Tempting the Enemy (13 page)

Perfect.

“My name is Jade-Scarlet. Mr. Favian here tells me that you don’t like the dark,” she whispered into the boy’s ear. He didn’t give any sign that he heard her. “I’ve never liked the dark, either. So, when I was little, my mother taught me how to make a star. Did you know that stars burn bright for millions and millions of years?”

Did his lashes flicker? Jade looked up at Aaron, who was watching the child with a sharp gaze, nodding at her to go on.

She held the orb out in front of the boy, carefully pulling his hands apart from the scrap of something he had knotted in his grip. He made a desperate noise, Dee Tenorio

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snatching them out of her grasp. She recognized the knitted fabric…the hat the young woman had been wearing. It looked so small, like a pouch, in his grip.

“It’s okay, you can hold your hat. I’m sorry.” She smoothed his silky dark hair back along the side of his head. “If you can use one of your hands, though, I could make a star for you. One you can keep with you forever and it’ll never be dark again.”

She held up the orb once again, waiting as still as she could for the boy to respond.

His fingers twitched, toyed with the knitting on the cap, then, finally, reached out to hold the orb for her.

“Never?”

“Never.” She’d make sure of it. This much, she could do without losing control. With the boy holding the orb, she reached for the flames in the fireplace. Ignoring Aaron’s whispered expletive, she separated the light and heat from the gases, transforming the orange and yellow licks into white. Then she pressed, tighter and tighter, the strain pulling at the back of her neck before rendering it into a tiny sphere of concentrated light. Shaping the tiny wave of heat around it to keep it suspended, she directed it into the bowl of the votive holder. The glow inside the glass shone even brighter in the boy’s hand, earning her a gasp of amazed delight.

Finally, someone who liked her tricks.

“Now don’t hold it too long, stars get very hot. But if you’re careful with it, it will keep the dark away from now on.” She took the orb and placed it delicately on the table in the center of the area. “If you’ll let Mr. Favian bring you something warm to eat, you can sit next to your star and watch it, all right?”

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The boy nodded, moving off her lap to kneel at the table and lay his head down next to the orb. She watched him, a small smile tugging at her lips even as exhaustion pulled at her shoulders. Between the walk, the Heat, the struggle with the black signature and the constant spikes of power Rysen seemed to set off, she’d already been growing tired. A small star wasn’t much to ask, especially considering that she’d been so close to them earlier and let them pass her by, but the weariness in her dragged at her limbs. She felt Aaron’s hand on her shoulder and looked up at his sun-lined face.

His hand squeezed, as if he could tell that she’d used more energy than she meant to, then he walked over to the kitchen to find some food for the boy. Giving in to the tiredness, strangely feeling as safe as Rysen promised she’d be with this man who guarded children, she closed her eyes and dozed. She had to rest. Before long, her gifts wouldn’t be needed to wake small children from nightmares.

Instead, she knew she’d be facing one of her own.

Chapter Nine

Long gone again.

Pale took a deep inhalation of the cold air, but nothing more than the acrid scent of ash filled his senses.

Ash and impatience, though, truthfully, that last was his own.

“Are you
trying
to get gutted?” he finally demanded of Tate, but his brother was still too busy grumbling about the melted rubber on the bottom of his boots to be threatened.

“They might as well be shovels now, damn it. Who the hell does she think she is?”

“You’re lucky that’s all you got for pissing off a Sibile.” Ty’s gray eyes scanned the trees as they waited for Pale to finish assessing the body.

“She’s a
Wolf
,” Pale growled, effectively shutting both of them up for long moments.

Not long enough, though.

“I always figured Pale’d mate a girl with as thick a beard as he has,” Tate said, because apparently silence was a fate worse than death. “Never thought he’d find someone as pretty as that.”

“She
is
pretty,” Ty agreed, “but I always figured his mate would have to be blind. Almost feel bad for her, looking at his ugly ass for the rest of her life. That’s just a damn shame.”

“Don’t the two of you have something better to do?”

Pale waved an arm around the drifts of snow, his blood 112

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revving hotter than before. “Have you tracked the trail?

