by Maren Smith
“It was not one of mine!” Catching himself, Lucius visibly struggles to contain his anger. I know how he feels. I’ve got Merris tucked behind me. Her hands clutch my shoulder. Her blood is in my nose and my veins, and all I want is vengeance against every shifter in this room. I don’t much care for the species under the best of circumstances. Right now, I would dearly love to murder them all. “I told you I’d handle it and I will.”
“When?” Garrett snaps. “When you get around to it? After you’ve had your little nap?”
“When I know something!” Lucius snaps back, advancing on the Alpha wolf-shifter, a single step that riles every shifter packed in this basement.
It’s Selene who announces, “She didn’t do it.” Turning to Garrett, very quietly she says, “You know me. I wouldn’t protect her if I thought for a second she had. But there was no trace of the matriarch’s smell on her when they arrived this morning, and she’s not a vampire.” Turning to the much younger Camino Seco coyote Alpha, she adds, “What was done to your grandmother, you know a human isn’t responsible for. You know it.”
The male holds her stare, fury and grief waging their silent war in the minute flinches of his expression. In the end, he looks away first, looking straight at Merris instead. I keep her tucked behind me. If he makes one move toward us, I will tear him open from gut to throat. But the white queen is right. He does know, only his rage needs a victim and he doesn’t want to believe it.
“I will find the vampire responsible,” Lucius tells them, soft in spite of his anger. “I have given you my word.”
“We will eradicate every vampire in this city if you don’t,” the Alpha wolf replies. It’s not an ill-thought out threat, either. He believes he can do it, Lucius believes he will try, and after what happened here now, as much as I am loathe to admit it, I believe he might even succeed.
Perhaps that’s why I am finally able to swallow past the fury still choking me enough to say one name. “Athanasius.”
They all look at me.
I forgive none of them, nor will I ever.
“He goes by Arthur now,” Merris says dryly, holding me with one hand and touching the back of her head. Though the bleeding has stopped, she’s still checking her fingers, and I’m sure her head must hurt.
“Who?” Lucius asks.
“Arthur, Athanasius,” I repeat both names. It’s all I can do to keep a civil tone. “He’s a drug addict who’s trying to take Club Toxic as his new hunting ground. Unfortunately, he killed a girl.”
“Jez,” Merris supplies. “My sister.”
“Merris came to the nightclub and, mistaking her for Jez, he panicked. Afraid she might alert Lucius to his presence, he tried to kill her, first at the nightclub—”
“The shooting,” Lucius says, gleaning the missing pieces to his own mental puzzle.
“—and then again at Merris’s apartment complex.” I look to the Camino Seco coyote Alpha. He still has a stake meant either for Merris or for me in his hand, and I harbor not an ounce of sympathy for the naked grief I can see in his eyes. “As near as I can figure, considering his mood when we got there, he killed your grandmother and everyone else in the building simply because he could.”
“Athanasius,” Garrett, the more powerful Alpha wolf-shifter repeats, saying the name as if it also came with a scent he could carry in his nose.
“He goes by Arthur now.” I’m imagining how good it will feel to hunt every one of these animals down.
“I will find him,” Lucius promises.
“Only if we don’t find him first,” Garrett replies. “You still have six hours until sunset. Frankly, the only reason we decided to come down here, instead of burning the house down around you, was out of respect to your mate. We’ll find ‘Arthur’. We’ll rout his entire God-damn nest. Consider this your first, last, and only warning. The next time one of your kind decides to treat mine as wasted meat, the truce is over. I’ll drag every last one of you motherfuckers out into the sun.”
The shifters withdraw back up the basement steps, leaving Lucius and his vampire-shifter queen exchanging uneasy glances.
“I’m sorry,” he tells me once they are gone, but he doesn’t trust me, and I don’t forgive him. We have no choice but to return to our cell, Merris and I, and once more he locks our prison door.
