So now you see...
Now you know.
She hadn’t just been sent here to assimilate with other Weres, but to help them. Only she wielded the magic necessary for finding anomalies and beasts.
This was a wake-up call. That was the way Rafe was describing his sudden enlightenment in the thoughts he was telegraphing. Yet who among them could have anticipated that their packs would be joined together in other ways, or that she and Rafe would be mates?
He was looking at her. Trying to read her, in turn. Rafe was like a rock in this gathering storm, and so very brave to have gotten this far.
Things were in the open now, so there was no need for any of them to hide what they were thinking.
“So how many demons can we expect, Cara? One of them killed that human who was dumped near our wall, I believe,” Dana said.
It was time to do her job. What she had been sent here for. There was no running from this kind of commitment. Still, Cara wondered if this was the reason Dana Delmonico Landau had brought her to Fairview tonight. Dana had used a little added pressure to kick Cara’s senses into overdrive.
“Only one demon came for me,” Cara said. “A bullet took that one down.”
“Not before his friends found out about you?” Dana pressed.
“They share thoughts the way we do. If that one found me, others will follow.”
“Christ!” Rafe muttered.
“And the vampires?” Dana asked.
“There’s a nest not far from the beach. Vampires don’t travel far from their resting places, and that’s where the first one appeared. The park shouldn’t be part of their area, but that’s where I met the second one and his friends.”
“That’s the vamp presence you detected around the body we found?” Rafe asked.
“Maybe,” Cara replied.
Dana cut in. “Wanting what you keep hidden inside can’t be the only reason these creatures have come aboveground.”
Rafe responded with new insight. “Because whoever brought Cara here might have known of the monsters’ return before calling the Kirk-Killions for a favor. Either that, or we have a psychic in our midst who can predict the future. It’s possible that Cara isn’t the inciting factor for vampires coming out of hiding after all and that her presence here is only coincidental with that.”
Rafe tightened his hold on Cara’s hand. She would have loved him for that alone when there were so many other reasons for her feelings.
“Our alpha seemed to be as surprised as we were by news of the vampires. If he knew about this, he has become a damn fine actor,” he said.
Dana shook her head. “It wasn’t your father who sensed vamp presence and started the ball rolling. I would have known about that.”
“But the alpha would have initiated my invitation,” Cara pointed out.
Dana was eyeing her thoughtfully. “Yes. Dylan sent the invitation, but it wasn’t to confront a possible vampire invasion. It was so that...”
“Cara and I could meet and possibly form a friendship?” Rafe finished for his mother.
His grip on Cara’s hand could have snapped a human’s bones. She relished the minor twinge of leftover discomfort in that injured hand that told her some of her fears about winding up alone in this strange life would disappear if only Rafe continued to hang on.
Had she been promised to Rafe as a mate? Was that one of the promises Dana had mentioned, or had the fates she had blamed after first setting eyes on Rafe Landau been responsible for getting them together, meaning that most of this was pure coincidence?
“Our relationship aside,” Rafe said, tensing slightly, “it would seem that there’s another mystery to be solved here. Who butchered that body, and why?”
Though the question needed an answer, he quickly circled back to the former subject. “Wasn’t it a long shot that Cara and I would imprint?”
Dana didn’t shirk the question. “I suppose. However, Colton and Rosalind were willing to take that chance if it eventually led to you being mated.” Dana looked to Cara as she went on. “Because if it worked out, Cara would be freed from the burden she carries.”
Cara’s insides began to twist. Another shudder rocked her. What Dana was telling them would never have crossed her mind. She hadn’t thought it could ever happen, or even be a possibility.
Could it be true?
That Rafe was to save her soul?
They would have a child, and if that child was a daughter, the Banshee would have a new soul to share.
When Rafe’s gaze came back to her, Cara met it. Though he didn’t immediately speak his thoughts out loud, Cara heard them as if he had.
“If we were to have a daughter...”
The thought of that sickened Cara the way it must have sickened her mother when the time came to pass along the dark spirit to its new younger, stronger host...
Because who could have wished such a thing for anyone they truly loved?
Chapter 31
Rafe rallied quickly and herded Cara toward the car. He was silent, though his mind whirled with questions, most of them having to do with sacrifice.
Cara’s family had sacrificed their life in Miami in order to save others from harm. Sending Cara here had been about their wish for a hopeful future for their daughter, freeing her of at least one burden—ending her turn with the Banshee. Then there was the fact that Rafe’s own family had been willing to tie their son to a Kirk-Killion and all that went with her by honoring promises they once had made.
Sacrifice.
As Rafe saw it, he was the big winner here. Cara was his. What was done was done, and the only direction open to them was forward.
He felt Cara’s racing pulse through his grip on her hand and warned himself not to look at her face. If he did, he would likely see her horror over what she had learned about their possible future progeny.
