by T. A. Grey
Putting the phone down, Ara watched as a secret door lifted up from the wood floor and a familiar man pulled himself out of a trap door. Alpha Zeke Hunter stood brushing dust off of his shorts—mostly doing a shitty job of it too, Ara noted.
Zeke had blond shaggy hair swept back from his face. The hairstyle made him look more like a surfer than an alpha with questionable sanity. His eyes were blue as the ocean, body in fine physical condition, but, his mind fluctuated between astute intelligence and pure cray-cray.
“Arabella Ophelia Donahue, daughter of Robert and Hilde Donahue, born in France though you never lived anywhere for long until you came here in my pack. Your stay in my pack has been your longest residence to date.”
“That’s correct, sir.” She’d moved into Zeke’s pack some fifteen years ago.
“I know a man who knows a man who said you have a special talent. Something unusual.” His smile transformed his handsome visage into something spectacular. The smile combined with his compliment made her blush.
“I wouldn’t call it a talent. It’s just something I can do.”
His smile was that of a predator’s. “That’s why it’s called talent, Oprah.”
“Oprah?” Ara blinked slowly. “Did you just called me Oprah?”
“That is your middle name, is it not?” Suddenly, his head jerked to the side and he looked as if he was listening to something she couldn’t hear. His eyes glazed over like that of a zombie.
“It is not,” she assured him. Did he even hear her? Three full minutes passed before the alpha snapped out of whatever daze held him. “Oprah.” He didn’t meet her gaze so she wasn’t even sure if he was talking to her or himself.
“My name is not Oprah,” she said.
He looked down at the floor a moment before his body glided down to it. Then he commenced in doing aggressive, military-style pushups. Down and up he pushed himself at rapid pace. “Oprah.” His voice was muffled from his breathing. And from talking to the floor.
“Ophelia,” she corrected.
He was on pushup twenty-two and hadn’t broken a sweat yet. “Arabella Oprah Donahue, I require your assistance in a grave matter of importance. It is very important to me.”
Ara stifled the urge to jump up and down screaming. A personal task from the president, what more of a career opportunity could she ask for? “What’s the job?”
Pushups lead to more pushups which lead to some kind of handstand push-up that made Ara wince. He made the athletic move seem easy.
“Well?”
“I need your help to find my mate.”
Ara stilled. “Wait, what did you say?” She couldn’t have heard that right. The infamously single Zeke had a mate and he wanted her to help find this person? How was she supposed to do that? If anyone had the power to find her it was him. He was the president after all!
The alpha jumped to a stand. He began stretching his arms, swinging them about to loosen them up. His hair had fallen in his face but he didn’t bother to fix it. “I’ve heard about you, Oprah. You might not be able to shift, but you have something else unique to you. And as far as I know it’s unique to you alone.”
Nothing could send a chill faster through Ara’s stomach then the harsh reminder of her deficiency as a Were. Her earlier excitement deflated like a popped balloon. She cleared her throat. “I don’t know if others have my…problem.”
“I assure you they do not or they would be here and not you, Oprah.”
Even her glare did nothing to affect the alpha. “My name isn’t Oprah.”
A guard came into the room. He carried a rolled up document and a black velvet box. Zeke gave the man an approving nod and the guard spread the document open on a table covered in papers, pens, and rolled up fast food wrappers. It was a map of the United States. Using color-coded sections the map depicted all the Were territories which all the alphas ran. It labeled the vampire strongholds throughout the country. The box he set to the side.
Zeke ran his hands across the map, almost lovingly. “Leave, Freddy.” The guard removed himself without a word. He started to hum a song. He still had yet to explain anything to her and now he was humming a tune. It took a few seconds for her to place the familiar tune.
There once was a man named Michael Finnegan. He had whiskers on his chin again. They fell out then grew back in again. Poor old Michael Finnegan. Begin again.
And the alpha did repeat the song, over and again, as he stared at that map as if it held all the answers and none of them.
