Blood Instinct (26 page)

F
einith stepped into the chamber
, her heels clicking on the stone. She stopped at Jake’s dead body and lingered on the serryn blood staining his mouth. She glanced at Sophia, hanging unconscious from her manacles.

‘Is she still alive?’ Hess asked.

‘She’s still alive,’ Feinith confirmed. ‘With blood as potent as hers, defunct or not, she was still going to kill him far quicker than he could drain her.’

‘The offspring?’

‘Also alive,’ Feinith said. She drew her knife and slid it sideways down Sophia’s abdomen, letting it linger over the source of the still-healthy second heartbeat. She looked back at the face of the limp human that hung before her. ‘What is it with you McKay sluts ruining my plans?’

‘At least you’ve turned it around,’ Hess said, moving alongside her.

Feinith cupped Sophia’s jaw to stare at her closed eyes. ‘I always do.’ She leaned into the serryn’s ear, lingering for as long as she dared. ‘Because I’m smarter than you’ll ever be,’ she whispered to her. ‘You and that bitch sister of yours.’

She glanced across her shoulder at Hess.

‘Tell the others to get him out of here,’ Feinith instructed her assistant. ‘Put his body somewhere close to the club. I want to make sure he’s found as soon as possible.’

‘And her?’ Hess asked, motioning towards Sophia.

‘The same. I want her put next to him.’

‘Are you going to kill her first?’

‘Kill her?’ Feinith laughed. ‘Of course I’m not going to kill her.’

Hess’s eyes flared slightly. ‘You want her alive? But what if she wakes before he’s found? What if she escapes? You’ll have a serryn loose.’

‘That’s the whole point, Hess: to let the hunt flow through his blood again. Let her escape, and it will fuel him even more.’

‘Feinith, as genius as this plan has been, after Jake telling her that he suspected your involvement, what if, when Caleb finds her, she tells him?’

Feinith smiled across at her. ‘My darling Hess, you don’t know my Caleb like I do. When he finds her, he won’t be listening to a word she says.’ She looked back at Sophia. ‘All he’ll see is his dead brother and those bite marks,’ she said. ‘This is no longer about capture – it’s about baiting. And if I can’t use Kane to bait him, I’ll use this little bitch instead. It’s about letting chaos erupt and raising a glass to the hell we’ll unleash.’

She pressed the blade against Sophia’s abdomen, lingering just a second longer before she knew she’d have to force herself away.

‘And when Caleb does find you,’ she said, lowering her voice to a whisper again, ‘I’ll see to it that he’ll be the one to rip that blight from you before he tears every single one of that fucking pack apart. And
then
I’ll make sure he starts on your sister. From here on, Caleb is
mine
.
Utterly
mine.’

T
hey’d spent almost
four hours searching to no avail. Sorran and Hank, one having led to the east, the other to the north, finally rejoined Jask at the meeting place they’d agreed. Corbin, having led to the west, had returned a few minutes before with Elias by his side.

Eden was still searching the south with the team he’d been assigned.

But Jask wasn’t going to quit. He couldn’t quit.

‘Jask—’

‘I don’t want to hear it, Corbin. She’s out here somewhere. I’m not abandoning her.’

‘I know it’s clichéd, but we’re searching for a needle in a haystack.’

‘And we’ll
keep
searching,’ Jask said, turning to face his beta fully. ‘Just like we did with Tuly and the other young.’

‘But what if she doesn’t
want
to be found?’

‘I am
not
letting the serryn win. Do you understand me?’

‘I understand that you should take a breather,’ Corbin replied, staring his alpha down. ‘You’re fraught. You’re not thinking straight. You’re putting our pack at risk enough out here. We’ve searched and we’ve found nothing. We’ll regroup, we’ll rest and we’ll talk through a different strategy.’

‘Exactly.
Our
pack. And Phia is part of our pack.’

‘And now she could be anywhere within miles of where we are,’ Corbin added defiantly. ‘In any nook or cranny.’

‘Which is
why
we don’t give up.’

‘At what price? She took herself away, Jask. She made her choice.’

‘This
wasn’t
her choice. She’s sick, Corbin. None of this is her choice. We – our pack – should understand that better than anyone.’

‘Then come back to the bunker. Let’s talk. Let’s—’

It came from nowhere.

Hank hit the ground side-on, taken down by whatever had struck him. And whatever it was had torn his throat open in the process.

Hank’s body juddered in his last few seconds of life, his startled gaze locked on his alpha’s as if failing to comprehend what had happened.

