The Dark-Hunters, page 260
“Don’t tempt me.” Vane growled low in his throat as he surveyed the lot of them. “Wren, listen close, ’cause, buddy, your chances are running slim. You kill Nicolette and you’re dead. There’s no way back from that.”
Wren scoffed at him. “There’s no way back from an execution order. Period.”
Shaking his head in denial, Fury stepped forward. “You weren’t there when the vote came down. The council was divided on the order.”
Wren frowned. “What are you saying?”
“That you have a shot at redemption,” Vane said, “but not if you kill Nicolette for vengeance.”
Wren hesitated as he felt a small twinge of hope. Did he dare believe them? It seemed a little too implausible even to a man who was really a tigard.
Vane sighed. “You give the council proof that you’re innocent of killing your parents and Savitar will rescind the Omegrion’s order.”
Wren froze as those ludicrous words went through him. Was the wolf on crack? “What the fuck are you talking about? They’re trying to kill me because I’m dating Maggie.”
“What are you, stupid?” Fury asked. “Your dating the human is only the catalyst for why Mama Lo tossed your ass out. The death warrant is because you murdered your parents.”
“Says who?”
“Your cousin Zack.”
Wren clenched his jaw shut to keep from gaping as rage took root deep inside him.
This, this just got ugly. He couldn’t believe that bastard had gone to the council with his lies.…
“We can help you, Wren,” Vane said calmly. “But you have to trust us.”
Wren sneered at the wolf. “I’m not putting my faith or life in anyone’s hands. All that ever got me was screwed, and my ass is currently sore from it.”
Fury curled his lip in repugnance. “Nice imagery there, tiger. Graphic. Ever think of writing children’s books?”
Fang popped his brother lightly in the back of his head.
“Ow!” Fury snapped, rubbing the spot where he’d been hit. He glared at Fang.
“Was I this annoying before my attack?” Fang asked Vane.
Vane didn’t hesitate. “Yes, and you still are most of the time. And we have now gotten off-topic.”
“There’s nothing to discuss,” Wren said. “You can’t keep me here forever, wolf. Putting me on a boat was a nice trick to keep them off my scent, but it won’t take them long to figure out where I am. All you’ve done is drag the Dark-Hunters into our fight, and knowing Acheron, I’m sure he won’t be amused by this.”
Wren let out a tired sigh as he shook his head at them. “They’ll be coming for me and we all know they won’t stop. I would rather face them on my own terms than have them attack me on theirs.”
Too tired and hurt to argue anymore, Wren headed for the door.
As he passed by Jean-Luc, the Dark-Hunter grabbed him. Before Wren could react, he felt the sting of a needle in his arm.
Infuriated, he growled and changed, but before he could do anything more, everything went black.
Marguerite went cold at the sight of Wren falling to the floor at the Dark-Hunter’s feet. “What did you do?”
“Tranked him.”
Fury let out a slow breath. “He’s going to be seriously pissed off when he wakes up.”
“No doubt,” Jean-Luc concurred. “Therefore I suggest we keep him under at least for a day or two, until he can heal and you can plan out what it is he needs to do.”
“Yeah, but if he doesn’t listen—”
“Come up with your plan,” Marguerite said, “and I’ll make sure he listens to it.”
Fury, who she had quickly learned was the doubting Thomas of the group, laughed at her. “Don’t be so cocky, human. Wren isn’t the kind of beast you manipulate.”
Aimee shook her head at him. “No, Fury, you’re wrong. With her, Wren is different.”
Fury moved over and took Marguerite’s hand into his. He turned it over to see her palm. “They’re not mates.”
Aimee passed an adoring look at Fang before she looked back at Fury. “You don’t have to be mated to care deeply for someone. I think Wren will listen to her.”
Marguerite stood back with Aimee as the men picked Wren’s tigard form up and carried him down the narrow hallway to a lush bedroom that was adjacent to the one they had given her. She’d learned from Bill that this ship was a converted tanker. On the outside, it looked like a rusted heap, but inside it held every luxury known to mankind, including a satellite room that would give NASA a run for its money.
Dr. Alexander and Bill had determined that a ship was the safest place for them to hide. While they were over water, the Were-Hunters after Wren wouldn’t be able to track him by scent, and so long as he kept his use of magic to a minimum, they wouldn’t be able to find him that way, either.
She only hoped this worked. “Do you really think there’s any way Wren can prove his innocence?” she asked Vane as he covered Wren in tigard form with a blanket.
“I don’t know. Hell, I’m not even sure he didn’t kill his parents. His cousin made one hell of an argument.”
“He didn’t kill them,” Aimee said firmly. “I was there when they brought him in. He was too traumatized by it. He sat in a corner for three weeks solid with his arms around himself, just rocking back and forth whenever he was in human form. As a tigard, leopard, or tiger, he stayed coiled up.”
Vane frowned. “Was he wounded when he was brought to you?”
Marguerite saw the reluctance on Aimee’s face. “He was a little scuffed up.”
Vane looked skeptical. “A little or a lot?”
“Okay, a lot,” Aimee admitted reluctantly. “But had he been in a fight with two full-grown Katagaria, he would have been a lot more injured than what he was.”
