As the words reverberated through him, the room seemed to shift and for a moment, Reece thought that he was going to faint. Part of him wished that he would, because maybe when he woke up, this would all be a dream. He started to close his eyes, but it only made the dizziness worse.
Gone.
She’s gone.
How could this have happened? Why?
Those were the questions that ran through his head, but what came out of his mouth in scarcely a whisper was, “When?”
“She might still be here,” Karissa said in a rush. “I gave her a new ID and all of her cash just two days ago and she didn’t say when she was leaving. I’m so, so sorry—”
Reece didn’t hear the rest of Karissa’s apology because he was already running for the door. Throwing it open, he burst out into the frigid air and sprinted toward his car. The engine was still warm from his drive up from Vermont, so as soon as he started it, he put the car in reverse and backed out of his parking space.
The passenger door opened just as he was switching gears and Nick slid into the seat. Reece didn’t know how the witch had caught up with him with a bad leg, but he didn’t bother asking as he pulled out onto the street.
The roads were icy as he raced through the city, running lights and weaving through traffic. The gaslight was on, but Reece knew from experience that he could go another thirty miles before the car died. Slamming on the gas pedal, he swerved into the left lane to take the next turn, cutting off a blue Toyota Corolla. The driver gave him the finger as he blared his horn, but Reece didn't give a damn. Nothing mattered now except getting back to his apartment, where his soulmate might still be.
Please be there, he thought as he steered around a white Mini Cooper who was going only thirty kilometers per hour. He was only five minutes away now—three, if he really pushed it—but it still seemed too long. What if she was walking out the door right now? He would just miss her. Please…
She wouldn’t really go, would she? Alexandra was a Wild Power and she knew that she couldn’t go off on her own. He had taught her a few self-defense moves and he’d helped her gain some measure of control over the blue fire, but she still needed him to protect her. To leave him now, as the war was drawing closer with each passing day, would be insane.
Then he remembered Lex’s expression just a few days ago when he’d told her that he had to go on another business trip. He hadn’t given her tight-lipped smile or chilled blue eyes a second thought on his way out the door, but now he realized that she’d looked resigned. She had been thinking about leaving him for a while and his latest trip was the last straw for her. No wonder she’d felt so far away when he was in Vermont.
Why hadn’t she just said something? He thought that they’d gotten better at communicating since he brought her up from D.C. They were certainly leagues ahead of where they’d been when he met her—back when it had taken him over thirty minutes just to wring her name out of her. She let him touch her now. As long as he didn’t use anything he saw against her, she could tolerate his presence in her mind. A few times she’d even invited him inside. Lex trusted him. So why hadn’t she told him that she was unhappy? Why just walk out on him without a word?
Reece angrily pressed the accelerator to the floor.
"You're not going to be much good to your soulmate as road kill," Nick commented from the passenger seat. "Want to slow down a little?"
"No," he snapped.
"Fine. But if I don’t make it out of here alive, could you tell Karissa that I want my body to be cremated and I want my ashes spread under a fir tree in La Mauricie Park?"
Reece wanted to glare at his friend, but at the speed he was driving, he couldn't afford to take his eyes off the road. "I didn’t ask you to come along."
"No," Nick agreed. "But if I hadn't come, then you'd probably go off on your own again and disappear for another few weeks without explanation."
He tipped his head back on the headrest tiredly. “Don’t start on me now. I really don’t need it. I learned my lesson, okay? Doesn’t coming to you and Karissa tonight prove that?”
"Maybe. But I still don’t understand why you did it in the first place. The Reece Cahill that I know would never shirk responsibilities for something as petty as revenge."
This time Reece couldn’t resist throwing Nick an angry glance. "Petty? Zarek tortured my soulmate, and if it weren't for me, he would be doing the same thing to Lindsay right now. I saved her life. How is that petty?"
"Because you did it for your own reasons. And how many people's lives did you sacrifice in the meantime by not being here, where you were needed?"
"You guys did fine without me."
