gemma’s hand in his own. The contact brought a small gasp to her lips.
“I know you don’t like these cases with children. If someone else could do this, I would have called them.” He paused, his eyes boring into hers. She gulped down her anxiety as she waited to hear what else he was about to say. “We think the baby is mix-breed.”
And that was it—the sentence that sent a burning hole right through her gut. The one that tore her heart to shreds for wounds that had not yet healed.
As she looked at Cade, she knew his heart was breaking, too. He didn’t say any more. He didn’t need to. She knew exactly what was going through his mind, because it was the same as hers. She couldn’t shift the sorrow in her chest. Like an anchor deep inside, it weighted her down.
She didn’t argue when he gently pulled her into his embrace. She clung onto him and buried her face in his neck, content to just breathe in the scent of him and make everything wrong in the world disappear.
She was tiger, and he was wolf—and two years ago, she had been pregnant with their child.
A child that never survived.
Chapter 2
Gemma
Gemma climbed into the passenger seat of Cade’s car without asking or waiting for his permission. Her heart was heavy, her skin prickling with a feeling she couldn’t shake. How could it be Jessica? Why was it Jessica? And a baby … mix-breed. It didn’t make any sense. She let her eyes close and her head fall back against the headrest. The image of the baby that appeared behind her closed eyelids wasn’t that of Jessica’s baby, however ...
Connor—her son had been stillborn. Gemma had never even got the chance to hear his cry or feel his little heart beating. She squeezed her eyes tight to dispel the image. It was never a good box to open, not even to poke.
Cade slipped into the driver’s seat beside her. She could feel his eyes on her as they sat in the quiet confines of the car for a moment. She had no doubt he knew exactly what she was thinking.
A warm hand found hers, sending small sparks of electricity shooting through her. “If there was someone else ...”
She pulled her hand out of his grasp. “If there was someone else, you would still have come and got me,” she said quietly, her eyes blinking open. “You should just drive, and we can get this over with.” She tried to keep the edge from her voice, hating that she sounded mad at Cade. She wasn’t. “Why?” she demanded, angry. “Why would someone kill Jessica and a baby? Is it because the baby was a mix? Is that it?” A sob caught in her throat and she quickly stifled it.
He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Maybe. But no one knew she was pregnant. Did you?”
She thought about it for a moment. Jessica had been around her so much. She had been shadowing Gemma—learning the ways of the Beta. She pictured her in her mind, trying to remember what she had worn, if the clothes had been oversized, or whether there had been any swelling in her belly. There hadn’t, though. Not in her memories of her.
“It was definitely her baby?”
“There’s no doubt.�
�� His jaw tightened into a hard line. “They’re still connected at the umbilical cord.”
Her stomach churned at the thought. “This could have been me,” she whispered. She had a sudden overwhelming urge to reach out and touch him again. Her skin burned with the ache for him, her tiger protesting at the distance and at the memory of the decisions she had made.
She wanted him to understand.
“This would never have been you,” he said roughly. “I would have killed anyone who tried.”
“You would have had to kill them all.”
He growled deep in his throat. “If that was what it would have taken.” There was a fierceness in his eyes that told Gemma he believed what he said, but she knew that they wouldn’t have been able to fight forever. What would have happened when they caught him and killed him? That was the punishment for mixing the breeds: death.
“This is going to create war,” she muttered solemnly.
“I hope not.” He started the engine, giving the car park one last glance before engaging the gear. “Where is your car? Is it dead again?”
“I grabbed a taxi,” she replied, ignoring his implication of the word again. She knew what it meant, especially from him. He was always on her case about how unsafe her car was.
“That’s a yes then?”
She didn’t answer, just stared at him and let him believe whatever it was he wanted. Her car was dead, but that wasn’t the reason for the taxi ride. She wasn’t about to tell him that, though. Telling Cade about the ‘phantom’ that followed her would have worse consequences than if she told her father.
“Jesus, Gem. Does that thing have to combust just for you to get it checked out?”
“I was getting around to it.” If he knew the truth, he’d have marched her ass right to her father and demanded that every member of the Society hunt for this man. When it came to overreacting at things like this, Cade could beat Malcolm Davies without trouble; especially where Gemma was involved.
“Of course you were.” His voice was thick with sarcasm, and Gemma didn’t care much for his tone. She didn’t really care much for anything at that moment. Her mind was too full of dread and pain and things she couldn’t even put into words. Just one wrong word and her heart was going to break open.
Why did she have to be the one to see Jessica’s body? It wasn’t that the dead bothered her. She had seen enough dead bodies through the wars, and life, to worry so much about it.
But it was Jessica, and it was a baby, too. It was her kid sister’s best friend—it was going to break Evie’s heart. Some deep part of her hoped that the person who had done this was Human. First, she’d kill them for what they had done to Jessica, and then she would kill them again for making her have to be the one signing off on this on behalf of the Society. The shit the Humans made the shifters go through caused anger to surge under her skin. On normal things, anyone could sign off on victims who were deemed, by the Council, to be no one. Mostly, Cade used Avery, his partner, but when it involved someone high up the food chain, only Gemma, her father, Malcolm, and Cade’s father, Trevor, could sign. The idea of making Trevor MacDonald come out and get his wolf paws dirty made Gemma silently scoff. He’d only come out if it benefited him …
Jessica wasn’t just Other. She was like Gemma, heir to her pack. She wasn’t tiger or wolf, though. She was a fox, and her mother was a member of the Society’s Council. Whoever killed her was either stupid … or downright stupid. For something like this to have been done, there had to be a reason—a serious reason.
