A beat of silence. The siren from a police car several blocks over screamed loud in pursuit, then faded away. Then Nola asked, “What are you talking about?”
Hearing those words, spoken in the flat, interrogating lawyerly tone Nola used when she wasn’t kidding around, Jack’s stomach dove toward her feet.
“You didn’t buy me a guy for my birthday.”
It was a statement, not a question, spoken in a tone to match her friend’s. A movie began to play in Jack’s mind. Images flashed by with lightning speed, and unforgiving clarity.
Sweat soaked sheets, naked bodies, tangled limbs, hunger.
Camera flashes.
Pictures.
“Buy you a guy for your birthday?” Nola echoed with a snort. Then she gasped. “Oh God, Jack, don’t tell me you hooked up with some guy you . . . you thought I . . .”
At Jack’s answering silence, Nola began to laugh. “You did! You so did! I need details, right now!”
Do you want something to remember me by? Hawk, beautiful and coy, holding up the camera. Jack’s camera.
Her gaze flashed to the duffel bag, discarded by the front door. “No, I’ve gotta call you back.”
Jack hung up before Nola could reply. She launched herself across the room, fell to her knees, and ripped open the bag, panting with panic.
The Canon was there, in its hard leather case.
The memory card, however, wasn’t.
As she stared down the empty slot in the side of the camera, horror—cold, slimy, and total, like being submerged in a tank of eels—washed over Jack. She broke out in a sweat. Her hands began to shake. Her heart started to race as if she’d been injected with adrenaline.
Set up. Jesus Christ, I’ve been set up!
But by who? And why? She sagged against the wall, hardly feeling the cold plaster against her bare shoulders, and stared down at the Canon in her hands.
She knew she’d made enemies over the years; she’d never shied away from controversy in her career. It could be a politician, angry about one of her scathing op-ed pieces, or one of the many military leaders she’d met during an assignment, and pissed off with her attitude or refusal to listen to orders. It could be a colleague; she knew she wasn’t particularly liked among her peers, for a whole host of reasons, which mainly boiled down to her inability to trust anyone.
It could even be one of the more vocal critics of her anti-Shifter article. Not everyone was on board with the idea that Shifters were mankind’s enemy.
Who was it who’d warned her someone might try to retaliate if she took such a strong stance against the newly discovered threat of Shifters? Who had said to her, “You’re just putting a big bull’s-eye on your back, missy. You see what those crazy animal rights activists do to celebrities who wear fur coats—what they’ll do to you will probably be a lot worse than throwing some red paint.”
It came to her in a blinding flash: old Mrs. Weingarden on the third floor. They’d ridden up the elevator together just after the article had come out a few months back, and the elderly woman had clucked her tongue and shaken her head, wondering why Jack needed to get on a soap box and rant and rave about patriotism and the American way of life. “Warmongering” she’d called it.
Jack understood in a bitter, wish-it-wasn’t-so way that the urge to fly her patriotic flag was tied to her loyalty to her father. He was her only remaining parent, her only remaining link to the time before she was the hollow shell she was now. He’d paid for the best therapists, and put her in private schools, and got her involved in sports, though none of it served his hoped-for purpose of making her forget what had happened.
But he’d tried. He’d tried everything he could. So she did her damndest to make him proud of her, even though she knew it was only a futile attempt to remake a past that had died long ago, and taken her heart with it.
Denial set in.
Jack began to rummage frantically through the duffel, tossing out clothes, feeling all around the bottom, scavenging through the smaller bag of toothpaste and tampons and ChapStick, ripping the whole thing apart.
Finally, the bag was empty. There was no memory card.
She sat staring in shock into the gaping opening. It can’t be. This can’t be happening.
In response to her voice in her head came her mother’s, sneering and quite decidedly filled with glee.
Serves you right. You little whore.
Jack shook her head, shoved away from the wall, jumped to her feet. “Think. Just think,” she said, beginning to pace. “When those pictures get out—because of course they’re going to get out, don’t kid yourself—what am I going to say? How can I spin this? I was drunk? Taken advantage of?”
She paused, considering it. Remembering the total abandon with which she’d participated in the best sex of her life, the brazen way she’d posed, clearly enjoying herself, clearly lucid, she began pacing anew. “Okay, you obviously weren’t taken advantage of. You just had a lapse in judgment. Stress of the job, that sort of thing. I mean, I was shot at yesterday! Of course I wasn’t in my right mind! This kind of stress reaction happens to men all the time, right?”
Even to her own ears, this argument sounded lame. Women were held to a different sexual standard than men, that was the harsh reality. It didn’t matter that she was single and had every right to sleep with whomever she wanted; the press would crucify her. Her judgment, morals, and entire character would be excoriated. A sexy romp with a total stranger while on assignment in a foreign country, with graphic pictorial evidence that she loved every minute of it to boot?
She would be fired. Her career would be over. She would lose everything she’d worked for so long to build. If she were lucky, in six months she’d be working at a fast-food drive-through.
If she were lucky, in a few years everyone would have forgotten that the woman who pushed the President’s anti-Shifter agenda through Congress was a total slut.
