by R. E. Butler
Immediately, Cella’s brain went into protective mode. They were holding Cyrus back?
“What’s going on here?” She stepped into Cyrus’s line of sight, blocking him from seeing the three males. His gaze bored into her, and for the first time since he’d woken up from his turning, she realized his eyes were different. No longer the blue color she adored, but a swirled mixture of blue and gold.
Mishka joined her and put a hand on her shoulder. Cyrus roared in fury. Mishka lifted his hand from her and cleared his throat. “It appears your beloved has become something of legend.”
“He’s not my beloved.”
“I’m not going to quibble over semantics. Whether you were able to perform the actual ceremony or not doesn’t change that you are, in fact, beloveds.”
She looked at Cyrus. His gaze was steady if not a little crazed, his fangs bared but not in anger any longer.
“He hates me.”
“I don’t,” Cyrus said, wheezing the words out as the two males continued to pin him to the wall. She was a little impressed that he was strong enough to need to be held back by two fully grown males. Okay, a lot impressed. He was sex on a stick, and she’d never been more attracted to him, even though her heart was breaking.
Mishka made an impatient noise and she slid her gaze to him briefly to let him know she was listening. He did not like to be ignored.
“You were saying?” she prompted.
Harmony handed Mishka a large book that was opened to pages filled with writing in a language she didn’t recognize. “Have you ever heard of a tribrid?”
“Tribe?”
“No, tribrid. It’s such a rare phenomenon that I had never heard of it actually happening in all my years. It was Traz, however, who recognized Cyrus for what he is. Three creatures in one.”
Cella peeked at the book. A tribrid was a supernatural creature with the traits of all his or her natures mixed into one – human, shifter, and vampire.
“I don’t understand. Cyrus is still a tiger?” She recalled the strange noises he’d made, part tiger, part something else. She’d shrugged off her concerns because she’d been so focused on him feeding.
“He is and he’s not,” Traz said.
“Right,” Mishka said, tapping the book. “According to the legends, the shifter has to be powerful and also a beloved mate. There’s something about the connection as beloveds, even without the sharing of blood and the bond, that changes the shifter at the core of what he is. He won’t shift, but he’ll have the strength and some of the other abilities of his cat, including no aversion to sunlight. Because he’s part vampire, he’ll have to feed but not from you or humans.”
Cella frowned. “That leaves shifters.”
“No kidding,” Wyst said from across the room. “That’s the reason he’s going ass wild over there.”
“Why didn’t you leave if you’re making him crazy?” she asked.
“We tried, but he nearly took the door off attempting to get to us,” Bridge said. “We’ll let him feed, but we need you here to ground him.”
Cella shook her head. “This isn’t making any sense.”
“Listen,” Traz said. “I heard about this happening in the old country. It was a wolf shifter and she was the beloved of the coven leader. She was in an accident and nearly dead when her beloved found her. He attempted to turn her, utilizing his coven members to provide enough blood to save her. When she awoke, she still had access to her wolf, but she couldn’t shift. And she also couldn’t drink human blood. She was killed because she returned to her pack and attempted to feed from a male who was mated. The female killed her in a jealous rage.”
“He’s kind of like a Valkyrie,” Harmony said. “They’re both human and vampire, daylight walkers but blood drinkers.”
“He needs to feed, but he needs you to anchor him so he doesn’t truly attack the males,” Mishka said.
“I couldn’t stop him if he did,” she pointed out. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
“He’s hungry,” Temple said from where he lounged in Mishka’s desk chair. “Turnings always bring up weird emotions, like everything’s amplified. I seem to recall you being pretty mad at Mishka for the pain of the turning. Once you fed though, your emotions evened out and you could think clearly. It’s probably worse for Cyrus because he’s a mixture of three different natures, and they’re all probably battling for dominance.”
She wanted to believe that he’d be okay after he fed. She desperately wanted a chance to talk to him about the choice she made, and how even if he hated her for eternity, she’d rather he be alive to hate her then in the ground.
Tentative hope filled her. “Cyrus?”
His gold and blue gaze bored into her. She could practically feel the emotions radiating from him – need, hunger, fury, sadness – and underneath all of that was a pulsing feeling of connection between them. She couldn’t feel it before, but she did now, faint as it was.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I think.”
She almost snorted. “Okay. Who’s donating?” She glanced at the three males who turned and shot odds.
“Damn it,” Bridge said. He unbuttoned his cuff and rolled the sleeve up, exposing a forearm covered with tattoos. “Just don’t mess with my ink.”
Cella walked over to where her beloved was being held back and put her hands on his face. He let out a purr and his shoulders slumped.
“I’m fucking sorry. It hurts. I need to feed,” he said. He bared his fangs and hissed out a pained wheeze.
“Let him go,” Cella said.
Bridge joined them. Traz and Brone stepped away. Immediately Cyrus pulled Cella against him with one arm and jerked Bridge’s arm forward, sinking his fangs into his wrist.
“Shit,” Bridge said, hissing the word. “That’s not pleasant. You do this a lot, Harm?”
