by Kresley Cole
Tension practically dripped from the walls as Lobo, his hands still bound, rested his forearms on the table and leaned forward. “I only took your form to get help for the wolf,” he said, far more calmly than she would have if someone had just asked her to explain why she shouldn’t die. “I had no other choice. Without Nicole’s aid, she would have died. I was trying to leave when Aylin saw me. She kissed me. I didn’t seduce her, and if she told you that, your mate is a liar.”
Baddon whistled under his breath while even more warriors reached for their weapons, but Hunter remained eerily still. The guy’s expression was stony, unreadable, and scarier for it.
“She didn’t tell me that,” Hunter said, “but given your history, it wasn’t a stretch to assume.” He gestured to Tehya. “What about her? Did she enter the compound with you?”
“She has nothing to do with this.” Lobo didn’t glance her way, and for some reason that bothered her. It was almost as if he was avoiding looking at her. “Drop all charges against her, welcome her into your clan, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
She gaped at him in astonishment. He wanted her to live with these people? “Lobo, no—”
“LawKeeper,” Hunter barked, cutting her off. “What is the punishment for impersonating a clan chief?”
A dark-haired male she’d heard someone call Takis tipped his chair back and pulled a leather-bound book off the shelf behind him. He flipped to a flagged page with more flourish than was probably needed for the situation. He seemed to be enjoying this. They all did.
“For followers of the Raven,” he said in a deep, ominous voice, “death is the acceptable penalty. For followers of the Crow, any punishment is allowed, and no punishment is considered too harsh.”
Oh, God. She had no idea what the Raven and Crow stuff was about, but she hoped like hell these people leaned toward the Crow.
Hunter’s cool gaze never left Lobo. “And what is the punishment for assaulting a pregnant female?”
Tehya’s gut did a slow roll as Takis flipped pages. “That’s a little more complicated,” he said. “The laws take into account circumstance and whether the crime was committed by a clan member or an outsider. But basically we’re talking about anything from imprisonment to lashes to staking atop an anthill.”
Tehya felt sick to her stomach. Had Lobo saved her life only for her to be slowly eaten by ants?
Smiling grimly, Hunter gestured to Lobo. “Now, answer my question.”
Lobo clenched his teeth and sat back in his seat, regarding Hunter with eyes that glittered with contempt. “Fuck you.”
Thunderheads formed in Hunter’s eyes, and once again the hairs on the back of Tehya’s neck stood up. He nodded at Aiden. “Take him to the dungeon.”
“No!” Tehya leaped to her feet. “He’s just trying to protect me. All of it—it’s all my fault.”
“Tehya,” Lobo snapped. “Don’t say another word.”
“Why?” she yelled, fed up with all the rules she couldn’t fathom. “I don’t understand. They could kill you.”
Slamming his palms down on the table, he flashed his fangs at her. “I don’t care. I need you to be safe.”
“You don’t care? What about what I care about?” she shot back. “I don’t want you to die. Did you think about that? You’ve kept me safe for the last twelve years, and now it’s my turn, you stubborn idiot.”
“Your turn? You don’t think you’ve kept me safe?” He laughed, but the sound was bitter and hard. “I’m alive because of you, Tehya. After MoonBound kicked me out, I had nothing to live for. I was a zombie looking for a bullet to the brain. You gave me purpose. A reason to live.”
Tears stung her eyes, but before she could say anything—not that she knew what to say—Hunter stood.
“Enough.” He jammed his finger at her. “I know this territory like the back of my hand, and not once in twelve damned years have I, or any of my warriors, laid eyes on you.”
“Yes, you have,” she said quietly, ignoring Lobo’s madly shaking head. “Except I didn’t look like this.”
Hunter’s brows drew down in confusion. In fact, everyone traded bewildered glances, but it was Nicole who turned to Tehya in amazement.
“Oh, my God,” Nicole said, her voice tinged with awe. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re . . . the wolf.”
