Lyon growled. “Your eyes.”
Tighe shrugged and grinned at his chief. “She’s a beautiful woman, Roar.” He winked at Kara. “Do you want me to put on the shades?”
Kara’s soft trill of laughter eased the craziness inside him. “It’s not like I don’t know why you wear sunglasses in the house.” She pulled out of his embrace and returned to her mate, looping her arm around Lyon’s waist. “I’m flattered, Tighe, and head over heels in love with my lion.” She grinned. “But you know that.”
Tighe laughed. “Yeah, I noticed. Lucky bastard.”
The growl that came from Lyon’s throat held a note of hard satisfaction. “You need to get one of these for yourself.”
“A mate? Hell no.” He winked at Kara. “Not unless I can have yours.”
At the teasing words, Lyon tightened his hold.
Tighe shook his head. “I never thought I’d see you like this, Roar.” The pleasure he felt that his friend had found his one true mate after all these centuries was bittersweet. Tighe remembered all too well how love could transform a man, clearing his vision and changing his world. And how it could destroy him.
Lyon smiled, his gaze dropping to Kara’s sweet face. “Sometimes you have to risk your heart.”
Tighe prayed Lyon never felt the cutting pain from the other side of that double-edged blade.
“Let’s eat.” Lyon turned Kara toward the large formal dining table that sat in front of the wall of windows looking onto sunlit woods.
Foxx, Paenther, and Wulfe were already seated, but as he approached the table, each rose and greeted him.
Foxx, who’d only been with them a couple of years and was genuinely twenty-three, nodded to him, his shaggy red hair falling in his face. “Tighe.”
As Foxx returned to his seat, Paenther, Lyon’s second-in-command, grasped his arm, his intense black eyes boring into him. The warrior, three-quarters Native American, had the bronzed skin and black hair and eyes of his human ancestors. A tribal tattoo snaked up his neck, while across one eye slashed the claw marks that marked him as a Feral Warrior. Dressed head to toe in leather, vibrating with a fine rage long ago burned into his soul by the Mage, he was a man whom others gave a wide berth. Except those few who knew him well.
Paenther, alone, never asked him how he was doing. But his friend’s deep concern came through in the too-tight grip on his wrist and the length of time he held the greeting.
“Find him,” Paenther said, his voice low, but tight. “I wish I could help.”
Tighe shook his head. “We’ll find the clone. You and Foxx find Vhyper and that blade. Of the two tasks, yours is by far the more important, B.P. If I die, another Feral will be marked. You won’t be down a man.”
That black gaze never wavered. “You’re not expendable, Stripes. Find him. I won’t lose you, too.”
Tighe found his grin. “Then I’ll find him.” The smile died as quickly as it was born, worry closing around his heart. “I’m doing my best, B.P.” But he was seriously worried his best was going to be too damn little. And too damn late.
“News.” Wulfe’s deep voice echoed off the walls of the dining room.
Tighe turned to the newly installed flat-screen hanging on the wall behind him. And froze.
“The killer some are calling the D.C. Vampire struck again last night in southwest. Jeanine Tinnings was slain in the same mysterious manner as at least ten others in the past three days.” In the middle of the screen was a photo of a laughing blond woman holding a chubby-cheeked toddler.
The air left Tighe’s lungs as if he’d been sucker punched. He was staring at the face of the woman who’d been folding the laundry, the first of the two women he’d thought he’d killed. Or would kill.
She was already dead.
The hard knot of dread slowly dissolved in his chest. He wasn’t going to kill her.
Ah, shit. That meant there would be no saving the other one, either. The dark-haired FBI beauty with the warrior’s eyes must already be dead, too.
Which meant…Chills rushed along the surface of his flesh. “It wasn’t a premonition,” he said out loud.
Lyon’s gaze swung to him. “What wasn’t a premonition?”
“I saw her die last night. Through the eyes of the killer. I thought I was seeing the future.”
