Darkness swirled around her, a perfect void without sound, without sight, without feel except that persistent, distant pain. But the voice continued to speak in her head.
D, I’m coming for you. I’m not going to leave you in there, but you have to reach out to me. You have to trust me.
You’re not real. You’re dead. And yet there was something about his voice that brushed her mind with a familiar feel of warmth. Of strength.
I’m not dead, brown eyes. I’m right here with you. I’m trying to get you out. Can you feel my hands on your face?
No. I can’t feel anything except the pain in my head, and even that isn’t very strong.
Come to me, D. Follow the sound of my voice, then. Reach for me. Trust me.
I can’t trust you. You ran from the Feds. The words tore at her, sending a cascade of tears through her mind. I can’t trust you.
Then at least trust me to get you out of here. You must reach for me.
Help me, Tighe.
Do you see the thread, D? The iridescent one?
I can’t see anything!
Easy, sweetheart. Reach for me with your mind. Reach for me, D.
And suddenly she saw something gleaming, shining with a million colors. A tiny thread. As she reached for it, she felt the angel wings flutter inside her head, telling her she’d found it at last. No, not it. Tighe.
She felt his mind brush against hers, a soft thrill of pleasure in the feather-light touch, as she followed the thread. Little by little, it grew larger, brighter.
In a rush of warmth, he grabbed her mentally, his mind lifting her from the dark.
Sensation rushed back, overwhelmingly sweet, as she felt his strong arms go around her and pull her close against his warm body. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his throat, clinging to him as joy squeezed her heart and rushed through her chest.
“You’re alive.” Tears streaked down her face as she felt his hand cradling the back of her head.
He pulled back, urging her to look at him. She did, her gaze searching the face of the man she’d thought she’d never see again.
His thumb traced her eyebrow. “You had me worried for a few minutes there, brown eyes. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to reach you.”
“How are you alive?”
A shadow brushed past the open doorway.
“Tighe, we’ve got company. Lots of it by the looks of things. We’re not going to be able to take her.”
Tighe’s expression tightened as he looked back down at her. “I’m going to have to leave you for now, but you need me, brown eyes. I’m the only one who can save you next time this happens.” His mouth turned hard. “If you sic the Feds on me again, you’re on your own. Don’t turn on me again, Delaney. I mean it.”
She forced herself to release him. “How do I find you?”
“Stand in the parking lot along the northeast side of the Tidal Basin at 5:30 A.M. In four hours. I’ll drive through in a green Camry sedan and pick you up.”
“How am I going to know it’s green, let alone you, in the dark?”
“I’ll have one halogen headlight and one normal one. You’ll be able to tell.”
“What if I can’t get there that fast?”
“Do it. I want you with me before you get another vision.”
“Tighe!” The man’s voice shouted from the hallway. “We have to get out of here. Now!”
Tighe leaned down and kissed her hard, his hand sliding behind her neck, his thumb tracing her ear, then the hollow below it.
“Trust me, Delaney,” he murmured against her lips, then pressed his thumb beneath her ear.
Darkness swallowed her again.
Delaney shoved her hands in the pockets of her blazer as she stood on the edge of the parking lot where Tighe had promised to pick her up. The sky was still dark, few cars on the road at this hour on a Sunday morning. Everything should go down exactly as planned.
As she’d planned, not Tighe.
Trust me, he’d begged her.
Her stomach felt like she’d swallowed nails. In some ways she did trust him. With her body. Oddly, she suspected, even with her life.
But she was an FBI agent. Sworn to uphold the law. She would not let her duty be derailed by feelings for a man she knew was involved in something hugely illegal. Feelings she didn’t even understand.
When Tighe arrived to pick her up, he would be the one taken instead.
Her stomach clenched. The angel wings fluttered angrily. He’d begged her to trust him.
He had to be brought in for questioning. He was into something bad, and the Feds needed to know what it was.
He’d risked his life to come to her and free her from that dark prison. He hadn’t even taken her with him, he’d just saved her.
Delaney pressed her fist against the aching lump sitting in her gut. God, what had she done?
