When Passion Lies: A Shadow Keepers Novel, page 5
“A percipient daemon,” Gabriel said. “Get the images. Solve the crime. Ring any bells?”
Two blinks of those oversized black eyes. “We have no percipient daemon on staff.”
One. Two. Three. Gabriel didn’t bother counting to ten. “Then you request a loan from another division. Never mind,” he snapped. “I’ll handle it.”
“You do that,” Everil said with an officious nod. As if summoning a percipient was all his idea.
He scurried away and Gabriel pulled out his phone. It took him all of three seconds to contact Koller and have him put the request in motion. With luck, the percipient would quickly conjure a wormhole and arrive within ten minutes. He knew of two currently working for the PEC: Armand Ylexi, who was stationed in Berlin, and Ryan Doyle, from Division 6 in L.A.
By the time he ended the call, Everil was back, this time accompanied by a tall vampire with a scar cutting across his right cheek.
“Says he came to Zermatt for a meeting with the victim,” Everil said. “Hasn’t told me his name yet, though.”
“Lucius Dragos,” Gabriel said. Everil’s eyes went wide, and he took a step back. Dragos, Gabriel was happy to see, looked amused. “If you had a meeting planned, I’m guessing you can identify our victim? Save us a little time?”
“I’ve never met the man in person, but he’d arranged a meeting with Tiberius at this spot,” Dragos said.
“So where’s Tiberius?”
“If you know who I am, you also know that I often stand in Tiberius’s stead.”
“Fair enough. Who’s the guy?”
“Cyrus Reinholt.”
Gabriel shook his head. “Should I know him?”
“Are you weren?”
“Half human, half hellhound,” Gabriel said. Beside him, Everil’s pinched face had pulled into a frown.
“No reason you’d know him, then. He’s weren, obviously. This was a preliminary meeting. He’d contacted Tiberius about acting as a possible intelligence resource.”
“He offered to spy on Lihter?” Gabriel said. “Why?”
“That was one of the questions I intended to ask him.”
Gabriel nodded, then turned toward Everil. “This puts Lihter at the top of our suspect list.” Dragos was on the list, too, of course. At least until his story was confirmed. But Gabriel didn’t intend to mention that. “We’ll see if the percipient can give us anything else to work with.”
“You’ve summoned a percipient?” Dragos asked. His expression shifted then, so slightly that Gabriel doubted anyone but himself noticed. But Dragos wasn’t happy with the idea of a percipient arriving. In fact, if Gabriel had to pin it, he’d say Dragos looked irritated. And that was interesting.
“Should be here any minute,” Gabriel said, keeping his eyes on Dragos’s face.
A pause, then, “Good thinking.”
“But?”
Now Dragos’s smile came easy. “Unless you want to deal with the inevitable consequences of the human Swiss police witnessing the arrival of a percipient daemon by wormhole, I suggest you clear away the humans.”
“We’re working on that,” Gabriel said, shooting a sideways glance at Everil, who was in fact supposed to be working on that. “The PEC can take exclusive jurisdiction pursuant to our agreement with the Swiss Polizei. But it takes time. Unfortunately, we don’t have any vampires on staff. No one with any sort of persuasive abilities, actually, so there’s no easy way to convince the humans they have somewhere else they need to be.”
Dragos nodded, obviously only half listening as he surveyed the scene.
“But you’re a vampire …”
Dragos turned, surprised. “I am.”
“You’re here. You’re a vampire. And,” Gabriel added, taking a step toward him. “I’m sure you must want your informant’s killer caught as much as we at Division 12 do.”
Dragos didn’t hesitate. He was either innocent or very, very good. Considering what he knew of the vampire, Gabriel wasn’t about to discount either possibility. “I’m happy to help,” he said. “By the way, who did you summon?”
“Whoever’s closest,” Gabriel said. “Probably Ylexi. Shouldn’t take any time to arrive from Berlin.”
“No, it shouldn’t,” Dragos said, and the hint of irritation that Gabriel had seen earlier faded.
Beside them, Everil shifted nervously from one foot to the other. “Gabriel, I don’t—”
“It’s homicide,” Gabriel said, cutting him off. “And technically, I outrank you.” He turned back to Dragos. “Do it.”
And just like that, Dragos did.
Gabriel watched him disappear into the crowd. He watched the forensics team examining the body. The staff protecting the scene. A hive of activity, just as it was supposed to be, and he was back in and hip deep whether he wanted to be or not.