Paenther looked at him with surprise. “You’re starting to see through your clone’s eyes.”
Tighe nodded slowly. “At least when he kills.”
“This is the break we need.” Lyon’s eyes began to glitter. “If you can identify where a murder is taking place, we may finally have a way to catch that son of a bitch.”
The crushing weight of the two deaths lifted from Tighe’s shoulders, but the relief was slight. The women were still dead even if he hadn’t been the one to kill them. And there was still a strong likelihood he’d end up as crazed and deadly as he’d feared. As Wulfe had. Little by little, he’d lose control until he finally tumbled into a feral rage from which he couldn’t escape.
Until then? It seemed he was doomed to watch the terror of the dying through the eyes of the one desecrating his soul.
Chapter Three
As the sun rose over Washington, D.C., Tighe slammed open the door of the safe house and stormed inside, his fingers and teeth tingling with the need to go feral and rip something apart. Anything.
Frustration bled from his brain, down into every cell in his body.
They were getting nowhere. Nowhere.
“Easy, Stripes,” Hawke said behind him as he and Kougar followed him in the door. “Stay in your skin, buddy.”
Tighe strode to the refrigerator of the small row house on Capitol Hill, grabbed a Budweiser, and drank it down with one long pull.
Once the residence of a Therian family, for years the house had served as a safe house for Therians caught too far from the enclaves at night. Nocturnal creatures, the draden only fed at night but were capable of passing through untreated glass to reach their Therian victims.
The glass of Therian homes and cars were treated with magic to keep them safe from draden penetration. Safe houses were scattered throughout the areas most often frequented by members of the race. Last he heard, there were nearly a dozen around the D.C. area in addition to the five actual enclaves.
This particular safe house was only four blocks from the apartment building where he’d watched the dark-eyed beauty die yesterday morning. For twenty-four hours, the three Ferals had roamed the area, both in their human and animal forms, searching for the clone. In their animal forms, they should have been able to smell him, but they’d gotten nothing. Worse than nothing.
Even the visions were useless. That first one had been so clear he’d really thought they might help him. But only in that one, when he’d watched the dark-eyed beauty die had he seen the death as if through the eyes of the clone. Ever since, he’d seen little more than vague faces contorted with terror. Nightmarish wisps with garbled sound. No details. Nothing to tell him where the killings were taking place. Nothing to help him catch the bastard.
He slammed the empty Budweiser can on the counter so hard that he crushed it.
Hawke lifted one dark, winged brow.
“I’m in my skin!” Tighe snapped, reading his friend’s expression all too well. “You can’t blame me for being frustrated.”
“No one’s blaming you, buddy. We’re watching you. But we’re not blaming you.”
“Great.” Watching him lose control, minute by minute. Tighe reached back into the fridge and pulled out three more beers, tossing one to each of his companions before turning on the old television in the corner to see if there was any news. He had a morbid need to know the identity of the dark-eyed woman he’d watched die. So far, there’d been nothing about her in the news. Maybe because she was FBI.
Already, she was haunting him. He’d barely gone an hour without thinking about her, without her face rising into his mind’s eye, those rich mahogany eyes flashing with fury and fire as she’d met her death. Why he was so obsessed with her he couldn’t begin to guess. Yeah, she’d been beautiful. And a fighter, which was admirable enough. But she’d been human. And he didn’t give a rat’s ass about humans.
Especially dead ones. And with their short, fragile lives, they were all basically the walking dead.
Damn, but he wanted this to be over. He wanted his soul intact so he and his companions could concentrate on the true threat, the apparent Mage plot to free Satanan and his Daemon horde. If there was a plot. They didn’t know what in the hell was going on.
Hawke’s brows drew down. “What’s with your eyes, Tighe?”
“The black streak?” He’d noticed it in the mirror that morning, a single black streak cutting across his green iris from pupil to outer ring. “Beats the hell out of me.” Frustration simmered inside him, refusing to be distracted. He slammed his fist on the counter. “Where is that son of a bitch clone? For all we know, he could be halfway to Texas by now.”