Jask’s attention jumped to the left where the creature had landed silently on all fours to face them in the middle of the alley, its teeth bared into a snarl, Hank’s blood dripping from its jaw.

Barely able to understand it himself, Jask stared at the morphed lycan poised and ready for more.

‘What the
fuck
,’ Corbin hissed.

Jask reached back, indicating that Corbin should get behind him, that Sorran and Elias should get behind him too, as the protective alpha in him erupted.

‘Jask,’ he heard Elias say, his voice laced with trepidation.

Jask looked over his shoulder and saw a second morphed lycan poised and ready to attack.

But morphed lycans didn’t work in a pack, let alone a pair. It was the only time they didn’t. Morphing turned them into solitary creatures. Yet what he saw in front of him was indicative of a strategy. A strategy that had started by taking the biggest of the five of them down first.

Jask stared back into the eyes of the morphed lycan in front of him, its pale grey eyes unflinching, its teeth still bared as it lowered itself – not in submission to an alpha of the species, but in attack mode.

He had no time to contemplate it further as both morphed lycans leapt simultaneously. The one behind him lunged at Elias and Sorran, Jask only just managed to avoid having his forearm torn from the socket by the snapping jaw of the other as he punched it away.

Corbin took it to ground a second later, rolling with it, his arms locked around its upper legs, the morphed lycan snapping and snarling and scrabbling to get back to its feet.

Jask snatched up the nearest breeze block.

‘Let it go!’ he commanded.

Corbin instantly did as he was told, throwing the morphed lycan sideways before scrambling backwards.

It sprung instantly back to its feet and spun one hundred and eighty degrees, but Jask was ready, slamming the breeze block down onto its skull and killing it outright.

He looked over his shoulder and saw the bloodied throat of Elias, Sorran knocked face first to the ground, the morphed lycan pinning him there.

Jask took a running leap, taking the morphed lycan clean off him. His arm wrapped around its throat, Jask honed all his instincts as he rolled with the creature, ignoring the pain of the scuffs and scrapes and his burning muscles as he tugged and tugged, it flailing for all it was worth.

The muscles in its neck made it too hard for him to snap it, so Jask had no option but to squeeze, his feet rammed against the wall of the alley as he refused to relent, despite it squirming.

With gritted teeth, he growled at the top of his voice, denying the morphed lycan even an inch, his forearms burning as he locked his hands together in a vice-like hold.

He closed his eyes tight, his jaw clenched as he waited for the morphed lycan to stop squirming.

Finally, Jask let go.

S
ophia stumbled
through the maze of back alleys. Despite the risk, it had been the lesser of two evils. The only alternative had been taking the main routes and potentially fuelling her serrynity further by brushing shoulders with the very species she needed to avoid.

She’d woken dazed and disorientated, face down on the cold stone floor to stare into the shadowed, dead face of Jake Dehain.

Despite it being more than obvious that he was long gone, she’d reached out to touch his hand and then his face regardless, as if waking from a nightmare and needing a sense of reality.

But the literal cold truth had continued to stare back at her.

Her hand had instantly fisted as she’d held it to her face, shielding her distress from the darkness – an emotion that incited the last ounce of fight left in her.

Because it proved she was
still
in there. Amidst the poison strengthening in her veins, there was still enough of her, of her humanity, left to want to drag herself off that floor and warn him.

Warn Jask.

She’d clutched her abdomen as she’d stumbled across to the doorway, tears fighting to break through as she recollected Jake’s claim.

Standing at the threshold, her hand wrapped around the doorframe of the outbuilding, it hadn’t taken her long to work out where she and Jake’s body had been strategically dumped. If she’d had any doubt that Jake had been right in his suspicions that Feinith had been involved in both of their abductions, it had evaporated there and then.

Adding to her horror was the realisation as to why she was still alive, why she was free: Feinith wanted her to run. Feinith had found a brand-new use for Caleb Dehain’s defunct sacrifice. Feinith had intended to let her loose like a rabbit in a hunt.

Caleb would be intent on revenge the second he discovered his dead brother; intent on spilling Jask’s blood too.

She’d tried to block out the low beat of music from inside the club, every sinew of her body being pulled towards her nemesis’s haven. But she’d managed to drag herself away from temptation.

Now Sophia used the dark, dank walls for support as she struggled onwards in the darkness, it taking every iota of strength not to be drawn towards the siren’s call on the streets beyond the mouth of each alleyway. Because she knew if she made her way out from the darkness, she’d be lost. She’d be lost in the depths of Blackthorn. Lost to her serrynity. Lost to Jask.

Lost until Caleb Dehain found her.

