Movement in the mirror drew her attention to find a man standing behind her. He was tall, incredibly handsome, with short dark hair and eyes that she thought might be green. As she stood there, staring at him, hoping that he would say something that would help her make sense out of what happened, she watched his eyes become brighter and-
He walked away.
Chapter 9
Williams Mansion
“Shit!” Noah mouthed, careful not to make a sound as he shifted closer to the locked door that he’d been trying to break into for the past half hour, only to realize that he wasn’t alone.
Really hoping that it wasn’t the Sentinel that didn’t like anyone in his office, Noah looked back and found himself sighing when Kale, who normally only acknowledged his existence when he wanted to know how Izzy and Danni were, grabbed him and dragged him to his feet. In seconds, Noah found himself dragged towards the back door.
When Noah opened his mouth to ask him what was going on, the large shifter sent him a look of warning that had him biting back another sigh as he found himself heading out the back door and being shoved towards a black SUV. Too exhausted to do anything more than climb into the passenger side, Noah pulled on his seatbelt and dropped his head back, wondering how he was going to pull this off.
He was in over his head on this one and had absolutely no fucking idea what he was doing. If Danni had been human…
She’d already be dead.
Over the past few months, Noah had learned a lot about this new world that he found himself in, but it wasn’t enough. Caine wanted a miracle and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know what would happen when he couldn’t deliver one. It would be easier if he could ask Michael for help, but Caine didn’t want the Sentinel involved.
Caine didn’t want the Council to know what he was doing and Noah honestly couldn’t say that he blamed him. Personally, Noah didn’t have a problem with the Sentinels, but then again, he wasn’t a Pyte that they were trying to control and what better way of doing that than by making Caine completely dependent on them for his mate’s care?
So, now he was on his own with absolutely no fucking clue where to start, Noah thought absently as he took in the large shifter next to him, noting that his eyes were silver and that the back of his knuckles were white as he held on to the steering wheel and found himself asking a question that he knew he wasn’t going to get an answer to until the shifter was ready to tell him.
“What’s going on?” Noah asked,
When a moment passed and Kale didn’t say anything, Noah sighed heavily as he settled back against the comfortable leather seat, closed his eyes and couldn’t help but think about how much his life had changed over the past few months. He’d gone from working double shifts in an emergency room that dealt with scraped knees, low-grade fevers, and a spike in venereal diseases among the senior citizen population to living in a mansion with shifters, Sentinels, and Pytes and having absolutely no fucking clue what he was doing.
God, he was fucking exhausted.
Every day he tried to figure out what was wrong with Danni, tried to figure out a way to stop her from slipping into another coma, but so far, everything they’d tried had failed. The demon blood that the Council gave them wasn’t working anymore. If anything, it was making it worse and not even Christofer’s blood was helping any longer. Danni was getting worse and time was running out. The baby was due in six months and Noah wasn’t sure how much longer Caine was going to be able to handle seeing his mate suffer.
Then there was Izzy.
Noah had no idea how he was supposed to help her. If she’d been human, he would have recommended more surgery and painkillers to help her manage the pain, but that wasn’t an option. Izzy was a Sentinel, which meant that he’d have to give her enough medicine to kill a human just to barely take the edge off the pain. They could try for another surgery, but the extent of damage that had been done to her hip and muscles…
He didn’t hold out much hope that surgery would help her. He didn’t want to put her through that unless he had to, and Noah had a bad feeling that they were going to have to do it. She was struggling, in constant pain, and they were running out of options.
Sentinels could live for two hundred years and Izzy was turning thirty in a few months. He couldn’t imagine leaving her in this much pain for another year, never mind a hundred and seventy. There had to be a way to fix this. Eric had given him everything the Council thought would help, which admittedly, wasn’t much. He’d asked Michael what he thought they should do for Izzy, but the Sentinel doctor hadn’t been able to tell him anything different than the Council had.
Unfortunately, a crippled Sentinel female wasn’t on the Council’s list of priorities, even one as important as Izzy. In a few months, the next group of Sentinels was set to be born and the Council was directing every available resource to finding them and doing whatever it took to keep them safe.
Then there was Kara…
The Council wanted to send her to one of the Sentinel’s islands, but her mate and grandfather refused to let her go. Noah didn’t know much, but from what he’d heard, he really couldn’t blame them. They’d keep Kara and the baby there until he reached his immortality, and once he did, it was anyone’s guess what the Council would do with them. Sentinels were normally born to human mothers, but Kara was special.
She was an Impure, the product of a shifter and a turned human, who’d been the child of Sentinels. Her mother had been mated to an asshole who’d kept her chained to a stake, furious to find out that he’d been mated to a turned human. He’d used her to build his mother’s Pack, keeping her pregnant until he’d finally managed to get a shifter child on her. If they’d realized that Kara was an Alpha, they would have killed her before she’d managed to draw her first breath, but somehow, she’d managed to keep her status a secret and survived until her father decided to have her killed out of fear that she would end up weakening their bloodlines.