Jack’s gaze fell on her laptop. Her heart throbbed inside her chest.
She crawled on her knees to the computer, flipped it open, and turned it on. With a whir it was awake, awaiting her command. With trembling hands, anticipating the worst, she Googled her name.
Nothing new. No headline news, no breaking scandal.
The relief was so palpable she felt as if someone had showered her in cool water. But anxiety quickly rose again as she realized the lack of news might mean nothing at all. It might mean the pictures were just sitting on her editor’s desk, at this very moment, but she just hadn’t gotten the call yet. It might, in fact, mean any one of a million different things, all of them bad.
Because whatever had prompted Hawk to take those pictures and steal the memory card had to be bad. There were no two ways about it.
Jack got her first glimpse of exactly how bad it was when an electronic chime notified her that she had a new email message.
With clammy, trembling hands, she opened the email. A timer popped up, along with a notice, “This email will be deleted in ten seconds.”
She read the sender’s message, saw the picture attached, and let out a scream of anger so primal and raw the overhead light in the foyer flickered on.
Above a photo of Jack kneeling between a man’s legs with his huge, jutting member shoved straight down the back of her throat, her cheeks hollowed, her upturned eyes glazed with lust, were the words, “This one’s my favorite.”
It was simply signed, “Yours, Rock. As in, head like a . . .”
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Oh no, the worst was just about to rear its ugly head.
Another email arrived from the same anonymous address. She clicked on it, her hands now shaking so badly they looked palsied. It was a video file, again with a self-destruct notice, this time set to one minute. When she opened the video, Jack felt simultaneous urges to vomit, faint, and beat something bloody.
/> Hawk, clothed all in white, beautiful and somber, stared straight into the camera. Behind him it was dark, but she could make out the vague outline of furniture, some kind of gauzy curtain, the branches of a tree. For a moment he did nothing, just stood unmoving with his hands hanging loose at his sides.
Then—unbelievably, horribly—he began to change.
First it appeared to be a trick of the light. There was a shimmer, a glow appeared around him as if emanating from within. The glow grew brighter, the shimmer more distinct, until all at once the flesh-and-bone man that was Hawk dissolved into a floating plume of glittering gray mist, ethereal and insubstantial, floating halfway between the floor and the ceiling like a disembodied spirit.
His clothes fell with a soft rustle of fabric to the floor.
Jack made a strangled sound. She went hot then cold, and found it increasingly difficult to breathe.
Breathing became next to impossible when the floating gray plume of mist gathered in on itself, and coalesced into the largest, most beautiful black panther Jack had ever seen.
It padded toward the camera. It paused, sat back on muscled haunches, staring into the camera with those eyes of vivid yellow-green, and let out a low, rumbling growl that stood all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck on end.
Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .
She’d been set up and used by . . . by one of them.
Bile rose in her throat. She clapped both hands over her mouth. Memories again swirled in a Technicolor tangle in her mind, vivid images of the two of them in every possible sexual position. Memories of his words, both harsh and tender, as he pushed himself inside her and brought her to orgasm, over and over again.
Jack didn’t have time to linger on those terrible memories, however, because again the image on the screen was changing shape. The panther changed back to mist, the mist changed back to man—naked, glorious—and the man came close to the camera, so close she saw the stubble shadowing his jaw.
Those cat eyes still burning lucent green, Hawk said into the camera, “I have a proposition for you, Jacqueline Dolan.”
He continued to speak in a low, cold monotone, as the bottom fell out of Jack’s world.
Aside from the sand that insinuates itself into every crack and crevice, the main problem with living in a desert is the heat.
Suffocating, relentless, palpable as a hand pressing on the crown of your head, the heat of the northern Sahara is particularly trying. Especially for a group of predators who originated from the lush, tropical heart of the African rainforest, a place where it rains at least once a day.
“If someone doesn’t figure out how to get me some ice,” muttered Caesar Cardinalis, sprawled in a high-backed rattan chair with one long leg flung over the wooden arm and a tepid glass of water in hand, “someone is going to die.” He stared around the arid, dusty room, eyeing each of his guards in turn. All of them had their hands clasped behind their backs, their gazes trained on some invisible point in the distance, a solid row of weapon-heavy soldiers as unnecessary to their lord and master’s continued health as snowshoes in the tropics.
Caesar added with languid ill humor, “And when I say someone, I mean everyone.”
The guards—knowing all too well this wasn’t an idle threat—shifted their weight from foot to foot, and sent each another quick, anxious glances.
One of them stepped forward. Larger than the rest, he was a cool, efficient killer with a withering stare and the impressive musculature of an elite athlete. Like the others, born and bred in darkness in the catacombs below Rome, he had eyes the color of polished obsidian, but unlike the others, he didn’t tremble when he addressed their leader.
He was, however, smart enough to keep his gaze lowered deferentially to Caesar’s bare, tanned feet. Before speaking, he bowed.
“I took the liberty of ordering a diesel-powered generator, Sire, the day we arrived. It’s being delivered soon to the market at Jamaa el Fna. With your permission, I’ll take Nico with me to pick it up when it arrives.”