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” she whispers, but only after the rocky grind of the stone sarcophagus lid slides shut, signaling Lucius and his mate have returned to their sleep.
She tries to hold me, and I hold her back but I do so sitting in the dirt in front of the door. Eventually, the darkness takes its toll on her. She’s only human, and she’s tired. She sleeps, curled up in my lap with her head on my shoulder and her soft breath warming the skin above my collar.
I don’t close my eyes. This is the last time I’ll ever rest in an enemy’s lair.
I may never sleep easily again.
Merris
The sound of the door opening startles me awake. I come upright with a shout and a slap, but Aleron is already up. I don’t know when he moved me from his lap to the floor, or maybe he never did. Maybe he stood up just that fast, flashing the way he sometimes does, faster than my eyes can follow. But he’s standing between me and the door before I can do more than realize it’s Lucius standing there, not the wolf-people coming back to finish us off.
Wolf-people? Coyote-people. Were-whatevers.
I guess now I know what shifters are.
Contrary to what the movies suggest, the world of paranormal beings is not one giant, happy family. They do not like one another. They do not get along.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Lucius says, holding the door open. “We’re going to have to hurry if we want to clean this mess up ourselves.”
I scramble to my feet, more than ready to get out of this cell, but Aleron stays me with his hand.
“Happy hunting,” he tells the other vampire.
I’m getting really, really good at reading vampire expressions. I swear I glimpse a flash of anger move through the king’s eyes. “You feel no obligation to help?”
“Whatever obligation I felt died six hours ago when her blood hit your floor.”
I touch his arm. “I’m okay.”
Those few moments in the darkness when the door wrenched open and the wolves came snarling in, those were the scariest I think I’ve ever known. I was bitten three times, but not savaged. I’m stiff right now, a little sore—particularly around the bites on my ankle, arm and the knee of my other leg, where they’d grabbed and dragged me out of the cell. And of course, the back of my head where I got hit. I’ve no idea with what, but that blow sent me sprawling face first on the floor. Had Selene not thrown herself into the fight to protect me, I have no doubt I’d have been killed.
But she did protect me.
So did Aleron.
Whatever anger I’d been feeling earlier, it’s gone. All I want to do now is get the hell out of here. Leave. Get in Aleron’s car and have him drive as far and as fast he wants to go, but Lucius is right. This is all far from over. Vampires are trying to kill me, shifters hate me, and my own people think I’m responsible for a mass murder, and no one’s mind-wiped me yet. There’s no escape for me yet, not in any direction. But after last night, I do know one thing. When Aleron comes to wipe my memories, I’m going to let him. It’s not that I want to forget. As awful as parts of this have been, I would do anything to keep my memories of Aleron. But now I can see just how much of a risk he’s taking for me. The last thing I want is for him to get hurt because I was being selfish.
“I’ll find you some clothes,” Selene says, heading for the stairs. When we reach the top, she heads off in one direction, but I’m more concerned with finding something to eat and drink, and I’m not at all shy about raiding their kitchen to do it. I shouldn’t be surprised to find blood in the refrigerator, but they’ve recently celebrated with a dinner out, because I find takeout ribs and half of a baked sweet potato in
a Styrofoam box.
“Help yourself,” Lucius says dryly, but by then I’m standing over the sink with a partially devoured sweet potato in one hand and I’m rapidly gnawing the meat off a rib bone in my other. My mouth is stuffed too full to answer. I just keep chewing.
It’s a few minutes after that, that Selene calls for her mate from another part of the house. Her voice is strange, just strained enough to bring us all following the sound until we find her standing in the front entryway, staring through drapes that had been closed last night but now stand wide open. The view overlooks their front yard and driveway all the way back to the entry gate that stands closed to keep out uninvited guests.
