by R. E. Butler
Cyrus nodded, thanked him, and ended the call. He sat back and exhaled loudly.
“That sounded promising,” she said, turning sideways to face him.
“Yeah. The question is whether when I see him if my vampire side is going to want to take a bite out of him. And also whether my tiger side is still enough of a part of me that I will recognize him as king so that you can join the ambush as my mate.”
“Do you think any of the ambush members will have a problem with you?”
“Maybe.”
“Some people must think we can’t control ourselves at all around shifters.”
“It’s what we’re raised believing. That putting ourselves in close proximity to vampires is straight-up foolish. Even after working with the vampire construction crew for weeks, my cousin still didn’t want his sister Aeryn working at the restaurant, simply because of the vampires.”
“Newbies can be aggressive, but I wouldn’t worry about a shifter dealing with one anyway. You’re generally stronger and faster than humans, and if you needed to get away from one of our kind, you could.”
He nodded and rose to his feet, offering her his hand. “Ready to go do some research?”
“After we eat, first. I’m starving.”
“Damn, I was so intent on finding out what we can about me that I forgot we need to eat.”
She chuckled and took his hand, leading him to the chamber door. “My growling stomach would have clued you in for sure.”
“I hope there’s a nice, rare steak waiting for me.”
“I’m certain there will be. The chef and his staff are really great about stocking what our people need.”
As she’d expected, they found several steaks for Cyrus, all what she would have considered barely cooked, but he raved about being perfect. While she sipped her reheated SyBl, she was amused by how much he enjoyed the steaks.
“I think it’s a prey thing,” he said.
“What is?”
He gestured to the remaining part of the third steak. “Why it satisfies me. I’m a tiger, which makes me a predator, and although a tiger wouldn’t go hunting on a farm necessarily, a cow is prey. I’m also part vampire, and that’s about the coolest predator around, but don’t tell Midas I said that.”
She grinned. “That makes sense. So you don’t mind being a vampire? Even if it’s mixed up with your tiger?”
He grasped her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Sweetheart, I get you, and however that happened, whatever cosmic stuff had to align in order for me to be sitting here with you – I love it and I’m grateful for it.”
She was more relieved every time he said he was grateful to be with her.
They finished their meal, stopped to check in with Mishka, and headed to the garage. Temple and Traz had volunteered to escort her and Cyrus to the off-site building, because the coven was still on alert for issues from the church. Cyrus and the other family members had helped to shut the church’s Cleveland office and many of their people had been taken into custody, so it wasn’t a far stretch to assume the church might retaliate at some point.
Cyrus opened the passenger door for her and she climbed into the plush second row seat of the SUV. He joined her, shutting the door and putting his arm around her as the vehicle left the garage. She and Cyrus talked about meeting with Midas the following night, and his hope that they’d find information about tribrids in Mishka’s collection so he could learn more about himself.
Temple entered a code into the security pad at the gate of the off-site building, which was a huge warehouse. The two-story building had no windows and was temperature-controlled, with remote access that Mishka kept tabs on.
“Has he always collected stuff?” Cyrus asked as he helped her out of the SUV.
“When he and I met, he had a small collection of old books that he kept locked up in a chest. We were traveling in the South and he found some other books, and then before I knew it, his collection was so large that it required two people to lift the chest because it was stuffed full and extremely heavy. He transferred the collection to a big safe he kept in his office, but it couldn’t hold the bigger items, so he used one of the offices for a long time. Then the club fire happened and he got paranoid, so now he’s got this unit.”
“I don’t understand why the church won’t just leave vampires alone. I mean, they don’t like your kind – so what? Why do they have to actively try to kill or harm vampires or those who are with them?”
“That’s a good question,” she said. The security door clicked as it was unlocked. They stepped into an alcove, and when the door was shut and locked behind them, she entered another code which unlocked the door. They entered a short hallway and she had to enter a third code, which finally opened a door that led to the warehouse.
“He’s pretty crazy about security,” Cyrus mused as he looked around the enormous space. There were rows of floor to ceiling shelves that extended from one end to the other, glass cases that held everything from swords to full suits of armor, and wooden racks loaded with weapons, many that he’d never seen before in his life.
She smiled at him. “Some of the things in here are worth a fortune. There are vampires and other collectors who would kill to have half of what he has here. The only person who knows everything that’s in here is Mishka, and this location is known only to the family and certain members of the coven. He also has a fallen angel who hunts for antiquities for him when he’s not acting as a guard for Arissa on Brone’s behalf.”
Cyrus looked around, taking in all that was stored in the room and said, “Pretty damn cool.”
“It will be, if we can find the books that he believes contain information on tribrids.” She pulled out her phone and opened the note app. “We’re heading into the stacks.”
“The stacks?” He followed her toward the back of the warehouse.
“That’s what we call his library. All the books and scrolls are arranged by category in a temperature-controlled section of the warehouse. It’s just a fancy name for bookshelves.”