"Fine?” Nick exploded. “The night I was attacked, I was covering your shift, Cahill, or have you forgotten? I'd already worked a double when you asked me to cover for you while you went out of town on ‘Daybreak business’ again. That vampire probably wouldn't have gotten the jump on me if I hadn't been so tired from doing your work."
Reece’s stomach turned. He had forgotten that Nick was working his shift that night. It hadn’t even occurred to him when he heard that Nick was in the hospital. “Do you want an apology?” he asked throatily, keeping his eyes fixed on the road.
"No, I want you to listen,” Nick replied gravely. “After I was cut down and Karissa was out of commission to take care of me, there was too much ground for Alyssa, Jase, and Sorrentino to cover on their own. People died because of that, do you understand? People died because of the choices you made."
Nick was right and there was no way that Reece could deny it. He knew that he'd let his team down, but he'd never thought about the people that he should have been protecting while he'd been hunting Zarek. And that realization disturbed him deeply. Once upon a time, he’d been all about the mission—saving lives without losing compassion—but he'd given up on all of that. Goddess, when had this happened?
Reece tried to shake off the guilt. It was too much for him to take right now and he had to concentrate on Alexandra. There was no way for him to change the past, but he could at least make sure that he hadn’t destroyed everything for nothing. "I know that I fucked things up," he said to Nick. “Can we please drop it now?”
The witch chose to ignore the plea. “Fucked things up? That's putting it mildly. And it’s not just other people, Cahill; you fucked yourself over as well. What were you thinking, doing an illegal spell?"
“Here it comes,” Reece groaned, wishing that he hadn’t mentioned the time altering spell to Nick. He only told him because he was sick of lying to everyone, but he should have known that his teammate wouldn’t let something like this go. The witch always did everything by the book. There was no such thing as mitigating circumstances for Nick. In his mind, the line between right and wrong was written in stone and there was no justification for crossing it.
"Did you think I was going to let you off the hook? Screwing around with time and space is a serious offense, Cahill.”
Reece’s head was throbbing and he wished that he could take his hands from the wheel to massage his temples. “I know.”
“You can’t unleash that kind of power without someone noticing. Daybreak will launch an investigation. And so will the Night World Witch Council.”
“I know.”
“At the very least, you’ll lose your job. There’s a good chance that you’ll go to a Daybreak prison. And if the Night World finds you first, they’ll probably execute you.”
“I know!” Reece snapped.
“Then why the hell did you do it?” Nick asked in exasperation.
He raked his fingers through his hair, and then used both hands to jerk the steering wheel to the right to take the next turn. "Zarek was right behind me. I needed to buy some time to get Lindsay out of there.”
“That’s it? That’s your explanation?”
“I needed to buy some time for myself, too, all right? Zarek knew that Lex was still alive and I had to stay alive so that I could warn her. I’m a selfish bastard who has fucked up everything and everyone and I damn well know it. Is that what you want to hear?”
“I want you to be honest with me. That’s never been a problem before, not until you went to D.C. last year.”
Again, Nick was right. The D.C. mission had changed everything. Reece had once told Lex that he didn’t regret taking that job, but more and more often, he wondered how true that was.
He pulled into a parking spot in front of his apartment building. As he pushed the car door open and stepped out onto the sidewalk, his gaze automatically lifted to the third floor, the second window from the left. When Lex was home at night, he usually saw the lights from the living room shining through that window. Now there was only darkness.
Dread choked him.
Nick came around to his side of the car and gave Reece a small push toward the building’s main entrance. “Come on, Speed Racer. You’re the one that wanted to risk certain death to get here in five minutes flat.”
“She’s not home,” he said dazedly. “She’s already gone.”
His friend gave him a sympathetic look—one that Reece wouldn’t have expected after the lecture Nick had given him in the car. “Maybe she left a note.”
She hadn’t.
After he managed to unlock his front door, Reece turned on every light in the apartment. He checked the refrigerator, the kitchen counters, the coffee table, the bathroom mirror, his desk, his computer, and the bedroom...
No note.
No explanation.
Nothing.
Lex had left him and she didn’t want him to go after her. He had lost his soulmate, his Wild Power, the love of his life...