“Unless he poisoned them,” Fury said. “Zack didn’t really say how he’d killed them.”
“I still don’t believe it,” Marguerite said. “It’s not in him.”
“Yeah, and you are delusional,” Fury said. “Babe, news flash, With the exception of you and the pirate, we’re all animals here. And we all have a killer’s instinct.”
Aimee sighed as she looked wistfully at Wren’s unconscious form. “He did have a really hard time in puberty. He couldn’t maintain his forms and he did have extremely violent outbursts over minor things.”
“Such as?” Vane asked.
“Well, the first night he was working in the kitchen, Dev startled him, and Wren cut Dev’s throat with the knife he had in his hands. Luckily, Dev pulled back fast enough that it was only a small wound, but had his reflexes been slower or if Dev had been human, it could have been fatal.”
“That doesn’t mean he killed his parents,” Fang said as he moved to stand beside Aimee.
Jean-Luc made a noise of disagreement. “It’s rather damning. Normal people don’t do that.”
Fang looked doubtful. “No, but someone who’s been severely attacked and who was powerless to stop it would do it.”
Fury didn’t seem to buy Fang’s argument, but Marguerite did.
“I don’t know, Brother,” Fury said. “I think you’re projecting what happened to you onto Wren.”
Marguerite looked at Aimee. “When was the last time Wren ever attacked anyone without them attacking him first?”
Aimee didn’t hesitate with her answer. “Just that one time with Dev, but Wren was scared and shaking when it happened.”
Marguerite nodded. “That’s what I thought. Wren is innocent in this. He told me that his parents killed each other, and I believe him. Now we just need to put our heads together and think of some way to prove it.”
Chapter 10
Marguerite lay on the bed beside Wren, who was still sleeping in cat form. She’d learned from Vane that the Were-Hunters as animals had full human cognition.
“If Wren won’t hurt you in human form, then he won’t hurt you as an animal.”
That knowledge had eased her mind a great deal. It was so strange, though, to be touching a huge, wild cat and have no fear of it.
How could this animal be the man she knew?
Marguerite touched his velvety soft ears. His fur was incredibly white, and when he was in his “true” form, there were no stripes or spots on it. He looked like a big, fluffy cat. As a tiger, he had the typical black tiger markings that bisected the white fur.
She moved her hand to sink it deep in the pelt of his neck. It was like clutching the softest silk imaginable. She could feel the strength of him. It was scary and oddly comforting.
Without a second thought, she sank her face there and held him close. Poor Wren had been through so much. If she could, she would ease the pain.
But how?
All she could do was offer him comfort and hope that their plan would work. The last thing she wanted was to see him hurt anymore. Vane had told her much about Wren’s childhood, about how alone he had always been. It was something she understood very well. All her life she, too, had been an outsider. Never good enough. Never what others wanted her to be.
It was a lonely place to live.
Her heart aching, she nuzzled the soft fur as she gently petted his uninjured side.
Wren came awake to the most incredible feeling of his life. Someone was stroking him.…
No one had ever laid a gentle hand on him in animal form before. The hand on his side was warm, soothing. It stroked and smoothed his fur in a sensuous rhythm that wasn’t sexual in any way. It was comforting. And that meant more to him than anything else ever had.
Other Were-Hunters knew better than to touch him when he was like this. Humans feared him as an animal.
And his parents … they had never been affectionate.
At least not to him.
He knew instinctively that it was Maggie who was petting him now. Her scent was heavy in his fur and he loved it.
He also remembered what he’d been about to do when the damned Dark-Hunter had drugged him.
But at the moment, suicide was the furthest thing from his mind. He just wanted to stay here and feel the delicate strength of Maggie’s hand on his body. There was nothing else like the peace he felt inside. The happiness.
How he wished there was nothing else in the world except the two of them.…
Marguerite gasped as Wren rolled over, changing as he moved from the tigard into a man. Those pale blue eyes seared her with heat.
She touched the healing cut on his bottom lip. “Are you okay? How do you feel?”
“Dizzy. Hazy. Nauseated.”
She wrinkled her nose at his honesty. “Do you need to go to the bathroom?”
He shook his head. “I just need a few minutes to let the last of the drug burn through my system. I hate friggin’ tranks.”
“I can imagine.” She brushed the hair back from his beautiful face. “You still planning on being stupid?”
“I don’t have any choice.”
“Vane says that you do. If you can prove—”
“How?” he asked. His voice sounded so very tired. So reserved and resigned to his bum fate. “There was never any evidence to show who killed my father or my mother.”
She refused to believe that. There had to be something left behind to help Wren. Something that could prove his innocence. “Tell me what happened.”
Wren grew quiet as he remembered the last few hours of his father’s life. He’d never spoken about it to anyone before. But the nightmares still haunted him at times.
“I’d just been learning to shift forms and I couldn’t hold on to anything for long. One minute I’d be human and helpless, and then in the next I was a leopard or tiger or tigard. My mother was completely disgusted by me and my appearance. It was why they never had any more children. I overheard from others that they’d gotten along well together until my birth. After that, my mother refused to let my father touch her for fear of having another thing like me.”