What a goddamned, fucked-up mess.
CHAPTER 5
She was running, the forest thick around her. She was in the heart of it now, where witches built gingerbread houses and ate small children for breakfast.
Trouble.
It was brewing all around her. Thick and heavy.
She needed to run faster, look harder.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t.
The dream had its claws well into her now.
This was her personal mission, and she couldn’t fail. She had to find the traitor. Had to prove that she could once again be an asset in the field. That she could be kyne by action if not by bond.
He would be angry, of course. Tiberius. Her mate. Her friend. Her love.
For years, he’d refused to send her into the field, and that one small point was creating a hard knot of dissension between them. He’d relented only once—when they’d hunted the hybrid in France—but she’d almost been bathed in the beast’s acid. In the end, they’d prevailed and Tiberius was hailed as a hero, raised up to sit at the Alliance table, and she had been praised as his mate and advisor.
But never again had he let her hunt.
Her daemon itched for the release of battle. This day, she would prove herself worthy.
Around her, the forest hummed with life. The wind whispered through the leaves, its music her anthem. Indigenous animals watched with glowing eyes, her witnesses to the traitor’s inevitable apprehension. He’d been clever enough to elude her for a time, but she’d found him. Was closing in on him. The bent branches and footprints lightly dusted with snow testified that the gap between them was closing.
Her smile was thin and determined. You’re mine. You’re all mine.
A sharp crack sounded to her left, and she froze, momentarily confused. Her quarry was in front and to her right—of that she was certain. So what had she heard?
An animal?
She sniffed the air, drawing in the sharp green scent of pine needles and the pungent smell of decaying undergrowth. There was something else, too. A heavy musk hanging in the air. A feral smell that she didn’t recognize.
Trap.
The word ricocheted through her, torn from some deep-buried instinct. But it came too late: The arrow pierced her shoulder while she was still corporeal, and suddenly her ability to change was gone. Hematite. The damned arrow tip was hematite.
Within her, the daemon roared, brought to the surface by the heady combination of anger and fear.
She let it rise, using its strength to speed her actions, and trusting that it wouldn’t rise so far and so fast that it punched through, leaving the daemon in charge rather than Caris herself.
Moving as fast as she was thinking, she reached back to remove the arrow, but the angle was no good. Instead of freeing the thing, she merely broke off the shaft. The metal tip was still inside her, and there was no way it was coming out.
She forced herself to remain calm, to keep her focus so she could keep her head. If they’d wanted her dead, a wooden arrow to her heart would have been the way to go. So that meant she had the advantage. Her attacker wanted her alive; she didn’t hold the same compunction. Whoever put an arrow in her was a dead man.
Too bad she didn’t have an enemy to fight.
Above her, a flock of birds took off with a flurry of wings and caws. Time she did the same.
She ran. The hematite in her shoulder slowed her some, sapping her strength, but not so much that she couldn’t fight through it. She’d make it.
By the time Caris heard the soft whoosh of the net being released from its anchor in the trees, it was too late. The hematite threads were already snugged tight around her, tripping her. Binding her.
She struggled, her daemon snarling as she tried to rip apart the web that had captured her, but it was no use. Her strength was fading in the presence of so much hematite, and her captor was approaching. Tall and dressed in fatigues. Face hidden by a mask. The body shapeless under the loose-fitting clothes.
In front of her, he raised his weapon—a tranquilizer gun. Fear ripped through her, an emotion she hadn’t felt with such force in centuries. She didn’t much like feeling it now, and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from begging. Begging would do no good, and she wasn’t about to show weakness.
He fired, and there was nowhere to go. The dart penetrated her chest, just above her breast, and the world began to spin.
Her attacker stepped closer, and she saw cold calculation in his gray-hued eyes. She breathed in through her nose, testing the air, trying to catch the scent of him, but he’d masked more than his face, and she smelled only the heady scent of the earth.
“Blaine?” she whispered, forcing the traitor’s name out as reality dissolved beneath her.
“No,” a man’s voice replied. “Now sleep.”
Caris shook herself, forcing her mind to clear. Tiberius was the last person she’d expected to see on that mountaintop, and his proximity had thrown her off her game. Pain mixed with a desperate longing. Emotions going where they had no business going. She should be over him. She should hate him as much as she’d once hated herself. More, even.
So why the hell did he still make her blood burn?
Stop thinking about it.