Kougar gave a pull on his Bud, his pale eyes shining over his mustache and goatee. “I wouldn’t put it past him. The bastard’s different than the other clones. Smarter.”
Hawke nodded. “He may be evolving.”
“What do you mean?” Tighe asked warily.
“If I’m right, he’s going to become smarter and more clever every day until he’s nearly your equal.”
“Goddess forbid. While I degenerate into a raving lunatic.”
Hawke shrugged. “He was the only one who escaped the battle when they were all but defeated. Then he ditched your Land Rover in McLean and stole the cars of each of his victims, one after the other, making him impossible to follow. That’s clever. As is the fact that he’s staying away from the Therian compounds despite the fact Therian energy is his natural food. He’s having to kill human after human to feed himself because he knows the Therians are watching for him.”
“Yeah, and maybe he just enjoys the killing,” Tighe grunted. “If I could get another real vision, maybe we could stop…” As if Nature heard his plea, his sight went suddenly black. “It’s happening again.” As he was swept into another place, he grabbed for the kitchen counter and held on.
Confusion clouded his mind as he stared into the face of the dark-eyed beauty who’d been haunting his thoughts all day and night. She wasn’t dead. He watched her in the mirror of a public bathroom, as if through her own eyes. She leaned in closer and pulled open the collar of her white blouse, revealing an oval of red welts on the otherwise-flawless olive skin of her long, graceful neck.
Teeth marks.
The clone had attacked her, yet she hadn’t died. How was that possible?
Praise the heavens and Earth.
He scowled at himself for the relief and, hell, joy rushing through him. She was human, for heaven’s sake. Human.
Yet there was little about her that reminded him of Gretchen. She was tall where Gretchen had been short. She was dark where Gretchen had been fair. And even in the vision her eyes burned with fire, the same fire that had lit their depths as she’d faced the clone. While Gretchen’s eyes would, in his memory, always radiate with fear.
There was a fury simmering inside this woman that he sensed was as much a part of her as her brown hair and high cheekbones. He didn’t have to hear her thoughts to know she wanted to catch the creature that had attacked her.
But it wasn’t going to happen.
There was no way the Ferals could allow human law enforcement to get their hands on that thing. The moment they realized he didn’t bleed, it was all over. For centuries, the Therian and Mage races had been careful to hide their existence from the humans. The mortals had become too numerous, too powerful. Yet their fear and hatred of the things they didn’t understand was as great as ever. The moment they learned of the immortal races among them, they’d turn their considerable cunning and weaponry toward eliminating them.
They’d end up destroying the only ones who could save them.
The woman grimaced suddenly, her face contorting in a pain she quickly masked. Shards of agony bolted through her eyes as her body went tense as a wire. She grabbed for the sink in much the same way he’d grabbed for the kitchen counter a moment ago. As if she feared she’d fall if she didn’t.
Suddenly, a second vision overlaid the woman’s face in his mind’s eye. An old woman this time, with terror in her eyes as her face became a blur and her wrinkled neck loomed large.
“Oh, God,” the dark-eyed beauty gasped, and suddenly she was the only one he was seeing again. “What did he do to me?” she whispered to her reflection. “It wasn’t enough that he almost killed me. Now I’m going to have to watch him kill others?”
Tighe’s scalp tingled as the meaning of her words became clear. She was seeing the murders. She was getting his visions.
“Agent Randall?” A second woman appeared in the bathroom mirror. An older woman of Asian descent rushed toward the beauty. “Delaney, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” his vision-stealer said brusquely and straightened, the pain and emotion disappearing from her expression as if they’d never been. “I’m fine.”
Tighe blinked as the beauty disappeared. He turned to find Hawke watching him expectantly.
“What did you see?”
Tighe shook his head, reeling at the implications. Staggering from the inexplicable need to find the woman.
“Someone’s stealing my visions.”
“What do you mean?”