After Kara managed to escape, she’d moved to Boston, careful not to piss off the local Packs or draw attention to herself. Once her old Pack realized just how special she was, they’d come back for her only to find out that she was mated to an Alpha who would never let her go. Thanks to her Sentinel grandparents, her blood had mutated, making it possible for other shifters to get her pregnant and every last one of them would be an Alpha.
Well, all of them except the little girl that most likely wouldn’t survive this birth, Noah amended. Sentinels needed a human twin to hide their scent and to help them survive the pregnancy, which unfortunately, usually resulted in the death of the human twin. None of them had been able to scent the little girl until a few months ago when Christofer, the resident Ion and the strongest Pyte among them, had scented her.
When Noah arrived at the mansion, he’d examined Kara and after several failed sonograms, finally spotted the little girl curled up next to her brother. She was so damn tiny. He couldn’t see how she was going to survive.
“I need a favor,” Kale said as Noah felt the SUV slow to a stop.
Already knowing that refusing the shifter wasn’t an option, Noah opened his eyes just as a small vial of blood was placed in his hand.
“What’s this?”
“Something that the Council better not find out about,” Kale drawled, but the warning was clear. “I need to know everything that you can find out about that blood.”
“That might be a problem if I’m going to need access to the Council’s database,” Noah pointed out.
Nodding absently, Kale pulled a piece of paper from his coat pocket and handed it to him with a pointed look at the door. Taking the hint, Noah climbed out of the car and resigned himself to the long walk back to the mansion as he glanced down at the vial of blood in his hand before he slid it in his pocket. He glanced down at the piece of paper and-
Couldn’t help but wonder how Kale managed to get his hands on a Sentinel password. Then again, he probably didn’t want to know, Noah told himself as h
e started the long walk back to the mansion. An hour later, he walked through the front door and headed straight for the office that Ephraim had set up for him in what used to be the library.
After preparing a few samples and running them, Noah grabbed a cup of coffee and settled in for what looked like another long night. While he ran the samples, he decided to take another look at Danni’s file, hoping to find something he’d missed earlier. There had to be something, Noah told himself as he scrolled through hundreds of pages of tests, notes, and lab results, looking for something, anything, to save her.
None of this made any fucking sense.
The cancer that had been killing Danni should have been destroyed during her transition, but she hadn’t been given enough blood to kill the cancer off, which allowed it to grow stronger. Eventually, the cancer grew stronger than Danni, leaving her body unable to fight back. Desperate to have another Pyte within their ranks, the Council scoured the world looking for a cure, using every resource at their disposal, searching through their massive library, looking for an answer only to find their answer in the small laboratory of one of their own.
Michael figured out a cure by using a mixture of demon blood and her mate’s blood to get the cancer under control. At least, it had worked for a while. When it started to take over again, they’d looked for other answers. It had taken time, but the combination of demon blood and Christofer’s blood had eventually killed the cancer. Or at least, they’d thought it had. Somehow the cancer came back stronger than ever, and now, nothing they did seemed to work. Danni was suffering, dying over and over again while her mate was forced to watch, and Noah wasn’t sure how much more Caine was going to be able to take before he lost it for good and the Council was forced to get rid of him.
A beep drew his attention back to his monitor and-
“Oh, shit…”
Chapter 10
“I just need a minute,” Ashley assured herself as she dropped her head back against the wall with a pained grunt, deciding that she’d escape after all the noises currently slamming into her head subsided again.
She should have made a run for it when she had the chance, Ashley thought on a pathetic groan as she squeezed her eyes closed and willed the fangs that wouldn’t go away to stop throbbing.
“How are you holding up?” came the hesitant question from the man that had been pacing on the other side of the bathroom door, bringing her pain to a new level of hell in the process.
“I’m fine,” Ashley mumbled as she willed her trembling hands to stop shaking only to end up pulling her knees against her chest and wrapping her arms around them as she slowly exhaled, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do now.
There was a heavy pause and then, “Yeah, you sound it,” as she heard the bathroom door open and that enticing aroma that she’d been struggling to ignore grew stronger, making it harder for her to pretend that the scent wasn’t coming from him.
When she heard him settle on the floor next to her, Ashley forced herself to open her eyes and took in the incredibly handsome man sitting next to her, wondering why he looked so familiar. He had that bad boy smile that she liked so much and-
“You used me as a coffee table,” Ashley said accusingly, only to immediately regret that decision when more pain shot through her head. Wondering when her head was going to stop pounding, she dropped her forehead against her knees and released a shaky breath. That was followed by wondering if she really needed to breathe when sharp pain shot between her eyes as the scent of woods, dirt, and a hundred other odors that she couldn’t quite name slammed into her head.
“Good times,” the man that was sitting next to her for some reason murmured absently as she was forced to release her hold on her knees so that she could cover her ears.
“Hearing sensitive?” he whispered softly.
She went to answer him only to settle on nodding as she opened her eyes and took in the man sitting next to her and found him watching her with a curious look in his eye.