Good advice, and she was trying. Except it wasn’t working. Her mind was all over the place. The mountaintop. Tiberius.
The past.
She clenched her fists, once again trying to force her thoughts not to go back to those weeks when she’d been changed.
Not to go back to when Tiberius had banished her. When he’d looked at her with such horror in his eyes. She’d hated him for not having the strength to kill her, even while she wanted to rail on him for not having the balls to step up and help.
He’d picked politics—his people—over her, and the wound had cut deep. It still did.
She shivered.
Her word. Why the hell had she given Tiberius her word?
She should have told him no way, screw you, just forget about it.
But she hadn’t, and now she was pacing the Tower Bridge’s pedestrian walkway, watching the Thames flow by beneath her. The mansion was a few kilometers to the south and sunrise was fast approaching.
She should go. But somehow she couldn’t get her feet moving in that direction.
Everything was so confused where Tiberius was concerned. For so long she’d told herself she hated him. That he’d betrayed her and their love, and that he’d destroyed everything.
But seeing him again …
She hugged herself, shaking her head to clear her thoughts, frustrated that her skin still tingled at the sound of his voice, and her throat still caught when she said his name.
Seeing him again so unexpectedly had driven the truth home, and hard. She didn’t hate him. Not really. That emotion had been reserved for herself, at least at first. Because of what she was. What she’d done.
She closed her eyes, clenching her fists against the pain and the regret and the guilt.
How quickly life could turn around. For centuries, she and Tiberius had been united. But then her hubris had gotten in the way. She’d gone out to prove that he was wrong and that she was a warrior. That she could capture a fugitive traitor. She’d been a fool. And that one choice had destroyed them both.
Reinholt had captured her—not because she was Tiberius’s woman, or because she was Caris, or because she was anyone in particular at all. He’d needed a female. He’d needed a vampire. And she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He’d caught her and he’d tortured her and he’d changed her.
“Stop it,” Caris said out loud, leaning against the railing of the bridge, wishing the wind would whip the memories from her mind.
But they stayed, and there was no forcing them back now.
She’d escaped from Reinholt—how was a painful blur—but she’d managed. She’d raced through the forest in a daze, hiding when she felt the wolf bursting free, transforming to mist when she could. When she reached London, she’d gone straight to Tiberius, and she’d seen the relief in his eyes as she rushed into their bedroom.
The air between them had been charged, and she could feel his need, his desire. She’d pushed him away, though. She felt the wolf beneath her skin, begging for release, and she feared that losing herself to passion would bring it out—and that would be the death of Tiberius.
Even more than that, though, she’d feared that if he knew the truth he wouldn’t want her. The weren were vile to him. They’d abused him, body and soul, and while she didn’t want him to look upon her like that, she knew that she couldn’t lie with him without telling him the truth.
She’d feared he would be unable to meet her eyes. She’d feared he would storm from the room, and that it would be hours—possibly even days—before he would come to her and tell her that it didn’t matter. That he loved her and always would.
She’d feared all that … but she hadn’t feared what had actually happened.
“It is in you, then?” he asked, after she’d forced herself to tell him the truth. “The wolf?”
She’d nodded. “I can feel it, pulling at me.”
She thought of his past at the hands of the vile werewolf Claudius. “I’m still me,” she’d urged. “I’m still Caris.”
She’d reached for his hand, but their fingers had only brushed as he’d moved away, rising to stand.
“And you changed? The wolf came out?”
She nodded. “At the full moon. My captor—he kept me in a basement. There was no one around. I infected no one, I swear.”
“And since the full moon? Has the change come upon you?”
She hesitated. It had, and she’d raced into a cavern, hoping like hell that no one would come along. Hoping she would get lost in the winding tunnels, unable to escape and rush to a nearby town. She’d been lucky. She truly didn’t know if she would ever be that lucky again.
He was watching her, his expression harsh. “Caris. Have you learned how to control it?” She thought she heard a hint of hope in his voice, but it was buried, deep beneath a harsh stoicism. She tried to ignore it, but she couldn’t. His overcalm voice made her afraid, so very afraid, and with fear came the wolf.
“I haven’t,” she admitted. “But I can learn. I can feel control inside me, but it’s edging just out of reach. Please, Tiberius, I need—”
“What?” His word was sharp.
“Help.”
He looked at her then, his eyes so full of love that she’d felt safer than she’d ever been in her life. Only after an eternity did he speak. “Come,” he said. “I know what to do.”