Her job. She’d done her job. He was a criminal. His brother a murderer. She had to catch them. She had no choice. He was a bad guy, blast it.
But he wasn’t. Not completely. He had a goodness in him, a gentleness. He’d rescued that little girl from the fire, hadn’t he?
All her life she’d seen people as good or bad. Especially criminals. Yet Tighe didn’t entirely fit either of those roles.
Delaney rubbed her fist against her churning stomach. Maybe he did. Maybe he wasn’t one of the bad guys at all. All she knew for sure was that he was involved with something big and had refused to be taken by the Feds. All along her instincts had been telling her that he wasn’t evil. What if her instincts were right? For all she knew, he could be part of some military special ops or other supersecret team put together to battle terrorism and save the world.
Yes, he’d kidnapped her. And drugged her.Good grief, was she really trying to convince herself he’d done all those things for the right reasons?
Yeah, maybe she was. He hadn’t hurt her. He’d never hurt her. In fact, he’d gone to great lengths to keep her from being hurt. He’d saved her.
And she’d set him up again to be captured. What if he tried to escape and wasn’t as lucky this time?
The knots in her stomach cramped.
She’d made Phil promise no one would shoot him, but even if they didn’t intend to kill him, they absolutely meant to apprehend him. Too many people had died for them to let him get away.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t let them shoot him again. It was a mistake. A horrible mistake.
Delaney started running through the trees, toward the road. She had to keep Tighe from making that turn. She had to stop this.
But she’d barely gone ten yards when a car swung into the parking lot. A midsized sedan with one halogen headlight.
No.
A large bird of prey flew low over her head, but she barely noticed. She watched the car come to a slow stop not ten spaces into the lot, too far away for her to see Tighe’s face. Immediately, half a dozen SWAT surrounded the car, weapons drawn. If he tried to get away this time, he was a dead man.
“Oh God, Tighe. What have I done?”
A large hand clamped around her mouth, as an iron arm pinned her against a hard chest.
“You did exactly what he expected you to,” a deep, vaguely familiar voice said against her ear.
Chapter Fourteen
Paenther turned at the sound of the blinkers to find Foxx preparing to pull the Mustang into a small, run-down convenience store set into the side of a steep, heavily wooded hill. An old sign hung above the single door. MARKET, it read. As if it were the only place to buy anything in this middle-of-nowhere deep in the mountains of western Virginia.
It probably was.
At the corner of the old brick building, a doe and a spotted fawn watched curiously until Foxx pulled into the nearly empty parking lot with a spray of gravel. The pair took off for the woods.
“Your gut telling you something?” Paenther eyed the redheaded Feral with a razor-sharp hope.
Foxx snorted. “Yeah. It’s telling me I’m hungry.”
With a thinly masked groan of disgust, Paenther tipped his head back against the headrest. Soon after the meeting at Feral House, Foxx announced that his gut was telling him they’d find Vhyper in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the narrow range that ran parallel to the East Coast from Georgia to Pennsylvania and met up with I–66 a little over an hour’s drive west of D.C.
With nothing better to go on, he and Foxx had hightailed it out there and been driving aimlessly around this pastoral outback for the past seven plus hours. They’d covered nearly two hundred miles of country roads and so far found nothing.
Damned useless intuition. How was the cub supposed to read his gut when all it seemed to do was rumble with hunger?
The dust kicked up by Foxx’s assault on the gravel covered the car in a light fog that wafted in the open window, making Paenther’s nose twitch.
“Want anything?” Foxx swung his long, broad-shouldered frame out of the car.
Yeah, he wanted something. Several somethings. Vhyper, the Daemon blade, Tighe’s clone. Not to mention the whereabouts of the Mage stronghold. None of which were likely to be found inside the Market.
With a growl of frustration, Paenther climbed out of the car and followed Foxx. For the moment, a hot dog and a Coke would have to do, but his always razor-thin patience was fraying fast. If that intuition of Foxx’s didn’t kick in soon, Paenther was going to turn into some seriously bad company.
