“If I can’t fight off a pack of puppies, I deserve to bite it.”
“And Syre would come down on me in a swarm of vamps. How much shit am I expected to have shoveled on me?”
That knocked her back a bit. She looked at the queen-sized air mattress, clearly debating the risks and benefits of sharing it with him.
“We’re both adults,” he pointed out. Then he groaned softly as Sarah smoothed ointment over his torn skin. He’d be healing faster if he was eating properly, but he was quickly becoming undernourished on the sparse amount of food to be found while roughing it. “Nothing wil happen that you don’t want.”
“I don’t want anything besides you keeping your end of our agreement.”
“Then you’ve got no worries. Why don’t you show me those property specs you mentioned?”
Vash stared at him for a long moment, then muttered something beneath her breath and dug in her bag. She set it down on the ground a moment later, her hand emerging from the depths with a folder clutched in her grip. She looked at Sarah, who was tying off a bandage. “Are you done yet?”
Sarah’s gaze searched Elijah’s face for instruction.
He dismissed her with an easy, “Thank you, Sarah.”
The lycan closed the first-aid kit and said, “I’l get you some dinner, Alpha. Esther made an awesome venison stew.”
“I appreciate that.” Ideal y, they’d each be eating their own deer, but they weren’t in a position to dine wel under the circumstances. Instead they were divvying up what they caught among everyone, which kept them alive. Barely.
“Also…” She offered a timid smile. “I’d like to stay with you when you make the arrangements to send some of us out with the vampires.”
“Aw,” Vash crooned with syrupy sweetness. “Puppy love. How touching.”
Sarah rose to her feet with graceful dignity, but the look she shot Vashti was poisonous, a rare display of hatred from an Omega.
“I’l work something out,” Elijah answered, his decision taking into account her innate Omega gift for soothing and comforting others. She’d be best utilized in a support position, rather than on a hunt.
“Thank you, Alpha.” She left the room in a calm, graceful glide.
Pushing to his feet, he rol ed his shoulders back, feeling better already. He felt Vash’s gaze slide over him and he glanced at her with an arched brow.
“Wil you put some damn clothes on?” she snapped.
“Why don’t you take yours off?”
She bared her fangs. “In your wet dreams, lycan.”
He shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
CHAPTER 5
They were on the road before dawn and across the Utah/Nevada border before midmorning.
Vash gripped the steering wheel and tried not to think about the restless night behind her. Elijah, damn him, had slept like a log, which said more clearly than anything that he didn’t consider her a threat at al .
She’d tried to work. There was so much to be done. But she’d been distracted by the way he had stretched out next to her with one arm tossed carelessly over his head, showing off beautiful y defined biceps. And the way the sheet had clung tantalizingly low on his hips…A tiny tug would have revealed al of his impressive assets.
Vash loved a healthy man’s body as much as the next woman, but Elijah’s was a work of art, his powerful frame covered in mouthwatering ridges of muscle she wanted to trace with her tongue and hands and— “These are al warehouses,” Elijah muttered, looking over the property listings she’d printed out.
“Warehouses with plenty of parking, room for a helipad, top-of-the-line electrical systems, and air-conditioning.” She glanced at him. “I know how touchy you lycans get when you’re overheated.”
“It’s not easy being furry.”
It took a moment for the levity of his dry statement to sink in. Looking out the windshield, she felt her lips curve. He was feeling more himself, it seemed, and she was relieved. His pain yesterday had moved her, made her see him in a far more personal way than she would’ve wished. His sincere grief proved his strength of character in many ways—he’d taken an action he knew would cost him personal y to benefit the many. She respected both that toughness and his wil ingness to shed tears without shame.
“These properties are expensive,” he said bluntly. “Syre’s making a hel of an investment in an al iance that hasn’t been tested.”
“I’l kil you if you double-cross me. Stake your head on a pike for other lycans to see.”
“You’re expecting me to screw you over.”