He didn’t take her hand, but he led her back to his office. Giorgio Dane was there, a newly inducted kyne. A young man who’d fought at Tiberius’s side in a recent battle with Gunnolf and his men.
Giorgio looked up, confused as they burst in. Caris was just as confused. “What—” she began as Tiberius circled behind his desk and pulled open a drawer. And then, because he moved so fast and because she had her guard down and because she never would have expected it of the man she loved, he managed to pull out a gun and fire a tranq dart into her before she even had time to react.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as a shocked Giorgio leaped to his feet. “I can’t risk you changing. Not here. Not with hundreds of vampires in the mansion. Giorgio will take you to Belgium. To the safe house.”
She’d tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.
“I love you,” he’d said, and the world went black.
Now she clenched her hands around the Tower Bridge railing, then shut her eyes tight, warding off memories of the nightmare that followed.
In front of her, the horizon was beginning to glow. No time for memories now. No time to be that Caris. The girl who’d had no control.
That girl was gone. She was strong now. She’d learned control. She’d harnessed the power of the two species inside her, and she knew how to keep them both where they belonged.
She was a warrior, and she had been for two decades.
And a warrior could face Tiberius without getting nervous.
A warrior could … and so could she.
CHAPTER 6
Tiberius paced the length of his London office, wondering why the hell she hadn’t arrived yet.
He’d gone down the mountain to Zurich as mist, then had one of the staff para-daemons at Division 12 transport him back to London by wormhole. The whole trip had taken under two hours. Presumably Caris was arriving by a less direct route.
Still, he was beginning to fear that his trust in her had been misplaced. That she was trying to pay him back by pissing him off.
So far it was working.
The truly frustrating thing was that it wasn’t her tardiness that had him on edge, but the anticipation of seeing her again. Dammit all, it had been almost two decades. He should have worked the woman from his blood by now.
Never.
The familiar scene came from the back of his mind, and he recognized it immediately. He was speaking to her. “You are my heart and soul, Caris,” he’d said. “And you will be forever.” Her laughter had covered him, as refreshing as a bubbling brook. “You’ll take that back one day,” she teased. “Push me aside. Toss me away.” He’d pulled her tightly into his embrace, then kissed her hard. “Never,” he whispered, after his lips had sealed the promise.
Two blinks of those oversized black eyes. “We have no percipient daemon on staff.”
One. Two. Three. Gabriel didn’t bother counting to ten. “Then you request a loan from another division. Never mind,” he snapped. “I’ll handle it.”
“You do that,” Everil said with an officious nod. As if summoning a percipient was all his idea.
He scurried away and Gabriel pulled out his phone. It took him all of three seconds to contact Koller and have him put the request in motion. With luck, the percipient would quickly conjure a wormhole and arrive within ten minutes. He knew of two currently working for the PEC: Armand Ylexi, who was stationed in Berlin, and Ryan Doyle, from Division 6 in L.A.
By the time he ended the call, Everil was back, this time accompanied by a tall vampire with a scar cutting across his right cheek.
“Says he came to Zermatt for a meeting with the victim,” Everil said. “Hasn’t told me his name yet, though.”
“Lucius Dragos,” Gabriel said. Everil’s eyes went wide, and he took a step back. Dragos, Gabriel was happy to see, looked amused. “If you had a meeting planned, I’m guessing you can identify our victim? Save us a little time?”
“I’ve never met the man in person, but he’d arranged a meeting with Tiberius at this spot,” Dragos said.
“So where’s Tiberius?”
“If you know who I am, you also know that I often stand in Tiberius’s stead.”
“Fair enough. Who’s the guy?”
“Cyrus Reinholt.”
Gabriel shook his head. “Should I know him?”
“Are you weren?”
“Half human, half hellhound,” Gabriel said. Beside him, Everil’s pinched face had pulled into a frown.
“No reason you’d know him, then. He’s weren, obviously. This was a preliminary meeting. He’d contacted Tiberius about acting as a possible intelligence resource.”
“He offered to spy on Lihter?” Gabriel said. “Why?”
“That was one of the questions I intended to ask him.”
Gabriel nodded, then turned toward Everil. “This puts Lihter at the top of our suspect list.” Dragos was on the list, too, of course. At least until his story was confirmed. But Gabriel didn’t intend to mention that. “We’ll see if the percipient can give us anything else to work with.”