He strode across the narrow parking lot, his gaze constantly on the move. There were five cars scattered across the small parking lot, none of which looked like it was less than fifteen years old. None of which was Vhyper’s. Across the rarely traveled two-lane was a small farmhouse set in the middle of a large pasture dotted with horses.
Not a mansion in sight. The Mage never lived in groups of fewer than thirty or forty, and there’d been no sign of any large residences around there. They were wasting their time.
Paenther pushed through the twin glass doors, spying Foxx in the middle of a narrow aisle, his hands already half-filled with junk food. How he could stand to eat that crap, Paenther didn’t know. He grabbed the closing door as a harried-looking woman approached, pushing a crying baby in a stroller.
“Thanks,” she said, smelling of stale milk and cigarettes as he held the door for her.
At the cash register, an elderly man bought a six-pack of beer. And at the magazine stand…
Paenther’s gaze slowed, lingering with appreciation over the slender, feminine form of a young woman flipping through magazines. Her hair was very short and dark, her bone structure delicate. Ethereal.
Lovely.
As if she felt him watching, she turned her head and lifted sweeping, dark lashes to reveal eyes the bright blue of a summer sky. Their gazes caught, snapping together like two pieces of a puzzle. He felt the contact like a physical jolt. His pulse lifted. His blood began to run thick and hot, racing to the juncture of his thighs.
Goddess, when was the last time he’d reacted to a woman like that? Years ago. Years ago.
A soft gentle smile lifted her mouth, stealing his breath, causing his heart to do a slow tumble in his chest.
The beauty set down the magazine and walked back to the EMPLOYEES ONLY door a few yards away and disappeared.
“You ready, B.P.?” Foxx’s voice called to him from the front of the store.
Slowly, Paenther turned to his companion, feeling as off-balance as a youth with his first crush. Damn. It was too bad he didn’t have time to hang around there for a couple of hours. Or days.
He scowled at the foolish thought and grabbed a Coke from the cooler. The last thing he needed just then was his head turned by a woman. A human woman, no less.
The good news was, he knew he’d forget her as soon as they drove away. No woman held his interest for long these days.
Chapter Fifteen
Tighe paced the small bedroom in the basement apartment of the house in Dupont Circle as he waited for Delaney to wake. He hadn’t dared take her back to Capitol Hill. Not when she’d probably been thoroughly debriefed by the FBI.
He crossed to the big bed, where she lay sleeping from Hawke’s capture, once more clothed in that navy blue suit and white shirt that cried Federal Agent. Her dark hair was partially knotted at the nape of her neck, but tendrils had come loose to splay across the white satin pillowcase, framing her flawless olive-toned skin. Even in sleep, her expression was tense. Guarded. The shadows that darkened her soul refused to release her, even in sleep.
His body warmed at the sight of her, something easing deep inside him. He hadn’t been able to take a full breath, for worrying about her, until he had her back, safe in his keeping. Which he’d accomplished with relative ease. He’d known she’d set him up. From the moment he’d told her to meet him by the Tidal Basin, he’d planned for Hawke to grab her.
Tighe had ensnared the mind of a human male of his own approximate size and hair color and told him to drive the green Camry into the parking lot, stop the car, and fall asleep. Which he’d done. The FBI had been thoroughly put out, but the man hadn’t been harmed.
And Delaney was back with him again.
No, this woman didn’t trust. He knew that from what she’d told him of her past. And when he’d delved into her mind to pull her free of the darkness, he’d seen the scars of betrayal. Scars he himself had lived with for way too long.
While he’d been in her mind, he’d also seen the dark Daemon threads that formed her connection to the clone. The threads weren’t strong ones, but they were tangled. He was going to have to find a way back into her head, then take some time to free her. Time he hadn’t had at that moment.
The one thing he might have succeeded in doing was closing the door in her mind that had been dropping her into the darkness every time she got a vision. As he’d pulled her out, he’d tried to close it behind him, but he wouldn’t know if he’d been successful until she had another vision. Even then, he couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t open and drag her down again.