“Who does he think killed his daughter?” Kat asked, her voice sounding hollow in her own ears. She already knew the answer. She didn’t even know why she was asking; it was automatic. Like a moth to a flame.
“Me,” said Byron. Kat slowly turned to look up at him. But his gaze was on the fire at the center of the camp, and his storm gray eyes were no longer glowing.
Chapter Twenty
“Crosshairs”
Lucas stood in the center of the cave and turned a slow circle. The fire had burned down to its embers, but the logs that remained were crisscrossed in a pattern that Lucas instantly recognized. Byron had built a lot of fires for them along the Gold Coast when they were teenagers. He’d always laid the logs just so.
The air in the cave was a mixture of cold and hot and it felt strangely charged, as if with electricity. Lightning waiting to happen.
It also smelled like him.
Like Byron.
It had been so long. There weren’t even words for what was going through Lucas’s body and mind in that moment. The emotion was unlike any he’d ever experienced. He felt numb and overrun at once. A crazy part of him wanted to touch the red and black logs in the campfire. He wanted to take them home with him.
“They were here,” said Daniel as he made his way back through the cave from the entrance where Lily, Charlie and Danny stood together with Malcolm and James Valentine. Lucas turned to face him, and Daniel stopped in his tracks.
It must have been the expression on Lucas’s face. He wondered what he looked like.
Daniel searched his gaze for a moment and then closed the distance between them to place his hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “We’ll find him, Caige. We’re one step closer.”
“I know,” Lucas said. His voice sounded hoarse but he didn’t bother to clear it. “He was with his mate,” he continued. “I can smell her blood.”
Daniel nodded, his expression unreadable. “Either she was injured or he marked her. I’m betting on the latter.”
So was Lucas. If his brother was anything like him – and he was – then he wouldn’t want to wait and he wouldn’t take chances. Especially not after being held prisoner for fifty years.
A wave of dizzying reality washed over Lucas, blurring his vision. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. Fifty years. He couldn’t come to grips with it. At first, he simply hadn’t believed it. Despite the fact that Lily Kane had had hundreds of visions in the last two and a half years and not one of them had been wrong, Lucas couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of someone keeping his brother locked up for five decades.
Byron Caige was a rebel, a fighter, a free man. Lucas had always wanted to be like him – hell, he’d pretty much grown up a carbon copy of his big brother and he’d done so on purpose. Because nothing beat Byron Caige. Nothing could hold him.
At least that was what he’d thought. But now Lucas could scent his brother in the cavernous air and the smoldering logs in the camp fire bore his signature and he had to admit – finally – that Lily Kane had been right once again.
Byron was alive.
“Their scent disappears right outside the cave entrance,” Daniel went on. “And it smells like magic. I’m assuming they were transported somewhere else. Danny’s trying to see if she can follow the spell’s signature, but if she can’t, then….” Daniel trailed off, shooting a concerned glance at his lovely wife where she stood conversing with her friends and running a hand through her long golden hair.
“Then it’s on Lily’s shoulders again,” Lucas supplied softly. Daniel turned to him, his blue eyes stark. He nodded, just once. ***** Kat had no idea what to say to Byron, but looking up at him in that moment, she was struck with a hard cord of anger. The crackling of the fire was the only sound that punctuated the silence, but in her head, she was screaming. And she wasn’t even sure why.
Without fully realizing what she was doing, Kat spun on Seth and her indigo gaze narrowed into purple slits. “Why did you bother telling him this?” she asked him hotly. “Why not just kill us?” Why would Seth fill Byron’s head with the guilt of knowing that it was his life and his life alone that could be sacrificed for the good of his entire race? What was the point? Torture?
“As I told you, Katherine,” Seth said patiently, “I owe you a boon.”
“And this is what you call a boon?” she demanded. “Telling us why you’re going to kill us before you do it?”
Seth looked as though he was going to reply when he suddenly went still and his eyes flashed into red. A second later, several other sets of eyes went red as well, until monster eyes pierced the darkness all around them, a vision straight out of a nightmare.
Katherine’s ears pricked, her skin flushed warm, and just as she was considering getting to her feet, Byron was already doing so. He and the vampires moved in synchronicity, their senses clearly kicked into high alert.
She heard the darts before she saw them; darts had a very unique sound to them. They suffered from a certain amount of drag and there was a hollow quality to the material they were created from. When they split the air, they left a deep gash in it that resonated on a lower level.
These darts came out of the darkness and whizzed past Kat’s ears. They’d failed to hit their mark, which Kat reasoned was somewhere in the vicinity of her throat, because Byron dove over her, taking her to the ground with blurring speed. She would have landed hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs, but Byron turned, wrapping his arms around her, and absorbed the impact himself. He then rolled with her across the clearing leaves and needles.
When they came to a stop, Kat tried to make out any sounds that would help her figure out what was going on. There were odd popping noises, mini-thunders that filled the clearing and the surrounding forest, and a few hurried footfalls in the underbrush.
