And reappeared standing directly beside Katherine.
She spun, her hand coming up in an automatic defensive strike. He could have stopped her. She knew this now; she’d seen them move. Vampires slid into speed so fast, it wasn’t traceable by the human eye. But for some reason, the vampire allowed her to hit him. His head snapped to the side with an audible crack. And then he very slowly turned back around, his eyes now glowing red as well.
His expression, however, had not changed. He still appeared calm and in control - and ever so slightly amused. “I think this makes us even, wolf,” he said softly, his red eyes trained on Byron’s tall form. “Your girlfriend packs quite a punch.”
Byron looked from him to Katherine and the platinum glow gradually ebbed from his eyes.
Girlfriend? Katherine thought, somewhat uncharacteristically baffled. She stared at Byron, taking in the blue black of his thick, wavy hair, the strong line of his chin and the perfection of his lips where his fangs peeked threateningly behind them. For the hundredth time since she’d first laid eyes on him, she was lost in his beauty. No model in any magazine advertisement had anything on him.
She imagined him on a motorcycle as he’d told her he’d once been – riding at the head of a motley pack of bikers. Dressed in leather… his hands around the handlebars, working the shift and throttle…. Her mouth watered at the idea. The power.
Girlfriend? she witlessly thought again. With everything going on around them, with the danger they now found themselves in, this was what she was going to focus on?
Beside her, the lead vampire moved forward, approaching Byron once more. Byron, for his part, remained where he was, his gaze sliding from the approaching vampire to Katherine. Their eyes met.
“Well that was fun,” said the vampire. “But play time’s over. Our man of the hour has arrived.” He turned to face an empty spot a few feet away, as did all of the other vampires.
The air over the pine needles and fallen leaves that littered the empty forest space began to shimmer like pixie dust. Then the shimmers coalesced and brightened until they were blinding enough that Kat shielded her eyes. There was a sound like miniature thunder, a clapping of air colliding, but not nearly as loud. When it passed, Kat could tell that the darkness had returned. She uncovered her eyes to find a tenth vampire standing in the small clearing.
At least she assumed he was a vampire. He had vaguely the same look about him. His hair was shoulder-length and straight and nearly as black as Byron’s. His eyes were a very stark blue, and his skin was so pale that vampire-wise he fit the bill perfectly. However, his build was a bit thicker than that of the others. Muscle-wise, he looked more like Byron.
Still, there was the same feel about him as with the other vampires. It was probably the mixture of the warlock stuff and pure magic that she was sensing on the “Offspring.” She was starting to recognize it for what it was.
“Seth,” the lead vampire greeted the newcomer. “Allow me to introduce Byron Caige and Katherine Elizabeth Dare.”
He knows my middle name too? thought Katherine. Her knuckles were hurting a bit from when she’d struck him. He, on the other hand, did not appear to have been effected in the least. It was a painful reminder of just what kind of creature she was dealing with.
The new vampire – Seth – stepped out of the clearing and approached Katherine. Byron was immediately mobile, but this time the lead vampire apparently didn’t feel like messing around with him because he raised his right hand, spoke an archaic word that echoed through the forest trees, and Byron fell to his knees in the dirt. He leaned forward, bracing himself with his hands, clearly weakened to the point of near unconsciousness.
“What did you do to him?” Kat demanded, trying her best not to rush to his side. She knew she wouldn’t get far.
“While I have to admire his devotion, at the moment we need your cooperation, Miss Dare, and werewolf antics will only waste what little time we have,” the vampire told her coolly.
Seth moved past Byron’s kneeling form, affording the werewolf a mere glance of interest before he was again capturing Katherine’s gaze in his. He came to stand before her and studied her in silence.
Kat’s skin crawled. The air felt tight, almost hard to breathe.
“Katherine Dare,” Seth repeated her name. There was something familiar to the sound of his voice. Kat couldn’t place it… it was a rumble or a deepness that the voices of the other vampires in the clearing didn’t seem to possess. “Something tells me that at the moment, you’re going to be the more reasonable one to deal with.” This, he said with a sharp glance at Byron over his shoulder.
Byron was watching him from where he knelt, doubled over in the dirt. His quicksilver eyes glowed eerily in his handsome face. He was once more surrounded by vampires.
Seth turned back around and Kat tried to prepare herself for whatever was coming. “You helped me to save the woman I love,” he told her plainly. There was no duplicity in his tone. His expression was one of such simple honesty that it seemed almost bored. “So I feel I owe you a similar boon, Miss Dare.”
Save? Kat thought. I didn’t rescue anyone. Not that she would have said as much out loud. If he was willing to believe she’d done him a favor, she’d ben an utter idiot to want to change his mind.
Seth smiled. “You obviously aren’t familiar enough with our kind yet, Katherine,” he said. “So just to get the record straight – I can read your mind.”
Kat blanched a little, but her surprise was relatively mild. She’d suspected as much, truth be told. The other vampire – the one who’d cast the spells on them in the cave – had responded to her as if he could read her thoughts. Now she knew that he could.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Then you know I didn’t save anyone. And I have no idea who you are, much less who the woman you love is.” Damn, she thought.