Marguerite’s heart ached for him. She couldn’t imagine having her parents flat out reject her. Her father could be judgmental, preoccupied or missing at times, but he’d never been deliberately cruel.
Wren toyed with a lock of her hair as he continued talking. “My father seldom looked at me as a cub. They kept me locked away in a small cage in their house until I started going through puberty. My father knew I needed someone to train me on how to use my powers, so he hired a cousin to come in and teach me … Zack.”
The one Vane said had accused Wren of the murders. But Marguerite didn’t bring that up at the moment. First she wanted to understand the chain of events. “So your cousin showed you how to use your powers?”
“No. He was too disgusted that I couldn’t hold a solid form, so he quit a week after my father had hired him.” Wren drew a ragged breath. “So my father decided he’d have to do it himself. It was the only time in my life that he’d ever spent any time with me. At first, he was so angry at me, so cold, that I kept trying to leave any way I could. I’d run out of the room, or use my burgeoning powers to flash myself into other parts of the house or outside. Angry and disgusted, he’d drag me back and try to teach me again.”
“Drag you back how?”
Pain haunted his eyes. “It’s not important.”
She knew better. The tightness of his body told her differently. His father’s actions had cut Wren straight to his soul.
“Once I began having some degree of control, my father calmed down. He was even starting to like me, I think. It’s what hurt most when he died. I’d spent my whole childhood alone, only seeing my keeper who came in once a day to change my food and my box. Every now and again, my father would come in, stare at me with a look of disappointment or hatred, and then leave without saying anything. So when he started paying attention to me, it was the most incredible thing.”
He paused and looked away. She could see the memories that ached. She only wished she knew some way to soothe them.
“He’d moved me from my cage into a bedroom,” Wren said quietly. “I was asleep when I heard something crash down the hall. I changed into human form to see what it was and I found him in his bedroom with his throat open. There was so much blood and bruising that you couldn’t even see his face.”
“What did you do?”
“I sat there crouched in human form, with my hand on his. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. I’d never seen a fresh kill before. All I could do was stare at him.”
“But you don’t know who killed him?”
“I knew,” he said in an angry tone. “I heard my mother and her lover. They were off laughing about it in another room.”
Marguerite swallowed as panic consumed her at the bitter hatred in his voice. Maybe he’d killed his mother after all.
“I was so angry that I wasn’t thinking. I went into the room where the two of them were toasting each other with champagne. I ran at my mother, but her lover caught me and threw me to the ground. He was going to kill me, too, but she stopped him. I found out then that that had been their initial plan. She was supposed to kill me and my father so that my uncle could take control of Tigarian Tech. But she said that she didn’t trust my uncle. If I died, she was sure he’d leave them with nothing. Their only hope to keep any of my father’s money was to keep me drugged and control it as my guardian.”
Anger coiled through Marguerite that anyone could do such a thing, never mind to their own son. What had been wrong with his mother?
“So what did they do?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. I was trying to use my magic to get away from her lover, the next thing I knew, I woke up in a locked room as the whole house was burning down around me.”
She frowned. “How did you get out?”
“The floor burned out from under me. I went crashing downstairs and a firefighter saw me and thought I was a pet. They threw a blanket over me and pulled me out right before the whole house went down. As they took me out, I saw the bodies of my mother and her lover and my father, who were lying on the lawn where they had placed them.”
A tic beat rapidly in Wren’s jaw. “Before they could hand me over to animal control, I bit the firefighter and escaped. I headed straight for the trees and shrubs that surrounded the house. And I just kept running until I came across another man who told me to jump into his car.”
“Wasn’t that unbelievably dangerous?”
He snorted. “Probably, but he knew who and what I was and he said that my father had sent him to take care of me. I wasn’t really thinking clearly at the time. I was wounded and scared, and had nowhere else to turn. All I knew was that if he had a chance, my uncle would kill me, too, and the man who came to me smelled human. My uncle hated humans, so I figured he was my safest bet.”
Marguerite was amazed by Wren’s tale. She couldn’t imagine just how terrifying that night must have been for him. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone what had happened to your parents?”
He gave her a droll look. “Who would believe me? Animals don’t kill for money. That’s a human crime.”
“You’re not an animal.”
“Yes, Maggie,” he said, his eyes burning her with their intensity. “I am. Never delude yourself on that count. Until I was twenty-five years old, I was nothing but a tigard cub. The ability to become human is a byproduct of the magic that some insane king forced onto my people centuries ago. But at the end of the day, I have the heart and instincts of an animal. And I will always act like an animal.”
Still she didn’t buy it. “And yet your so-called animal uncle killed for a very human reason and he’s now setting you up. I think there’s more human in you than you admit.”
He looked away from her. “I’ve been living my whole life in Sanctuary. I knew if I ever left it that my father’s family would come for me. Now they have.” He locked gazes with her. “They’ll kill you to get to me. Do you understand that?”
His words sent a wave of fear over her, even so, she refused to cower. She didn’t know what would or even could happen, but she wasn’t going to run from this. She wouldn’t let them intimidate her.
“Yes.”
Wren let out a ragged yet determined breath. “I have to face them.”