Reece sat down on the edge of the bed and covered his face with his hands. Tears burned behind his closed eyelids.
“I’m sorry, man,” Nick said from the bedroom doorway.
He nodded in response without lifting his head. “I have to find her before Zarek does.”
“Why don’t we just go after him?”
“He’s a chameleon, Nick. It took me eighteen months to find him. It’ll be a hell of a lot easier to track down Lex. She’s inexperienced at this.”
“Okay. Then let’s go back to my place. Karissa made Lex’s new ID, so we’ll know what name she’s using.”
“Karissa helped her?” Reece asked sharply. He vaguely remembered that the human girl had been apologizing for something as he ran out the door, but he’d been in too much of a rush to really listen.
“Don’t be mad at her, Cahill. I reprimanded her enough for the both of us. And if Lex really wanted to leave, she would have obtained an alias one way or another. At least this way we know the name. We have a rough idea of when she left. And maybe she gave Karissa a clue as to where she might be heading.”
With another nod, Reece forced himself to stand up and follow Nick out of the apartment. He couldn’t despair now, not when his soulmate needed him most.
Her mind was a place of barbed wires and broken glass. Aiden allowed himself to steal only brief glimpses into it, lifting and lowering the veil between them so quickly that Lex didn’t seem to notice, and after each glance, he returned with blood dripping from his eyes. Or maybe it was tears. Either way, it fascinated him because even though her mind was a harsh, craggy wasteland, she remained soft and pliant in his arms. He wondered if she even felt the splinters inside her head, or if she kept them locked away from her consciousness.
He’d been like that once. There had been a time when he was able to compartmentalize his emotions so well that he hadn’t known they existed. Any of them. Of course, Alexandra was a little different; Aiden had the feeling that she had to lock away some emotions in order to feel others.
“What are you looking at?” She smiled down at him as he pushed her hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ear. Her small, delicate body was draped over him as she propped herself up on her forearms, which rested on either side of his head. It was easier for her if she was lying on top of him or to his side, he’d learned. It kept her in the present. The second his weight was on her, she withdrew into herself, her sapphire eyes glazing over like a door slamming shut.
“You,” Aiden replied, brushing the pad of his thumb over her cheekbone. Her skin was unbelievably soft and he thought that he would be content to simply touch her for the rest of eternity. The link between them vibrated, and he tried not to tug on it too hard. He didn’t want to disrupt whatever balance she had struck between her fear and her desire. Better to just coil the link around his fingers for now, knowing that it was there for the taking whenever he needed it.
“Oh yeah? See anything you like?” Alexandra asked in a husky voice that was paired with a teasing smile. It turned him on—that was a given—but Aiden was far more intrigued by the dichotomy between her tone and the sudden hollowness he sensed inside of her. The razor-sharp edges of her mind disappeared and Lex’s voice echoed in the resultant emptiness.
“You are so beautiful,” he whispered earnestly, tracing his thumb over her pouty lips. It was more than her appearance, which still stole his breath from time to time; there was beauty in the mystery of her—the contradictions and the complications. Eve had been such a simple soul, but Alexandra was an intricate web of strength overlying weakness, overlying strength. Sadness entangled with anger. Passion intertwined with fear.
Lex’s eyes sparkled brightly and her cheeks flushed as if she weren’t used to receiving compliments. But didn’t her Daybreak witch tell her how beautiful she was? What had that bastard done to her, anyways?
“I thought we agreed to forget about niceness for a while,” she replied, trying too hard to sound playful.
“I didn’t say that to be nice,” Aiden assured her.
Her brows drew together in confusion. “Then why did you?”
“Because it’s true. Because you should know it.”
Alexandra cringed inwardly. Aiden could feel it, even though she remained still in his arms, and he knew that she was going to pull away. His instincts screamed at him to tighten his hold, but in the end, he forced himself to let her go. She sat up and drew her knees into her chest, leaving him to stare at the curve of her bare back.
“What is it?” he asked, perplexed.