Have you found anything at all that’ll get us closer to this bastard or are you going to stand there cracking jokes all damn night?”

Ty sobered immediately, his faint grin disappearing into a grim line, just the way Pale wanted it.

Tate, unfortunately, wasn’t so accommodating. “Hell no, let’s crack jokes. After all, we’ve been sitting here with our thumbs up our asses while you carted one of the evil Amish right into our most secure safe house. What’s the hurry?”

Pale pointed at the near-frozen body in the snow.

“Does this look fucking secure to you, Tate?” He crossed the space between them to glare down at the younger man from less than two inches away. “This is the sixth victim.

The second one less than a mile from the cabin and that evil Amish is our only goddamned chance at finding the one responsible. There
is
no safe house here, not for them, and if you don’t watch your tongue about her, there won’t be one for you.”

Tate held his ground for several stubborn seconds before his gaze flickered down.

When he met Pale’s gaze again, it was with the respect demanded, his eyes focused just to the side, not meeting Pale directly. “Trail starts two miles south, where the road meets the highway. Last stop off the city bus.

Looked pretty typical until the last quarter mile. She was moving fast, hit a hard stop at the top of this hill, then pretty much ran for her life. She didn’t get far. Kid seems to have followed later.”

The kid being the witness Tate mentioned when he’d called. Tate made no motion to further dissemble. For a Dee Tenorio

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rare, suspended moment, he was the soldier they’d fashioned themselves into, waiting for the next command.

Satisfied, Pale backed away, his hackles lowering.

He crouched next to the girl, still not sure what he was so irritated about. The two men knew their jobs and they did them without his interference or instruction. Their sarcasm was about the only reason all of them weren’t ravaging the mountainside—or each other—because they’d lost another life. The teasing, the insults, the sniping…it wasn’t new. Pushing his weight around didn’t make him feel any better, either. The girl was still dead.

And Jade still wasn’t his.

Yet.

Ferocious hunger swept through him, making him clench clawed fingertips and grind lengthening fangs.

Now that he’d made the decision that he wanted her, Instinct surged stronger than before. Need burned through his blood, demanding he complete the bonding. She’d offered herself, a fact that had to have the Heat inside her boiling to new heights, but with this latest murder, with his brothers watching like spectators, they’d both have to suffer a while longer.

“Well, that answers that question,” Ty murmured.

“What question?” Pale snapped.

“Whether you’d mated with her yet or not,” Ty answered, no small amount of wryness to his tone. “I’m going to go with no.”

Pale looked up to pin his friend with a glare that had little to no effect.

Tate’s snort lacked eloquence, but Ty’s slow grin didn’t. “Well, you have to admit, you’d be in a better mood if you had.”

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Pale bit off an expletive. “Is this some kind of half-assed challenge?”

Ty only laughed. “Hell no. I wouldn’t touch her with
his
dick.” He hooked his thumb over at Tate, who scowled at the prospect. “Any woman who can boil snow with a look is not one I want to piss off. You, on the other hand, could probably use a woman with weapons. God knows she’s gonna need ’em.”

Maybe he should have left his brothers at the cabin and brought Jade instead. “How about the two of you just shut up and let me think.”

“Yes, sir,” Tate answered, the smart ass.

Pale ignored them both and looked down at the body.

He didn’t know what he expected to find that was any different than the times before. Like the last victim, this girl was dressed. Had she been given the time to shift, like the early ones? Or was she like Shae, and chose to be bait in order to save her ward? He looked upward, following the slope of the snow and saw that the distance to the road could have been traversed in seconds for a panicked runner. No, she hadn’t been given the option to shift. The killer was either taking less time on these kills or he was becoming more patient with his stalking, letting the victims walk the lengths of their nooses before tightening the knot just when they could see safety. He wouldn’t be able to tell until he could get Jade up here.

He glared into the gaping wound of the girl’s chest, at the hollow blackness inside. “Where’s the heart?”

“Yeah, that’s the problem.” Ty’s easy manner disappeared behind the soldier he was first. “He took it with him this time.”

