Grow the fuck up! Quit being a goddamn whiny baby!
With that reprimand ringing in his internal ears, Jack turned back around.
Crap. She sat on the edge of the couch, huge brown eyes, full pouty lips, long thick lashes, gorgeous masses of hair, scrubbed pink skin, scent like an angel – a bleeding angel – staring at him expectantly, and all grown up thought fled his very male shifter brain. All the reprimanding in the world couldn’t get him out of this struggle.
He swallowed hard and made his way to the couch adjacent to hers. But he didn’t sit. He was too restless. “I know you must have a million questions.”
“That doesn’t begin to describe it,” she said quietly. Her voice was small in her fear, but he could see every muscle in her body tensed for fight or flight. She didn’t trust him. And why would she? He’d stalked her for twenty years. She’d run away from the only home she’d ever really known because of him. Trust was going to be a long time coming.
“Fair enough,” he said, clearing his throat. He was starting to sweat. Jesus. “Samantha, I want to start by telling you that I never meant to scare you. I swear it.”
She stared up at him, eyes wide, and suddenly said, “Bullshit.” She stood up, and her cheeks turned red. “You stalk a girl who’s all of fifteen years old and you expect her to not be scared?”
“I wasn’t stalking you,” he told her. “I was following you. To keep you safe.”
“You what?!” she asked, confusion and disbelief warring for control of her features.
The raised tone of her voice flipped some kind of switch in Jack. He felt his magic move through the veins just beneath his skin, and the smell of her blood grew stronger. “I was protecting you!” he said, his own voice rising to match hers.
“From what?” she demanded, “Because as far as I could tell, you were the only one giving me grief!”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Sam. You have no idea what kinds of things would have given you grief if I hadn’t been there.”
“If you hadn’t been there? If you hadn’t been there?! Jack Colton, if you hadn’t been there, I would have grown up with my aunt and uncle, gone to college, and gotten a regular job like the rest of American society! Instead, I grew up on the streets and begged for food as a goddamn dog!”
Jack had the sudden image of her suffering, of her begging, and that was the last straw. He felt his temperature gauge hit the red, and his eyes took on a glowing cast. Maybe his anger was misdirected, but there was no helping it. “No, Samantha,” he said in a slow, cold voice filled with bad memories and hard truths. “If I hadn’t been there, you would be dead. As would your aunt and uncle. They would have been killed by Hunters, just like my parents and my little sister.”
Sam stared at him in silence, her expression unchanging, but her eyes softening. He knew she was stunned. He knew she was processing what he’d just told her. And he knew it was too much. So he took her momentary silence for the brief excuse it was to continue.
“Sam, the Hunters found you a very short while after I did. If you had been at home, I have little doubt your aunt and uncle would have been killed. I might not have been able to stop them. But you left, and as you moved, so did we.”
By “we,” he was referring to himself and the Hunters he killed along the way. He shook his head. “They came after you dozens of times. I never wanted you to know. You had enough to deal with.”
She still said nothing. But her legs must have grown weak, because she sat back down, landing rather roughly on her rump. Her eyes grew distant, and she slowly and numbly placed her hands in her lap. “My parents…”
“Died in a fire when you were a child,” he finished for her. She never talked about her parents’ death, not with anyone. He would know. He knew everything about her. “And I know what you’re thinking, Sam.”
She looked up at him. She was holding her breath. So he told her the truth.
“And you’re right,” he said. Hunters had murdered her parents when she was seven years old. “It was the Hunters started that fire. It’s one of their favorite ways to kill our kind,” he told her softly. “They believe fire purifies the soul.”
Twenty years ago, after he’d found Samantha at that high school, he’d begun doing his homework. And he’d learned about her parents. He didn’t have suspicions, he had certainties. He spent the next year and a half tracking down the Hunters who had killed them. He made them talk. Apparently her mother and father had been shot in their bed. The house was then set on fire and the Hunters ran. Samantha crawled out her second story bedroom window and watched everything she’d ever known go up in smoke.