She didn’t answer, which baffled him even more. They understood each other in a way that Aiden had never believed possible. She knew that he would understand whatever was going through her mind.
“What are we doing?” she said softly.
He gazed up at the cracks in the ceiling. “Talking?” he offered helplessly.
“I have a soulmate. So do you. So what the hell are we doing here now?”
“Do you want me to go?” Aiden had asked her that question once already, but he still dreaded her response. Though, now that he thought about it, she hadn’t actually answered the question last time. From her silence, it didn’t seem like she was going to answer it now, either. “Lex?” he prompted.
She exhaled. “Maybe.”
Aiden sat up and swept her hair back behind her shoulder so that he could see her profile. It was dark inside the motel room and suddenly the light shining into their window from the streetlamp wasn’t nearly enough. Telepathically, he flicked on the overhead light.
She shied away from him, but Aiden cupped her cheek and turned her face to him. “Let me see you,” he whispered. “Let me see your eyes.”
Lex stared at him almost challengingly, but her blue eyes were shuttered, as he’d known they would be. Aiden made an impatient sound through his teeth. “Talk to me about this again when you’re actually here.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you’re lying,” he replied. “You’re walled off. And it’s not that I mind, exactly, but I’m not about to leave when whatever is bothering you has nothing to do with us.”
“There is no ‘us’, Aiden.”
“The hell there isn’t. I’ve had you twice now, Lex, and we both know that I’m going to have you again.”
Fury blazed in her eyes like blue fire and Aiden felt a perverse sense of satisfaction. Anger was certainly better than the emptiness it replaced. It meant that she was back in the moment with him instead of behind her walls. He would have to remember that trigger in the future.
“You’re an arrogant bastard,” she seethed.
“Yes. And I’d say it’s damn lucky for you that I am, because I’m not letting you get rid of me with your lame excuses. I’m not like you’re sweet, spineless soulmate.”
“You don’t know anything about him.”
“I know that you’re here with me instead of him. That’s enough.”
“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” Lex snapped with exasperation. “I don’t want to lead you on. I don’t want to make you promises that I can’t keep. I left Reece so that I could finally be alone, where I won’t ruin someone else. So we need to end this now, before it goes any further.”
“Ruin someone else?” Aiden repeated incredulously. “That’s what you’re afraid of? Angel, I’m already ruined. You of all people should know that.”
“And you of all people should know that I’m not beautiful,” she retorted. “You’ve seen the things I’ve done—”
“Likewise.”
“—and the things that have been done to me. Don’t you care?”
“Why should I care?”
Lex opened her mouth, but no words came out. “Because—” she finally sputtered. “Because—”
Realization dawned on him. “Because he cares,” Aiden finished for her. “Your Daybreak witch. Am I right?”
She looked away from him. “Yes. No. I don’t know,” she said wearily. “He didn’t use to, but he’s been...different.”
Interesting. The Daybreak witch finally had a flaw that Aiden could honestly say he didn’t share.
“You’re hardly a saint,” he said to her, “but that’s not what I want. The way you think, the way you move, the things you feel...you are beautiful, Lex.”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head slightly. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
Aiden smiled wryly to himself. He’d given her permission to use that diversion earlier, but he had the feeling that she was going to use it more often than he’d bargained for. Well, it didn’t really matter. He had told her that he didn’t want her trust and he meant it. So if she didn’t want to tell him something, who was he to push her?
“Look, I haven’t asked you to make any promises,” he said softly. “And I never will. I don’t believe in them. I made Eve too many promises that I had no intention of keeping and they still haunt me. I won’t repeat that mistake.”
“No trust, no promises,” she murmured. “What kind of relationship do you expect us to have?”
“A painless one.”
Lex laughed humorlessly. “I played this game with someone before, and I lost.”
He reached out to run his fingers through her hair, letting his nails graze her scalp. He knew that this gesture was another trigger of hers—one that stole the bones from her body. She shivered without making a sound, the satin skin of her neck and shoulder breaking into goose bumps.
“This isn’t a game,” he replied once he felt some of the tension inside of her ease. “It’s the only way I can keep you from getting hurt.”