“You’ve summoned a percipient?” Dragos asked. His expression shifted then, so slightly that Gabriel doubted anyone but himself noticed. But Dragos wasn’t happy with the idea of a percipient arriving. In fact, if Gabriel had to pin it, he’d say Dragos looked irritated. And that was interesting.
“Should be here any minute,” Gabriel said, keeping his eyes on Dragos’s face.
A pause, then, “Good thinking.”
“But?”
Now Dragos’s smile came easy. “Unless you want to deal with the inevitable consequences of the human Swiss police witnessing the arrival of a percipient daemon by wormhole, I suggest you clear away the humans.”
“We’re working on that,” Gabriel said, shooting a sideways glance at Everil, who was in fact supposed to be working on that. “The PEC can take exclusive jurisdiction pursuant to our agreement with the Swiss Polizei. But it takes time. Unfortunately, we don’t have any vampires on staff. No one with any sort of persuasive abilities, actually, so there’s no easy way to convince the humans they have somewhere else they need to be.”
Dragos nodded, obviously only half listening as he surveyed the scene.
“But you’re a vampire …”
Dragos turned, surprised. “I am.”
“You’re here. You’re a vampire. And,” Gabriel added, taking a step toward him. “I’m sure you must want your informant’s killer caught as much as we at Division 12 do.”
Dragos didn’t hesitate. He was either innocent or very, very good. Considering what he knew of the vampire, Gabriel wasn’t about to discount either possibility. “I’m happy to help,” he said. “By the way, who did you summon?”
“Whoever’s closest,” Gabriel said. “Probably Ylexi. Shouldn’t take any time to arrive from Berlin.”
“No, it shouldn’t,” Dragos said, and the hint of irritation that Gabriel had seen earlier faded.
Beside them, Everil shifted nervously from one foot to the other. “Gabriel, I don’t—”
“It’s homicide,” Gabriel said, cutting him off. “And technically, I outrank you.” He turned back to Dragos. “Do it.”
And just like that, Dragos did.
Gabriel watched him disappear into the crowd. He watched the forensics team examining the body. The staff protecting the scene. A hive of activity, just as it was supposed to be, and he was back in and hip deep whether he wanted to be or not.
What a goddamned, fucked-up mess.
CHAPTER 5
She was running, the forest thick around her. She was in the heart of it now, where witches built gingerbread houses and ate small children for breakfast.
Trouble.
It was brewing all around her. Thick and heavy.
She needed to run faster, look harder.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t.
The dream had its claws well into her now.
This was her personal mission, and she couldn’t fail. She had to find the traitor. Had to prove that she could once again be an asset in the field. That she could be kyne by action if not by bond.
He would be angry, of course. Tiberius. Her mate. Her friend. Her love.
For years, he’d refused to send her into the field, and that one small point was creating a hard knot of dissension between them. He’d relented only once—when they’d hunted the hybrid in France—but she’d almost been bathed in the beast’s acid. In the end, they’d prevailed and Tiberius was hailed as a hero, raised up to sit at the Alliance table, and she had been praised as his mate and advisor.
But never again had he let her hunt.
Her daemon itched for the release of battle. This day, she would prove herself worthy.
Around her, the forest hummed with life. The wind whispered through the leaves, its music her anthem. Indigenous animals watched with glowing eyes, her witnesses to the traitor’s inevitable apprehension. He’d been clever enough to elude her for a time, but she’d found him. Was closing in on him. The bent branches and footprints lightly dusted with snow testified that the gap between them was closing.
Her smile was thin and determined. You’re mine. You’re all mine.
A sharp crack sounded to her left, and she froze, momentarily confused. Her quarry was in front and to her right—of that she was certain. So what had she heard?
An animal?
She sniffed the air, drawing in the sharp green scent of pine needles and the pungent smell of decaying undergrowth. There was something else, too. A heavy musk hanging in the air. A feral smell that she didn’t recognize.
Trap.
The word ricocheted through her, torn from some deep-buried instinct. But it came too late: The arrow pierced her shoulder while she was still corporeal, and suddenly her ability to change was gone. Hematite. The damned arrow tip was hematite.
Within her, the daemon roared, brought to the surface by the heady combination of anger and fear.
She let it rise, using its strength to speed her actions, and trusting that it wouldn’t rise so far and so fast that it punched through, leaving the daemon in charge rather than Caris herself.