They reached a glass-enclosed room and she entered a three-digit code, which allowed them inside. Before they stepped in, they put paper booties over their shoes and white gloves on their hands. He inhaled, sorting through the scents that lingered in the air. Leather, paper, fabric, and the faint scents of other vampires, shifters, and humans who had handled the materials at one time or another. His tiger and his vampire sat up in his mind in curiosity, wondering what they’d find.
“Here’s the directory,” she said, entering a password on a nearby computer.
He hummed and turned away, walking through the bookshelves. His senses were on alert, his cat and his vampire finding interesting and curious smells coming from the books.
“Cyrus?”
“I’m following my nose,” he called back.
She chuckled. “Ah, okay. Do your thing.”
He smiled at her turn of phrase and returned his attention to the scents that his inner beasts were demanding he follow. He found himself at the end of one of the rows, scanning the books with his eyes from shelf to shelf until he ended up squatting to peer at the bottom one. There, tucked between two thick books with titles on their spines related to phases of the moon, he withdrew a thin book with a black leather cover. He opened the book carefully, smelling the age of the paper pages that were scripted in a language he didn’t recognize.
Until he suddenly did.
Through his bond as Cella’s beloved, he recognized the language as French, which Cella had spoken fluently when she lived in France before she came to the States. He stood and carried the book to a small reading table and sat, scanning the pages. He wasn’t sure why he’d picked up the book, but he felt like it had been handled by someone like him once upon a time.
“What’s that?” Cella asked, setting several books down on the desk next to him.
He didn’t speak for several moments, and then he found the word he’d been looking for – tribrid. He pointed to th
e page, and Cella leaned over and read out loud, translating from French to English the story of a male wolf shifter who nearly died in a battle with another pack. He stumbled into a vampire coven’s territory and thought he’d be killed off, but instead a female vampire found him, drawn to him because they were beloveds. She and her coven saved his life, and the combination of different vampires’ blood and the fact he was a beloved mate, turned him into a tribrid, a mixture of wolf, vampire, and human. The coven brought countless humans to him for feeding, but he refused.
Cella sat in a chair and drummed her fingers on the table. “He wouldn’t feed from humans and nearly starved to death, turning into a ravening beast that couldn’t be controlled.”
Cyrus nodded. He continued the story, not as good at translating as Cella had been, but much better than he thought he’d be, considering he’d never spoken a word of French in his entire life. But that was something to think about another night.
“Until he found a shifter who was willing to feed him,” Cyrus continued, “and calmed the violent need within.”
He turned the page and found only one more paragraph, written in a different hand than the original, explaining that he died in a battle between his coven and his pack, and was laid to rest in honor in the crypt of the master vampire of the coven.
“That’s it?” Cella asked. He slid the book closer to her and watched as she inspected the pages, which had seemed promising, but ended so suddenly.
“It’s almost like whoever was keeping this account quit or died,” he said. “It was nice of whoever penned the last part to do so, at least we know what happened to him.”
“Not his name though,” she pointed out. She gave him a curious look. “How did you even find this?”
He shrugged. “My beasts. They led me here.” He lifted the book to his nose and inhaled. “It smells like one person that has three different parts to him. I wonder if the tribrid created the journal and someone from the coven added the end.”
“It’s possible.” She carefully flipped to the front of the book and looked for notations about the author or where it was from, and then she checked it against the computer. “There’s literally nothing in the computer about this book except that it’s here and about a shifter and vampire war. I think someone cataloged it wrong.”
“That’s okay,” he said. They turned their attention to the other books she’d gathered. As the night waned, they found nothing further about tribrids, save for one passage in a volume about shifters that said in a rare circumstance a newly turned vampire nearly killed her beloved mate during a feeding and he became a tribrid.
“It’s amazing to me that there’s nothing else about the phenomenon,” she said, leaning back in the chair and stretching.
“Yeah, I guess that means it’s so rare that no one bothered to keep track.”
She gave him a sad smile. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“We can still reach out to the wiccans.”
He stood and returned the book he’d discovered to its place on the shelf and caught up with Cella as she returned the others. When they’d tossed their paper booties in the trash receptacle outside of the room and put the gloves in a small laundry tote hanging on the wall, he took her hand and they headed toward the front door.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I am. Although we didn’t find definitive proof that tribrids aren’t dangerous to shifters, or anyone else, I feel like the book that I found, coupled with the information in the ones you found, was helpful. Gives me hope that I’ll be able to be around my family without trying to take them out.” He held the door open for her and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Thank you.”
“For what?” she asked.
“For caring about what’s going on with me enough to come sit in a strange building and read old books.”
“Come on,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’re my beloved, Cyrus. There isn’t anything on earth that I wouldn’t do to make you happy and help you.”
His whole being warmed from the inside out, and his cat let out a stuttering purr. Catching her gently by the arm, he pulled her against him and cupped her face, gazing down at his gorgeous, sexy vampire.
“Cella, I love you. I loved you from the moment I scented you in the restaurant, and I count myself the luckiest male on the planet that I get to wake up next to you forever.”