“Your breed’s track record isn’t so hot. Your ancestors ditched us for Adrian to save their hides and you just ditched Adrian, once again to save your ass.”
His gaze seared her profile. “You’re skipping over mil ennia and multiple generations. With the average lycan lifespan being two hundred and thirty years, there’s not a single lycan in existence who’s been touched by what happened to the Watchers. Most of them couldn’t even tel you which angel they’re descended from.”
Yet the memory of her fal was as fresh to her as if it had occurred mere weeks ago instead of lifetimes. “So if you forget an obligation, it doesn’t count?”
“Not what I meant. It’s just a tough sel enforcing promises made on behalf of someone who’s centuries away from being born.”
“Your great-great-grandwolfies made that decision for you. A shame you can’t ask them about it.” Familiar bitterness coated her tongue. “I expected fidelity from the angels who served beside me. We made our beds—it’s not a tough sel thinking they’d be honorable for lying in them.”
“I was told the Fal en who became lycans hadn’t broken the laws the rest of you did,” Elijah said.
Vash shot him a scathing glance and became even more irritated by how delicious he looked. She would’ve thought that after seeing how impressive he was naked, seeing him dressed would be no big deal. But he managed to make the casual attire of wide-legged jeans and plain black T-shirt look stunning. He was a big, brawny hunk of a male, capable of taking on a woman of her strength and force of wil in a way very few men could. That got to her. Made her hot and hungry for the greedy touch of a passionate man’s hands. His hands. The hands she’d watched stroke over his bare skin in deliberate provocation.
Of course, she wasn’t even sure she remembered how to have sex anymore… She looked away. “That’s a cop-out. We al lost our way in some manner or another. We were tasked with observing and reporting. Any sort of contact with mortals was outside our scope as Watchers—seeing, talking, hearing, touching, teaching. But we were scholars. We thirsted for knowledge, the giving and receiving of it. We couldn’t resist the desire to interact.”
He tucked the property spec sheets back in the file. “But you didn’t. Not like the others did.”
“I took a mate.”
“Charron. Another Watcher like you. Not a mortal.”
“I know what they say about me, that I martyred myself out of a twisted sense of loyalty to the others, that I wasn’t as guilty because I mated with another angel. But I fraternized in nonsexual ways. I taught what I knew, gave man knowledge they weren’t ready for yet. So when I walked up to a Sentinel with my head held high and accepted my punishment without a fight, it’s because I deserved it. I also thought His fury was just a test of our resolve. The Creator had never al owed the shedding of an angel’s blood before. I thought if we showed our remorse and repentance that we’d be forgiven our trespasses.” She blew out her breath in a rush. “And then the Sentinels were created.”
Her eyes lost their focus on the road, her mind rewinding to that bleak, heartrending time of her life. She would never forget looking down from her hidden vantage, seeing Adrian and Syre battling in the field below while Sentinels rimmed one side and the soon-to-be-Fal en Watchers the other.
The deadly dance had been terrifyingly beautiful. Adrian with his alabaster wings and Syre with wings of iridescent blue. Both men tal and dark.
Works of art lovingly crafted by the Creator. The best and most favored of their respective castes.
Their fists had pummeled each other viciously; tenderizing flesh and rippling muscle. Twisting and lunging, their wings had swirled fluidly around them like massive capes.
But Syre had been no match for the honed instrument of punishment that was Adrian. Syre was a scholar; Adrian a warrior. Syre had been softened by the humanity that seeped into him via his love for his mortal mate. Adrian was too new to the earth; his control and purpose had yet to be eroded by emotion of any kind. And his entire body was lethal. Unlike the Watchers, the Sentinels were weaponized from head to toe. The tips of their feathers sliced like knives, and their hands and feet clawed with talons that shredded through skin and bone.
Syre had been vulnerable; Adrian inviolate.
In the moment after the Sentinel leader had severed the wings from Syre’s back, his head had lifted and his flame-blue gaze had locked with hers. There had been nothing in the cerulean depths but angelfire, the scorching vengeance of the Creator from which he’d been forged. Over time Vashti would watch those eyes change, as the Sentinel leader settled into his life on earth and fel prey to Shadoe’s erotic hunger.