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That couldn’t be good. Pulling a small flashlight from his pocket, Pale shone the beam into the body cavity. Unlike the other times, there was no ragged chunk of flesh left abandoned inside, an organ torn apart. This extraction was clean, leaving mangled lungs and severed arteries coated with fallen ice but nothing else. The bastard had finally figured out how to tear the heart out whole.

“You’re sure he’s gone?” he asked, though his own senses were absolute. But Tate and Ty had combed the hillside for miles. They might have insight he didn’t.

“Honestly, Pale,” Ty replied, tone dark with repressed frustration, “if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t think he’d been here in the first place.”

Pale nodded, understanding. Apart from the blood, each site had been utterly untouched. Not even a damn footprint in the snow. But he wasn’t getting away this time. Jade would help Pale see to that.

He backed away, returning to the two on the far side of the clearing. The Woodsman’s random selections over the past three months had been spaced weeks apart. These last two, mere days. And he’d risked survivors. The killer wasn’t playing by his own rules anymore, and that could be dangerous for everyone, especially the families that came almost every other day now. Regret hung closer to him than a shadow, but he had no other choice. “Close the Underground. No one moves into Moonridge until this is over.”

The two didn’t like that option any more than Pale did himself. There were hundreds of shifters in the pipeline, traveling from safe house to safe house in search of sanctuary; more were coming all the time. Keeping 116

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them in one place for more than a day or two was inviting discovery.

“Pale, we can’t leave them indefinitely,” Ty said, obviously speaking for both of them.

“I won’t have them walking into the arms of a butcher.” Particularly one who almost seemed to be reading their minds about how they were coming to the cabin. Grimly, he added, “He’s taking them faster.

Combine that with the city killings and he’s accelerated out of control. Whatever the hell is going on, it’s coming to a head.”

Ty grunted in grudging agreement. Tate’s eyes remained flinty, but he didn’t argue. Meaning he knew as well as they did, this wasn’t going to end easy.

“I’ll get Jade. Don’t move the body until I bring her back. We’re going to start at the road. I want to know how long this bastard tracked them.”

“She can tell you that?” Tate asked, for once not sounding offensive.

Pale shrugged. Not even for these men would he break the promise he made to her. “We’ll find out.”

On the way back to the cabin, Pale brooded in the snowy silence. Fat flakes came down on his shoulders and melted on his uncovered hair. So many choices to make and none of the answers as clear as usual.

For the first time in his life, his loyalties were conflicted. These brothers he’d gladly die for, would likely die next to, and he’d been ready to end them for looking at a female. A female he couldn’t even bring himself to trust completely. There was something very wrong about that, but he couldn’t reason out which aspect bothered him the most. That his allegiances could be Dee Tenorio

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tempted so easily or that he resented having reservations about the woman he’d chosen.

He wanted Jade, unequivocally. Was attracted to her beauty, yes, but was even more attracted to the strength of her spirit. Of her Wolf, buried so deep he hadn’t even been sure it was still there. But he could see it in her eyes, feel it in her voice. Taste it on her lips like a secret.

How could he tie himself to a woman who rejected everything he was? And how could she ever give herself to a man who had bathed in the blood of everything she’d been raised to become?

What price would they both pay if they tried?

His feet fell heavily on the stone steps as he opened the cabin door, the chill inside him now far more biting than anything the weather could attempt. He shook the worst of the snow off before opening the door. Her scent slammed into him like freight train, rocking him back on his heels as his senses narrowed to a single imperative point.

She needs. Find her. Take her. Claim her.

He was already halfway down the stairs before he could stop himself. Claws fully extended, fangs throbbing, he was prepared to tear through walls if needed to get to her. But it wasn’t walls he had to tear through. It was a strange red haze, a light that filled the entire downstairs like fog.

Lust had his muscles clenching while responsibility—to the lost, to the people who relied on him, but most importantly to her—froze him where he stood. This was nothing he’d ever seen before. He forced himself to calm, to think. Hold back the crushing want.