“I have a task for you,” he said with sudden energy.
“I’d like to know what that task is if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“I need you to find someone for me using your…unique ability. And you’re going to do it with this.” He opened the black velvet box. She didn’t know what to expect inside—a severed head, a gun, a bottle of wine—with Zeke’s mental stability, she wouldn’t have been surprised at any of those things. But it was none of those things.
A hairbrush.
Tucked into soft black velvet cushioning was a classic-style woman’s hairbrush. It had soft bristles that had begun to yellow with age. The brush looked like it was made from silver. An engraved floral pattern covered the head of the brush. It looked a hundred years old, perhaps more. They simply didn’t make hairbrushes like this anymore, or at least not that Ara had seen. This was made from real bore hair, not synthetic fibers. It looked like it might even be heavy if she could pick it up.
“What’s the significance of the hairbrush?” Ara asked. She wanted to touch it. She had to curl her hands into fists to keep from reaching out to stroke the brush. Its memories called to her like whispers in the back of her mind.
Touch me and know my story, the whispers said.
“There is none,” he answered, voice removed of any inflection.
“Is this hers?” she asked.
“Yes.” It was almost a hiss of sound. Zeke stared at the brush as if it were both the bane of his existence and his lifeline. His eyes glowed with an eerie light as the animal inside him struggled to surface. He fought the need to change and was making it look simple. Most weres, once the urge to shift came over then, could not refuse the temptation. Zeke did and he looked so scary doing it, Ara backed away a step out of fear.
“What exactly do you need me to do?”
He took his time to answer her. “My mate has blue eyes hair like spun gold. Her beauty makes women weep. Others only wish they could look as lovely as my mate does.” He picked up the brush, tossing it back and forth from hand to hand as if it were a ball and not some precious item. “She used to brush her hair with this. It’s all I have of her.”
A spark of trepidation skittered down her spine like an insect crawling on bare skin. “H-how long ago was this?”
His eyes and mouth twitched in unison, and his head jerked. “Many years. Eighty-eight years. Or was it two-hundred and eighty-eight years ago?” His wide, haunted gaze slid up to the ceiling. “Black…blonde. No, dammit, remember,” he muttered. Pacing around the tent, he mumbled to himself every now and then looking back up at the ceiling or over at the hairbrush as if it was a puzzle. “Eighty…eighty-eight. One hundred years. She has brown eyes.”
Before Ara could say a word about how his mate’s description kept changing, Zeke spun around and held out the hairbrush.
“Take it and tell me what you see.”
Her stomach knotted. “Listen, that’s not how it works. I’ve never tried to find anyone using an object from so long ago. I need more information before I touch that brush.” Crescent divots were being embedded in her palms from her fingernails digging in.
“I’ve told you enough!”
“Well, what’s her name? How old is she? Is she a Were, too?”
“Olivia. My sweet Olivia.” He went quiet, contemplative. “She is human. She is mine, and I cannot find her. That’s what you need to know.”
“If she’s human then…then…” How did she ask him how his human
mate could possibly be alive after so long. Unless she’d lived to be quite old.
“She’s human and she is alive.” He spoke as if distracted by other more important thoughts.
“How do you know that?”
He didn’t answer.
“What’s her last name?”
No answer.
“What color hair does she have?”
Nothing.
Ara sighed. Her excitement at his assignment had taken a nosedive into a pile of shit. “Well…I’ll touch the brush, but I can’t guarantee anything. I’ve never tried to track a person through an object so old. And I’ve never done it on such little information on the person I’m looking for.”
He said nothing, merely held the brush out to her.
She took it, fingers wrapping around the warmed metal handle. It was heavy. A few pounds at least. They certainly didn’t make brushes like this anymore. This was meant to last a lifetime, and well, it had in a way.
“Tell me what you see.”
Ara met his gaze and nearly jumped. Lucid eyes stared back at her.