As the room exploded in conversation and questions, Tehya watched Lobo sag into his seat as if drained by disappointment. She couldn’t stand the way he was looking at her, as if she’d betrayed them both. How, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that Hunter had been determined to punish him for not talking, and she couldn’t allow that to happen.
Hunter held up his hand and called for everyone to shut the fuck up. Once everyone was seated again, he turned to Tehya. “Look, I don’t know much about skinwalkers, but I know they can’t hold any form but their own indefinitely. So unless you spent most of your time hiding, and then only coming out into the open as a wolf, you’re lying.”
It hadn’t occurred to her that anyone would think she was lying, but with no way to prove that what she was saying was true aside from shifting into a wolf and possibly never shifting back, she knew she had to be convincing. Lobo’s life might depend on it.
“It’s true, I swear.” She told them what she’d told Lobo, that she’d barely been turned into a vampire when she shifted into a wolf and was never able to shift back.
Skepticism wafted through the air, its scent similar to singed hair, and Tehya wondered if her sense of smell would always be so sensitive. It was useful to gauge emotion—but just once, couldn’t some emotion smell like chocolate? Or bacon?
“You’re saying you were turned into a vampire twelve years ago?” Riker asked, and when she nodded, he added, “How? And why aren’t your eyes silver?”
Even though more than a decade had passed, the wounds still felt raw, and she trembled a little as she spoke. “I can’t explain my eyes. They’ve always been this color. As for the rest, I was working as a dental assistant while going to school to be a dentist. Then my mom got cancer. She died six weeks after the diagnosis.”
Tehya inhaled deeply, willing herself to not break down. She and her mother, Cherie, had been close, each the only person the other had in her life. A secret had bonded them, and once Cherie was gone, Tehya’s life fell apart.
“The pressure and stress got to me, and I made some bad choices.” She’d partied too much and hung out with a wild crowd, and one night she’d found herself at an underground blood club on the outskirts of Seattle. Because, hey, all the cool people were illegally feeding and sleeping with vampires.
“I was drunk and stupid, and I let a vampire bite me.” She grimaced, hating herself for being so reckless when she’d spent twenty-four years being responsible, the kind of person the government didn’t look at too closely. “The really messed-up thing? He didn’t even get any blood, because the place got raided by VAST. They collared or killed all the vampires. The one who bit me is probably someone’s slave now.”
She’d always been disgusted by the vampire slave trade, something humans had legalized long before she was born. Vampires were stronger, faster, and superior in almost every way, but humans overwhelmingly outnumbered them, and free vampires spent their time in hiding, subject to being hunted for bounties or captured for the slave trade.
“Wait.” Nicole scowled. “If Vampire Strike Team forces interrupted, how did you exchange blood with the vampire?”
“I didn’t.”
“You must have,” she insisted. “Worldwide man-datory vaccinations against the saliva-borne vampiric infection have been in effect for decades. The failure rate of the vaccine is practically nil. Humans can only turn if they’re introduced to the blood-borne version of the virus.”
Never let a vampire bite you, sweetheart, and never tell anyone where you’re from or that your vaccination document is forged. Never.
Funny how her mother’s words, drilled into Tehya since she was th
ree years old, were ringing loud and clear in her ears now, but that night when the vampire was plunging his fangs into her throat, her mom had been as silent as she was dead. And the funniest thing was, none of those warnings mattered now.
“I was never vaccinated.” She slid a glance at Lobo, who was watching intently, puzzling her out the way he did a hunter’s cruel snare or leg trap before he disarmed and destroyed it. “My mother paid a lot of money to have my immunization record falsified.”
“Why?” he asked, but she had a feeling he was already close to the answer. It had never taken him long to figure out a trap either.
“Because the vaccine is fatal to my father’s people.”
Every eye in the room fell on Nicole, and it was Riker who posed the next question. “Is that possible, Nicole?”
Nicole nodded, almost numbly. She shifted in her seat, fidgeting like a kid in a dentist’s chair who was about to have a cavity filled.
