Page 97 of Tin God

Jesus, she was turning into her Aunt Sinead with the number of times she’d held her breath only to let it out in a minor explosion.

“…but once I figured out how to keep the bugs away, it got a lot better.”

“Completely missed the first part of that one.” She gasped and ducked down as a bird nearly sideswiped them. “Dear God in heaven.”

“My uncle and aunt refuse to fly with me, but my sister loves it.”

“That’s mildly terrifying.” Ben’s sister was something like thirteen. Perhaps she had a death wish.

“Nearly there.” He pointed off to the left. “I recognize that old lumber mill.”

“Great!”

Let her die. She’d had a good life—she could just die now. Surely it was possible for vampires to have heart attacks. Was that possible? What about a stroke? If he dropped another time to avoid a seagull, something in her head was bound to explode.

“You’re not getting tired, are you?” Ben yelled over his shoulder. “Tenzin and I exchange blood, so the short days have been great. But I don’t need as much sleep as most new vampires.”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

It wasn’t fine. None of this was fine. She wanted her feet on the ground. Even a boat would be better than this terror.

“Banking to the right, then going down.”

“Okay.”

For the love of all things holy, let that mean they were almost there.

Brigid saw lights in the distance, a cluster of them sitting between a peninsula and an island, straddling a narrow strait dotted with smaller lights that were probably boats.

Beyond that strait was a vast stretch of dark water as they looked over the cold Pacific Ocean. As they’d crossed the maze of land and sea dotted with tiny moving lights, she’d had one thought repeating in her head over and over.

Well, one thought other than contemplating death.

How the hell were they supposed to find Zasha Sokholov in this huge stretch of wilderness? She’d thought the Alaskan interior was vast.

This maze of islands was so much worse.

When Brigid’sfeet finally hit land, she understood the humans who kissed the ground. Despite the pouring rain and the mud that squelched between her boots, she was tempted.

In the distance, she saw a house clinging to the edge of land, a dock sticking out into relatively calm waters while two wooden decks wrapped around a wood-clad house.

Behind the house was a raised cedar-plank longhouse with smoke pumping from a stone chimney, and next to it rose a mound with a door cut into the earth.

“I see Clovis’s boat,” Ben muttered, “so they must have gotten back already. I wonder where?—”

“He’s here.” The moment she touched the ground, a pull in her blood had started. “He’s comin’.”

The door to the mound house swung open, and silhouetted in the gold glow, she saw Carwyn’s outline.

Her blood leaped, and she felt the whisper of Ben and Tenzin as they took to the sky, leaving her alone in the drizzling rain.

While Brigid’s blood was a riot, he walked slowly. Deliberately.

It took a lot to make her mate angry, but when he was, he went stone-cold and silent.

Brigid walked to him, halting a dozen feet from him, lifting her chin and pushing back the hood that protected her head.

Carwyn stopped and stared, his face a mask.

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