Moving as fast as she was thinking, she reached back to remove the arrow, but the angle was no good. Instead of freeing the thing, she merely broke off the shaft. The metal tip was still inside her, and there was no way it was coming out.
She forced herself to remain calm, to keep her focus so she could keep her head. If they’d wanted her dead, a wooden arrow to her heart would have been the way to go. So that meant she had the advantage. Her attacker wanted her alive; she didn’t hold the same compunction. Whoever put an arrow in her was a dead man.
Too bad she didn’t have an enemy to fight.
Above her, a flock of birds took off with a flurry of wings and caws. Time she did the same.
She ran. The hematite in her shoulder slowed her some, sapping her strength, but not so much that she couldn’t fight through it. She’d make it.
By the time Caris heard the soft whoosh of the net being released from its anchor in the trees, it was too late. The hematite threads were already snugged tight around her, tripping her. Binding her.
She struggled, her daemon snarling as she tried to rip apart the web that had captured her, but it was no use. Her strength was fading in the presence of so much hematite, and her captor was approaching. Tall and dressed in fatigues. Face hidden by a mask. The body shapeless under the loose-fitting clothes.
In front of her, he raised his weapon—a tranquilizer gun. Fear ripped through her, an emotion she hadn’t felt with such force in centuries. She didn’t much like feeling it now, and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from begging. Begging would do no good, and she wasn’t about to show weakness.
He fired, and there was nowhere to go. The dart penetrated her chest, just above her breast, and the world began to spin.
Her attacker stepped closer, and she saw cold calculation in his gray-hued eyes. She breathed in through her nose, testing the air, trying to catch the scent of him, but he’d masked more than his face, and she smelled only the heady scent of the earth.
“Blaine?” she whispered, forcing the traitor’s name out as reality dissolved beneath her.
“No,” a man’s voice replied. “Now sleep.”
Caris shook herself, forcing her mind to clear. Tiberius was the last person she’d expected to see on that mountaintop, and his proximity had thrown her off her game. Pain mixed with a desperate longing. Emotions going where they had no business going. She should be over him. She should hate him as much as she’d once hated herself. More, even.
So why the hell did he still make her blood burn?
Stop thinking about it.
Good advice, and she was trying. Except it wasn’t working. Her mind was all over the place. The mountaintop. Tiberius.
The past.
She clenched her fists, once again trying to force her thoughts not to go back to those weeks when she’d been changed.
Not to go back to when Tiberius had banished her. When he’d looked at her with such horror in his eyes. She’d hated him for not having the strength to kill her, even while she wanted to rail on him for not having the balls to step up and help.
He’d picked politics—his people—over her, and the wound had cut deep. It still did.
She shivered.
Her word. Why the hell had she given Tiberius her word?
She should have told him no way, screw you, just forget about it.
But she hadn’t, and now she was pacing the Tower Bridge’s pedestrian walkway, watching the Thames flow by beneath her. The mansion was a few kilometers to the south and sunrise was fast approaching.
She should go. But somehow she couldn’t get her feet moving in that direction.
Everything was so confused where Tiberius was concerned. For so long she’d told herself she hated him. That he’d betrayed her and their love, and that he’d destroyed everything.
But seeing him again …
She hugged herself, shaking her head to clear her thoughts, frustrated that her skin still tingled at the sound of his voice, and her throat still caught when she said his name.
Seeing him again so unexpectedly had driven the truth home, and hard. She didn’t hate him. Not really. That emotion had been reserved for herself, at least at first. Because of what she was. What she’d done.
She closed her eyes, clenching her fists against the pain and the regret and the guilt.
How quickly life could turn around. For centuries, she and Tiberius had been united. But then her hubris had gotten in the way. She’d gone out to prove that he was wrong and that she was a warrior. That she could capture a fugitive traitor. She’d been a fool. And that one choice had destroyed them both.
Reinholt had captured her—not because she was Tiberius’s woman, or because she was Caris, or because she was anyone in particular at all. He’d needed a female. He’d needed a vampire. And she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He’d caught her and he’d tortured her and he’d changed her.
“Stop it,” Caris said out loud, leaning against the railing of the bridge, wishing the wind would whip the memories from her mind.
But they stayed, and there was no forcing them back now.
She’d escaped from Reinholt—how was a painful blur—but she’d managed. She’d raced through the forest in a daze, hiding when she felt the wolf bursting free, transforming to mist when she could. When she reached London, she’d gone straight to Tiberius, and she’d seen the relief in his eyes as she rushed into their bedroom.