She’d be wondering how she could possibly pass the dark spirit to anyone else after having experienced what that kind of life was like, let alone asking such a thing of a child of her own. She might vow never to have children, which in turn might lead her to contemplate their relationship and possible ways to break the chains binding her to him.
Hell, he wasn’t going to lose her. And anyway, that breakup couldn’t happen.
Cara stopped when they reached their vehicles, and a new wave of tension ran through her. Rafe turned to search the driveway.
“Even I can smell that,” his mother said. And she was right. Foul odors were drifting across the field, emanating from the area beneath the trees that they had just left.
Inner warnings came too fast for Rafe to acknowledge all of them, but one warning stood out and brought him a new round of fear. The only way for Cara to sever their bond was for one of them to die.
If Cara were to sacrifice herself in order to prevent a dismal childless future, perhaps she’d assume the Banshee might die with her. Where would the dark spirit go if that were the case?
“Don’t you dare think that way,” he said to her adamantly. “Please get in the car. We can outdistance this fight, at least for now, until we know more about it.”
His mother didn’t waste any time. She dived behind the wheel of the black SUV and started the engine. Rafe opened the door and ushered Cara inside.
“Go,” he directed. “Take Cara home.” He trusted his mother to take care of her, and she didn’t argue.
Anyone who had been a cop, or in any way affiliated with law enforcement, trusted others in the field to do the right thing and make the right choices. His mother took off in a whirlwind of kicked-up dirt and debris, jamming the car into Reverse, then wheeling it around to head down the driveway at breakneck speed. Cara’s face in the window became a white blur.
Rafe got behind the wheel of his borrowed sedan but didn’t follow the SUV. After starting the engine, he steered toward the tree
s, determined to see for himself what kind of abomination had come for his lover this time, and if there was anything he could do about it.
* * *
“He won’t do anything stupid,” Dana said as Fairview Hospital slid into the distance. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
Cara leaned back against the seat, feeling sick and thinking about jumping out of the car. She couldn’t see Rafe or the vehicle he had been driving. It was entirely possible that Rafe’s mother didn’t know her son as well as she liked to think, and his next choice might surprise her.
“It worked,” Cara said.
“Yes.” Dana didn’t pretend not to understand what Cara was talking about. Two families touched by tragedy had been joined at the hip. She and Rafe had become lovers, which had been one of the secret goals for bringing her to Miami that had been exposed at Fairview tonight.
“That must have been some promise your pack made to my family,” Cara said. “I wonder what you think about it now.”
“I think that had you come here under any circumstances, there would have been the same result. I see the way you look at each other. No one made you do that.”
“Rafe knows what I am.”
Dana nodded. “We all do.”
“Yet you’d accept the consequences of such a pairing for your family? Welcome it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because everyone benefits, especially you, Cara. And because you’ve taken your turn with this spirit and deserve some freedom of your own.”
“What about Rafe?”
“You’ll have to believe me when I tell you that my son can take care of himself and has never once done anything he hasn’t chosen to do.”
“He chose me.”
“Yes, he did.”
“And that fell right into the original plan for bringing me here.”
“Yes, though none of us could have been sure what might have happened,” Dana said.
In Cara’s mind, the two objectives for her visit to Miami had been tied together in a nice little knot. She had walked right into this, she realized as she replayed the events of the past few days in search of the details she might have otherwise missed.
En route to Miami, she had jumped from the car that had been sent to transport her and had ended up at the beach...when she now knew that beach was nowhere near the Landau estate. It was in the opposite direction.
This raised the question that nagged at her now. Had someone predicted that she’d try to escape and planned to have her taken in the direction where she had ended up that first night...which just happened to be in Rafe’s front yard?
Could anyone actually have seen that far ahead?
Who would have had an idea about the kind of male she’d be attracted to, and vice versa? Her parents?
Had they...could they...have planted those dreams about Rafe in her mind, so that she would recognize him the way she had when they met face-to-face?
Had their union been preordained by the parents who had raised her and who possessed the kind of power and talent to set such a plan in motion?
Cara’s fingers closed over the door handle of Dana’s car.
“Did you know?” she asked Dana. “Were you in on the details of his plan?”
Dana nodded. “It all came down to freedom.”
“That’s not the way I see it now. This plan was more like manipulation.”
“You weren’t forced to make the choices you made, Cara. Neither was Rafe. This could have turned out differently and been a big mistake, but I believe you’d be lying if you told me you’d have changed things.”
Silence fell, as dark and weighty as the knot in Cara’s stomach. Maybe Dana was right, and she would have fallen for Rafe in any circumstance without interference, but how was she to know that?
Dana broke the silence.
“Rosalind was eighteen and had never been to a city when she came here,” Dana said. “You’re also eighteen and have led the same kind of secluded life she did.”
They were back to an area where streetlights kept the dark at bay. The sun would rise soon, and there would be a short period of relief from finding out what kinds of things the darkness had in store for her.