Her eyes glittered with emotion as she cupped his hand and held it against her face. “I love you too. I’m so glad you’re mine.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The following night after sunset, Cella and Cyrus met with Brone and Arissa, and several coven guards, and took a trip to The Cleveland Mother Earth Store, which was run by the wiccans. When she and Cyrus had come back to the club after getting only a little more information on tribrids, they spoke to Arissa who volunteered to take them to the wiccans and meet with Lorene and Bitty, both Corners of the coven.
“What does one have to do to become a Corner?” Cella asked from the second row of the SUV. Arissa and Brone were in the front seats, their hands clasped on the console between the seats. Arissa twisted in the seat and looked at them.
“Wiccans, whether they’re natural or unnatural, have one of four powers they’re connected to – Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. In order to become a Corner, a wiccan has to be the most powerful in their coven of whatever their power is.”
“Is natural and unnatural the way that we think of vampires, as born or made?”
Arissa thought for a moment and said, “I hadn’t actually thought of it that way, but I suppose that’s a good way to look at them. Natural wiccans are born of two wiccan parents. Unnatural wiccans usually have a wiccan somewhere in their family line, but the power was rejected and as the generations passed it grew weaker until it was nearly non-existent.”
“Why would anyone want to turn away from a naturally inherited power? That would be like me deciding not to shift anymore,” Cyrus said.
“A lot of wiccan families turned away from their powers during the witch trials in the 1800s, and they often passed down that fear to future generations. Most of the wiccans in the Cleveland coven are unnatural, with some buried power in their history that they can draw out and strengthen with training. An unnatural wiccan would have to spend years developing it in order to be powerful enough to be a Corner, but it can be done. Two of the four Corners are unnatural.”
“Could a human or a shifter just decide they want to study to become a wiccan and create a power within themselves?” Cella asked.
“No. It has to already exist within them, even minutely.”
Brone parked in front of the store and turned off the engine. The SUV with the coven guards parked next to them, but the males didn’t get out. They weren’t along for the ride to visit, they were there to keep watch. Even with the church’s Cleveland location closed and the offenders in prison with denied bail, she didn’t trust the leader of the church not to come at them again in some way. He’d done nothing but try to harm vampires since he started the church, and she wouldn’t put anything past him.
She accepted Cyrus’s hand and got out of the SUV. “I’m glad you’re on our side,” she said to Arissa.
Arissa smiled broadly. “Me too.”
Cyrus held the door open for Cella and Arissa, and all four of them walked inside. The large open space was full of tables containing statues, vessels, and various things she couldn’t name, and the walls were lined with bookshelves that were stuffed full. The air smelled heavily of flowers and herbs, and she was surprised to see a young woman behind the long, wooden counter grinding dried leaves with a mortar and pestle.
“Hi, Lulu,” Arissa said as she walked to the counter.
“Hey! I heard you were coming tonight.” Lulu rested the marble pestle in the bowl and gave Arissa a hug. “It’s so nice to see you.”
Arissa introduced Cella and Cyrus. “They’re meeting with Lorene and Bitty.”
“They’re in room three, you can go on back.”
Arissa led them through a door to a long hallway, where she knocked on the open door of a room with a large golden number three above it. “Hi, ladies.”
Two females were seated around a large round table, one of them quite old in appearance and the other looking as if she was in her late twenties. The younger-looking one stood and came to the door, hugging Arissa. “You always look so lovely. Immortality agrees with you.”
“Thanks,” Arissa said. She introduced Cyrus and Cella to Lorene. “She’s the North Corner and head of the coven.”
“I’d stand but my arthritis is giving me fits,” the older woman said. “Forgive my manners.”
Arissa walked to the table and hugged her. “I can make you a stronger tonic, Bitty.”
“It’s working, it just fades quickly.” She smiled at Cella and Cyrus and pulled an afghan tighter around her shoulders. “Come and sit. This old bird needs to get home to rest. I’m no night owl anymore.”
“Were you ever?” Lorene asked with a chuckle.
“Maybe sixty years ago.”
The four sat at the table with the two wiccans, and Cella smiled at the head of the coven. “Thank you so much for seeing us.”
“We’re happy to help,” Lorene said.
“Plus, I’ve never met a tribrid,” Bitty said, “and it’s totally on my bucket list.”
“Cella, Cyrus, this is Bitty. She’s our coven’s East Corner and our resident shifter expert,” said Arissa.
Cyrus linked his fingers on the polished tabletop. “Nice to meet you, Bitty. How much do you know about what happened to me?”
Bitty opened a book and turned it on the table, pushing it across to them. Cella leaned over as Cyrus inspected the page. “As I mentioned,” Bitty said, “I’ve never met a tribrid, but for the past few decades I’ve had a hobby of collecting information on shifters and their histories. When Arissa called and explained what happened, I knew I had some things that would help you out. I am guessing your biggest worry now is whether you’ll have trouble controlling yourself around other shifters.”