“It’s better when you’re all hazed from good sex.” Harmony winked.
“Good sex?” Mishka asked, his upper lip curled.
“Sorry, I mean great sex.”
“Ew, you’re like my sister.” Bridge made a disgusted sound and shuddered.
Cella watched as Cyrus fed from the wolf shifter’s wrist as if he’d been doing it for decades, and not for the first time. She rubbed Cyrus’s back, feeling the connection between them strengthening. “Why didn’t you feed as soon as you knew what you needed?”
“He wouldn’t,” Brone said. “He wanted you to be here.”
She smiled and leaned her head against his shoulder. His fingers dug into her waist and pulled her even closer. Was this their new reality? And just what did it mean for them?
“I’m getting a little dizzy,” Bridge said after several minutes. He looked over his shoulder at his bandmates. “Switch off with me.”
Cyrus didn’t have to be pulled off the male, he simply disengaged his fangs and licked across the bite marks. They healed quicker than Cella had ever seen bites heal, and she let out a hum of curiosity. Tamar, a puma shifter, took his place and Cyrus fed from him until he was sated, and when he’d healed that male, he turned to face Cella and his eyes were like molten gold with tiny pinpricks of neon blue in them. The vampire, it seemed, was in full control.
She said his name.
“Mine,” he said, spinning her away from the group and pressing her against the wall. He faced outward, his back to her front, and snarled at the males.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“We’re not mated yet. There are unmated males here.” His voice was rough and growly, and it did wonderful things to her insides.
Protective male. Owner of her heart.
“Yeah, but they’re my family.”
“Not all of them.”
“So what should we do?” She rested her hands on his back and inhaled his scent. It was a mixture of his tiger layered with vampire.
“Clear the room,” Cyrus said. There was power in his voice that hadn’t been there before. It made chills break out on her ski
n and her spine tingle with awareness. Cyrus had been a badass tiger before she turned him, but now he was more. She peeked around him and saw Mishka’s brows raised, his jaw clenched tightly.
Was one of the most powerful vampires in the States feeling compelled by her mate? She pressed her lips together to stifle the smile that wanted to break free. What a strange turn of events.
Leaning fully against Cyrus, she rested her cheek on his back and was surprised to hear his heart beating. One of the many things she’d have to learn about when it came to her beloved and how things were different now. Different with him. With her. With them.
“You have to dial back the power, Cyrus. Mishka’s not used to being bossed around by anyone.”
“But me,” Harmony quipped.
“Indeed,” Mishka said, a smile curving his lips.
Cyrus straightened from his defensive crouch once the three shifters were gone. He immediately pulled Cella to his side, tucking her against him. “I apologize for my behavior. My emotions are just... I don’t know. Crazy.”
Mishka relaxed, and so did everyone else. Cella was just happy that Cyrus was okay and didn’t seem to hate her anymore. She knew they had a lot to discuss. The explosion had caused her to turn him, and that screwed up his plans to bring her into his ambush as a member. She hated that one aspect of what she’d done because she knew how important it was to him, but the truth was she’d trade anything and everything in her possession to keep him with her forever.
They’d get past this. She hoped, anyway.
She loved him, after all.
Chapter Fourteen
Cyrus took Cella’s hand and took a step toward the door to lead her out and down into their chamber so they could talk. And by talk he was thinking about getting horizontal and connecting on a physical level. Several times. But then he remembered the bomb that had happened twenty-four hours earlier.
He turned to face the family. “The bomb.”
Brone’s purple eyes narrowed. “We didn’t know how much you remembered, if anything at all.”
His nostrils flared as Cella tucked herself close to him. Damn, he wanted her. He felt like he had a thousand things to make up for, the most glaring thing being that he’d behaved like an ass in their chamber. He looked down at her. He could see her features even more clearly; she was gorgeous on a hundred different levels, and he was in awe of how lucky he was to have her in his life.
“This is important,” she said, as if she could read his mind and the bedroom-thoughts that were straying into it.
“So are you.”
Her lips split into a sweet smile. “This first. The coven could still be in danger.”
Cella was one hundred percent right. And if the coven was in danger, it meant that she could potentially be in danger, and that was unacceptable. He pushed back the part of him that wanted to rush her off into a dark corner and make her come a dozen times and focused on the event in question. As he thought over what happened, he could see it as clearly in his mind as if he were watching a movie. He explained to the family what happened, from scenting a strange, artificial tiger to seeing the bomb in the ceiling, trying to get as many workers out as possible, and then the pain and darkness that followed. It was odd to consider he’d lost a whole day because of the turning. It felt like the explosion had just happened.
Temple joined them with a tablet computer, which showed a split screen of four camera angles from the restaurant – one at the front and back doors, and two inside the kitchen.
“How does someone get tiger scent in the first place?” Rage asked. “What’s the purpose of a product like that even existing?”
Cyrus checked the time stamps on the videos and rolled them back to the beginning of the second shift and set the footage speed to fast forward at three times the normal rate. While he watched the first shift leave and the second shift come on, he knew each and every tiger that stepped foot in the restaurant. As the footage raced by, he had no trouble seeing every detail, and he briefly wondered if it was due to his turning and whatever strange thing had happened to him because of it. He was the same but different. An anomaly.
