Strangers of the Night

  She should’ve been surprised to see him, perhaps even angry at this interference in her life, but instead relief swept over her in a wave so strong she had to put her hand on the bathroom door frame to keep herself from hurtling forward, across the room and into Kane’s arms.

  “Kane,” she said.

  Phoenix’s head went up at once, his eyes narrowed. He took a step back as Kane moved forward, not trying to keep the other man from entering the room. He didn’t have to do that physically. All he had to do was take control. He could only handle one person at a time, though.

  “Persephone,” Kane said without giving her brother so much as a second glance, clearly dismissing the threat. “Are you all right?”

  She was all right, at least so far as she wasn’t being harmed. But was she okay? Not really. Phoenix had forced her to come with him on this trip, and although he hadn’t continued to control her every move, she wasn’t here by choice.

  “Tell him you’re all right, sister mine.”

  “I’m all right,” she said at once. No matter what she might have wanted to answer, her brother’s words came out of her mouth.

  “She’s fine. You can leave now, whoever you are.” Phoenix didn’t say it as a command, which meant he was still bent on controlling Persephone.

  Kane ignored Phoenix. “I went to your apartment. I was worried.”

  A flicker of heat lit inside her, low in her belly but growing upward beneath her heart. She’d known this man for a little over a year. She’d spent hours with him naked, but for all of them she’d been wearing the faces of other women. She’d cold-shouldered him with her own face, but here he was.

  He’d come to save her.

  Then she was stepping forward, one hand out, her mouth open. What she meant to say, she wasn’t sure. She wanted to thank him, maybe. To be grateful that even though she wasn’t in any true danger, he’d been worried enough to come after her and find her.

  “Sister mine, it seems strange to me that this guy would have figured out where you were. You should ask him how he found you.”

  “How did you find me?”

  Phoenix had not said aloud that she ought to stop moving toward Kane, but he didn’t have to speak in order to control her. Her feet wanted to move but would not. She wanted to struggle, actually. To call her brother out and tell Kane what was really going on—but what stopped her from doing that was nothing her brother was doing. She didn’t want to tell Kane that her brother could manipulate other people with his mind. He might think she was crazy.

  Worse, he might believe her.

  She didn’t want to tell Kane that she and Phoenix had been conceived by a pack of insane cultists. She wanted him to keep looking at her the way he was now, as though she was exactly the treasure he’d been hunting. He wouldn’t, if he knew the truth. Not only about her or about Phoenix, but the other truth, that she’d been sleeping with him for months without letting him know it was her.

  “I looked on your computer,” Kane said with a twist of his lips as though he knew the admission should embarrass him, but he was owning it, anyway. “I tracked your phone.”

  Phoenix curled his lip. “That sounds a little creepy.”

  “Yes,” Persephone said because the tickling tendrils of her brother’s control were twitching in her brain. “Super creepy. What the hell? I told you, we’re not friends.”

  I hate you, she thought at Phoenix. He couldn’t read her thoughts exactly, but he would get the feeling of what she was trying to convey.

  “We don’t have to be friends for me to be concerned about you,” Kane said.

  “So you drove almost two hours to find her? My sister’s fine,” Phoenix said. “If you ask me, you going all alpha-male caveman on her isn’t cool. Not at all.”

  Kane flicked a glance toward Phoenix, who was probably more angry that the other man had been ignoring him than by the fact he’d shown up in the first place. “I was concerned.”

  “You need to go,” Persephone said. “I’m fine. I’m taking a road trip.”

  Kane fixed her with a look, then a stare around the room before fixing his gaze back on hers. “A road trip without your computer, without locking the door behind you? Without luggage?”

  “We’re free spirits. Damn you, Phoenix,” she manage to bite out when her brother’s mental puppet strings sagged for a split second. “We don’t need to answer to anyone. I was tired of working in that building—damn it, Phoenix, why do you have to be such a...good...damn it...brother.” Asshole, she thought vehemently even though her face betrayed no hint of her anger.

  “That’s fine,” Kane said mildly. “I didn’t mind the drive. I like road trips, too.”

  Another ripple of heat trickled through her. She knew Phoenix would feel it. He rolled his eyes at her. Truthfully, she felt a little exasperated with herself. After so long fending off even the barest hint of interest Kane directed at her—at Persephone, not when she was in another guise—she didn’t want to start getting all gooey about him now. Hell, the man had not only been concerned that something had happened to her, he’d tracked her down to rescue her. It might’ve made a girl cry, if she’d allowed herself to give in to emotion that way.

  It might’ve made a girl fall in love.

  “You can go. I’m really okay,” she told him without needing any prompting or mental coercion from Phoenix. Kane needed to get the hell out of here before she lost her shit. “I’m sorry if I worried you. My brother came and got me and I just booked out of there because I... I didn’t have anything there I cared enough about to take along.”

  Including you was the unspoken addition to that sentence, and she could see that Kane understood it. His lips pressed together, hard, and he nodded. He took a step backward, putting himself in the doorway again. He did not look at Phoenix. He looked at Persephone. That steely glare, the one that took in everything, that noticed everything, swept her up and down.

