Page 196 of Golden Eagle

~*~

“I think we need to get down there,” Trina said. Her heart had settled into that accelerated, metronome rhythm that had powered her through ever chase and dangerous arrest. The pulse of someone about to dive into a crack den in pursuit of a murderer. Gustav and Alexei had only been talking, but she didn’t need immortal senses to see that the tension was too high – and getting higher. That Dante was very visibly upset, and that, if left alone, the situation had the potential to explode into something violent.

Then Alexei, who’d been staunchly ignoring Dante, turned to him, and his expression went slack with shock.

Trina tensed. “Guys.”

“Yeah,” Nikita said, putting a booted foot up on the parapet. “We’ll go. Stay here and cover us.”

She reached out blindly, and laid a hand on the stock of Katya’s rifle where it sat propped beside her, clean, loaded, and ready to fire.

Lanny cracked his knuckles.

Gustav said something, and both the wolves flanking him shifted to their four-legged shapes.

“Shit,” she said, and plucked up the rifle.

“Guys!” Jamie said.

Sasha gave a loudsniff.

A sound behind them drew her attention, and she turned her head.

The rooftop door that led up from the warehouse below swung open, and a man stepped out of it. A hulking man, dressed for warmer weather in nothing but a tight, short-sleeved white shirt. He had toduckto get out of the doorway, and sunlight gleamed off massive arms that rippled with muscle. When she got a look at his face, she murmured, “Oh, shit.”

It was the vampire from the cage match. The one Lanny had fought, and Nikita had finished.

And he wasn’t alone. Other figures crowded out the door after him, men and women, all of them tall, athletic, bodies roped with heavy muscle.

“Vampires,” Sasha said, snarling, and shifted, a tall, shaggy white wolf standing with paws braced apart, claws digging into the gravel of the roof.

Trina raised the rifle to her shoulder, sighted, and fired.

~*~

The wolves shifted.

Gustav tucked his hands in his pockets, and looked content to wait for his Familiars to do his dirty work for him.

Both wolves lowered their heads, ruffs pricked, teeth bared, muscled bodies coiled and thrumming with energy. They leapt as one; it would take only a few long strides to reach their prey.

Who appeared to be Dante, and only Dante. They were gunning straight for him.

Dante froze in place, hand still stretched out toward Alexei, expression one of pale shock, and dread – a knowing dread. He could flee, and he might even get a good head start, but they would catch him. Nothing on two legs could outrun a shifted werewolf.

He lied to me, Alexei thought in the span between heartbeats, the moment when time slowed, and the inevitable carnage lay before him, a flower waiting to unfold.He pretended to be my friend, tocareabout me; tricked me into bed, and showed me his old books, and he was trying to hurt me the whole time. It would serve the bastard right to get torn apart by wolves.

But there’d been something terribly sweet, and terribly real in his gaze earlier, in his kitchen. When he’d plucked right through all of Alexei’s outer smokescreens and hit at the heart of what he really wanted. The confession he so rarely even acknowledged to himself. That he wanted honesty. That he wanted a family; people to trust and love.

Another lie. Dante was a dream-walker; he’d just admitted it. There’d been no perception there, only a cheap dip into Alexei’s mind. An invasion, another betrayal.

But he realized, in that frozen moment, that he wanted to hear all of that for himself. He wanted an admission.

Alexei snatched the hand that still hovered in front of his face, leapt backward, andpulled.

Dante toppled forward with a gasp, collided with him, and Alexei spun and shoved him.

The wolves overshot their target, snarling, but skidded and rebounded.

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