“My name is Jacob, by the way,” he said as he held his hand out to her only to reluctantly drop it when she could only sit there, staring at it.
“Ashley,” she mumbled, wincing when that caused more pain to shoot through her head.
“It’s nice to meet you, Ashley,” Jacob said, stretching out his legs to get comfortable only to go still when she asked, “What happened to me?”
“You don’t know?” Jacob asked, throwing her a questioning look as he finished stretching his legs out in front of him.
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” Ashley said with a wince, deciding that she was going to have to suck it up so that she could get some answers.
Frowning, Jacob asked, “Kale didn’t tell you?”
“Who’s Kale?” she asked, wondering if he was the man that had been watching her earlier.
“The asshole,” Jacob said as he reached over and grabbed the stack of large towels someone left on the bathroom floor and dragged them closer. With a satisfied sigh, he scooted forward and then lay down, using the towels as a pillow. Once he was settled, Jacob closed his eyes as he said, “He was hired to watch over you.”
“Wait. Why would someone hire him to watch over me?” Ashley asked because none of this made any sense. Unless…
No, her father wouldn’t have hired anyone to look after her, Ashley reminded herself. He’d actually have to care about her to do something like that, which meant that someone found out about her. The question was how? She’d always been careful, making sure that no one knew anything about her. She’d always kept to herself, made sure that she never got close to anyone, and recited the story that had been drilled into her head by her mother whenever anyone asked too many questions.
This didn’t make any sense.
“You tell me,” Jacob said, opening his eyes to watch her.
“There’s nothing to tell,” Ashley said, forcing herself to hold his gaze, knowing better than to look away when she had to lie.
“You’re telling me that you have no idea what you are?” he asked, frowning.
“None,” she said because as far as she knew, she was human, but now…
“You’re a Pyte,” Jacob said, and before she could ask what that was, he continued. “You’re either the result of a vampire male and a human female, or a Pyte male and a human female. Then again, your mother could have been a turned Pyte,” he said, making her frown because her mother hadn’t been human and she definitely hadn’t been whatever a Pyte was. Not that she was going to tell him that because she knew better.
“Why do you think I’m a Pyte?” Ashley asked, still having absolutely no idea what that was.
“You mean besides the red eyes and the fact that you slipped into a coma looking like a little girl and transitioned into an incredibly beautiful woman in less than a month?” Jacob asked, blinking innocently before adding dryly, “I can scent it.”
“H-How?” she asked, wondering what else he could scent on her.
With a shrug, Jacob said, “I’m a shifter,” like it was no big deal while Ashley sat there, trying to remember how to breathe. His eyes narrowed on her as he said, “Judging by that spike of fear that you just gave off, I’m guessing you know what that means.”
Deciding that it would be foolish to try to pretend that she didn’t know what a shifter was, Ashley mumbled, “Werewolf.”
“And how do you know that, I wonder,” Jacob murmured, looking thoughtful only to narrow his eyes on her when she mumbled, “The Twilight books.”
“I don’t shift into a fucking dog!” he bit out, looking really insulted, which would have normally had her lips twitching, but not now, not when she realized just how much danger she was in.
They’d found her.
“No, no, of course, you don’t,” Ashley murmured as she dropped her hands away so that she could wrap her arms back around her knees as she struggled to resist the urge to glance at the bathroom door, wondering if she’d be able to make it to the d
oor before he could stop her.
“Vampires don’t sparkle,” he bit out, making her blink.
“Okay…” she said, not really sure how else to respond to that.
With a satisfied sigh, Jacob nodded to himself as he asked, “Where were we?”
“You were telling me what a Pyte is,” Ashley said, deciding that it couldn’t hurt to keep him talking while she tried to figure out a way to get herself out of this mess.
“God, where to start?” Jacob asked, sighing heavily as he folded his arms over his chest and stared up at the ceiling, which Ashley couldn’t help but notice wasn’t painted either.
She took in the sheetrock marked with compound that made up the walls and ceiling, the tile that was clearly new, the lack of any shelves, a toilet-roll holder, or even a soap dispenser, and-
Still had absolutely no idea where she was, Ashley realized, biting back a sigh as she focused her attention back on Jacob to find him watching her with that curious look in his eye again.
“You really have no idea what a Pyte is?”
“No,” Ashley said, noting that her headache was slowly making its way back to migraine level.
There was a heavy sigh and then…
“I’m probably not the best person to ask, but since it appears that the asshole took off again, I’ll do my best. Pytes come into this world the usual way except for the fact that they normally end up killing their mothers in the process unless they were changed in time,” Jacob said, shooting her a questioning look as he tried to gauge her reaction.
Since her mother had survived her birth, Ashley didn’t say anything as she waited for him to continue. When it became obvious that she wasn’t planning on saying anything, he continued. “Unless they’re given a steady diet of blood along with regular food, they usually stop aging around ten, which would explain why you stopped growing. It doesn’t explain how you managed to survive, though,” Jacob murmured, sounding thoughtful as he considered her.
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