  “I wanted to make sure you were safe,” Kane said steadily. “I would do anything to make sure you hadn’t come to harm.”

  Offer or threat, she wasn’t sure and didn’t care. The sentiment was enough to threaten to buckle her knees. The heat beneath her heart flashed upward to paint her cheeks. Her fingers curled, making fists at her sides. She swallowed hard, words fighting to break free but kept inside the prison of her mouth by her brother’s insistence she remain silent.

  “If you need me, all you have to do is call me,” Kane said. “I’ll be there.”

  Phoenix snorted. “How romantic. You can leave now.”

  The way Kane did immediately without so much as a single word more, even closing the door behind him, told Persephone her brother had something to do with it. Before she could move or say anything, though, Phoenix had the lock on her thoughts again. He didn’t let her move.

  “I’ll hold you here until you convince me you’re not going after him,” he said calmly.

  Persephone frowned. “I’m not going after him.”

  “I can smell it on you,” her brother said. “You’re way into him.”

  “I’m not,” she protested.

  The hold on her released. She did not go to the door or even the window next to it. She wanted to run after Kane and tell him to wait for her, but that wasn’t going to do her any good. Besides, as angry as she might be about Phoenix forcing her to go with him, he wasn’t wrong about everything. She did like road trips. She did like adventure. And there really wasn’t anything to keep her in that apartment—except for Kane.

  “Do you want to go after him, Persephone?” Phoenix sounded confused and a little upset. “Oh my God, you... You’re in love with him!”

  “Don’t be stupid. I barely know him!”

  Phoenix shook his head. “That’s not how you feel about him.”

  “You know as well as I do that
it doesn’t matter,” she retorted. “It’s not going to happen. Anyway, he’s a cop. A detective. What do you think he’d do if he knew about all the things I’ve done over the years?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Phoenix began, but there was no time for him to finish because the motel room door broke inward, splintering.

  It was not Kane.

  Chapter 10

  Six of them, six against one. They weren’t odds in Kane’s favor, although that wouldn’t have stopped him from trying. At least not if he’d had the chance, but he’d seen five of them heading toward him and had turned. Another had come up behind him and hit him over the back of the head while he stood in front of the motel room door wondering why the hell he’d immediately gone out, no protest, when Persephone’s brother had told him to, and why it had felt like his brain was itching when he tried to resist.

  He came to with more than an itch in his brain. His entire head felt like it was on fire, throbbing and aching. His fingers came away bloody when he felt the giant lump on the back of it.

  “Shit.” He spat, tasting copper. They’d rolled him, all right. Taken everything in his pockets. Smashed his phone on the concrete. His keys were gone.

  It hadn’t been a gang attack, though. Those guys were military or at least something close to it, both by the way they’d been dressed and how efficiently they’d dropped him. Feeling like an idiot, Kane got to one knee on the cracked asphalt of the parking lot behind the dumpster where they’d dragged him. His head swam, but he pushed away the nausea and the pain.

  He rounded the dumpster and came up short at the sight of a woman with blond hair pulled into a tight bun just coming out of the room Persephone and her brother had been using. Kane was already drawing his weapon. The way the woman came at him, he might have killed her if they both hadn’t backed off at the same time, each of them breathing hard and on the defensive.

  “Where did they go?” he barked.

  The woman backed up a few steps, hands raised to show him she wasn’t going to make any wrong moves. “I don’t know. I’m Samantha. I was going to meet with Phoenix.”

  “I came to find out to make sure Persephone was all right.” Kane lowered the gun. “The next thing I know, I’m standing outside the door and those goons are coming at me, and one of them hit me.”

  “You couldn’t have known.” Samantha put her hands on her hips and shook her head.

  Kane’s lip curled. “I should have known. I should’ve done better, anyway. Did they take them?”

  “Yes. They would have.” Samantha hesitated, eyeing him. “You have no idea who ‘they’ are, do you?”

  “Not a one. You gonna tell me?” He gave her a small grin. “I have no idea what the hell’s going on, other than she’s in some kind of trouble.”

  “You don’t want to know. You should just walk away.” Samantha gestured with a sigh, then frowned. “Damn it.”

  “I’m not walking away. I want to know who those guys were, why they took Persephone and her brother, where they took them, and how I can get her back.”

  Samantha eyed him. “Is she your girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Huh.” Her eyebrows lifted. “You have a savior complex?”

  “No, not that. She was the super in my building and I...” Kane shrugged, meeting Samantha’s gaze steadily but not returning her knowing grin. “We were friends. I wanted to be friends.”

  “You wanted to be more than friends,” the woman told him with a shake of her head and a rueful chuckle that led him to believe she knew far more about the situation than she should have. “Take my advice. Get out of here and forget about Persephone. Definitely forget about her brother—he’s even more trouble. Just get in your car and go far away. This isn’t for you.”

  Irritated, Kane spat to the side. “No.”

  “Don’t like being told what to do, huh? Can’t say that I blame you. But this is a real true mess. Beyond your scope—”

  “Try me,” he said.