“Me?” she murmured, tipping her head back slightly into his nails. Her curls slipped between his fingers like water.
“Yes, you. I destroy everything I touch, Lex. If I hadn’t heard you scream this morning, I wouldn’t have come in here. I was about to drive away.”
“How did you find me, anyway?”
Aiden shrugged. “I was driving through the area and I felt that you were nearby. I figured that if the soulmate link wanted me to find you, I’d better listen.” He slid his hand under her mass of hair to caress the nape of her neck. “How did you wind up here?”
“Bus out of Montreal crashed,” she sighed, closing her eyes.
“Where were you headed?”
“I don’t know. South. I couldn’t take the cold any more.”
Something in her voice got to him. Longing, maybe. Sadness. Whatever it was, he understood it only too well. He’d been cold for so long and this amazing girl made him burn. He knew at that moment that he would do anything for her.
Impulsively, Aiden grasped her shoulders and turned her towards him. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
Lex’s eyes widened. “What? Right now?”
“Yes,” he replied as excitement bubbled up inside of him, unfamiliar and intoxicating. “My car is right outside. We could be on a plane to Hawaii in a few hours. Salty air, sandy beaches...”
She smiled at him ruefully. “Aiden, that sounds nice, but—”
“Do you really want to spend another night in this sleezy place?” he pressed, unwilling to let her turn him down.
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what?”
Lex lowered her eyes and flushed. “I hate planes. I can’t fly.”
Relief flooded him. She wasn’t saying no after all. Taking her hands in his, Aiden got off the bed and pulled her to her feet. “Okay, forget Hawaii,” he said. “We’ll drive to Florida. Key West. As far south as we can get.”
“You really want to come with me?”
“Why not? Look, I’m not proposing here, Lex. But we get along, we make each other laugh, we have incredible sex...why not keep each other company for a while longer? No strings attached.”
“Okay,” she replied slowly as a brilliant smile captured her lips. “Let’s do it.”
Aiden kissed her quickly. Then he bent down to find the clothes that Lex had ripped off of him earlier. He dressed in record time and then rushed around the room to grab all of her clothes, which were still hanging from the doors and spread across the furniture. By the time he was stuffing them into her duffel bag, Lex was fully dressed and pulling on her shoes. She couldn’t move fast enough for him and Aiden hauled her up over his shoulder before she could finish tying her laces. Lex giggled as he walked out of the room, leaving the broken door against the wall.
Once they were on the sidewalk, he set her back down and dug through his pocket for the car keys. “The manager isn’t going to be pleased when he sees the damage we did to the room.”
Lex sneered. “Well, the bastard behind the desk over-charged me for the room in the first place, so I think we’re covered regardless.”
“Over-charged you by how much?” Aiden asked curiously.
“I don’t know; I didn’t count it. Three hundred, maybe?”
“Why?”
“Well, it seems that young girls who are drenched from head-to-toe really do it for the guy, so he wanted to be rid of me before he could give in to the temptations of the flesh. I had to give him all the cash in my pocket to get a key from him.”
Rage ran like ice-water through his veins. His mind, which had been buzzing with excitement only a moment ago, suddenly froze. The euphoria was gone as if it had never come. “Is that right?”
Lex nodded. “At least he didn’t try to sneak into my room in the middle of the night, telling me that I was asking for it,” she said with deep-rooted bitterness that she tried to play off as her usual sarcasm.
“Why don’t you let me return the room key,” Aiden offered smoothly. “You can start the car. Get the heat going.”
She lifted her chin up like a fighter, letting her eyes meet his for a long moment. Understanding passed between them and as she wordlessly handed him the room key, she squeezed his hand.
“I’ll be right back,” he promised, giving the key to his car to her. He waited until she was inside and the engine was running before he turned toward the motel’s office.
The bell over the door jangled as he entered, startling the small, weaselly man who was standing behind the reservation desk. Aiden approached him slowly, letting the man give him a once-over as he made his way across the room.
“Can I help you?” the man asked.
