“Who the hell are you?”
“Have some respect when you speak to the enforcer,” Isaiah snapped.
“Pardon me, but right now I don’t have much respect for any of you. And until I get some answers, I’m not in the mood to develop any.”
“The name’s Blade.”
The lethal edge to the man’s attitude more than the knives tucked into his boots made it clear why he was called Blade.
“I’ve heard about you.”
“And I you.”
“So what makes you an expert on my sanity?”
“My nose.”
“Pardon?”
“To be more exact, your scent.”
“My scent?”
“You’re not full Reaper, but I’m guessing somewhere back in your bloodline there was a Reaper. It’s in your scent.”
From the way Isaiah’s head snapped around, this was news.
“Reapers are made, not born.”
Blade took a smoke out of his pocket. “You can’t think it was happenstance that those men who made you were able to create their weapons, Isaiah. The source had to come from somewhere.”
“You’re saying that somewhere there are born Reapers?”
Striking a sulfur on his boot, Blade nodded. “Yes.”
Isaiah swore. Not as hard as Cole wanted to.
“And you think I’m part of that source?”
Blade shook his head. “No, but I think the blood runs in your veins. You’ve always been faster than other humans, more mentally attuned than them.” He blew out a stream of smoke. “And there’s that minor detail of you taking out four Reapers. That just doesn’t ‘happen.’”
“I could just be that good.”
Blade smiled. “You could be.”
Cole sighed. “But you don’t believe it.”
“I already told you what I believe.”
“Are you part of this bloodline, Blade?” Isaiah asked.
“What I am isn’t important. What is important is what he’s going to do with what he’s becoming.”
The sun was shining; the air was warm. His gloves were still hot from the burnt timber, but a chill went down Cole’s spine.
Isaiah pushed his hat back and took a step forward. Blade didn’t step back. The man had balls; Cole had to give him that. He had to be feeling the anger lashing out from Isaiah, the unsteadiness of his energy.
“These are my people, Enforcer. What do you know that we don’t?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Isaiah took another step forward. His energy lashed out. “Find it.”
Sometimes Cole wondered if Jones had ever been sane. Addy’s presence in his life had stabilized him the way he stabilized her, but, right now, Isaiah was one inch from going for Blade’s throat. Cole sighed. If anything happened to Isaiah, Addy would take it personally. Talk petered off as men noticed the building confrontation. Cole stepped up and slapped Isaiah on the shoulder as if it were all in good fun. He forced a smile at Blade while keeping his hand clamped down on Isaiah.
“I think you’d better talk, Enforcer.”
Blade looked between the two of them and sent back an equally false smile. Stubbing out his smoke on the sole of his boot, he said, “Not here.”
Isaiah snarled. “Here works for me.”
Blade just looked at him.
“This might be a conversation better served by privacy,” Cole pointed out.
With another snarl Isaiah shook off Cole’s hand, barked out a few orders to the men, and turned back. With a wave of his hand he motioned them on. “Let’s go.”
Blade started out down the path to the river, but as soon as they were out of sight, he veered into the woods. They walked into the trees, making a path where there was none.
The scents of rotting leaves, wood, and summer surrounded Cole. It smelled good and natural, and on any other day, the combination would have soothed him, but today all he could focus on was the relentless waves of anger coming off Isaiah and the tension coming off Blade. Whatever they were going to say, it wasn’t going to be good.
They reached a small spot between three trees. Camouflage, he realized. He swept the area with his senses and felt nothing.
“We’re alone,” Blade confirmed.
So the other Reaper could sense energy, too.
“I can more than sense it; I can read your mind.”
Fuck. “A handy skill to have.”
Blade nodded. “If it helps, though, I can’t always hear the words. Sometimes it’s just images.”
Cole pictured himself squeezing Blade’s neck between his hands, choking the life from him. He sent a thought, Read that.
Blade smiled. “You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to top out Isaiah. He’s got me gutted over a log.”
Cole looked over. “I thought he was one of yours?”
Isaiah shrugged and cut Blade another glare. “He’s an irritating sort.”
“No argument there.”
Blade leaned back against a tree. “Nice to be appreciated.”
“If you want to be appreciated, tell us what you know,” Cole growled, not wanting to like the enforcer. “Why are your own kind attacking you?”
“We’re not the only ones of our kind,” Blade answered quietly.
“No shit.”
“But we are the only ones of our kind over here.”
“Over here?”
“In Europe werewolves live in established clans.”
“Werewolves?” Isaiah repeated.
“Yeah. Werewolves. That’s their name for us.”
Cole blinked. A cold, hard knot settled in his stomach. “That’s just legend.”
Blade offered Cole his cigarette makings. Cole took them. There was the slightest tremor in his fingers. Werewolf? It made sense. Yet absolutely didn’t.
“Well, legend or not, now you’re part of it, whether you want to be or not,” Blade finished.
Cole pulled out a paper. He’d have rather poured a shot. Or two. Or three. “Because Miranda bit me?”