Marcell waited patiently for Caesar to assess this and pass judgment. This kind of independent thinking was not something Caesar normally appreciated, but knowing their luxury-loving leader as Marcell did, he’d taken the risk with full confidence of reward.
A reward that was ensured when Caesar replied, “Thank Horus one of you has a brain.”
Careful to keep the self-satisfied smirk from his face, Marcell bowed a little lower, then returned to his place at the wall.
The kasbah in Morocco that Caesar and his followers had settled in after their abrupt departure from Spain was vast and crumbling and echoing empty, one of the hundreds of abandoned sandcastle palaces left to bake in the sun by a clan of long-ago Berber warriors. Situated in an unexpected oasis along the former route of the caravans over the Atlas mountains to Marrakech, the stronghold built of earth was isolated from any human settlements, and steadily collapsing.
In spite of its decay, it was spectacular.
An austere, sprawling maze of red clay and stone, it still held the echoes of its former glory and conspicuous wealth. Elaborate stucco pillars, brilliant mosaics, soaring Moorish doorways, and intricately carved woodwork had survived the harsh desert climate, as had a store of handwoven wool rugs, stashed in rolls of dust-covered canvas in the dungeon below. Along with a few pieces of mismatched furniture bought from a local bazaar, the rugs were now scattered about Caesar’s rooms on the uppermost floor of the palace.
The view from Caesar’s bed chamber revealed an abandoned cobweb village below, surrounded by multilevel towers and a series of crooked, interlinked alleyways. When he had looked down on the deserted dwellings for the first time, Caesar had felt a thrill of delight as he imagined all the generations of humans who had died within those walls.
Because the only good human was a dead one.
The kasbah’s dusty beauty was matched by its eerie stillness. An incessant hot breeze was the only thing that stirred in the smothering heat of the day. The only thing that broke the yawning silence was the occasional flapping of a vulture’s wings as it peered from the tower ramparts with avid black eyes for anything freshly dead.
More often than not, the vulture found what it was looking for. Caesar tired quickly of the playthings he kept chained to the dark dungeon wall.
“All right.” Caesar pulled himself to an upright position in the chair. “What’s the current count?”
Again it was Marcell who spoke. “Eight hundred sixty-two, Sire.”
Caesar was pleased. Their little colony was growing quickly.
After a brief pause, Marcell added, “Not including the females, of course.”
Caesar waved a hand dismissively. Naturally the females wouldn’t be counted—unless they were pregnant, that is. Then they actually had value. Speaking of which—
“How many females are near whelping?”
Marcell didn’t have to consult a written ledger or any notes to correctly answer Caesar’s inquiry. He knew all the important details of his master’s plan by heart. He was intelligent, ambitious, and knew that pleasing Caesar was the only way he’d ever get the things he wanted for himself, so he made it his business to anticipate his master’s needs.
“Ninety-two. Another two dozen have been recently confirmed pregnant.”
When Caesar blinked in surprise, Marcell allowed himself to smile. “You’ve been quite prolific, Sire.”
Caesar chuckled, a sound as dry and humorless as the striking of a match.
Ikati females only went into heat—called the Fever—once per year, and many times did not get pregnant, a fact which aggravated the Ikati’s already dwindling numbers. Human females, on the other hand, bred like rabbits. A single female could potentially birth upward of a dozen children during her fertile years. More if assisted with drugs.
As the son of a king who re
gularly mated with human women to increase his own half-Blood army, Caesar had no qualms about following in his father’s footsteps. Like his father, he’d rid himself of the human mothers when they were no longer useful.
The vultures around here are going to be getting very, very fat, he thought, smiling.
He rose from the chair and stretched. “Well, we’re going to have to finish the addition to the nursery much sooner than we thought, aren’t we?”
Marcell inclined his head. “It’s near completion, Sire. I’ve been overseeing the construction myself. If you like, I can take you on a tour today.”
In an uncharacteristic display of camaraderie, Caesar walked over to Marcell and clapped him on the shoulder, beaming. “You, my friend, are worth your weight in gold.” He studied Marcell’s face for a moment. “Why don’t you choose from the stock in the dungeon and take the rest of the day off. Enjoy yourself. You deserve it. You can show me the nursery tomorrow.”
Marcell bowed. It was deep and respectful, and not at all ironic.
The “stock” in the dungeon was of the highest quality, chosen carefully from cities near and far to satisfy Caesar’s highly refined aesthetics. The females were young, busty, and universally pretty, a veritable smorgasbord of pleasure from which to choose. Marcell had his eye on one particularly lovely specimen who’d been snatched from a public market not three days ago, whom not even Caesar had had the chance to sample. A dusky, delicious brunette by all appearances not yet out of her teens.
“Sire,” said Marcell, gratitude ringing in his tone.
Caesar’s gaze, cooler, swept over the other guards. “As for the rest of you, get back to digging the trenches for the aqueduct. I want running water within the week. Do I make myself clear?”
Judging by the chorus of “Yes, Sire!” that rang out, he had.
Darkness Bound (A Night Prowler Novel) Page 8