He was nervous, Aiden could tell, but that wasn’t unusual. Aiden had that effect on a lot of people. It had something to do with his height, his eyes, his predatory grace. Most people intuitively recognized him as a monster, but society forced them to ignore their instincts for the sake of politesse.
He leaned forward onto the desk, purposely invading the man’s personal space. “Yes, I was wondering if you could tell me the name of the man who was working here early this morning? Maybe around five?”
The man swallowed, and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Uh, me, sir. I work the night shift.”
“Ah. So do you by any chance remember seeing a girl come in—about five feet tall, with curly black hair?”
“Yes,” the man said with sudden enthusiasm. “Is she in any trouble? I knew I shouldn’t have given her a room.”
Aiden smiled. “Huh. From what I heard, you didn’t give her a room at all. You charged her over three hundred dollars for it.”
The man flushed a deep shade of red. “I most certainly did not,” he said indignantly.
“Right.” The vampire lunged forward and grabbed the man by the collar of his shirt, dragging him up over the desk. As the man’s feet dangled in the air, Aiden broadened his smile, letting his fangs show. “Now,” he said icily, “care to revise your answer?”
“Okay!” the man shrieked, kicking his feet frantically. “I did! Please, just don’t hurt me...”
Aiden gently lowered the man to the floor. “Oh, I won’t hurt you. As long as you give me that money back.”
Once the vampire released him, the man scurried over to the cash box, his hands shaking as he unlocked it and retrieved a wad of twenty-dollar bills. “Here,” he said, slapping the money on the desk. “Take it. I swear, that’s everything.”
The vampire slipped the money into his pocket. “Thank you for your help,” he said casually.
As the man started to back away, Aiden gripped his arm and wrenched him forward. Grabbing his hair, he yanked the man’s head to the side. “And the next time you try to take advantage of a young girl, I want you to remember this.” Then he sank his teeth into the man’s throat, feeling the hot blood spill over this tongue.
Oh god...it had been almost nineteen months since he’d drunk from a human and he’d forgotten just how incredible it was. For a few long moments, Aiden simply lost himself in the rush, but as he felt the man’s heartbeat slow, he held onto his last shred of self-control and forced himself to let go. The man fell to the floor—unconscious, but still alive.
Aiden left him there as he walked out into the parking lot, where Lex was waiting in the car. He slid into the driver’s seat and handed her the roll of money.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
He licked the last of the blood from his teeth. “My pleasure.”
It wasn’t until they were pulling out onto the street that Aiden realized that he hadn’t heard any horrified gasp inside of his head during his attack. He hadn’t felt an uncontrollable compulsion to help the man he’d left on the floor of the office. Eve’s silent voice, which had plagued him since the day she’d died, was silent.
Zarek Kakopoios despised the twenty-first century. He loathed its World Wide Web and cellular phones and credit cards. He abhorred fax machines and electronic mail and Personal Digital Assistants and Global Positioning Systems. The digital age was crass and garish, lacking any semblance of romance or elegance. He had been alive for nearly five millennia and he had never witnessed as much chaos as he had seen in the last sixty years. Humans were exchanging information faster than the speed of thought and it still was not enough for them. Technology expired before most people even had the opportunity to master it. Their insatiable greed, coupled with their skill for innovation, was bringing the world to its knees. And yet they had no direction. They were rushing headlong into the future without any inkling of where they wanted to end up. At their frantic pace, it would be only a matter of time before they crashed and burned.
Because of his lifestyle, Zarek had been able to shun most of the human’s technological revolution. He had no friends, no acquaintances, and therefore no use for any digital communication devices. He did not own a cell phone, he didn’t have an e-mail address, and he’d never actually used a computer before. Zarek existed along side the human world, but he held himself apart from it with clinical distaste.
At times like this, he cursed himself for it. He had just discovered that his beautiful Alexandra was somehow still alive, and there was nothing he could do about it. Zarek knew her full name, but did not know how to begin searching for her. His enhanced telepathy allowed him to read humans and Night People alike, but only when they were in fairly close proximity. And while he was willing travel to the end of the world and back to find her, he wanted her now.
