“An American. What a coincidence,” the lycaness mused, then shrugged. “We were hoping you could take us to your alpha,” the woman finished, her voice still oddly kind despite the glittering silver eyes that spelled death.
“Go to hell.” Ruby struggled harder against the hands, craning her head to try and glimpse again the threat behind her.
The female shook her head, dark waves of hair tossing as she reached inside her pocket. The hands on Ruby’s arms tightened.
A decidedly un-American voice near her ear bit out, “Hurry, Lily. Now.”
Ruby glanced over her shoulder: The light that gleamed where his irises should be burned into her. In a surge of strength, she twisted in his arms. Opening her mouth, she started to spit out that she knew what he was, all right… she knew that he was worse than a lycan because he had control, a choice, and he chose this. A lycan at his side. Darkness in his heart. He was nothing like Sebastian.
A stabbing pain in her shoulder stopped the words. She gasped. The monster at her back pressed two fingers against the side of her neck and all ability to speak, to utter a sound, vanished.
She slapped a hand over her shoulder, groping wildly until she felt something. Lily’s fist—the slim fingers wrapped around a syringe buried in Ruby’s shoulder.
She arched, tried to pull the needle free from her body, but Lily beat her to it, tucking it away inside her coat with a covert glance around her. “We’re good,” she murmured.
A rush of pin-pricks cascaded over Ruby’s body. She sagged against her captor, head suddenly spinning. Whatever had been in that needle spread through her. As quickly as wildfire, lethargy sank in. Total numbing exhaustion. She would have fallen to the ground if not for the dovenatu holding her up.
The lycaness materialized on her other side, taking her arm. Ruby blinked at her face, beautiful but for the silver eyes. The dovenatu gripped her other arm. With Ruby lolling like a rag doll between them, they walked. Her feet didn’t work, but it didn’t matter. They were strong enough to support her. Her feet skimmed the ground. Anyone who looked at them would probably think she had hit the raki too hard.
Ruby looked back and forth between them. Their images grew fuzzy. They carried her toward a parked car. She didn’t resist, could not even utter a sound as they secured her in the back seat. Still, she worked her lips, trying to speak, put her vague thoughts into speech, to push the words up past her throat. No use.
The dovenatu climbed behind the wheel.
Then they were moving, the motion of the car rhythmic. She slumped, sliding to her side. The seat beneath her nose smelled of worn leather and sweat. Their voices rolled on the air, but she could not concentrate on their words no matter how she tried. Her thoughts ran a sluggish trail, like a train chugging up a mountain.
Her eyes drifted shut, only one thought able to stick, to penetrate. Sebastian. He’d helped her escape, threw himself into danger for her. For nothing.
She prayed that he, at least, had escaped. That at least one of them found freedom. One of them would survive.
Sebastian jumped from building to building, legs launching him far and high. He inhaled the air. The fresh smell of his own blood mingled with the soft aroma of settling night. He bore several wounds. A gouge at his neck. Chest. Arm. He was almost fully regenerated, but blood still soaked him.
His stomach was his first priority. Before he lost it totally—finally—and took down some innocent bystander in a starving fit. He broke into a darkened bakery and gorged himself on breads, sticky baklava and spinach-stuffed pies, and swallowed a gallon of juice from the back refrigerator. And he still hungered, could eat more, but he forced himself to stop. He could eat again later. The clamoring ache had been appeased. For now, he had to find Ruby.
Soon he prowled atop another building. He snatched a man’s shirt off a laundry line, studying the streets far below as he pulled it over his head. Ruby was out there somewhere. He felt her. Knew she still lived. He had to reach her. Before any other lycan did… or before the dovenatu that he had escaped from at Gunter’s nest found him. At least what once was Gunter’s nest. Now some other pack had seized it. A pack who had a dovenatu at the helm—a fact that settled like rocks in his gut.
Apparently Sebastian, his brother and Kit weren’t the only ones out there. Looking out at the night, he picked up a scent. One he knew all too well. His throat tightened.