“Because you love your cousin and are mated to Miranda.”
The enforcer was right. Dammit. He poured tobacco onto the paper.
“How do you know there are others?” Isaiah demanded. Cole handed Isaiah the makings, which he almost snatched from Cole’s hands. The smoke Isaiah started rolling was heavy on the tobacco.
Blade merely cocked an eyebrow at the rudeness and handed Cole a sulfur.
“A few years back I went to Europe. Sailed on one of those fucking oversize canoes they call ships.” He took the makings back and started rolling another smoke. “Thought I’d get away from here, and I found out the hard way that we are not unique.”
“Explain ‘the hard way.’”
“Werewolf culture in Europe is very well established. You belong to a pack. Packs have a hierarchy within a clan. Interlopers are not welcome.”
“Got your ass kicked, huh?” Isaiah growled, striking a sulfur on the heel of his boot.
Blade shrugged. “A time or two, but I kicked a few asses, too. Important asses, which kept me alive.” He lit his own cigarette, shaking out the sulfur when he was done. “There, as here, it comes down to strength, and if you’ve got the strength to make a place for yourself, you can have it.”
“You made a place for yourself?”
“Yes. For a while.”
“So why are you here?” Cole asked.
“Because an unfortunate result of my appearance in Europe was to alert those clans of Rogue Reapers here.”
Isaiah shook his own match out and tossed it to the ground. “Rogue? We’re fucking Rogue?”
The wind changed directions, sweeping in the stench of burned wood and destruction.
“We came
about through aberration. Man interfering with the way things should be. To them we’re monsters, things that shouldn’t exist but do. And if we don’t become what they need us to become, if we don’t police ourselves, they will take over the job.”
“From Europe?”
Blade nodded. “Yeah. They have the numbers and the determination to wipe us out. And they would. They’d hunt us to the very last one to remove the contamination to the blood.”
“Contamination? Makes us sound like a breakout of small pox.”
“To them we are.”
“Uppity bastards,” Isaiah growled, blowing out a stream of smoke that disintegrated on the breeze as soon as it appeared.
Would the Reapers be extinguished before they even got started? Cole thought of Gaelen. And Dirk. Of the men he’d practiced with. Each and every one a warrior. “They’d better come packing.”
The glance Blade gave him was pitying. “Make no mistake, they will. You think Jones is a badass? They’ve got thousands of years of being badass behind them. And best I can tell, they live two to three hundred years. That’s a lot of experience to come up against.”
Isaiah sat for a minute, absorbing the information. He took one, two, three puffs on his cigarette. “Two to three hundred years would be a nice spell in which to get to know Addy. Can we expect to live that long?”
Blade looked at him. “Don’t know. No one’s ever taken Reaper blood to create Reapers until the asses that made us.”
Isaiah swore. “And they didn’t even have the grace to do it clean. They just tortured and punished us until we couldn’t see past the pain to fight.”
Blade nodded. “And then they started feeding us that drug.”
Drug?” Cole asked. They were drugged?
Isaiah looked off into the horizon, his energy seething. “Once they’d made us their weapons, they needed a way to keep us compliant so we’d take out the targets they wanted.”
“So they got us addicted to ‘the cure.’”
Blade snorted. “Some cure.”
Cole had seen men addicted to opium do without. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “That bad?”
Isaiah grunted. “Worse.”
“How’d you get free?”
Blade blew a smoke ring. He watched it float, expand, and as it dissipated said quietly, “The thing about weapons is, no matter how well you think you’ve perfected them, there’s always a chance they’ll misfire.”
Isaiah nodded and flicked an ash off the stub of his cigarette. “In case you can’t figure it out, Blade misfired first. Then he arranged it so the rest of us could, too.”
Blade smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. “One by one. Piece by piece their empire came down.”
“And at the end?” Cole asked, knowing the men, knowing the answer.
It was Isaiah who answered. “None of them were alive to complain. The Reapers made their initial laws that still control us, one of them being not to consort with humans, and disappeared into the wilderness.”
“You banished yourselves?”
“As broken as we were, it seemed a good idea at the time.”
It wasn’t a good idea now. Reapers were human at their core. Humans needed other humans. Isaiah was right. Those laws needed to be changed.
“Takes a fucked-up mind to do something like that,” Cole murmured, beginning to comprehend the enormity of what had been done to Jones and the others. To see past what they were to the lives from which they’d come. Shit. “Makes for a fucked-up life, too.”
Isaiah shrugged and drew on his smoke. “I don’t think my life was worth much before they got hold of me.”
“None of ours were,” Blade interrupted. “That’s why they chose us. Made it easy to break us since we didn’t have anything to hold on to.”
“Easy?” Isaiah asked. “Is that how you remember it?”
“After the torture, I don’t remember shit.”
