Page 75 of Fated Exile

The scent isn't the hybrid, though. When I come to its source, pacing around and around it, I find only a pile of the whitest, thinnest ash. Pushing my nose into it, I inhale deeply and exhale slowly, air rushing out of the sides of my wolf nose to avoid disturbing the smell.

It's a vampire,I tell the guys, raising my head to meet their glowing gazes. Twin slivers of confusion and wariness pulse out of them, their ears pricked as they scan the dappled light for an enemy.Someone killed a vampire in the forest, and now its pile of ash is here. Did you hear of that happening while you were on patrol?

No.Lance shakes his large, white head, his blue eyes glowing beneath furrowed brows.Ian and Barry fell in an old hunter's trap and hurt themselves, but nothing else of note happened.

My pulse skips a beat.An old hunter's trap?

Finn says,It must've been old. We haven't used them in a few decades. When the moonsickness was bad a few generations back, many of the packs started hunting in human form.

And it was just left behind? No one noticed it or checked it in that many years?

Lance's worry doubles.What else could it have been?

What else indeed.

We don't find an explanation for the pile of vampire ash. Finn suggests that it must've been from an old patrol, and never got reported or cleaned up, but that doesn't explain how it's still here instead of scattered to the wind. Lance suggests that an illicit werewolf meetup with a vampire for a venom high went wrong sometime recently, and that's the only explanation we can really come up with. It doesn't satisfy the wary, worried part of me, but there's no reason to think it's anything else.

All we can do is guess. Unless, of course, the vampire we captured gives us answers.

Which is precisely what I intend on making him do.

Twenty-Nine

Delilah

The vampire smells like death. Not death like a goth's perfume, or death like incense and graveyard dirt, but the death of things rotting. It's a smell that my wolf nose picks up immediately, and I have to hold back the urge to retch as I get closer to him.

He's been chained up in the moon sickness compound, iron shackles holding him tight to a heavy metal chair. Iron stakes have been pushed through his hands into the arms of the chair below, his blood sluggishly oozing through the wounds in time with the beats of his slow, dead heart. He has bright blonde hair that hangs in limp strands around his unnaturally pale head, and eyes that glow with otherworldly light.

Despite the threat of a werewolf pack capturing and torturing him, he smiles as I enter the room, jerking his chin up to purr in my direction. "You must be themagkos.I can smell it on you."

"You must be Ignacio," I acknowledge, glancing over my shoulder at Bastian, who cautiously enters the room after me. "I've heard a few things about you."

Things Bastian told me, in his quiet and halting voice, a frown settling on his face. He said it simply and easily—he used to play with me when Demetri was bored, he liked to see me bleed—but his words ignited a fiery rage inside me, and it takes all my self-control not to pummel Ignacio into the ground for what he did to my mate.

Once I've gotten the information we need from him, I'll flay him alive and burn the pieces. I want to make him suffer. First, though, I have to make him squeal.

Ian, the warrior on duty at shift, closes the door to the cell behind us, leaving me and Bastian alone with the bloodsucking vamp. There's darkness in the corners of the room, but a brightly-shining light fixture overhead chases most of it away. Ian told me when we arrived that they'd replaced the halogen bulbs with UV bulbs, the better to torture the vamp with. There are no windows in the room otherwise, and no color other than the spray of old blood across the floor, no doubt from a previous torture attempt.

"They haven't gotten anything from me, you know," Ignacio says, flicking his eyes over my shoulder to Bastian, who hovers near the closed door. "I did discover some interesting things while I was being interrogated, though. Apparently you've joined with the mutts. I suppose you're no longer a threat to them—though I wonder how that was achieved? Since your hypnosis wassovery thorough."

I can feel the flicker of unease from Bastian, and I know he's wondering if the vampire's speaking the truth. His biggest fear is betraying us again, especially now that we've welcomed him so completely and woven him into the fabric of our pack, and our mate bonds. Sending a silent pulse of reassurance towards him, I face the bloodsucker head-on and interrupt him before he can continue on his harmful little rant.

"You're the first vampire we've been able to capture and interrogate. Is that because you're so weak, or was Delphine willing to give you over to us because you know nothing?"

His eyes flicker at the sound of the hybrid's voice in my mouth. "I don't know what you're talking about. I'm working alone."

"Sure. You, a clearly very stupid and weak vampire, just decided to cross our borders the night of the Summit." I approach him, grab the stakes going through his hands, and bend down to look into his eyes. "How did you do that? How were you able to fool the land?"

He hisses out, "I'll never tell."

"It was some sort of black cloud," Bastian says, gaining the courage to approach the vampire. He looms over him, using his height and breadth to intimidate the rotting dead. "I saw through it, even though I don't think I was supposed to. Was it some kind of spell? Can Delphine do it to more than one vampire?"

I push the stakes around, enjoying the sound of Ignacio's bones and tendons grinding together. "Tell us what she has planned, and maybe we won't turn you into dust."

He narrows his eyes at us, though I can see his pain on his face, which tightens imperceptibly. "I couldn't tell you even if I wanted to—and trust me when I say that I don't want to."

I tilt my head at him, the memory of Demetri's neck breaking running through my head. "Is that because Delphine has cursed you somehow? Will you die if you give up any information?" He frowns, not quite meeting my eyes, and I pounce. "That's why Demetri died, after all. But I could lift the curse from you so you can speak freely."

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