Back From Hell (2 page)

“I’ll be damned.”

* * * * *

Jenai awoke, her body still trembling from climax, to find Stephanie, her little sister and sometimes pain in the ass, standing over her with a smirk on her dark face.

“Dreaming about him again?” Stephanie asked with a sly smile.

Rolling onto her belly to hide her flushed face, Jenai snorted. “No,” she lied. “No dreams at all.”

Stephanie laughed. “Uh-huh. That’s why I come in here and find you moaning and whimpering, sounding like some star in a porno flick.”

Jenai hissed, sliding Stephanie an evil look. “Don’t you have something better to do than pester me?”

The younger woman shrugged, her red-slicked lips curving up as she replied, “Maybe. But none of that is as fun as pestering you.” She plopped down on the bed, stretching her length out beside Jenai, smiling wickedly. “So tell me about the dream.”

Jenai went back to playing ostrich in the sand with her pillow. “Nothing to tell,” she mumbled.

“Oh, come on! Those moans I heard weren’t
nothing
.”

Jenai groaned, rolling onto her back and staring at the ceiling. “I don’t remember anything, Steph. I never do.”

Steph’s eyes narrowed, her lips pursing as she studied Jenai. “Nothing?”

With a sigh, Jenai closed her eyes. “Just his eyes.”

Stephanie stuck out her tongue and made a rude sound. “Only you, girl. If I was having wet dreams like
that
, I’d damn well make sure I remembered more than his eyes.”

Jenai just sighed, closing her eyes as she tried to piece together the rapidly fading fragments of the dream. But there was nothing left except the image of his eyes, staring at her from the shadows.

* * * * *

Ronan really couldn’t believe this.

Reading through the documents once more, he replayed the discussion with Brunich over in his mind, trying to puzzle this out.

Either they join us…or we have to eliminate them. Free radicals like them are a threat, to our way of life, to our security. To everything.

The agency didn’t like loose cannons floating around, Ronan knew that. And these two were definitely loose cannons.

Between the two of them, in the past four years, they had killed more than seventy rogue
autre
, vamps or weres that were preying on society like the monsters from fiction.

Seventy.

They were doing society a service, and with no pay, no gratitude, nothing.

But the agency didn’t like people like the two sisters. Standard operating procedure was to recruit them. Most people who were vigilantes with a cause were more than happy to get the backing of a powerful, and very well-funded, agency, Ronan knew.

But the whole damn thing left a bad taste in his mouth. Okay,
worse
than a bad taste in his mouth. It made him sick in his gut, and furious.

One of the women they wanted dead was
his
woman, his destined mate, and he’d be damned if he let the agency try to force her into a damn thing.

But even if it wasn’t for Jenai, it would piss him off, he suspected.

What Brunich was talking about was murder.

Ronan idly stroked his jaw, still staring down at the dossier on the sisters.

Of course, considering what he was dealing with, it may well be suicide, not murder.

His
suicide.

He had to check it out. Left with no choice, he packed up what little he traveled with and left the hotel, leaving the key card on the dresser for the cleaning people to find.

If he refused the assignment, Brunich would stick another agent on the case.

And some of the people in his agency were fanatics, blind to everything except their orders and the cause.

The cause. Ronan’s lips twisted in a sardonic smirk. The cause had changed over the past few decades. It had gone from protecting the unknowing mortal society from the monsters in their midst, to becoming like just about any other bureaucratic agency.

To serve their own needs.

Oh, the agents still took out threats to mortal society, but often—too often—they were being used to spy on the higher governments, to kill people who should have been left to the mortal government to deal with, or they were being used as bodyguards to the high-ranking officials in their own agency.

Ronan, an agent for decades now, had yet to be requested to do such menial, and sometimes questionable, activities, but his abilities were rather refined, better suited to a certain activity.

Of course, tracking down two
free radicals
, as Brunich called the King sisters, wasn’t exactly up his alley. But he wasn’t going to question it, not when it put Jenai exactly where he wanted her.