The air between them had been charged, and she could feel his need, his desire. She’d pushed him away, though. She felt the wolf beneath her skin, begging for release, and she feared that losing herself to passion would bring it out—and that would be the death of Tiberius.
Even more than that, though, she’d feared that if he knew the truth he wouldn’t want her. The weren were vile to him. They’d abused him, body and soul, and while she didn’t want him to look upon her like that, she knew that she couldn’t lie with him without telling him the truth.
She’d feared he would be unable to meet her eyes. She’d feared he would storm from the room, and that it would be hours—possibly even days—before he would come to her and tell her that it didn’t matter. That he loved her and always would.
She’d feared all that … but she hadn’t feared what had actually happened.
“It is in you, then?” he asked, after she’d forced herself to tell him the truth. “The wolf?”
She’d nodded. “I can feel it, pulling at me.”
She thought of his past at the hands of the vile werewolf Claudius. “I’m still me,” she’d urged. “I’m still Caris.”
She’d reached for his hand, but their fingers had only brushed as he’d moved away, rising to stand.
“And you changed? The wolf came out?”
She nodded. “At the full moon. My captor—he kept me in a basement. There was no one around. I infected no one, I swear.”
“And since the full moon? Has the change come upon you?”
She hesitated. It had, and she’d raced into a cavern, hoping like hell that no one would come along. Hoping she would get lost in the winding tunnels, unable to escape and rush to a nearby town. She’d been lucky. She truly didn’t know if she would ever be that lucky again.
He was watching her, his expression harsh. “Caris. Have you learned how to control it?” She thought she heard a hint of hope in his voice, but it was buried, deep beneath a harsh stoicism. She tried to ignore it, but she couldn’t. His overcalm voice made her afraid, so very afraid, and with fear came the wolf.
“I haven’t,” she admitted. “But I can learn. I can feel control inside me, but it’s edging just out of reach. Please, Tiberius, I need—”
“What?” His word was sharp.
“Help.”
He looked at her then, his eyes so full of love that she’d felt safer than she’d ever been in her life. Only after an eternity did he speak. “Come,” he said. “I know what to do.”
He didn’t take her hand, but he led her back to his office. Giorgio Dane was there, a newly inducted kyne. A young man who’d fought at Tiberius’s side in a recent battle with Gunnolf and his men.
Giorgio looked up, confused as they burst in. Caris was just as confused. “What—” she began as Tiberius circled behind his desk and pulled open a drawer. And then, because he moved so fast and because she had her guard down and because she never would have expected it of the man she loved, he managed to pull out a gun and fire a tranq dart into her before she even had time to react.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as a shocked Giorgio leaped to his feet. “I can’t risk you changing. Not here. Not with hundreds of vampires in the mansion. Giorgio will take you to Belgium. To the safe house.”
She’d tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.
“I love you,” he’d said, and the world went black.
Now she clenched her hands around the Tower Bridge railing, then shut her eyes tight, warding off memories of the nightmare that followed.
In front of her, the horizon was beginning to glow. No time for memories now. No time to be that Caris. The girl who’d had no control.
That girl was gone. She was strong now. She’d learned control. She’d harnessed the power of the two species inside her, and she knew how to keep them both where they belonged.
She was a warrior, and she had been for two decades.
And a warrior could face Tiberius without getting nervous.
A warrior could … and so could she.
CHAPTER 6
Tiberius paced the length of his London office, wondering why the hell she hadn’t arrived yet.
He’d gone down the mountain to Zurich as mist, then had one of the staff para-daemons at Division 12 transport him back to London by wormhole. The whole trip had taken under two hours. Presumably Caris was arriving by a less direct route.
Still, he was beginning to fear that his trust in her had been misplaced. That she was trying to pay him back by pissing him off.
So far it was working.
The truly frustrating thing was that it wasn’t her tardiness that had him on edge, but the anticipation of seeing her again. Dammit all, it had been almost two decades. He should have worked the woman from his blood by now.
Never.
The familiar scene came from the back of his mind, and he recognized it immediately. He was speaking to her. “You are my heart and soul, Caris,” he’d said. “And you will be forever.” Her laughter had covered him, as refreshing as a bubbling brook. “You’ll take that back one day,” she teased. “Push me aside. Toss me away.” He’d pulled her tightly into his embrace, then kissed her hard. “Never,” he whispered, after his lips had sealed the promise.