“Rafe,” he breathed, not really all that surprised his brother was in Istanbul. He would have come, too. The moment he sensed Rafe was in danger. He would have sensed his pain these last weeks. It had been simply too intense for him to disguise.
He soared onto another building, the scent growing closer as he moved, landing like a cat on the balls of his feet from one surface to the next.
His brother was close. He moved toward him, following the thread. In the deepening twilight, he landed on the rooftop of a crowded restaurant. Voices and laughter floated from below, rising on the night with the tempting smells of grilled lamb. He stood, waiting, only a moment before his brother burst through the roof’s door.
“Seb,” he cried, embracing him. “I knew you were alive.”
They had lived apart for so long, Rafe consumed in his role of savior, infiltrated deep in EFLA, the European Federation of Lycan Agents, saving all Marshans marked for death. That was what he did. He helped people, used his skills to save lives, whereas Sebastian simply hunted and destroyed every lycan he came across… even the occasional lycan agent if the urge seized him. If he felt justified.
Rafe pulled back to look him over. “God, you’re thin.”
“A little starvation never killed anyone.”
His brother failed to laugh at that. A face identical to his own, only fuller and lacking a beard, stared at him intently, the eyes knowing, traveling down the dark paths that Sebastian had lived in the last months, “Seb… you didn’t…”
“No,” he ground out, jaw aching in a tight clench, knowing what his brother was asking. “But it’s what they wanted me to do. Bastards.” An image of Ruby flashed in his head, bleeding and suffering, enduring her transition in that dank little cell. And all because of him. Because they wished to corrupt him.
And she was still out there. A lycan now. He blinked hard. He had to find her. Before some lycan did. Or that dovenatu he’d narrowly escaped. Or a trigger-happy lycan hunter. His head spun from the possibilities of all that could happen to her. She needed him.
He noticed his brother was not alone. Beyond him stood a petite blond. “Kit, I take it.”
With a sharp little twist of her lips, his brother’s wife stepped forward and astonished him with a hug. “Thought you two were twins.” Pulling back her arm, she scratched warm fingers across his bristly cheek. “Guess we need to work on that.”
“You’re married to this little thing?” he teased, hiding his unease at suddenly having another relation—a female relation. It had only ever been his mother and Rafe.
He felt pity for his mother, compassion for all his mother had endured… raped by a lycan… then giving birth to him and Rafe. But he suspected she despised them, even if she had raised them and stood by them. Only he knew of the night she had tried to kill them both. He had never shared that information with Rafe. But he knew, and he never forgot.
A tall man with dark blond hair, arms folded across a well-muscled chest, hovered behind his sister-in-law. Kit’s brother, he guessed. A lycan hunter who once worked for NODEAL, America’s National Organization of Defense against Evolving and Ancient Lycans.
They nodded to one another. In his old life, Gideon March would have killed him without blinking an eye. Would have seen him as just another lycan to be hunted and destroyed. Until he saved a woman from a lycan’s curse, and then married her. The precise thing you must do for Ruby, a small voice whispered across his head. Minus the marrying part.
“I was starting to worry we wouldn’t find you,” Rafe said. “We’ve been here awhile.”
“Would take more than a f
ew lycans to kill me.”
“Indeed?”
Sebastian’s gaze flew to the owner of that voice. His nostrils flared, immediately recognizing what he was even before seeing the pair of pewter eyes. Eyes without the faintest remorse. As chilling as any lycan’s.
“Don’t tell me. Darius. The lycan with a soul.” Doubt rang in his voice; he didn’t care. Not after what he’d endured at the hands of Darius’s brethren.
“The lycan who wants a soul,” Kit corrected. And there was a difference. A lycan with a soul was Ruby. An innocent who had not fed, not taken a life. But she would. If he did not find her before moonrise. If he did not protect the world from her… protect her from himself. Darius did not possess a soul. He had given it up centuries ago. One look at the hard set of his face and Sebastian knew he had fed, killed countless innocents in the course of his life.Not Ruby. He would not let Ruby go down that path.
