The Strip (22 page)

Mr. Kavanagh wasn’t sure what to do, at that point. It seemed that Charlie was content living a human life. She had no idea that she was a werewolf, to say nothing of the fact that her grandfather was alive, was also a werewolf, and that he was the Overseer of the Clan Council – the most powerful and influential werewolf organization in the world.

He knew that it was too much information for a twelve year old to absorb, much less believe. So, in the end, he let her go.

But, just in case, he told Jessie to continue to watch over her. So, Jessie did. And as he did, he noticed her grow. He watched her transform, from a lovely and spirited young girl to a painfully exquisite young woman.

How could he not notice? She was stunning. From her sunshine and strawberry hair to her tall, slim, strong figure, to her clear, glacier-blue eyes, she was unbearably beautiful.

But a few days after her eighteenth birthday, Jessie left Pittsburgh on another temporary assignment. In his absence, Charlie was viciously attacked. It was luck and a 911 call from someone who overheard her scream that saved her from being raped. As it was, she sustained bruises and abrasions and was so mentally distraught that she actually ran when the sirens scared her attackers away. She didn’t seek medical attention.

The werewolf community never would have known about the attack if Jessie hadn’t returned the next day and noticed the bruises. When he found out what happened – when he saw the marks on her body and read the fear and shame in her eyes and overheard enough conversation between her and her friends that he was able to piece the incident together – he contacted the Overseer. He asked for permission to remain in Pittsburgh on full-time assignment. He asked for permission to get closer to Claire so that he could more effectively protect her.

And he asked for what he wanted, most of all, at that moment in time: The go-ahead to kill the men who had hurt Charlie.

They died the next night in a fire on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill. The authorities eventually came to the conclusion that the three young men had broken into the funeral home with the intention of debasing the bodies. It was good old fashioned juvenile delinquency at its finest.

Unfortunately for the boys, one or more of them managed to bump into a number of combustive chemical containers, and they were trapped in the resulting fire.

Charlie began taking self defense lessons at community centers. She made more friends – big ones. And she stopped going anywhere alone.

Not long after the attack and the subsequent fire, Charlie’s godmother died, leaving her alone in the world. That was when Charlie met Jessie.

The rules were simple. He was allowed to take care of her. To see to her happiness and needs. He was even allowed to befriend her – and he did. But he was not allowed to mark her. He could not claim her. He was a Sentinel – a werewolf with the unique ability to mask his scent and pass for human, but possessing of the massive strength and exceptional power of a guardian. His kind were rare and in great demand. They were granted a great many boons by the Council for their services, and had been for hundreds of years.

However, in return, they were beholden by their oaths to remain uncommitted. It was the only way to ensure their continued utility. They were to remain on active duty, so to speak, and claiming a mate would change all of that. The Council wasn’t willing to risk losing any of their few, precious Sentinels these days, and Jessie was the best.

On that first day, fifteen years ago, when the Overseer had called Jessie into his office, Mr. Kavanagh had made the situation very clear. His granddaughter’s mate would one day make his appearance. She would see him in a dream. If it happened to be Jessie, then so be it. He would let Graves go, releasing him from his duties as a Sentinel, and give the couple his blessing. However, if it didn’t, then Jessie had to accept that. And he had to help Charlie find her way to her mate, no matter how difficult the task might be, physically – or emotionally.

The Overseer had wanted to make certain, before allowing Jessie to take Charlie’s assignment, that Graves understood the somber importance of these instructions and could accept them, whatever the consequences. Jessie had agreed.

He hated to admit it, but as he now followed Cole’s bike path across Las Vegas and peered down at the British werewolf who
was
supposed to be Charlie’s mate, he realized that he’d had no idea what he had truly been promising the Overseer. Boy, did he know now.

Charlie had a way of getting to that place inside of you – that place that lays empty for most or all of your life, and remains stubbornly empty, no matter how you try to fill it. You start directionless but resolute, and search year after year for whatever it will be that will finally slide snuggly into place within the darkness at your core to fill it right up.

But nothing ever does.

And then you meet Claire St.James and she looks at you with her baby blue eyes and you feel something strange happening inside. It’s like having someone sand-blast the inkiness right out of your murky, depressing spirit and fill it up with down feathers, violin music, and candle light.

That he would never be –
could
never be – anything other than her watcher, would forever remain Jessie’s greatest regret. But he was an old man. And, in the years that he had seen come and go, he’d learned that however deep the wound, even the worst of scars faded over time.

* * * *

Charlie wasn’t sure what it meant. She just knew, instinctively perhaps, that she could not let on about the way the mark on her right arm was warming up. It was tingling again, but this time, in a
good
way. It was a comforting feeling, like cold water on a burn, or a heating pad on sore muscles. It felt like the brush of silk against her skin and when she surreptitiously glanced down at it, she found that it was shimmering like crushed emeralds that had been super-glued into some fantastic, Celtic knot design. The mark almost glowed in the sunlight slicing through the livingroom curtains.

Her mind could make no sense of it. Her mind was exhausted, traumatized, and in mourning. But, as crazy as it seemed, her
body
was telling her that Malcolm Cole was near. It was insisting that he was drawing nearer with every passing second. It was like a humming in her blood; a lick of electricity that hardened her nipples and tightened her stomach.

Charlie felt the heat rush to her chest and up her neck in an honest-to-god blush and she ducked her head, praying with all of her might that Gabriel Phelan would not notice.

Right now, he stood across the room, near the bar that connected the family room to the kitchen, and he was on the phone. He spoke softly, but she could hear him anyway. She’d always had good hearing.

He was talking to someone about a jet and a private air strip. Making flight plans.

The thought gave her a hard chill and, despite the sudden and unexpected comfort afforded her by the mark on her arm, she also experienced a brief wave of queasiness. There was no way in Hell she was going to get on a plane with that man. She would find a way to kill herself first.