But Sam didn’t need to know everything about that. Not now. Not yet. From what he could hear, it already sounded as if her heart was going to crash free of her ribcage and head for the skies like Meatloaf’s infamous bat out of hell. She sat stock-still, straight-backed, and her face was white as a sheet. Her racing heart continued to pump blood through her wound as well. She’d done a very good job with the bandaging; it wasn’t yet showing through her white shirt. But it would if he didn’t change the subject and calm her down.
He also needed to calm himself down. The scent of her was filling the air around him, making his body ache.
Jack schooled his instincts, closing his eyes and calling himself every name in the book. Then he said, “Sam, I have to speak with Roman D’Angelo. He needs to know….” Shit, he thought. That was one of the many things he needed to discuss with her – the fact that he was one of the Thirteen Kings, had officially re-claimed the position, and that he was hoping beyond hope that Sam would join him at that Table. But like so many of the things he wanted to talk to her about, now might not be the best time. Because there was only so much a person could accept at one given moment, and Sam was probably at her limit.
“Those sons of bitches,” she suddenly whispered. Jack blinked, and it took him a moment to realize that she wasn’t referring to Roman D’Angelo and the Thirteen; she couldn’t be. As far as he was aware, she didn’t know they existed other than the former Shifter King, Darius Walker. No. She was talking about the Hunters.
He made his way between the couches until he was standing in front of her. He prepared to assure her that he would find the Hunter leader, kill him, and put an end to their disgusting “hunt” once and for all. He would avenge her parents’ deaths ultimately – and his parents’ and his sister’s as well. But he lost his breath and lost his words when she looked up at him at last. Because for the first time since he’d met her, for the first time in twenty years, Samantha O’Neill’s eyes were lit up bright red, glowing with all the passion and magic of a very pissed off magishifter.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Oliver Allen cringed, inhaling sharply through clenched teeth as his boss slammed him up against the wall. He’d never have thought there was that much strength in the man. Abraham Silence wasn’t a particularly “buff” individual. He didn’t eat six chicken breasts a day, drink “protein shakes,” or refuse to ingest carbs. He hadn’t taken so many steroids that his body looked like a balloon that ran out of air before it reached his head. He was a fifty to sixty year old man with thick but graying hair, laugh lines he hadn’t earned, and arthritis. But he was somehow capable of lifting Allen off the ground with one hand and holding him there, cutting off his oxygen supply as he did.
“It’s been three hours. A transport signature is supposed to be easy to trace,” Silence hissed menacingly. “So what seems to be your problem, Allen?”
Allen opened his mouth to respond, but when he went to draw breath for his words, he remembered there was no air. Not that he’d ever forgotten. Silence was cutting off his air supply.
As if he realized suddenly what he was doing, the Hunter leader’s lip curled up in a demeaning smile, and his grip around Allen’s throat lessened just enough for him to gasp in a gulp of life saving oxygen. He did so several times, choking and coughing in-between ragged inhales, and then clo
sed his eyes to concentrate. It took that much effort to speak.
“The… use of blood… makes a spell stronger,” he gasped out. “It’s like this… spell… was made with it.”
He’d been trying to find the transport signature of the man who’d taken the dragon shifter away, and he’d come up against nothing but road blocks as he had. What he said was true. When someone used blood for a spell, it made that spell much, much stronger. This particular transport felt as though it was not only aided by the sacrifice of blood, but embedded in blood. It was like the spell literally ran through the user’s veins.
Silence considered him for a long, very uncomfortable moment. And then, just when Allen was certain he was going to release him and let him breathe, he tightened his grip again instead. Once more, the warlock’s air was completely cut off.
Silence leaned in, and Allen felt something dark wash over him. Sound shifted, becoming distant. Light faded. He wondered for a moment whether he was losing consciousness. He thought of blood clots in his brain and things exploding – and death.