He paused the footage. “First and second shift are normal. No one who doesn’t belong there. As for the faux tiger scent, it’s off the market in the States, but it’s available in other countries and on the black market. It was used in the States a few decades ago for hunting tiger shifters. It mimics the scent of a tiger to allow someone to infiltrate an ambush. The problem is that the scent isn’t really true. To a tiger shifter, it scents of a strange tiger at first but it takes only seconds to figure out that it’s artificial.”
“It’s outlawed in the States?” Harmony asked.
“When shifters fought for legal rights and won, yes. A few years ago there was a company selling the tiger essence to homeowners as a protective measure, saying they could lay the scent around their house and keep other predators away. They were shut down fast, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there still selling it on the down low.”
“Does it work?” Cella asked.
“Not to keep shifters away. Any shifter would smell that the essence is fake. But it might work on a human, maybe light up that place in their brain that tells them to avoid places that could get them killed.”
Mishka hummed. “It has to be the church.”
The church made Cyrus’s hackles rise and his fangs throb. Damn humans holding a grudge had nearly cost him his life and his chance at forever with his beloved.
While the family discussed the church and their motives for bombing the restaurant, Cyrus turned his attention back to the tablet, restarted the footage, and let out what he’d come to think of as his new growl, a mixture of his tiger and vampire. It had a rougher edge to it, the sound dangerous in a way that the tiger by itself had not been.
A male wearing coveralls with a baseball cap low on his head strode into the kitchen with the ladder, set it up under the light, and climbed up. He worked efficiently, on the ladder only two minutes before he scurried down, leaned the ladder against the counter and exited out the front of the restaurant, away from the back of the building where the crews entered and exited.
Cyrus rewound the footage. Where had the male come from?
He stared at the screen and watched the video, slowing the speed way down. The male, recognizable by the dark cap, came in from the right of the kitchen. Cyrus thought back to the room he’d worked for weeks in and realized where the male must have come from.
“I need to go into the restaurant,” Cyrus said. He turned the tablet over to Mishka. “This is the male that doesn’t belong. And we need the footage from the alley.”
“We checked it already, but we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” Ven said.
“Because you didn’t know what to look for,” Cyrus answered.
“Let’s go,” Brone said.
Cyrus took Cella’s hands in his. “I don’t want you going with us, it’s too dangerous.”
She frowned and he thought she’d protest. Instead, she just nodded. “I’ll be here waiting.”
“Actually,” he said with a low voice, “why don’t you wait in our chamber? We have a lot to discuss.”
Her eyes flashed to the dark color he loved. “Okay.”
To the family members, he said, “I’ll be back in a few,” then he walked Cella to the elevator and paused before pushing the button. “You look tired. Have you had SyBl or fed since the explosion?”
“No.”
He detoured them to the kitchen, where he popped the top off a bottle of SyBl, poured it into one of the stoneware mugs in the cabinet, and heated it in the microwave. When he took the synthetic blood from the microwave, he sniffed it.
“You can taste it.”
“It smells like human blood. I mean not really since it’s clearly synthetic, but I didn’t want real human blood so I sure as hell don’t want the fake stuff. I wonder...” He didn’t finish his thought.
But Ce
lla seemed to know what he was going to say. “You wonder if you’ll have to feed daily from a shifter, because there’s no version of SyBl that’s more like shifter blood than human blood.”
He let out a sigh. “Yeah. There aren’t any shifters who work in the club as food. I could maybe get my family to donate blood, but every day? There’s no way. What if I can’t sustain myself and I do something awful like go on a killing spree?”
She put the mug down and cupped his face. “Slow down, Cyrus. We don’t know anything yet. I’ll point out that shifter blood is stronger than human and sustains us longer. But aside from that, you’re not just a vampire, you’re something different – a combination of your tiger and me and your human side. We just don’t know what you’ll need to deal with because we have zero information on a tribrid. But no matter what, I’m by your side. As long as you still want me.”
Her face shadowed and he snarled, “Why wouldn’t I want you?”
“You were so angry when you woke.”
“I couldn’t control my emotions and I didn’t feel like myself. I was pissed about being turned because I wanted you to be able to be part of my ambush. But, damn it, Cella, tell me that you know I’d choose you over anything else in the world.”
Her eyes glittered with emotion. “I do. I was scared though.”
“I’m sorry for everything I said to you in the chamber. Thank you for saving my life.” He pulled her close and hugged her tightly. “I get you for eternity. However that happened is what our destiny is, and I’m grateful to you.”
She shuddered in his arms and he once more realized what a raging jackass he’d been. It was a wonder she hadn’t walked away from him entirely, but that was the mark of a good female. She’d stuck by him even when he was out of his mind.
“When I woke up, all I could think about was how different I felt. I didn’t feel like I was in the right skin, if that makes sense, and everything I felt was magnified by a thousand. I couldn’t control being angry that our plans had changed.”