In his life.

The wind whipped through the open window of his car as he sped down the interstate. Indianapolis was definitely at the far edge of his normal territory. It was going to take until nightfall to get there—and then he still had the pleasure of tracking them down.

And pleasure, it certainly would be—getting Jenai in his life, not just in his dreams.

Her name. His lips curved up as he rolled the feel of it in his mind. Exotic, lovely, just as she was. Would she know him?

His kind were known for dreaming of their mates for years, but often, even though the mate shared the dreams, they didn’t remember them clearly.

Ronan’s psychic gifts made it even easier for him to recall the dreams, right down to the finest detail. But he knew there was a possibility she wouldn’t remember.

She wasn’t a shape-shifter.

What she was, none of the agency had been able to find out, but if she had been a shifter, Ronan would have sensed that in the dreams they shared.

His smile grew as he pictured walking into her life, with her not realizing who he was. She’d feel the bond between them, but she wouldn’t understand it.

And damn, but that would piss her off.

Chapter Two

The two were as different as night and day—except for their eyes.

Both sisters had eyes that were pure silver, as silver as the metal that made up the necklaces each one wore. But all similarities stopped there.

Stephanie was curvy, well built, average height, with a figure that would have given the new and improved Anna Nicole Smith a run for her hard-earned money—large, full breasts that were currently encased in a leather halter top that left her flat tummy bare, the charm in her navel winking and glinting in the light as they strode across the parking lot. Her long legs were covered in sturdy thick cotton, the fatigue pants tucked into a pair of thick-soled combat boots. Various knives were hidden on her body. Her thick, heavy mass of dense black curls was pulled back and secured in a tight French braid, out of the way, out of her eyes. She’d tried wearing it in cornrows, but the long braids had done little more than offer opportunity for the predator to become the prey when one of her targets caught hold of her hair. Her skin was the color of pale caramel, smooth and clear. The only makeup she ever wore was deep, deep red lipstick.

Mama had been a looker, but Steph’s looks came from her dad’s side. She looked almost identical to her grandma, who had died before Steph was five years old. But she’d seen pictures. Steph’s caramel-colored skin was shades lighter than her grandma’s, but they looked so similar it was amazing.

Now Jenai, she looked almost exactly like Mama. Of course, only Celeste McKade knew what her father looked like. Steph had been sixteen before she’d heard the truth about Jenai’s dad.

He’d been a vampire. And he’d raped the Night Stalker Celeste, a woman born with the abilities to hunt and prey on the creatures of the night that would have preyed on others. Raped her and infected her with the weaker strain of vampirism that could be transmitted through semen.

As a result, Celeste had developed some of the minor vampiric gifts.

And Jenai had almost all of them. And very few of the weaknesses. In her anger, fangs would drop, her eyes would glow, and Steph had seen people flee from her simply because of a look on her cold face. When those fangs dropped and her eyes started to gleam with the fires of rage, she was a damn frightening thing to face.

Of course, Steph wasn’t exactly a mild creature to face either. Her daddy had been werewolf, born and bred, just like his mama and daddy before him. Though Steph wasn’t pure wolf, she could shape-shift. It didn’t happen on the full moon, thank God. It took great emotion for her to harness the power to shift—great fear, great rage—and she could usually control it. To her, that was a hell of a lot better than what Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa had done, spending the full moons alone out in the boonies so nobody saw them.

Not that they turned into ravening beasts. A werewolf still had a mortal’s heart, understood right from wrong. But if you were an evil son of a bitch like the one they were hunting, you cut a swath of blood and pain.

And Steph and Jenai came after your ass.

They were Night Stalkers. A blood-inherited power that allowed them to track and kill the monsters. Their silvery eyes were the only visible sign of their difference. But there were many—a superhuman strength and speed, refined hearing, acute night sight, everything that a hunter needed to track and trap his prey, to kill it.

And right now, everything inside of Steph was shouting that they were in the wrong place.