He swallowed hard against the lump in his throat, telling himself it was nothing more than obligation, his basic sense of rightness that drove him to find her. Nothing more. Not the overriding need to see her again, smell her, feel her, taste her, have her…
He looked back at his brother. “You have rooms somewhere not far, I hope. Guns, ammo.” He didn’t doubt his brother’s ability to infiltrate any government’s rules and regulations. If he hadn’t come fully armed, he would have been so upon the hour of arrival in the city.
“Yes. We’re at the Four Seasons.”
“Good.” He strode for the roof’s door. “Let’s go and get suited.” It felt good. Familiar. To be himself again, on a mission, on the hunt.
Rafe’s steps fell hard behind him. “Go where?”
“I have to find someone.”
“Someone who?” Rafe demanded, his footsteps and that of his companions reverberating throughout the old building’s stairwell as they descended to the street.
Sebastian didn’t answer at first. The memory of warm, giving skin flooded him.
He should forget her. Logically, he knew it. He had refrained from killing her. No small feat. He hadn’t been the one, after all, to drag her into Gunter’s nest. She’d done that all on her own. The mess she was in was her own. He could call it quits. He could. He should.
Ruby’s face drifted through his mind, her eyes—even silver, the warm brown long gone—gleamed at him with knowing, a deep awareness of him. She could see him, the core of him, read him. No woman had before.
Shaking his head, he cursed. He would never forget her. An empath. A person who knew him no matter what barriers he tossed up. She was both compelling and frightening. And she needs you.
“I’m going to catch a lycan.” The easiest explanation. Even if they did not ring quite true. She was more than a lycan. So much more.
“Bro, we need to care for you first, put some meat back on you, and then we’ll talk and plan a way to take out the pack who did this to you.”
He didn’t have time to wait and lick his wounds. Ruby didn’t have that much time. He needed to find her. Then he would go back for her alpha.
Then she would be free.
And so would he.
14
Ruby woke on a comfortable bed, cheerful rays of light spilling through partially-slitted shutters. Gone was her caftan. A simple white tee hugged her torso. Soft velour jogging pants encased her legs. And her body was clean. Her fingers brushed her head, trailed through clean strands of hair.
Despite her state of comfort, an awful taste filled her mouth at the thought of someone undressing her. Bathing her. Either the female, Lily, or the dovenatu, it didn’t matter. She felt violated. A hot wash of anger shuddered through her.
She sprang to life, vaulting from the bed, not pausing to acclimate to her new surroundings. She didn’t need to. She took it all in at a glance. The sparsely furnished yet well-appointed room, the open bedroom door. Open?
On her feet, she stopped before the open door. Her captors felt comfortable enough with their prowess that they did not bother to lock her in?
She resisted running through the door, convinced more stealth was required. Turning, she raised the shutters from the window, hoping to find a way out. She growled at the bars lining the window. No escape that way.
“You’re awake.”
Ruby spun around, facing the female from yesterday. At least she supposed it was yesterday. Who knew how long they drugged her?
“Good afternoon. Have a good rest?”
Ruby sidled along the wall, palms skimming the cool wallpaper, watching Lily carefully. So far she had met with only brutality at the hands of lycans. “Where am I?”
“My husband and I have rented this house while we attend to our business in Istanbul.”
Business. She made it sound so professional. Wasn’t their business killing and dealing savagery on the world? And who was her husband? That dovenatu? How could they be together? Sebastian made it seem such an impossibility. There were lycans. And there were dovenatus, and never the two mixed. Except with these two. Oh, and the golden dovenatu she had seen back at Gunter’s nest. He’d been in league with lycans. Apparently the rules were changing. At least as Sebastian knew them.
“And what does your business have to do with me?”
“Well, you’re a lycan.” She gestured at Ruby, light glinting off the very large diamond wedding ring on her hand.
Angling her head, she studied Ruby. “You’re young. And I don’t just mean in human years. Newly turned, I’m guessing.”
“How can you tell?”
The dovenatu emerged in the doorway then. His large frame dominated the space and Ruby shrank even deeper against the wall.