J
ask caught
his breath as the morphed lycan lay limp in his arms.

‘Elias?’ he asked as Corbin and Sorran joined him.

Corbin shook his head in confirmation that he hadn’t survived the tear to his throat.

After a few seconds of silence, of suppressed grief, Jask pushed the morphed lycan away and struggled to his feet.

Corbin reached out to give him a helping hand. ‘Do you think that was them? The ones they talked about on the news?’

Jask looked back down at the body.

‘Because if it is, I don’t get it, Jask. We accounted for everyone – everyone here in Blackthorn.’

Jask fell to his knees at the morphed lycan’s side. He moved its upper limb to reveal the area that would have been under its arm in its human-like state. The tattoo should have been there, or a burn mark in the case of banishment. But there was nothing.

Nothing at all.

‘Where is it?’ Corbin asked, crouching alongside him. ‘Where’s the mark?’

Jask met Corbin’s troubled frown with his own. ‘This wasn’t one of our own. These lycans weren’t from Blackthorn.’

‘Then where were they from? What lycan doesn’t have a pack mark?’

Jask looked back at the morphed lycan, which, now that he’d had a chance to examine it, looked incredibly young to have been able to morph so successfully. And this was certainly no alpha to justify its success either. Not even he would have been able to take either of the morphed lycans down if they’d been of alpha strength.

‘Something’s not right,’ Jask said, unease permeating his every instinct. He looked over his shoulder at the other dead morphed lycan. He tongued his incisor as he stared back down at the one he was kneeling beside.

‘What are you thinking?’ Corbin asked.

‘I think we could be in a shit load of trouble,’ Jask said, holding his beta’s gaze.

He got to his feet. ‘Get a couple of the others here. Have them help you get Hank and Elias back to the bunker. Get everyone back there.’ He turned on his heels. ‘And check on the compound for me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

‘Jask, come on,’ Corbin said, pursuing him into the depths of the alley. ‘You can’t still be considering this…’

‘Now more than ever,’ Jask said over his shoulder, his strides purposeful.

Because he wasn’t leaving Sophia out there. He wasn’t leaving his young out there. If there were more of these morphed lycans… These far from natural morphed lycans…

‘Jask, just hold on!’

But less than a hundred feet down the alley, Jask froze and sniffed the air. It was subtle, but it was there: carried on the breeze towards him and toying with his sensitive sense of smell as much as it did wisps of his hair.

‘What is it?’ Corbin asked.

Jask sniffed the air again – the scent was unmistakeable. It had him catching his breath and picking up his pace without hesitation.

He ran through the maze of alleys with every ounce of stamina he had left, Corbin close behind him. Seeing her in the distance and about to veer left, he ran even faster. ‘Phia!’

She turned to face him. He took in her bloodied shirt, her dazed expression, as if she was lost somewhere, her initial passiveness to his presence heartbreaking.

But he swept her up in his arms regardless, pulling her close – as close as he could – relief washing over him as he held one hand tight to the back of her head, his other arm wrapped around her waist.

Because as well as having her back, he could still hear the heartbeat of their young.

Eventually Sophia came to her senses and reciprocated his hug, her tears soaking his shirt.

When he could finally bear to let her go, he forged just a little distance between them – enough to turn her head to the side and survey the incisor wounds on her neck.

A vampire bite.

He looked deep into her eyes – eyes that echoed more distress than he’d ever seen. With it, any sense of relief quickly faded.

‘Phia? What’s happened?’

Her lips parted but her continued silence exacerbated his unease.

He caught her jaw firmly but tenderly. ‘Talk to me.’

‘Jake,’ she said, pending doom filling her gaze.

He wanted her to stop there; to not utter another word. He wanted to slam his hand over her mouth and pretend there was nothing left to say.

‘I killed Jake,’ she said. ‘I killed Jake Dehain.’

She may as well have knocked him to the ground with an iron fist. His throat tightened at the prospect of the opportunity lost: saving her life and, with it, their baby’s. He stared at Sophia before he glanced across at his beta, equal horror crossing Corbin’s face.

‘They had me tied up. In a room,’ Sophia explained. ‘I didn’t go looking for him. I swear, Jask – I didn’t go looking for him.’

He grasped her face in both hands. ‘Phia, where? Where did it happen?’

Her lips parted again, but her silence had returned.

‘We need to find him,’ Jask added. ‘We need to find the body.’

‘There’s no point,’ she said. ‘It was a set-up. Feinith set it up.’ Her breath caught as she swallowed hard. ‘He told me,’ she added. ‘Jake told me I’m pregnant.’