“Hey.” Elijah’s voice broke into her reverie. “Where’d you go?”
“Adrian’s getting a taste of his own medicine now,” she said hoarsely, thinking of the Sentinel’s beautiful crimson-tipped wings. Those ruby bands of honor were the bloodstains that marked him as the first being ever to draw the blood of an angel. “I hope it goes down like acid.”
He withdrew the aviator shades he had slung over his col ar and put them on. “There are very few people I admire more than Adrian.”
“He’s a hypocritical asshat. A total douche for breaking the very rules he busted our asses over.”
“Wasn’t his decision to punish you, and it isn’t his decision to not be punished himself. That order has to come from the Creator, right? If you break a law in front of a cop and the cop doesn’t arrest you, whose fault is it that you don’t get punished?”
“So? He could at least show a little remorse. A little guilt. Something. He’s completely unrepentant.”
“Something I admire him for.”
“You would.”
“To me an asshat is a guy who’d fuck around, angst about it, then fuck around again as if angsting about it absolved him in some twisted way.
Adrian owns his mistakes and he owns his feelings for Lindsay, which is just what you did when you gave up your wings without a fight. I think he’d do the same thing, if the punishment comes his way. He certainly wouldn’t make excuses, because he’s not making any now.”
Frowning, Vash stared across the hood at the expanse of flat nothingness that hugged the stretch of Nevada highway they traveled on. Resenting Adrian was one of her tenets. She wasn’t prepared to lose it alongside losing her hatred of every single lycan in existence. One truce was enough for now. “Shut up.”
She didn’t look at him, but she suspected he was smiling. Smug bastard.
“Our exit,” he said, and she pul ed off.
“This works.”
Vash looked at him. “Just like that? First place we see and you’re done.”
He glanced around the vast open space again and shrugged. It had been the distribution center for a smal import company that hadn’t survived the economic downturn. The exterior was marked by loading bay doors and the interior by soaring ceilings that suspended moving cranes on elaborate tracks. Skylights flooded the space with il umination, dissipating any possibility of feeling closed in. “It has everything you say it needs. No point in wasting the day looking at more of the same. Besides, you liked this one best, and it’s your dime we’re dropping.”
It didn’t bother him to take the handout and it didn’t shake his confidence, which she grudgingly admired. “I didn’t say I liked this one best.”
He shot her a look.
“Okay, then.” She pul ed out her iPhone and cal ed Syre’s assistant, Raven, to complete the sale. Then she speed dialed Raze. “Hey,” she said when he answered. “You win. And…I didn’t cheat.”
“Ha! Be there in ten.”
She ended the cal and met Elijah’s gaze, explaining, “He was sure you’d go with my choice.”
Amusement warmed his eyes. There’d be no repudiations from him, no defensiveness, even though it could be easy for her to say he was so used to fol owing commands that he was easily led. His poise and self-possession stirred her admiration. And her desire. There was nothing so attractive as a powerful, handsome, and self-assured man.
God. What the hel was the matter with her?
She needed to eat. That was it. She hadn’t fed in days, and hunger was making her vulnerable to Elijah’s appeal and making it too easy to forget what he was.
Trying to get her mind off it, she texted Salem to make sure he was en route with the busload of lycans Stephan had been tasked with rounding up. Assured that everything was on track, she took a moment to make sure the Alpha was on track, too.
“Are you al right?” she asked him. “About yesterday.”
“No.” His face shuttered. “But I’l survive.”
“You handled the announcement wel last night. I meant to tel you that.” But she had been distracted by aggravation with the fawning lycan who’d patched him up. Not that she’d ever admit it.
He stared at her a minute. “Thanks. And thanks for the pep talk.”
“No problem.” Suddenly feeling awkward, she gestured toward her Jeep. “Help me unload before Raze arrives.”