It’s a metal gate, with the bars fashioned into decorative spikes across the top. In a ghastly row speared atop some of those spikes are seven blackened masses. They look like pumpkins at first glance, charred almost to crumbling into dust, with hair of varying colors and lengths and indents that look like mouths gaping open in silent screams. The shoulder-length brown strands of one are long enough to catch in the faint night wind. It billows sideways and as it does, I can see bits of char turning to dust and blowing away.
“What is that?” I hear myself ask, my own voice sounding strange from the shock of what I was seeing.
“Garrett left us a message.” Lucius opens the door and he, Aleron, and even Selene head down the driveway for a closer look. I don’t go with them. I don’t want to see those pumpkins turning into faces, all blackened, burned and screaming, and slowly crumbling into ash with each puff of wind that rustles through their hair.
Approaching one, Aleron reaches up to take it off the gate and the entire form simply crumbles in a billow of drifting ash and small bits of bone that rain down through the bars of the gate. Only a few of the others do the same. The rest lose their flesh in drifting gray and black clouds that scatter across the mouth of the driveway in the bright glow of the yard lights. The skulls remain.
“Let’s get you dressed,” Selene says, coming back up to the house.
I don’t move. “Is… is that Athanasius?”
“And his nest, from the looks of it.” She looks at me with such an absence of sympathy. As if she takes heads off her gate all the time. I can’t even imagine.
“They tortured them, didn’t they?” Rooted in the doorway, I feel sick as I watch Lucius and Aleron take down the heads.
“No,” she answers. “They cut their heads off, yes. But what you’re seeing is what happens to vampires exposed to the sun. It’s a warning.”
“Play nice or else?”
“This is shifter territory. Lucius buffaloed his way in, making a place for himself and Club Toxic, but he doesn’t control Tucson. This is just a reminder.” She glances back over her shoulder at her mate, coming back up the driveway with an armful of skulls and skull pieces. “Shifters have been mistreated by vampires for centuries. Lucius is trying to change that, but even so, this is Garrett’s way of saying he’s all done taking it.”
Aleron is trailing along behind Lucius, carrying more skulls. His gaze finds mine. It’s weird, how the yard lights seem to catch in his eyes, making them glow like a predator’s.
“Do you want a shower?”
“Please.” I shiver, unaware that my hand has drifted up to touch the tender place where he bit me. My nipples tighten, the peaks of them already aching for his next kiss.
Chapter 13
Aleron
“Do you want help?” Lucius asks as we dump the skulls of those vampires too recently turned for the sunlight to destroy completely in the flowerbed behind the garbage cans. He’ll need to dispose of them later, but he’s king of his nest. Supposedly, he has those he can command to do that for him. Either way, I still have problems of my own to clean up, so I’ll not be volunteering.
The question, however, does catch me off-guard.
“You mean the police station?” I ask, because frankly, that’s what I’ve been thinking about.
Athanasius was the first head I tried to touch down on that gate. I recognized him by his hair. One problem solved, but the human one remains. Merris will continue to be hunted by her own people until the mass murder is solved—unlikely, since the man responsible is now ash in the wind—or until I walk into the appropriate police station and compel everyone there to wipe her from their investigation. As much as I’d love to tell him where he can stick it, I consider his offer carefully.
“Perhaps. I’ve never tried to affect that many minds at once. It won’t just be mind-wiping, however. We’ll need to get them to erase her from the computer files and any report she might appear in. It might just be easier to convince them all she’s dead.”
“Probably,” Lucius agrees. “But while I am happy to help remove her from the investigation, that isn’t what I meant.”
Brushing the dust off my hands and the front of my now quite dirty trousers—lord, the state of me—I give him only half an ear. “What do you mean?”
“You were willing to allow yourself to be torn to pieces to protect that girl last night. A girl who knows of our existence and who, apart from everything else, now knows where I live. May I ask, what are your intentions?”
I have zero interest in discussing my intimate feelings with a man who threw both me and Merris to the shifters, not to mention keeping us locked in his cell all night.