No voices. That was disorienting and it would have served to further confuse Kat under normal circumstances, but the darts had tipped her off as to who their attackers were. Hunters used darts on quarry they wanted alive. Every once in a while, a human got caught up in “demon” business and the Hunters took him or her in for questioning. The guns Hunters normally used on werewolves would have killed a human ten times over, so they developed the darts, which could be used on anyone. Even children.
“Stay here!” Byron commanded before he was once more blurring into action. He was up on his feet and flashing into wolf form so fast she couldn’t catch the movement. And then he was gone.
“Like hell,” she said as she sat up. A cursory scan of the clearing revealed that it had been cast into darkness. The vampires who had been there moments ago were gone; they’d vanished to leave Katherine and Byron to fight alone. Figures moved in the shadows and the fire had been magically doused. There wasn’t even any smoke.
Kat rolled back and then jumped to bring her legs beneath her in a crouched position. That serum worked, she thought. It was incredibly easy for her to move as she’d been trained to move, despite the blood Byron had taken from her. The vampire had obviously been telling the truth about his experience with such things.
Now that she was upright, she could see the red beams of laser sights slicing across the clearing in different directions. Byron was at the center of the clearing, once more in human form and engaged in fist to cuffs with two Hunters at once. No doubt he’d rushed them; she could see their discarded weapons on the ground nearby. Two other Hunters lay dead on the ground, their throats ripped out. One of the bodies had a face she recognized. He was young; probably around nineteen or twenty. He worked with Manuel Sanchez.
Katherine absorbed the sight with a heavy feeling in her gut, and then shoved the image into some compartment within her mind saved for things she would have to digest eventually but didn’t have time to deal with right now.
The sights that were lasering in on Byron’s body couldn’t get a clear shot. He moved so fast, his opponents kept getting in the way. Only split seconds had passed sin
ce he’d left her on the ground, but she was seeing everything the way one does when faced with a traumatic event: In slow motion.
The laser sights belonged to the same kind of weapon Kat had faced Byron with in the clearing on the warlock king’s estate. She remembered that her gun hadn’t gone off – it had “jammed.” Now she knew that Byron’s immensely powerful control over electrical objects had had something to do with it. He could stop these before they went off too, but he was enmeshed in hand-to-hand combat and might not even know they were there.
“Byron!” she yelled. “Shut down the guns!”
She heard someone swear and then one of the guns went off. The shot missed, thankfully, and no further shots were fired. Or they were, but the guns were “jammed.”
Relief washed over Katherine, but it was short lived.
“Get out of here!” Byron yelled. Kat could feel the shift in the air; the mood was changing. The other Hunters were coming out of the clearing now. She turned to count them – half a dozen in addition to the men on the ground and the two Byron was fighting. A third Hunter joined his companions in the dirt and Byron was left fighting a single man. Kat knew the human wouldn’t last long.
But with a sinking feeling, she realized it didn’t matter. She heard the cocking of cold, hard steel and smelled the musk of gun powder on the air. A second later, there was the sound of leather on nylon and the tiny click of a dart gun being reloaded.
Kat dove for cover as the dart sailed past. The razor edge of its casing sliced across her back as she went down, ripping a line into her leather jacket. Which was why she wore leather jackets in the first place.
As she hit the ground and rolled of her own accord, she called out once more. “Byron, he has a revolver!”
There was no electricity involved in the shooting of a Smith and Wesson. Those guns were old magic, all fire and brimstone, lightning and thunder. She knew Sanchez carried one with him just in case; she’d done her homework on the opposition, even if she had never planned to outwardly challenge them for the position of leader.
Sanchez’s particular weapon carried bullets made to kill a werewolf. They weren’t silver; that was a rather expensive myth gone awry. Kat didn’t actually know what was in these particular bullets. Rumor had it that the bullets were a gift to Sanchez from their former leader – a box of one hundred of them. That was why he carried the revolver. The gun would have been useless without them.
Somewhere over her head and a few feet away, a hammer slammed a primer and fire split the night. Kat rolled to her hands and knees and scrambled through the dirt. Above her, someone tried to grab her by the back of her jacket, but she rose, slipped out of it, and then spun on the ground, raising her leg in a fan kick that took her attacker out.
Another Hunter hit the ground – but at least she hadn’t killed him. Kat looked at his unconscious body and saw the glint of steel on his thigh. Working on instinct, she reached out and yanked the Buck knife out of its sheath and shoved it into the similar sheath on the inside of her own boot.
The gun went off again, an explosion that echoed through the forest like a single-strike epitaph. Kat tried to keep moving, shooting for the tree line in front of her. Another dart raced toward her and this time, she felt it slice across her upper arm, digging a hole into her shirt and carving a red line across her bicep. She gritted her teeth against the sudden flash of pain and thanked her lucky stars she’d chosen to wear black. They could probably see her river of white-blonde hair well enough in the darkness, but fortunately they weren’t aiming for her head.
The revolver went off a third time and fourth time and Kat’s stomach clenched. She made it to the edge of the clearing, scrambled into the shadows beneath the low-lying braches of a tree, and tried to see what the hell was going on.
Several feet away, Byron Caige stood with a Hunter in his grasp. He’d placed the other man before his own body as a shield, one strong arm wrapped around the Hunter’s neck, the other around his chest. In front of them both stood Manuel Sanchez, his gun arm extended, the hammer pulled back and ready.