“In point of fact, you helped quite a lot,” Seth said. He looked at the ground for a moment, contemplated something in silence, and then shrugged. “And so I think that you and I should have a talk.”
Chapter Nineteen
“The Rub”
Byron didn’t fail to notice the way Katherine’s every breath was monitored by the men around her. He may be standing right next to her, but to the number of very dangerous creatures surrounding them, he was a mere obstacle that stood in the way of a really good night. Kat’s blood was singing a siren song and he wasn’t the only one who could hear it.
He also didn’t fail to notice how “Seth” and the lead vampire hung close to the both of them, almost seeming to guard them from the others. Or maybe they were just guarding Katherine.
It was fortunate that none of them seemed to want to harm her because Byron wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it if they had. Not now. He’d been placed in black diamond bonds; they were bracers with the dark diamond dust enmeshed in their fabric. They were the same kind the princess had used on him for fifty years. Whether his restraints had been constructed of metal or leather, they’d always had crushed black diamonds embedded in them. It was the primary material component in spells that enabled a warlock or vampire to maintain control over a victim.
He’d also been draped with so many spells there in that redwood clearing, he could barely breathe without inhaling dark magic. Apparently they didn’t want to take any chances with Byron interrupting them again, and he had to hand it to them. With this much dark power wrapped around him, he wouldn’t be acting out again any time soon.
The three vampires he’d attacked earlier had healed completely and, though their eyes were wary when they fell on Byron, their expressions held neither malice nor any kind of need for revenge.
Again, he considered how different they were from the princess’s private guard. In fact, these men reminded Byron of the military: take orders, follow instructions, show no personality of your own whatsoever.
It would have intrigued Byron but for the fact that he was mos
tly just pissed. He was getting really sick and tired of being a prisoner. Time and again, he would gain the slightest taste of freedom only to have it ripped from him as if it had been no more than decoration on his chest. He often wondered if he’d lived some sort of past life as a slave owner and this was his comeuppance. He hoped not. The very idea made him nauseated.
It was sort of how he felt when he thought of what would happen to Katherine once he was dead and the mark on her neck disappeared. Because from the looks of it, that was where things were headed. Byron couldn’t really imagine another viable outcome.
On the up side, once he’d been covered in black magic, the guards had backed off. When he got to his booted feet and strode toward Katherine, she’d rushed to meet him half way, and neither of them were stopped. He’d felt the ripple of tension caused by the instant jealousy his nearness to her set off; every single man in that clearing wanted to be in his place. But they’d held their ground and kept their distance.
Now he and Katherine sat side by side. She was warm next to him, but he could feel a tremble of faint fear move through her beneath the grip he had on her waist. She was trying to be brave, but he could hear the rapid fire hammering of her little heart.
He felt her take a deep breath. “What’s the deal with…” She swallowed hard and continued, “vampires… and the redwood forest?” she asked. She and Byron rested together on one of the logs that surrounded the bonfire the Offspring had magically created. The fire was warm and the forest was cold, so Byron had to admit he was grateful they’d gone to the trouble of thinking of something that would keep a human – and a wolf – comfortable in such conditions. God knew it didn’t do anything for the Offspring. Vampires never got cold, and fire was one of the few things that could kill them.
“The warlock king’s estate was in the middle of Muir woods,” Kat continued. He turned to gaze down at her. “And now we’re here. Why?” she asked.
He had to hand it to her for her bravery. The Huntress obviously preferred to be in the know and not even fear of death by blood draining was going to keep her from asking what she wanted.
Seth moved away from them to sit on a log not far away. The vampire with the different colored eyes remained by their sides, not too close, but close enough that Byron knew he did so purely to act as a reminder. His stance was easy, however, and his expression was calm as usual.
Kat glanced nervously up at the lead vampire before turning back to Seth.
“Vampires prefer moist climates,” Seth told her as he gracefully seated himself. “The redwood forest is one of the few places on the planet with this climate that possesses trees as old as we are. We feel comfortable here,” he said as he gestured to the massive woods around them. “The warlock king set his estate within these woods for his daughter’s sake.”
Kat absorbed this information quietly. When the silence stretched until she shifted beside Byron, Seth straightened, suddenly all business.
“Speaking of Malachi Wraythe,” he said, “the warlock king came to our sovereign recently and proposed a bargain.”
I knew it, thought Byron.
Seth went on. “For thousands of years, the werewolf community has existed under the false impression that the females born within their race lack an active werewolf gene – one that would give them the same powers and abilities as their male siblings.”
“It isn’t a false impression,” Byron said softly. “It’s very much true.”
“Granted, that certainly seems to be the case,” said Seth, splaying his long graceful fingers out before him in a show of placation. “However, the fact is, your females have only suffered this inequality recently – anthropologically speaking.”
Byron’s gaze narrowed. “What game are you playing at, vampire?”
“No game,” said Seth. “It has fallen on my shoulders to relay to you the situation and that’s what I’m doing.” His tone neither rose nor inflected. He was as seemingly calm as his charismatic and scarred vampire companion.