“Jenai, babe, he ain’t here,” Steph insisted, forced to practically trot to keep up with Jenai’s long, ground-eating strides. Jenai was five feet, ten inches of long, pale limbs and restrained fury.

The fury had been eating a hole inside her since she had learned of her history, how her mama had gotten pregnant with her. Although she knew the laughing, loveable man her mama had married wasn’t her father, she had loved him like one. Dominick had loved her as his own, trained her and taken her out along with her mama as Jenai had learned to be a Night Stalker.

Steph was born on Jenai’s seventh birthday. All her life she had adored the faerie-looking creature who was her big sister. Jenai had been laughter, jokes and giggles. Until three years ago—the night she had learned about her true father. Just before the bastard had killed both Dominick and Celeste King.

In a cool, controlled voice, Jenai said, “He isn’t. But he was. And somebody here knows how to find him.”

Steph rolled her eyes.

There was no talking with Jenai when she was on a mission. There was no stopping her, either.

Jenai automatically muffled the intrusive presence of Steph’s thoughts. Though Jenai’s psychic abilities weren’t terribly powerful, when she shared a bond with somebody, she could hear that person’s thoughts fairly well.

And when she was hunting… Prey often knew they were being hunted, and fear seemed to make their thoughts clearer to her.

Too damn bad Mannen had yet to pick up that they were after him.

But her baby sister was wrong. Sure, she could be stopped.

After all, she’d been searching for her biological father—the man who had murdered her mama and the adoptive father who had raised Jenai as his own from the time she was three. Searching for three long years, and she had yet to find him.

Oh, she would. It might take the rest of her life, and it may very well end her life when she found him. But she would find him, and he’d pay for what he had done. He would pay, and so would anybody who had ever helped him along the way.

The man they stalked tonight was one of his cronies. He just might be able to point the way to Leon Varnell. Of course, even if he didn’t, killing him would be a pleasure. This werewolf had a fondness for stalking young women, kidnapping them and then waiting until the change was on him to rape them, his massive werewolf form tearing them apart before he ripped out their throats and feasted on their flesh. They had three days until the next full moon, three more days to save the woman he had targeted from dying a terrifying, hideous death.

Just three days…

A scowl tightened her face as she blocked out what would happen if they failed. Such thoughts made her weak. Her sympathy, her rage wouldn’t help anybody.

Cold. She had to be cold to accomplish her goals. Cold would get her where the heat of anger wouldn’t.

A time would come, though, when she could unleash all the rage that had been brewing inside her for three years. Jenai just hoped when that anger erupted, the people around her would be the ones responsible for her parents’ deaths.

She slowed outside the dark entranceway. Beyond it was a narrow street, five apartments on either side of the walkway. Cash up front, no questions asked—that was the landlord’s policy.

He was about to learn that wasn’t acceptable.

He was harboring monsters—and Jenai would be damned if it continued.

* * * * *

Ronan McAdams was leaning out the window as they strode in, his dark blue eyes watchful. Two more striking women a man was unlikely to find. The shorter of the two was Stephanie King, the daughter of a white woman by the name of Celeste McKade and a black man, Dominick King—who just happened to be a werewolf.

The PSA, Paranormal Security Administration, had files on both Dominick and Celeste. They had them on almost every known paranormal creature in the country. Dom had been easy to classify. Hell, he had worked for the PSA at one time, until he’d met Celeste.

He’d left the administration behind for a normal life, or so he’d claimed.

Because he had married a woman who was anything but normal—and she lived her life hunting the monsters that sprang from the paranormal beings that lived at the fringe of society.

But she wasn’t vampire, wasn’t were, wasn’t fae.

She was a vigilante—that he knew—and a very effective one. The file that the PSA had on Celeste McKade spanned a time period of twenty-seven years, and in that time she’d killed more vampires and weres than Ronan had ever even met. But they hadn’t been random killings, or hate killings.

The people she had hunted had been monsters—monsters like the one her daughters now hunted. Monsters—men and women who preyed on mortals and gloried in their deaths.