As if he could sense the stark, stubborn resolution of her thoughts, Gabriel turned then, and pinned her with a hard-as-diamonds sapphire glare. She felt like glaring right back, but she was a little worried that he would detect something was amiss – that he would notice the mark’s effects on her – if he looked at her too long.

So, she glanced away and slowly turned around in her chair to face the other direction. When she did, she found herself gazing up at the warlock. Who had clearly been watching her all along. From the gleam of knowledge in his glittering indigo eyes, it was obvious that
he
had noticed her blush, even if Gabriel had not.

She wondered if he was going to say anything about it.

But he just smiled. It was entirely unnerving. She gazed up at him and found herself reminded of insane, deadly youth, like the vampires in The Lost Boys and After Dark. But there was something not-so-young about him, as well. Like someone had taken a boy’s skin and laid it out over a mummy’s body.

She realized in that moment that the warlock was not working for Gabriel Phelan because Gabriel Phelan wanted him to. He was working for the werewolf because he had his own agenda. Everything about him screamed
secret
,
trouble
, and
don’t let down your guard down
. He may have appeared to be no more than a quarter of a century in age, but the depth to the darkness in his eyes and the cruel curl of his lips spoke volumes of that appearance’s deceit.

Whatever his plans were, helping Gabriel Phelan at that moment somehow fit into the scheme. Otherwise he wouldn’t be there.

Charlie managed to pull her gaze away from his and look over at the werewolf, Ulrich. He was resting in a love seat a few feet away. His expression seemed to indicate that his thoughts were turned inward. He was staring out the windows, as if waiting to catch sight of something.

He had been a perfect gentleman while Charlie got cleaned up and dressed. He’d somehow procured a summer dress for her, which was not Charlie’s style at all. But once she’d showered – with him waiting patiently
outside
the bathroom door – and gotten dressed, she had to admit that it was refreshingly cool to be wearing white linen and not blue jeans in the Las Vegas heat.

Watching him now, with his regal air and ramrod-straight back, Charlie found herself wondering what his story was. What was he to Phelan? Why was he working for him? She had the urge to ask him, flat-out. He seemed a gentle enough man. Why would he allow himself to be employed by such a ruthless, sadistic bastard?

But, then again, appearances could be deceiving. David Reese was really Gabriel Phelan, after all. And the warlock appeared to be a young human male. In actuality, Charlie would bet her drum sticks that he was anything but young – and probably anything but human.

She was pondering these things when the mark on her arm heated itself to a degree that it became distracting. It was still not a painful kind of heat, but it was certain and it was imminent and accompanying it was the sudden, irresistible urge to
move
.

She suddenly wanted to get up and leave the space she was currently occupying.

To
get back…

Without giving it further thought, Charlie allowed her instinct to take over. She sprang up from the chair and whirled around, heading for the hallway just off to her left. In her peripheral vision, she noticed Ulrich rising from his own chair in order to take chase. She also noticed Phelan glancing up from where he’d been writing something down on the counter. The warlock cocked his head to one side and turned, not toward her, but toward the windows.

Something shimmered and flashed just beyond her sight – a blaze of black and chrome in the stark Nevada sunshine, slicing through the washed-out landscape in a quick gleam and burst of reflected light.

And then there was a crashing sound and the chiming of a million shards of glass hitting tables and walls, and Charlie intuitively dove, hitting the hard-wood floors and covering her head.

* * * *

There were a hundred things about protecting Charlie that had irritated the hell out of Jessie. When she’d begun to train with David Reese, Jessie had known right away that the other man was a werewolf, and not only a werewolf, but an alpha. He knew that David was most likely not his real name and that brown was most certainly not his real eye color.

Still, he wasn’t allowed to interfere. So, when the man had begun beating on Charlie in the guise of training her to defend herself, the only thing Jessie had been able to do was gently suggest that she stop seeing him. Week after week, month after month, year after year – he told her that Reese was bad news. And she kept going back.

It was her prerogative. She was stubborn.

And she was scared. Jessie could understand that. Charlie had been treated badly by a plethora of ill-intentioned men and Reese was the only self-defense trainer who had been capable of teaching her what she needed to know in order to survive.

She didn’t want to lose that, and bruises would heal.

When Charlie had begun having her dreams and panic attacks, he had watched her strength ebb and recede and wondered what she was seeing behind her closed lids at night. Finally, a few nights ago, she had opened up to him. She’d been dreaming of two men. One with blue eyes. Another with green.

Jessie was smart enough to put two and two together and come up with
mate
. Over the last few years and with increasing frequency, Dormants had begun to dream of two separate possible mates. The Council had its theories as to why this was the case.

Dormants were very rare. All political correctness aside, they needed to be used to their ultimate potential. In other words, they needed to mate with the werewolf most worthy of reproducing offspring. It was possible that the double dream presented the Dormant with a choice that she had never had before. And, let the best alpha win.

But when Jessie realized that one of the men in Charlie’s dreams had blue eyes, he grew increasingly nervous that the blue-eyed alpha may in fact be David Reese. He so badly did not want Charlie to wind up with Reese for a mate, that he very nearly broke his oath to the Council and told Charlie everything.

And then Malcolm Cole appeared on the scene.

It had given Jessie pause. There was a lot of history to Malcolm Cole, the British bad boy who had long been thought a serial killer among wolves. He’d recently been exonerated of all of his purported crimes – and even commended by the Council for bringing justice upon the men who had actually
done
all of the killing. He’d worked as a spy for the British in World War II and served in both the Korean War and Vietnam.

He donated frequently and anonymously – to human perception, anyway – to countless charitable organizations and had even traveled to several countries around the world in order to provide whatever help he could, wherever it was needed.