She ran her thumb over the soft bristles and closed her eyes. Her ‘ability’ as others liked to call it worked in a way that was hard to explain. She could touch certain objects and then track that person down. As far as she knew there was nobody else like her. Her father used to say she was one of a kind. Yeah, except she’s never wanted to be. For years, she’d yearned to be normal, still did some days.
Never had she been given a task like this. To find a woman without any details, who may or may not be alive seeing as she’s human, and the object she was touching was old. None of those factors would benefit her. Could she even receive an image off an object so old? There was only one way to find out.
Ara’s eyes slid shut. She quieted her thoughts into a meditative-like state. With brush in hand she stroked it, touched it everywhere. The bristles brushed across her sensitive fingertips. The metal warmed in her palm. Her mind quieted. Once her father had asked her how she did it, how she could touch an object and find the person who used that item.
Ara had been young at the time and unable to really answer her father. Most of what her abilities rested on were her feelings and images much like a movie. Only, as she held the brush, nothing happened. Not a stirring of feelings, not a flash of an image. It was as if the link to the brush was broken.
She opened her eyes to find the alpha staring intently at her. “Well?” he demanded.
“I—” It was on the verge of her tongue to lie. To say she’d found something she hadn’t. But she couldn’t do that. “I didn’t see anything. Listen, maybe if I have more time to focus I can pick up something.”
Zeke snatched the brush back from her with such force she gasped. He shoved it back into its box, and slammed the lid closed. Then he did something that completely took Ara by surprise—he handed her the box.
“Take it and find her. My Olivia.”
She nearly argued. To be quite frank, she had no idea if she could get a ‘feel’ off the hairbrush at all. It’s possible it was too old or didn’t hold a significant connection to this Olivia. Or if she was dead then…well, there was that, Ara noted.
But she didn’t say any of those things. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Zeke grinned. “I knew you would.”
The way he said it…like he knew all along that she’d agree. Even before she did. But that would be impossible.
CHAPTER 5
Grayson sat in his boss’s office. They might as well be throwing a party for how many people were here for this meeting. His brother, Vas, had come, his co-workers, Graham, Jonathan, Eric, Suzanne, and of course his boss, TJ. TJ sat behind her desk dwarfed by her huge chair, which was far too large for her petite frame.
“Tell me what happened.” This TJ demanded of Grayson leaving him no choice but to rehash yesterday’s botched assignment—to keep Winston alive. Fail, fail, fail. Fuck, it made him so mad he wanted to find a face to beat in just to let off some steam. The idea was so tempting, Gray found his gaze meeting his brother, Vas’s from across the room. Maybe if he threw the first punch his brother would go with it and attack. That’s exactly what he needed. Something physical to let out the stress and tension from that past two days. Hell, from the last twelve years.
Vas cocked an eyebrow at Gray. His brother’s face was scarred from a number his psycho-ex pulled on him. While the scars did detract from Vas’s abundant physical attractiveness, it added a layer of depth to the man that brought nothing but curiosity. The fact that he was so damn close-mouthed about what actually happened used to drive Gray mad. Now he understood. Some things were personal. People didn’t need to know about the fucked up shit happening in his life, just as he didn’t need to know what happened to Vas’s face.
Gray had never lost a client. Not once. And he’d been doing this job for a very long time.
After he finished telling the group about what happened, quiet settled in. This was one of those times Gray wanted to clam up, just leave this place behind. He’d take it to the grave if he could. Like hell he could get away with that.
“Since you’re the only one not up to speed, let me catch you up,” TJ told Grayson. She wore her ginger hair cut short but feminine. She wore power suits and high heels yet had the sex appeal of a mouse. “You killed Domico Donato. He’s the youngest son of Vincent Donato. Maybe that name rings a bell to you. Vincent and his sons run the largest paranormal black market in the world.”
“Well now they have one less son,” Gray remarked.