“Go on,” Byron said.
*****
It had been a strange night thus far. Katherine was already on information overload with everything that she’d seen and heard and felt in the last forty-eight hours, but this had pretty much sent her over the too-much-information waterfall.
She’d known about the fact that werewolf females were born helpless, of course. It was one of the few things she’d truly disliked about the race other than the fact that she’d thought one of them had killed her father. It was so drastically unfair that the women were born so powerless, unable to heal like their brothers, unable to run as fast or lift as much. In her hurt and angry mind, it had simply been further proof that the race was truly as demonic as the Hunter organization made it out to be.
But like so much of what she’d thought she knew, that knowledge turned out to be wrong. Yes, the females were born powerless, but not because of some horrible design flaw in their natures or any deliberate, forced hierarchy where the men lorded over the women. Werewolves were not the criminals in this crime, but the victims.
Roughly four thousand years ago, a warlock had taken half of their power as his own, and since that fateful moment, female werewolves were born without the benefits of the race that their brothers enjoyed. They were also never born dormants. Well, almost never. Seth seemed to have personal experience with one very special dormant who happened to have also been a female-born. But as far as he knew, she was the only one.
It was a lot of information to take in. Especially when Seth went on to tell them that the power the warlock had taken had then been passed down from him to his son and his son’s son and so forth, for the next several thousand years. According to Seth, the power now rested in the hands of one Malachi Wraythe, the warlock king.
“That explains a lot,” said Byron. Kat turned to look up at him. So close beside her, he was a rod of tension that radiated a nearly unnatural heat. Between him and the fire in front of her, it could have begun snowing and she wouldn’t have noticed.
“Indeed,” agreed Seth. “Wraythe has always had more power than he knew what to do with. Even given the curse that fuels his abilities, he can’t seem to do anything on his own. You know of what I speak,” he said softly, giving Byron a meaningful look. “Did he ever face you without the help of one or more of his men while you were his daughter’s prisoner?”
Byron’s tall form stiffened. Kat found herself wanting to inch away from him. There was an uncomfortable vibration coming off of him at the mention of his imprisonment. For an instant, Kat imagined the wolf she’d seen over her father’s dead body, the massive black wolf that she’d faced in the clearing on the warlock king’s grounds. He was huge and terrifying. It was startling to recall that it was that very same wolf that lay, barely hidden, beneath the handsome façade that was Byron Caige.
“No,” Byron said simply. His eyes were glowing again.
“No,” Seth repeated. “He kept his own unwilling bride locked up with the help of borrowed magic and vampire guards. The man does not deserve the power he possesses.”
There was a silence following that decree that none of them seemed to want to break. Certainly no one disagreed.
“However, the warlock king’s unworthiness is not what is important here,” Seth finally continued. “What is important is that the curse his ancestor placed upon your kind can be reversed.”
Another silence stretched, this one pregnant with a mixture of shock and stark disbelief. “You’re lying,” Byron finally accused. “Why would I lie?” “Why do vampires do any of the things they do?” Byron asked, his expression darkening. “I have no idea.” “Hear him out” Kat interrupted, laying a gentle hand on Byron’s arm. The rod of tension that had stiffened his body seemed to instantly relax a bit. He turned to look down at her.
“I knew she would be the logical one,” Seth said softly.
Byron shot him a hard look and seemed to mull something over. “Okay then
, have out with it,” he finally said. “How can this curse be reversed?”
Seth looked from Byron to Katherine and back again, and something dark flashed before his ice blue eyes. Kat knew that look. He was going to have to say something he didn’t want to say.
“Lord Wraythe has agreed to release the werewolf race from the bindings that leach its power on one condition,” he said.
“Release us?” Byron questioned. “Is such a thing possible?”
“It is,” said Seth. “But at great cost to Malachi. He must willingly die to release the magic. It will run free with the blood of his death.”
Kat felt her jaw drop and her eyes widen. Could what he was saying be true? There was actually a way to change everything for the werewolf race?
If so… if he was being honest, then Kat couldn’t imagine why the warlock king would agree to do such a thing. Why would he die to ensure the future of the werewolf race? If anything, he had to hate werewolves right now; he probably believed that Byron had something to do with his daughter’s death.
And why would the vampires think this was a good thing? What did they stand to gain from this deal?
Katherine could imagine that Byron was as surprised as she was about all of this; he had yet to say anything where he sat beside her. But she couldn’t look up at him to verify her hunch. She was too caught up in what Seth was telling them. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why in God’s name would the warlock king agree to do such a thing? What can he possibly hope to gain from such a deal? Not to mention the vampires?”
“My sovereign has his reasons for showing interest in this arrangement,” Seth said. “They remain his reasons and his alone.” “I just bet they do,” Kat said. “And the warlock king? Why would he do this?” Again that dark look crossed Seth’s features. “As I said,” he began, “Wraythe has agreed to do so on one condition.” Here it comes, thought Kat. The other shoe dropping.
“He wants the guaranteed death of the man who killed his daughter.”