Closing her eyes was not an option. They had traveled away from Fairview, and yet Cara still strained for a glimpse of Rafe in the side mirror.
“You might have been conceived here,” Dana continued. “Eighteen would therefore have been a magic number in all of this.”
Cara’s sickness doubled as that idea sank in. If what Dana suggested was true, the timing had also been perfectly planned for this visit. She was mating age, and had been hungry enough for companionship to look forward to those dreams of Rafe, in spite of her anger over having them.
Her fingers put pressure on the door handle as thoughts seemed to coagulate...
By mating with Rafe in the bedroom her parents had used, was there a chance she also might have conceived a child—a werewolf child she could then pass the dark spirit along to? A child carrying Rosalind and Colton’s superior genes?
She needed to pull over and throw up but couldn’t speak.
“I’m sorry,” Dana said. “If I had known about all of the logistics of the plan beforehand, I could have approached you about it. I could have spoken to Rafe and armed you both.”
“If you didn’t know the extent of this plan, who did?” Cara barely got that out. She was millimeters away from opening the door.
“Rafe’s grandfather,” Dana said. “Landau alpha at the time. And your parents.”
She hadn’t escaped by the time the gates to the Landau estate appeared, but it was never too late.
Cara pushed down on the handle.
* * *
There was dark and then there was dark—true darkness that sprang from bad origins. Rafe’s car’s headlights barely made a dent in it. Like a creeping fog, everything outside the windows was a deep, solid black. So it was a good thing that all Landau vehicles came fully loaded with weapons and a stash of silver bullets in a secret compartment under the floor that only Landau fingerprints could access.
Things like that sometimes came in handy, and Rafe was afraid this was going to be one of those times. The foul odor he had detected had seeped into the car to choke him. Death’s detritus was all too familiar to him, except that this time he wasn’t in an enclosed room with a week-old dead body. The space around him was wide-open.
“Where are you, you damn bloodsuckers?” he muttered, yanking the wheel to the right to avoid a grove of ancient trees in need of water. Once he had passed the trees, Rafe stopped the car and left it to idle as he pulled up the floor mat and pressed his thumb to the digital lock.
The compartment holding the small cache of weapons and specialized bullets opened with a soft click. He reached inside for the gun, comfortable with it in his hand.
Then he got out of the car.
* * *
Cara stopped herself from making her escape, struck by a premonition of her own.
“Turn around,” she directed as the gate opened to let them through. “Please. Quickly. Now.”
“Cara...” Dana began.
“Rafe didn’t follow us. He is out there, searching for them, and shouldn’t be alone. He told me he had never seen a vampire before the incident at the beach. What are the chances he’s seen a demon?”
Dana didn’t balk or argue. She rolled down the window and barked orders to the guard. Wearing a worried expression, she turned to Cara. “Dylan is still in the park, but he will hear me and come. Whoever is with him will follow.”
They backed up and headed toward the road to Fairview. Cara didn’t press home the point that Dana had been wrong about Rafe and that they shouldn’t have left him there on his own.
She shouldn’t have left him.
> Cara’s pulse sped faster than the car. Rafe was going to protect his new mate and had sent her to safety. He was going to face demons for her, in her place, and all Cara could think about was that no matter what the plans had been, if Rafe were to die, her soul would die with him.
The SUV blew through several stop signs and a lot of traffic lights without incident or the police catching on. Dana had gone quiet, tucking her fears inside. Maybe she blamed herself for not seeing what Rafe was capable of. Again, this came down to choices, and whether anyone could accurately predict the behavior of another.
Cara couldn’t sit still. How could she when she was sure that Rafe loved her? He had joined up with a monster hunter who was also a monster in most eyes. The thought of a budding love between them, so soon and so very unique, caused another kind of drumbeat deep inside, this time arising from fear.
Was Rafe doing this to give her the choices she hadn’t had? Was he willing to sacrifice himself for her?
She felt the tingle of the warmth of the sun that now sat just beneath the horizon like an emerging ball of fire. Its presence was in the air she breathed. The closeness of sunrise was the saving grace in all of this. Vampires and demons couldn’t function in daylight. They would burn to a crisp in the light of a new day.
And as far as she knew, another body had not turned up before the stars came out, as the dark spirit had predicted.
Which meant that body hadn’t yet been found.
“Hold on,” she messaged to Rafe on a channel she was sure he would hear. “Hold them off until I get there. If you can... If you do...we can...”
She didn’t get to finish that message, and probably couldn’t have anyway without the vocabulary necessary to tell Rafe how she felt. Love was new to her.
And it hurt.
Chapter 32
Rafe saw nothing past the beams of the headlights at first. There was no extra weight to the air here and no added foulness now that a breeze had arrived to cut the stink of whatever hid from him. He wasn’t alone, though. Were senses told him so.
“She’s gone,” he called out. “You came here for nothing.”
The Black Wolf Page 22