“I think you need to learn a lesson about taking my requests lightly, warlock, so you’re going to take a brief nap,” he told Allen, his tone so cold it was unfamiliar. “When you wake up, despite the headache you will undoubtedly be nursing, you will have until the end of the day to get me that signature and trace that transport,” he said, punctuating his words with a slam up against the wall. “Find the magishifter.”
The magishifter? Allen thought distantly. What is that…. But the thought was moving further away by the nanosecond. He was fading fast.
“Or there will be no place on Earth you can hide from me.”
The Hunter leader made this last threat with a hissing breath, one that reached into Allen’s nerves and made them vibrate as if he were touching a live wire. Stars moved through what was left of Allen’s vision. He had no feeling below his neck. As his brain shut down, so did his nervous system. Pain was going away, discomfort was dwindling. This was the peace that came before death and that so many attributed to gods or heaven, he knew.
Just before Allen’s world went black, Abraham Silence’s eyes lit up. They began to glow red like the fires of Hell.
But that must have been Allen’s imagination. It wasn’t possible. Not for the Hunter leader, the man who hated anything inhuman with a vitriolic passion. No. The warlock was just seeing things as consciousness failed him and the night moved in.
And then he saw nothing.
*****
Every thought in the book must have gone through Samantha O’Neill’s mind that morning when she woke up alone in a room she didn’t recognize. First, she thought she’d moved again and had simply forgotten she’d done so. She’d moved so many times in her life that she’d definitely been here before – in this space of confusion one experiences in the morning when they’ve forgotten what they’ve recently done and their surroundings are foreign, and it takes a moment for everything in the recent past to catch up.
But this time, when the recent past caught up, there was too much to make sense of. For a few seconds, thoughts ran disjointed and muddled through her mind like fireflies on an Indiana summer’s night: She was in Jack Colton’s apartment. In his spare bedroom. The Hunters were after her. They’d shot her in the shoulder. She’d run away from her aunt and uncle’s home. She’d spent a night or so in a stand-alone emergency room. She took out Jack Colton’s eye. The Shifter King, Darius Walker, had been abducted. Sam’s best friend was a guardian. Malcolm Cole the famous author was a werewolf. The Hunters killed her parents….
When that last thought hit her head, it brought all of her thinking to a halt as if someone had applied the mental breaks. She went back. Ran through it again. This time, she put it all in the correct order: The Hunters killed her parents. She’d moved in with her aunt and uncle. The doppelshifter found her. She took out his eye and ran. He followed her, protecting her from the same Hunters who’d killed her parents. Now they were in Chicago together. Her best friend Raven was actually her guardian. The Hunters shot her. They abducted the Shifter King. And she was in Jack Colton’s apartment.
Once she had it straight in her head, she sat up and shoved off her covers. The spare bedroom was clean, well decorated, fresh. The sheets and blankets were white, the windows had white venetian blinds, and the carpet was white. She noticed a spot of red on the blankets she’d shoved down and she blanched. That was her blood.
She’d bled on Jack’s sheets. Embarrassment warred with worry as she looked down at her white tee-shirt. She’d only laid down for a short nap, and she’d slept in her clothes in case she had to get up really quickly and leave again. But when she’d chosen a white shirt, she hadn’t been thinking things through. White shows blood better than anything.
Thank goodness she’d taken off the jacket and placed it on the end of the bed before laying down.
Sam ran her hand over her face, rubbing her eyes for a moment before grabbing the jacket and heading to the hallway door. She placed her ear to it. There was no noise from beyond it. I’m being stupid, she thought. What was with the clandestine bullshit? The jig was up. The cat was out of the bag. And the shit had hit the fan.