His wife moved closer to his side, as if linked by a magnetic force. Her husband wrapped an arm around her waist. Ruby stared at the pair. Something was wrong. Well, maybe not wrong, but just… off. They seemed genuinely besotted with each other. In love. And love was not something she had witnessed—or felt—among the lycans of Gunter’s pack. According to Sebastian, after a lycan fed, all humanity was lost. Hope stirred in her heart. Maybe there was a way to live with this curse and keep her humanity.
“When were you turned?” Lily asked.
“What day is it?”
The female blinked. “You haven’t fed yet, then?”
“No.” Ruby stared back and forth between them. “Why should that matter to you?”
“Of course it matters to us. If you haven’t fed, then you’re… you’re—” She looked to her husband before turning back to Ruby with unmistakably kind eyes and announcing with great emphasis, “I’ve never fed either.”
Hope swelled over. She took a jerky step away from the wall. “You haven’t? Why? How?”
“Because I don’t want to,” she answered simply, as if there were a choice in the matter. As if stopping herself from shifting and killing every moonrise posed no difficulty. As if sheer will alone could prevent that from happening.
“Every moonrise, I sedate my wife,” the dovenatu answered, apparently reading her mind.
She stared at the arm he wrapped so securely around her waist and felt a flash of envy that Lily had such love and devotion from another soul that she could rely on him to see her through every moonrise. She felt the lack in her own life all the more keenly. She didn’t have anyone. Perhaps Adele could be counted upon, but Ruby hated to put her at risk. And how could she rely on Adele forever? Adele was mortal… would age and die. Then who would safeguard mankind from her? Unbidden, an image of Sebastian rose in her mind. She shook her head. He was gone. She would never see him again.
“Propofol,” Lily volunteered.
“Propofol?”
“It’s a sedative. Takes effect almost immediately.”
Her knees went weak. So there was a way. She didn’t have to live the life of a ravaging beast, cursed, damned, lacking a soul. She didn’t need to hope Sebastian would help her find Gunter and put an end to him… an end to her curse.
There was a way. I can go home. I can t
ake back my life. She must have whispered the words aloud.
Lily smiled. “Well, maybe. But you could help us first before you do.”
“How can I help you?” And did she want to? She was over the whole putting herself in jeopardy thing. Maybe that made her selfish, but she didn’t care. She had tried to help Amy and Emily, and look where it got her. Sex for the first time with someone who wasn’t even human. A scratch that turned her into a lycan. Oh, and gutted from stomach to chest. She was tired. Tired of hurting. Tired of feeling the wretched, black emotions of the monsters around her. She was through, finished. She wanted to go home and lick her wounds.
So she would be this… creature. She could handle it. She was used to being different. A freak.
“We don’t mean you any harm,” the dovenatu murmured.
She focused on him, but she could not pick up any ill feelings, none of the darkness, no beast prowling beneath the surface. Most of his emotions centered on his wife… and all those sentiments were tender. Warm.
“We promise to help you. Get you safely wherever you want to go after you do us this favor.” Favor. She made it sound minor. Small. “Come on.” Lily stepped aside, motioning her through the door. “You must be famished. We have brunch laid out. We can eat while we talk.
Her stomach rumbled. “I would like that.” She took a deep breath, feeling safe for the first time in days. Safe. And free. Free of that damned cell and those lycans. She could help them. A small thing to do for their help. After she helped them with whatever they needed, she’d be on a plane home.
Minutes later, sitting outside at a wrought-iron table overlooking a heavenly rose garden, taking her first bite of jam-slathered toast and imagining herself back home, she learned what they wanted from her.
“We want you to lead us to the lycans who infected you.”
The toast turned to dust on her tongue.
* * *
Ivo lounged in the great bed that had once belonged to the alpha of the pack he had just deposed. He listened as Jonah gave an accounting of the day’s events. A total of eleven lycans dead: eight of Gunter’s pack, three of Ivo’s force. Not bad. Not that he cared about the loss of his three, anyway. Lycans were expendable, mere soldiers to him. To be used for his purpose. And his purpose was simple. Amass an army great enough to take on the world, to wipe out EFLA, NODEAL and all humans who dared resist.
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