Cole tried to imagine that. Not remembering his brothers, his parents, his ranch, his life. Everything that made him . . . him. He couldn’t. He realized he was still holding the unlit match and cigarette. He put both in his pocket. He’d sucked in enough smoke and ash.
“So?” Isaiah asked. “When you say we have to clean up our clan—because I’m assuming our pack is going to be our clan—does that mean we have to form our own societies? Do we set them up by werewolf rules? Do we do all that just to keep the European werewolves happy?”
“No,” Cole cut in, understanding what Isaiah didn’t want to. “We do all that to keep Reapers alive, no matter what the werewolves decide.”
Blade nodded. “I’m thinking it will come to war.”
“Does anyone else know this?” Isaiah asked.
Blade shook his head. “Until there is a central government among Reapers rather than a loose collection of half-baked laws, all telling people would do is spook them.”
“At least we have the pack council and the high council.”
“Except the high council is the one that made the laws that designed to keep you all separate. We need to come together.”
“Damn.” Even Cole could see that wasn’t likely to happen. Not if the ones who created the original laws were attached to them.
Blade nodded and leaned back against a tree. “Those are my thoughts.”
There were still some things Cole didn’t understand. “I have a couple questions.”
“Shoot,” Isaiah said, flicking the ash off his smoke.
“Who exactly made you Reaper?”
Blade answered. “During the war a group of opportunists, businessmen as they liked to call themselves, occasionally needed leverage in certain situations. They created us to be assassins and to provide them with that leverage.”
“Where did they find you?”
“The streets, pretty much.”
“They stripped away who we were and put in place what they wanted,” Isaiah tacked on. “They liked the Reaper madness the process created. It gave them something to build on.”
Isaiah said that with the dispassion of someone talking of a stranger. Hell, maybe it felt like that to him. Cole hoped so. Everyone had memories they didn’t want to live with. Reapers apparently had more than most.
“And they used those assassins to what end?”
“For whatever they needed,” Isaiah filled in. “If they needed a businessperson removed so they could buy what they wanted, they sent a Reaper. If they needed to change the course of politics in whatever direction they desired, we did it. We were point-and-shoot weapons with teeth and claws. We worked quietly. We worked quickly. We worked efficiently.”
“We hunted,” Blade growled.
The way the European werewolves would hunt Reapers, Cole realized.
“They controlled us with the cure,” Isaiah added with the same dispassion as before. “Built our dependence on it and then made it the reward.”
Rage whipped around Cole. Isaiah’s. Blade’s. Pushing at him like a spring storm. Wild and violent.
“We were animals,” Blade snarled.
“But you’re not now,” Cole pointed out, breathing slowly to control his reaction to the emotional maelstrom catching him up. “Push came to shove, and you found your way out.”
Isaiah looked up. His eyes glittered. His smile took on a feral edge. “Even the most beaten dog will turn on its master.”
For the first time Cole felt the full power of the man that was Addy’s husband. It was . . . impressive.
And Addy’s protector.
The thought slipped into his mind with the smoothness of speech. He looked at Blade. Blade stared back. Cole acknowledged the truth with a nod. And protector. There was something to be said for having someone like Jones sitting watch over Addy. The woman did have a penchant for trouble. Another thought hit him.
“Can the werewo
lves in Europe have children?”
“Not frequently,” Blade answered, “but they do, and the children are cherished.”
“So women here, if they can have children, would they be valued in Europe?”
“I don’t know. Bloodline matters a hell of a lot in clan hierarchy over there.”
Isaiah grunted. “Cliquish bunch, aren’t they?”
“Very.”
Isaiah straightened and put out his smoke against the tree. “Then we need to become cliquish, too.”
“Very,” Blade agreed.
Isaiah looked over. “How long do we have?”
“Not as long as you’d think. Part of the deal of my being released to return to the U.S. was I was supposed to spy on your progress here and then report back.”
“When?” Cole asked.
Blade didn’t look concerned. “About six months ago.”
“You didn’t make it.” Isaiah didn’t make it a question.
“No.”
Isaiah simply asked, “Why?”
“Because I didn’t think it mattered what I had to report. My impression before I left was that the decision had already been made. It was just a matter of gathering the forces. Any information I supplied would have been used for enhancing an attack.”
The hair rose on the back of Cole’s neck. Werewolf genocide. And Addy and Miranda were caught in the middle. “So they sent you back here to lull us into a false sense of security?”
“Apparently.”
Isaiah straightened, looking off into the woods as if he could see beyond. “And you’re sure they’re coming?”
Blade nodded. “I’d bet the farm on it.”
“And they’re not going to be happy?”
“Nope.”
Settling his brown Stetson on his head, Isaiah grunted, “Then this fighting we’re doing among ourselves has got to stop. Or else we need to disappear.”
Cole agreed. “If we separated out, blended into society, they’d have a damn hard time finding us all.”
Blade looked at him. “True, but that would only delay things. They would hunt us relentlessly, track us down, and kill every man, woman, and child until there wasn’t a shimmer of Reaper energy out there.”
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