“Don’t worry,” I promise. “After tonight, I intend to take her as far from this place as any two people can possibly get. You’ll never find her much less hurt her again.”
“Are you bonded?” he softly asks.
“Go fuck yourself,” I return in kind.
He doesn’t appear at all offended. If anything, he seems sympathetic. “I have sired many vampires. I don’t know if you’ve yet tried, but if that is what you want for her, I would be willing to help. There are always risks, but if she’s strong enough to survive the process, then I will do everything I can. I promise, I will not be cruel and will release her to you as soon as I can.”
I stare at him. Honestly, I don’t know whether to be touched by his offer or infuriated by it. “What makes you think that is something I would ever do to someone I love?”
He seems surprised. “What alternative do you have?”
I move in close to him, just upset enough not to care if he perceives it to be a threat. Vampires have killed one another for less, but I am beyond calculating the consequences. “I will hold her every day for the rest of her life, however long that may be. I will watch over her until the day she draws her last breath, and between this moment and that, do everything in my power to ensure she never has reason to doubt my affection. And yes, one day I will have to let her go, but I would sooner stand at her gravesite and watch the sun come up than to spend the next hundred years watching what love she bears for me slowly die as she realizes exactly what I’ve done to her.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” he tries to say, but I cut him off with another step.
“When have you ever found it not to end that way? Tell me, which of your sired has not come to hate you in the end?”
Lucius stares at me, but he doesn’t answer.
“Thank you for your offer, but I believe I will decline.” I back from him. “Good luck to you and your shifter queen.”
He frowns, but I don’t care. I walk back into his house in search of my Merris and find her in a steamy bathroom, taking a shower. I miss being clean. I miss the touch of her skin on mine even more.
I should leave. Give her this one last moment of privacy before I spring it on her that I’m taking her away from this city, state, and perhaps even the continent. Never to return, at least until I’m sure she’ll be safe.
But I can’t make myself go. I come all the way inside, shutting and locking the door behind me.
I don’t know if it’s the click of the lock she hears or if she spies my motions through the steam-covered glass. Either way, she stops in the middle of washing her hair and pokes her head out the door. I sho
uldn’t be surprised that she’s beautiful wet, with her hair slicked down and her eyelashes all clumped together, but she gives me a worried moment to spring more bad news on her. When it doesn’t come, the worry melts into understanding, regret, and finally sadness.
“Are you going to wipe my mind now?” She doesn’t look at me, but I can tell she’s steeling herself to go through with it without protest. My darling Merris.
I shake my head. “I’m not going to wipe your mind.”
She looks up, and at first, she doesn’t look any happier to hear that. “B-but… the risk to you is—”
“My decision is final,” I say gently, but firmly. “Besides, I would much rather take you with me, then I would wipe your mind and leave you behind. I would happily take you anywhere in the world you’d like to go. You could practice your art, visit the finest museums.” I do my best to make running for our lives sound appealing. “Whatever I need to do to keep you safe, believe me, I will do it. Merris, I… I will do anything to keep you with me. Of course, you can say no if you’d rather stay here. The decision of whether or not to wipe your mind won’t be mine any longer, but I will still do whatever is required to make sure you are—”
“I’ll go with you,” she softly interrupts.
“—as safe as I possibly—”
“I’ll go with you,” she says again, when it suddenly hits me what she’s just agreed to. Of the two of us, I got the better end of this deal by far. I’m not used to being so thoroughly humbled. I have no idea what to say.
Opening the shower door a little wider, she shyly asks, “D-do you want some of this hot water before I take it all?”
It’s not the water I crave, but I strip down and step in behind her. The spray hits me, hot against my skin, warming me slowly although I still feel her startle when I touch her. She laughs, but it’s a faltering awkward sound. She’s trying not to look at me, but she can’t seem to help herself. It’s the first time she’s seen me in the light. Her gaze goes right to my cock. She could not have made me harder had she cupped my balls and stroked me in her wet, soapy hand.