If only he had been able to glean more from that witch at the church than his first name—Reece—and the taste of Alexandra’s rage through the legendary soulmate link …
Reece had been a remarkable witch, Zarek would give him that—certainly everything that he would have expected Alexandra’s soulmate to be. The spell Reece had cast to cloak his mind had been devastatingly effective, and the one he’d used outside the church to stop time had been truly extraordinary. What impressed Zarek more than anything, though, was that Reece still had the strength to run after casting such grueling spells. It had been a very long time since Zarek had encountered a witch that powerful.
Oh, the things that he was going to do to that witch once he found him. Zarek had never had a male slave before, but there was a first time for everything and having both Alexandra and her soulmate would indeed be interesting.
Of course, Zarek did have to find them first, which was proving to be a difficult task, even for the humans. For several hours, he had watched the police work. They had been called to the scene where a few people had witnessed Reece steal Lindsay Rosen off the sidewalk, but they hadn’t found any evidence. At the moment, they were posted inside and outside of Lindsay’s home, waiting for a ransom demand that Zarek knew would never come. Still, the police understood modern technology and they had a far better chance of tracking down Reece than Zarek did.
So he waited, aimlessly walking the streets of the small town while he kept part of his mind trained on the humans in Lindsay’s house. The rest of his mind remained open to the world as he searched in vain for a glimmer of Alexandra’s presence somewhere nearby. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could wait for the police to find a lead. Patience was a virtue that he normally possessed in abundance, but after all of the time he had invested in stalking Lindsay Rosen, he had already let the anticipation build to the point that it was excruciating.
As Zarek was heading back toward the church, his feet unconsciously bringing him back to the place where he had almost captured Lindsay, he finally felt something that made him stop in his tracks.
Night People.
An eagle shapeshifter and a female witch.
Zarek had been in this town for several weeks without sensing another Night Person close by and now there were two of them. Intrigued, he closed his eyes and let his mind seek them out. He smiled to himself when he found them to be standing outside of the very same Catholic church to which Zarek was heading. This was not a coincidence; they had to know something about Reece.
He ran the rest of the way there. He could have listened to their conversation telepathically, but Zarek wanted to see these Night People for himself.
The eagle shifter was rather gangly and from the looks of him, rather young. He was perfectly off-set by the middle-aged female witch who was the epitome of an Amazon woman. She was far older than the girls that normally interested Zarek, but even he could understand the allure of her hour-glass figure and her mane of shining brown hair. And the anger smoldering in her green eyes was truly breath-taking.
“Are you getting anything?” the shifter asked her.
“Panic,” the Amazon witch replied. “Desperation. Rage.” She took a step forward and gave the shifter a small nod. “This is the place the spell originated from, but I don’t recognize the energy signature. This wasn’t done by anyone on our Watch List.”
“Great,” the shifter said sarcastically. “I’m sure Daybreak will be glad to hear that. There are already too many witches practicing illegal spells and now we’ve got another one.”
“It’s a long-shot, I might be able to gather up some of the Power here and use it to trace the witch. Either way, we still need to collect as much information here as possible, so that we can compare the sig if this witch casts another spell of this magnitude.”
“Well, with any luck, the witch burned him- or herself out with this one.”
The witch looked crossly at the shifter. “Don’t wish that upon anyone, Hal.”
“Sorry,” he grumbled. “It’s just…with the war coming, this is getting out of hand. We can’t catch them all.”
“I know,” the witch replied sympathetically. “But we have to try. So let’s just get to work.”
Indeed, Zarek thought as he watched them. So they were both members of some group called Circle Daybreak. He never would have expected a witch circle to allow shifters as members, but from the things he read in their minds, it seemed like times were changing. That didn’t matter to him. He’d lived long enough to know that times were always changing. Wars were fought, battles were won, and it all meant nothing in the end because it was impossible to hold on to your victory. The only thing that truly mattered was experience. Pleasure and pain. And once these two Night People found Reece for him, Zarek was going to inflict a great deal of both on him, Alexandra, and Lindsay.
Soon, he would have them all.
Part 9
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