“We already know that Vincent has learned of his son’s death,” Graham said. He was a favorite of Grayson’s, not that he’d never tell the man so. Nothing like having a big, strong Were at your side on the job. Hell, Gray could have used his services last night. Then maybe he wouldn’t be sitting here feeling like his head was about to split open.
“Now the operation is left to Vincent and his only remaining son, Jericho,” TJ said. “He’s known as ‘The Butcher’ amongst enemies. It seems Jericho prefers his knife and machete for doing dirty work.”
“Oh yeah?” Gray patted his pockets until he found his pack of smokes. Only three left. Just fucking great. Even though he wanted nothing more than to light one up right now, he refrained himself. God knows he’d be chain smoking after this meeting.
“Grayson, I urge you to use extreme caution. I already upped up security at your house,” TJ said.
“Tomorrow I’m going to set up and upgrade the security system,” Vas said. He was good with technology: computers, software, hacking. He always had a phone or some kind of device on him. Even now he kept glancing down at his phone like he might miss something important. Gray didn’t get it, maybe never would. He didn’t own a computer or any of that. What was the point?
“I tapped into some of our underground resources. They say Domico went after Winston because he lost a bet. A big bet. One so big his daddy would be awfully upset to hear about,” said Suzanne, their liaison to narcs everywhere.
“How much?” TJ asked.
Suzanne answered, “Youngest boy loses twenty-five million, gets scared and goes after the man he lost it to. Maybe he thought he could get the money back.”
And now they were both dead. What a shit-storm.
They all talked around him, comparing and questioning and hypothesizing about what would happen next. Grayson didn’t care. He only half-listened as he stared at the navy blue carpet beneath his feet. In his mind he was someplace else entirely. At the beach with warm water lapping at his bare feet. If he thought about it hard enough he swore he could feel the wet sand giving way beneath his weight, the coarse granules sliding across the top of his feet. He conjured an image to mind of the ocean, standing on the shore in the moonlight with only the water to keep him company.
But the fragile fantasy broke apart with one intruding thought—you’ve never been there. He’d seen water, lots of water. Lakes, streams, or ponds did nothing to instill tranquility. An
d his fantasy would always be just that. He would never stand on a beach with his shoes off without any worries, without stress weighing him down. This was a fantasy because it would never come true. At least he had no false hopes about his life. He had a sick mate, getting sicker by the day it seemed, and he’d failed on the job letting a client be murdered.
“Also, according to my sources they know it was Grayson who killed him,” Suzanne was still going on.
Gray stood up and headed for the door. He was done. Nothing important was happening here. He’d killed the kid and now the Donato family wanted justice. There wasn’t anything Gray didn’t understand about the situation. What he didn’t want was to sit here and listen to everyone’s thoughts about it.
“I’ll take care of it.”
Grayson’s words silenced the room bringing all eyes to him.
“How do you plan to do that?” TJ asked.
“They will find me. And I’ll kill them.”
“Do you believe it will be that easy, Grayson?” TJ’s expression remained unrevealing as always.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
His comment only sparked more discussion. A throbbing beat slammed against his temples. The only reprieve came when he closed his eyes. There wouldn’t be any time for relaxing. Not anytime soon, maybe never.
The phone on TJ’s desk rang. She answered. Then Graham’s phone went off followed by Suzanne’s. Everyone answered and stiffed in an almost comical way. It was the way someone looked after they’d just been told bad news.
TJ hung up the phone which clattered in the receiver. Grayson watched pensively. Her hand trembled. As his mind took in everyone’s reactions to the phone calls a disquieting silence filled the room.
“Grayson…” His boss, his ever stoic and intelligent boss was the only one who could meet his gaze.
“What happened?” he asked.
“It’s Anita—”
He flew from the room. Voices shouted after him. He didn’t slow. He made it to his SUV and sped home at dangerous speeds. Cars narrowly moved out of the way as he honked and weaved his way in and out of traffic. The normal thirty-odd minute drive was done in half that.