“Go ahead,” growled Byron through a deadly set of fangs. His jacket, too, was missing and his clothes were smeared with dirt and blood.
Sanchez pulled the trigger without blinking. The man Byron was holding jerked once in his grip and then went slack. Byron looked down at the limp form in his arms and, a brief moment later, he let the human slide to the ground. When he looked back up at Sanchez, it was through glowing eyes and a stark, enigmatic expression.
Kat couldn’t believe what she’d just seen. She’d known that Hunter teams were turning against one another, but this had been one of Sanchez’s own men.
“I don’t suppose you’d agree to coming quietly,” Sanchez said softly, cocking his head to one side and regarding Byron with unadaltered disgust.
Byron didn’t respond.
Sanchez shrugged. “Either way.” And then he cocked the gun again and Kat found herself rushing forward into the clearing.
“No!” she screamed, coming to a skidding halt ten feet from the two of them. Byron glanced at her in hard disappointment. It was as if he’d known she was there all along and this was the very thing he hadn’t wanted her to do.
But Sanchez smiled. Without taking his eyes from Byron, he addressed Katherine. “I was wondering when you would speak up, Dare. Your compassion is admirable, but it’s misplaced. We aren’t the humane society.”
“You can’t kill him, Sanchez. He has powers that other wolves have only ever dreamed of,” she said. She blinked. Apparently her mind was faster than she’d thought. She was trying to buy them time. Bartering. And she was using the one piece of information that might actually work. “Our people could learn a lot from him.”
“Oh, you mean that little trick he plays with the juice?” Sanchez asked before he chuckled. “I’m well aware. I admit I had no idea it would extend to our weapons – impressive,” he nodded in mock respect. “And I would love to know more. But your puppy is a trouble maker, Dare; his life doesn’t seem to mean enough to him to insure his cooperation.” He paused and then said, “I wonder if yours does.”
Without looking at her, he turned the gun on Katherine and Kat felt herself go cold.
Sanchez waited, his black eyes revealing nothing. And then, finally, he turned to look down his arm at Katherine. “Your death would suck the life right out of him.”
Kat held her breath.
“But you’re one of our best and you can be redeemed. You’re not the demon here,” he said quickly, turning the gun back on Byron. “He is.”
Kat knew it was coming. Her body was moving before her brain fully processed the knowledge. “No!” she screamed as Sanchez pulled the trigger.
She hit the Hunter in the side, her shoulder to his waist, and the gun went off a sixth and final time. And then she was being pulled off of him none too gently and thrown in the other direction. Katherine landed on a patch of fallen leaves and rushed to get back on her feet. But the sounds coming from behind her then were retched and horrible, straight out of a nightmare, and at the last minute, she simply stood still, her body too terrified to turn around.
She was trembling badly and a ruthless cold was seeping into her bones when the noises stopped and silence filled the forest. Kat realized her eyes were shut tight and her arms were stiff at her sides when she heard the single footfall directly behind her.
She inhaled sharply, her body jerking to spin around, but a strong pair of arms wrapped around her, holding her in place. The heat from that embrace was instantly recognizable.
Kat opened her eyes. “Byron, I –” she began, not even knowing what she was about to say. “We have to get out of here, Kat,” he said softly, his lips beside her ear. Katherine shivered violently. “Shh,” he said then. “Let’s get somewhere safe and I’ll see you warmed up.” His hands slid down her arms until he took her fingers in his. Slowly he moved around her, pulling her after him. He neve
r turned back toward the clearing and the mess of bodies she knew would be strung across its earth. He never let her look.
Instead, he pulled her deeper into the forest and the darkness and the freedom beyond.
Chapter Twenty-One
“The Trophy”
Katherine was good at noting the passage of time. She’d been trained to know how many minutes or hours or even seconds passed in any given space of moments. She could tell that they’d been moving roughly half an hour when Byron slowed – and then dropped to his knees.
Kat was instantly kneeling beside him. “Byron,” she said, trying to get a better look at him. “What is it?” she asked as she scooted on her knees until she was in front of him. Now she could see the blood that coated his right side; it had been hidden from her.
“He hit you,” she said softly, speaking more to herself than to him. I knew it. She’d known deep down that she hadn’t been able to get to Sanchez in time. Byron had been so close; it was stupid to think a trained Hunter would miss at that range, despite her efforts.
“What do you need?” she asked quickly. His entire right side was drenched in precious red liquid. His face was pale; she could see that now in the moonlight. His lips had no color to them and the gray in his eyes had darkened – as if night were coming.
Byron shook his head, just once. “Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“Bullshit,” Kat hissed. Werewolves were shot all the time and survived. Not every Hunter had always been as successful as she was. “Demons” got away. There had to be something now that would bring Byron back from the brink of death. “Tell me what you need,” she insisted, taking Byron’s face in her hands.
His eyes were unfocused for a moment, but when she looked into them, they caught her gaze and held it, back for a moment.
“Tell me,” she repeated firmly.
Byron smiled a small, somewhat sad smile and a glow sparked in his stormy grays. But as soon as it was there, it was gone.
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