  Samantha fixed him with a steady look, studying him. Whatever she saw must’ve convinced her, because she nodded. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Wyrmwood?”

  * * *

  One of them had gone to his knees with his gun to his head before another had come up behind Phoenix and grabbed his arms. Persephone remembered that another had hit her brother on the head with the butt of a gun, knocking him out. It was the only reason why they’d been able to take him. She had been much easier to grab.

  Persephone didn’t know where they’d taken Phoenix, but she didn’t think it had been far. She knew he wasn’t dead, at least. That would’ve left an absence inside her that would’ve been impossible not to feel.

  She was in the back of a van. Bars on the door. Plain benches on the inside. Manacles attached to the metal wall, although fortunately they hadn’t shackled her. She was a little insulted they hadn’t felt the need.

  They’d been driving for what felt like an hour or so, over bumpy roads. She had to pee, desperately. Her stomach was growling. She could smell her own stink, sour breath and armpit sweat.

  Kane wouldn’t want her so much now, she thought and was surprised at her ability to laugh aloud. The chuckle swiftly became a sigh, and then a half-strangled sob. Not grief, exactly. Not sadness. A combination of both, for the opportunities lost to her. She was never going to see him again; she knew that as surely as she knew the set of armed brutes that had grabbed them were taking her someplace where the only reason there wouldn’t be any bars on the windows would be because there weren’t going to be any windows.

  They were the same men who’d broken down the doors and come through the windows in the dining room where she and Phoenix and a dozen other of the Collins Creek kids had been eating their daily dose of porridge laced with hallucinogens and other drugs. They’d come from the same place, anyway, even if they weren’t likely to be the same exact men.

  * * *

  The table overturns. People are screaming. Persephone freezes, spoon in her hand. Phoenix is beside her. He takes her hand. He pulls her, making her do what he wants her to without tickling her brain the way he usually does. He doesn’t have to—she’s willing to follow him. Behind the table, a narrow space between it and the wall, they crouch and hide, quiet, so quiet.

  The men have guns.

  There is screaming and the stink of something like fire that burns her nose, makes her cough, makes her want to throw up. The table is shoved hard against them, trapping them. It bruises her ankle before she can pull it back. She’s not crying, because Phoenix has her hand. As long as he’s with her, Persephone isn’t going to be afraid.

  A man is there, wearing black. A mask. She’s not scared of masks. The grown-ups here wear them all the time. She can wear one, too, whenever she likes. She’s afraid of the gun in his hand, and the way he grabs at them both over the top edge of the overturned table.

  “Go away!” Phoenix is pushing, pushing, he’s not good enough yet, but he’s afraid and this makes him stronger.

  Persephone puts on another face. She is small but makes herself bigger, makes a beard and an old man face. The men with the guns want the kids, they’re taking all the kids, so she makes herself something else. The man with the gun stumbles back.

  “Get out of here, leave us alone, tell the others there’s nobody back here!” Phoenix says in a voice so hard Persephone thinks it could break bricks.

  The man leaves them. Somehow, they’re all right. More screaming. Shooting. They find a way to run, to get out. There are cars with lights, there are men and women, there is lots of fighting, but they get out. They get away.

  They run away.

  * * *

  Yet here she was now in the back of a van, being taken someplace that would make the very worst days on the street seem like a picnic. Persephone
and Phoenix had heard stories over the years of what happened to the ones from Collins Creek who were taken away, and of those who were rounded up and also taken. Phoenix didn’t trust Vadim or the Crew, but Wyrmwood would be so much worse.

  With a shudder, she shifted on the hard bench as the van bounced. She had to grab one of the manacles to keep herself from falling off. Wherever they were taking her, they were doing it fast and without much care about avoiding the potholes.

  She let herself think of Kane again. He’d promised he would come for her, but it was beyond stupid to think he’d be able to. He would have no clue she’d really been taken this time. No way to find her.

  He would not be coming to save her, yet somehow Persephone clung to the hope that he would find a way.

  Chapter 11

  “They took my keys. We’ll go in your car,” Kane said, making it clear to Samantha that he had no intention of taking no for an answer.

  She didn’t argue, there was that, but she did insist on driving. “You have no idea where we’re going—”

  “Do you?”

  “I know where they’re taking her, and I can drive fast enough to cut them off. I think,” she said grimly as she slid into the passenger seat of the black sedan nobody would ever have been able to remember seeing. “Buckle up.”

  Kane did, securing a heavy-duty three-point belt over his lap and across his chest. He gave her a look as she put the car in gear. “Racetrack?”

  “No. But I do drive fast.” She gave him a sideways look and a laugh. “This car is made to go off road. It doesn’t look like it, but it’s been tricked out for defensive driving. Pursuit.”

  “Can you talk and drive without running us off the road?”

  She nodded, casting a sharp but quick glance at him. “Yes. You want to know about Wyrmwood.”

  “Talk,” Kane said.

  She talked. She told him about the hospital whose patients never got better and left only when they were dead. The security precautions. The studies, the tests.