As Cade drove down the quiet road, she had no doubt that they were heading towards the beginning of chaos. No one kills someone connected to the Council unless their reason is worth more to them than their lives.
It took them around thirty minutes to get to the estate. It was an old, abandoned chemical plant that hadn’t been used since the later part of the 90s. It wasn’t far from where Gemma lived, either. From her house, she could see the disused chimney sticking its ugly head out above everything else. The area around it was mostly fields and roads. Not much traffic went by normally, except to get to a supermarket that was down near the docks, but that closed in the evenings. The rest was just bushes. Nothing spectacular. It was so boring that not even the local vandals or teens wanting to get drunk or high without detection hung out there. It had once belonged to the Humans, but like everything they had, once it was used up, they moved on and left it behind. They were like termites, devouring buildings from the inside out.
Cade pulled the car to a stop on the gravelled area that was once used for the managers of the place. Rusted signs displaying the word ‘Reserved’ hung in odd places at a couple of the parking spots, and on another, the sign was broken and on the ground. He reached over Gemma’s legs to flick open the glove compartment of the dash. “Put these on,” he said to her, pulling out a packet of latex gloves. She would have put them on anyway, not that she planned on touching anything, but it was procedure. Doing everything correctly and by the books was integral to their case. She knew that if there was just one thing done wrong, one tiny sliver that she could give the Humans, they would use it and make them close down the case, adding yet another unsolved crime against an Other to the pile.
The estate appeared normal; derelict and dark. Its chimney stood tall above everything else. Years of neglect stained the sides with moss and rust. The building itself was five stories tall, but even the uppermost windows were broken.
“This is not a very dignified place for one of our own to meet her demise,” she remarked as she took it all in.
“It’s not a place for anyone to die,” said a solemn Cade.
They had both gone into work mode. Their voices were factual, void of any emotion that would give away what they were feeling inside. For Gemma, it was easier this way. She had braced herself for what she was about to see and feel and she was sure that when she went home, in the dark, when there was no one there, she would cry. Not for Jessica or her baby, but for her and for Cade and for Connor. Just the thought of his name made tears prick at the back of her eyes. She took a deep breath, refusing to give in to them, and focused on the job.
“Humans could die here. They deserve to.” She pulled her gloves on and got out of the car. Her mind switching to work mode once again in an almost robotic way. She took a mental note of everything as she went. The door to the building was to the side, more like a piece of metal placed across the entrance. Aside from Cade’s car, there were three others, including the van ready to ship Jessica off to the DSA rather than the Human authorities. The DSA—Department for Supernatural Affairs, did exactly what it said on the can. Cade worked for them—the Other’s version of the police—but unlike the Humans, there were no badges, no training, no wailing blue lights to help him get to someone fast. It was just a title and a job. He was one of the Others’ investigators.
She stopped. “You guys put the door here?” she asked Cade.
“Nope; it was already there. We haven’t moved or touched anything. Just looked and took pictures.” He turned his head to look at her then added, “And spent hours trying to get hold of you so we could carry on with our jobs.”
A young trainee burst out of the building before Gemma had time to either apologise or retort. She wondered if she should go over to him and enquire what was wrong, but he didn’t get very far before stopping and giving up his last meal to the ground with violent heaves.
“First job?” she asked, feeling a little sympathy—but not much.
“They all have to start somewhere,” Cade replied with a dismissive shrug. “Want to work in the DSA, you better pull your shit together and get used to it.”
As they walked past the younger Other, Gemma cast a compassionate glance at him. He’d either get used to it and have a bright career, or he’d quit in the morning. Patting him on the back wasn’t going to change those facts. She dismissed him from her mind and followed Cade into the building.
“Jessica is on the third floor,” Ca
de said flatly, and she tried not to think too much about what she was about to see. She tried not to think of anything other than work really. Not her, not Evie, not the strange man … and certainly not how much she wanted to reach out and take Cade’s hand.
They ran up the metal steps, the clanging of their feet echoing through the building. Her tiger hearing still allowed her to hear the low rumble of voices in the rooms above, though.
It was unusual for a body to bother Gemma, but she feared that Jessica’s might a little. She supposed that the real problem would lie in the event that it possibly didn’t bother her. But she had seen her fair share of death and slaughter—more than she cared to admit. Humans cut down more of the Other kind than all the deadly diseases put together. Illness, she believed, was more tolerant.
When she reached the room, Avery was waiting at the door, blocking her entry and her view. He gave her a weak smile then stepped aside so that she could go in by herself. Cade, she noted, backed away and let her go at her own pace.
She thought for a moment that it might be better to wait outside and give herself a moment to brace herself before entering, but then she realised, all she would be doing was making herself anxious. Taking a deep breath, she walked in and went right to where Jessica lay sprawled on the floor. Staring down at the bodies on the floor in front of her, she refused to avert her eyes. Looking away was not going to achieve anything. She owed the young girl the honour and respect to look at her and her baby. As she stared down at them, however, something seemed off. She knew that it was Jessica—she told herself that it was—but something wasn’t registering at first, as if her mind was protecting her. But then she saw it—Jessica’s eyes ... her face.