“Once worldwide vaccination became mandatory,” she said finally, “pockets of anti-vaxxers were rooted out. Most had resisted for ideological reasons, but one group, a native population in Canada, the Kleemut tribe”—she looked over at Tehya almost apologetically—“they resisted out of self-preservation. The vaccine was lethal for them. They would die within twenty-four hours of getting the shot. A lot of the Kleemut went into hiding. They were hunted mercilessly by Canadian and international VAST forces, and those who were caught were never seen again by anyone outside of a Daedalus lab.” She gave Tehya that look again, but this time the apologetic expression was steeped in shame, and that was when it clicked. Nicole must have worked for Daedalus, the company that had revolutionized vampire slavery and created the vaccine against the vampire infection. They were the most loved and hated company on the planet. “Your father was a Kleemut Indian, wasn’t he?”
“I never knew him, but yes.” Tehya fixed her gaze on a bear skull hanging on the wall, its surface painted with scenes of ancient Native American bison hunts. “My mom changed her name and fled to Seattle when she found out she was pregnant. They didn’t want anyone to ever suspect that I’m part Kleemut. She got one letter from my father, and then she never heard from him again. Apparently, he went missing.” She turned to Nicole and was surprised to see that the doctor’s expression was still tight with guilt. Whatever she’d done in her past was a source of pain for her, and right now it didn’t matter that Nicole was supposed to be the enemy. She’d been nothing but kind to Tehya. Offering a tentative smile, Tehya said softly, “Thank you for trying to help me, and I’m sorry I attacked you for it.”
Nicole blinked, obviously expecting neither gratitude nor an apology. Even Riker looked a little startled. “It’s okay,” Nicole said. “You must have been terrified to wake up in a strange place. And with two legs instead of four.”
Lobo tugged at the rope around his wrists with his teeth, and she almost laughed. He did not know that in order to chew through something—like shoelaces or a drawstring on a pair of sweats—you had to use your back teeth. With a curse, he settled his hands on the table again. “Your mother wasn’t a native, was she?”
Not even close. “Except for her name, she was as Scottish as Loch Ness.”
Lobo nodded, more to himself than anyone else. “That explains the skinwalker glitch.”
“I’m not following,” she said, and a murmur of agreement rose up from around the table as everyone turned to Lobo.
He didn’t look at anyone else, kept his gaze focused solely on her. “According to lore, most skinwalkers are born vampires, but all of them come from pure Native American blood. You were born neither a vampire nor a purebred native. You shouldn’t have this ability at all, so it’s not a surprise that you can’t control it.”
“So why did I shift back in the lab, when I hadn’t been able to do it on my own for years?”
Nicole blew out a long breath before speaking up. “I did a little reading up on shape-shifters after Hunter told me about Lobo. If what I read is true, skinwalkers who are injured while in another body will revert to their true form when they die. It’s likely that you were so close to death that your body shifted, and in doing so, you healed.” She gave Tehya a pointed look. “I would recommend that you not shift into a wolf again.”
Good call, Doc. “I don’t even know if I can.”
“How did it happen before?”
God, this was so embarrassing. How could she admit that it had been a total accident? “I’m not sure. I’d turned into a vampire, and I was terrified I’d get caught. I didn’t know what to do, so I drove until my car ran out of gas.” She’d been in the mountains, hungry, alone, with no idea how to survive. And then she’d heard it. A wolf howling in the distance. Then another. And another. They’d seemed to be singing to each other, so in tune that she’d felt the ties that held the pack together. “There was a family of wolves that . . . I don’t know . . . I heard them, and they made me want what they had. I had this urge to join them, and I felt this pull . . . and the next thing I knew, I had four legs and fur. I tried to switch back, but I couldn’t.” She shook her head. “How did I get this ability in the first place, if it’s something so rare, let alone unheard of in someone like me?”
Lobo cut a sharp look at Hunter. “It seems that the impossible has become possible lately.”