Okay, that’s enough platitudes, she thought next as she opened the door and headed out into the hall. There was no sign of Jack. So she hurried to the master bedroom, which was open. Still no sign of him. She rushed to the bathroom and grabbed all of the first aid materials she’d used the night before, redressing the wound as quickly as she could. It was beyond obvious to her that the pain killers had worn off, and for some reason injuries always hurt worse later than earlier. By the time she’d finished, she was in a full-on horrible mood.
She put the first aid stuff away, throwing it violently into the drawers and cabinets she’d pulled it all from just because it made her feel a little better to do so. Then she disappeared into the giant walk-in closet she’d spent hours admiring the day before. She stopped and considered all of the still-tagged gorgeous clothing and took a long, deep breath. That made her feel just a little better too. But not much.
After a few minutes, she hurriedly changed her white shirt out for another of the same color and brand. It would have made more sense to go with black with her injury. But white looked better with the red leather jacket. And why did she care how she looked right now? That was something she refused to think about.
“Coffee?”
Sam jumped and screamed, spinning around like she was a black belt in Kung Fu or karate or some other martial art she actually knew nothing about. Jack stood in the doorway of the enormous walk-in closet, leaning against the door jam. He had a paper cup of steaming coffee in each hand and looked like a guardian angel and the devil wrapped into one.
Sam swallowed hard. Her heart rate sped up, making her shoulder throb incessantly. “Yes, please,” she said, taking the cup he offered her. Their fingers brushed as he gave her the drink, and fissures of electricity rode up through them, up her arm, and into her chest. She tried to ignore it, but felt the blush enter her cheeks regardless.
So she turned slightly and placed the cup to her lips, inhaling. It was a mocha. She turned the cup around and read off the abbreviations written in black marker on the side. Four shots of espresso, soy milk, sugar-free mocha. It was her signature coffee.
“How did you know?” she asked softly before taking a slow, careful drink. It was still hot, and the liquid burned pleasantly across her tongue and down her throat. She closed her eyes.
“Lucky guess.”
Sam’s eyes flew open. Jack smiled rakishly, and his blue eye flashed. “I’m also thinking that you need another pain killer or two right about now.” He pulled the bottle from before out of his black leather jacket and placed it on the bathroom counter. He glanced at her over his shoulder and his rakish smile was back, stunning and wicked. “Another lucky guess.” Then he turned and left the bathroom with a tall, graceful swagger.
“Of course it was,” she whispere
d after him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
They were sitting at the bar in Jack’s kitchen, and Jack had been telling her about a property he owned that they would be transporting to shortly. He’d apparently told her so that she could take a moment to pack what she wanted from the apartment.
Samantha had mixed feelings about this. She didn’t own anything in that flat. Not a thing. Everything inside it was his, from the underwear she was wearing to the jacket she had decided she couldn’t live without. The boots, the toothbrush, the very bandages over her shoulder. The only thing he didn’t own was her. So she felt quite strange packing it all up. It was almost as if she were surrendering. And that didn’t sit well with her. Not at all.
But now wasn’t the time to be stubborn. Not with the Hunters on her tail. So she swallowed hard and tried to get her mind off her discomfort. “What is this place we’re going to?” she asked as she used her fork to push around the remnants of the breakfast he’d made for her. He was an excellent cook. Which was also irritating, because it was just too perfect. “Where is it?” she added.
“It’s on the coast in California. That’s about all I can tell you. I haven’t actually seen it myself.”
“You own a house you’ve never even stepped foot in?” Sam turned wide eyes on him. All at once, she was reminded of how little she knew about Jack Colton. And she couldn’t help but wonder how much of that was dangerous. He still hadn’t told her how he earned his money.
Jack studied her a moment in silence where he sat across the bar from her. He straightened, and his attention focused. His look became calculating. He spoke as if he were measuring each word much more carefully now because he’d already screwed up in telling her he’d never been there and didn’t want to make any more mistakes. “I wouldn’t call it a house,” he said slowly but dismissively. “But it’s a living space, and it’ll be safer than this. We shouldn’t stay in any one place too long.”