Whatever subtext was at play here struck a nerve, and Hunter went taut. “What do you mean?”
Lobo shifted his gaze to peg Riker with a meaningful stare. “I know about your son. I always thought invisibility was a myth.”
Tehya tried not to let her mouth fall open. And failed. So she hadn’t been seeing things that day she and Lobo had been out patrolling the forest and they’d come across a young vampire who had disappeared and reappeared twice before their eyes.
“Bastien is . . . unique,” Riker said, a note of pride in his voice.
Hunter sat back in his chair and surveyed everyone. “I think I’ve heard enough. Lobo, I’ll honor your request to keep Tehya safe. We will welcome her as a MoonBound member. I’m sure we can use someone with dental training around here. Vampires are probably a dentist’s wet dream. Nicole, unless you want to pursue her attack against you—”
“I don’t,” Nicole said quickly. She shot Tehya a friendly smile, and Tehya shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She wanted to hate these people, but she was finding that they weren’t all the monsters she’d expected them to be.
“Then we’ll have quarters prepared for her,” Hunter said. “Katina, will you show her around?”
“Wait.” Tehya might have conflicting emotions about MoonBound, but she did know that she didn’t want to live here. “I don’t want this. I’m going home with Lobo.”
“That’s in violation of vampire law,” Aiden said, a little too gleefully. He was definitely one of the ones she didn’t like. “Skinwalkers aren’t allowed to mate with each other.”
“We aren’t . . . mated.” But, man, her cheeks felt hot, because mating was exactly what they’d done in the trailer. Katina rolled her eyes again. “Not like that.”
Lobo didn’t meet her gaze, and she realized that, while the mating restrictions might be true, that wasn’t what this was about. “You need to go, Tehya.”
“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest and dug in. “Not until I know what’s going to happen to you.”
“You’ll see him again,” Hunter assured her. “You have my word.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Since I don’t know you, your word means nothing to me.”
One black eyebrow shot up and his lip quirked in amusement. “I see your point. But given that I’m in charge, you don’t have any choice but to trust me.”
She hated that he was right.
“Please go, Tehya,” Lobo murmured. “Hunter is a dick, but he’s a dick who keeps his word.”
“Thanks for the endorsement,” Hunter said drily.
Reluctantly she rose from her seat and followed Katina out of the room. Only after the
y were on the other side of the complex did she realize that Hunter had said she’d see Lobo again . . . but he hadn’t said he’d be alive.
9
Once the door was closed and Lobo was sure Tehya was out of earshot, he turned to Hunter. “You told her I’d see her again. Before my execution, or after?”
There were a few chuckles from around the table, because, sure, executions were hilarious. He must have forgotten how much he’d laughed at all the people he’d seen die at the command—or hand—of Hunter’s father. Bear Roar had been a brutal leader, a strict follower of the Way of the Raven, and a total bastard. Lobo had laughed when Hunter killed him.
Hunter gestured at Baddon, who, after giving Hunter an are you fucking serious? look, shrugged and sliced through the ropes binding Lobo’s wrists. Lobo rubbed the raw skin as circulation flowed back into his hands.
“Leave us.” Hunter’s tone made it clear that he wouldn’t tolerate argument. “You too, Rike.”
Riker frowned but, like the good soldier he was, herded everyone out, and mere seconds later, Lobo was alone in the room with MoonBound’s chief. The last time they’d been alone, it had been for the same reason and, just like now, his life had been on the line.
The only differences were that this time he wasn’t in chains, and there wasn’t a horde of people calling for a painful, drawn-out death sentence.
Hunter lounged back in his chair, his fingers steepled as his hands rested on his abs, his cold, hard gaze tracking Lobo as he paced the room.
“I told you that if you ever shifted into another vampire’s form again, I’d end you. Do you remember that?”
Lobo laughed, really getting behind the gallows humor thing. “Do you think I get death threats so often that I forget them?”
“You’re an asshole, so I’m going to answer that with a yes.”
