He had the grace to blush. “It’s not an issue now.”
“So, what, have I been given a pass? And you can look at me now.”
Arik’s mouth tightened into a grim line. “You haven’t been given a pass.”
Runa froze as she tugged her caramel-colored hair out of the back of the robe, and Ky’s pulse picked up. He didn’t want to believe that the man who used to be his friend had come to grab his own sister, but a lot of things he hadn’t wanted to believe had proved to be true over the last couple of years.
“Why are you here?” Kynan tapped the pistol against his thigh, drawing Arik’s gaze. “You’ve got five seconds to fill us in.”
Arik’s pause lasted four. “I refused to give up Runa’s location, and they threatened to lock me up until all of this is over. So I walked.”
“You’re AWOL?”
Arik nodded, and Ky let out a low whistle. Absent without leave was a serious offense in the regular military. But from the R-XR? The paranormal unit played for keeps and without oversight. It could do anything it wanted to Arik, and no one would argue or even know.
The only thing that might save him was that the people who worked for the R-XR were specialists and worth their weight in gold. And Arik, an ex–Delta Force operative who could learn any demon language after hearing only a few words, was priceless.
Runa ran to Arik and folded him into her embrace. “You can stay here, Arik. For as long as you need to.”
Arik cocked a dark eyebrow at Kynan. “And what does your bodyguard have to say about that?”
“Brother,” Kynan drawled, “it ain’t me you need to worry about.”
“Shade will be fine,” Runa said, as she drew away, and Ky hoped she was right. Arik and Shade weren’t the best of friends; Arik still hadn’t forgiven Shade for his role in turning Runa into a werewolf, and Shade had a total distrust of the R-XR.
“Do I get to see my nephews?”
“They’re in the bedroom with Stewie.” Runa’s champagne-colored eyes lit on a rattle on the floor and then flicked back to her brother. “You haven’t met Wraith’s son, have you?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, hold on a minute.” Runa went into the bedroom, leaving Kynan and Arik alone.
Ky gestured for Arik to follow him into the living room. Once there, Ky pivoted, putting himself in line to keep an eye on the doorway. “Tell me everything.”
Arik rubbed his hand over his dark, military-short high-and-tight. “Have you spoken with the other Elders recently?”
“You could say that,” Kynan said.
“Did they tell you The Aegis is taking orders from the R-XR now?”
“Val mentioned something about that. But I don’t know why The Aegis is going to be the R-XR’s bitch. We didn’t get that far into the conversation.”
Arik glanced through the doorway at the bedroom Runa had disappeared into. “You know born wargs are now being affected by SF, right?”
“Yeah. And there’s a danger it’ll jump species.”
“There’s no time left to find a cure.”
Kynan exhaled slowly, as if that would put off what he knew was going to be very bad news. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying,” Arik said gravely, “that the powers that be are done waiting. They’re mobilizing forces and joining up with The Aegis to go out on a search-and-destroy mission. If a cure for this disease isn’t found now, they intend to eradicate every werewolf on the planet.”
They had just gotten to the mountainside Harrowgate when Tay’s phone rang. She peeled away from the group to answer, and through the static and in-and-out reception, she could barely hear Kynan’s voice.
“Tay? Where are you?”
“Montana. Are Runa and the kids okay?”
“They’re fine. But The Aegis has been trying to contact you—” As if on cue, her phone beeped, and the caller ID identified her supervisor, the head of the New York State cells.
“Yeah, Richard is on the other line—”
“Don’t answer!”
Jesus. Okay… Ky never got excited like that. “Ky, you’re making me nervous.” He was making everyone nervous—they’d gathered around, and Shade was about to grab the phone from her.
“Look, I got a call from Val earlier. He said the R-XR and every military supernatural unit in the world is heading up an operation, and that The Aegis was going to be taking orders from them.”
Tayla snorted. “Bullshit.”
“That’s what I said. Val told me to fall in line, and I told him to go to hell. Right after that, Arik showed up.”
She lowered her voice and turned away so Shade wouldn’t flip out. “At the cave?”
“Yeah. He’s here because he refused to hand over Runa. Apparently, the R-XR and The Aegis are sending out extermination squads to kill all wargs, born and turned.”
“Oh, shit.” Tayla paused, the implications of what Kynan had just told her flashing like a movie in her head. A horror movie. The worldwide slaughter would be off the scale. “We’ve got to stop them.”
“I tried,” Kynan said. “I just got off a conference call with the Sigil.”
“They’re not listening to you?”
A sound of frustration came over the airwaves. “Tay, I used all my clout. I swore to leave the fucking organization, but they aren’t budging. They’re serious about destroying the wargs.”
“Is that why Richard is calling? To get me to organize my cell for a warg hunt? Because I won’t do it.” Ky paused, and a chill skittered up Tay’s spine. “Ky… what are you not saying?”
“They know you won’t cooperate. Richard wants you to head back to your cell’s HQ.”
“And then what?”
“They plan to hold you until the massacre is over. They don’t want you interfering. Tay, hold on.” She stood there, stewing, while Ky spoke in low tones to someone else. When he came back on the line, he sounded like he was speaking between clenched teeth. “Arik’s got some interesting intel. The R-XR indicated that there’s a massive gathering of wargs in Canada. Do you know anything about it?”
“Canada?” She frowned, and then scowled when Con grabbed the phone from her.
“Kynan? What about Canada? Isn’t that where you told the Warg Council there was a Feast warg?” Con listened for a moment. “She’s a Guardian? And wait… what? Holy shit.” Con closed the phone.
“What’s going on?” Eidolon asked.
“Luc.” His gaze drifted to Sin, and Tay recognized that look. The dhampire was falling, and falling fast. “We need to get to his place.”
“Why?” Tayla was confused as all hell.
“Man, I can’t believe I didn’t put this all together sooner,” Con said. “Luc… in Egypt. He banged this Guardian who was a werewolf—”
“We don’t have any werewolf Guardians,” Tay interrupted.
“Not that you knew of. Apparently, she was hiding it.”
“You can’t hide it. We make sure every Guardian works at least one night of the full moon.”
Con nodded impatiently. “She’s a special breed. They turn on the new moon. Kynan went to the Warg Council to ask about her. She was heading to the Northwest Territories. So the borns and turneds both sent out extermination squads to kill her. But the thing is, I think she was heading there because that’s where Luc is. She’s the werewolf he had sex with.”
“So she’s leading packs of werewolves right to him,” Wraith said.
Con’s voice went low. “And worse, both warg sides know the other one is there. They’re amassing an army.”
“That’s where they’re going to fight their civil war,” Sin said, and uttered a dark curse. “Werewolf Armageddon.”
Eighteen
“Well?”
Luc tossed a log onto the fire and cast a glance over his shoulder at Kar, who was curled up under a blanket on the couch. The fire was roaring hot, and Luc had moved the couch closer to the hearth, but she was still cold. It was all he could do n
ot to stretch out with her and add his body heat to hers. He wanted to—if she had SF, he’d already been exposed. But she wouldn’t let him come near.
The odd thing was, she wasn’t nearly as sick as she should be if she’d contracted the disease. Maybe it wasn’t SF. Or maybe it affected Feast wargs differently. Either way, he needed to get hold of Eidolon. He’d called the hospital and E’s apartment, but nothing. And no one seemed to know where he was. Hell, he couldn’t get hold of any of the brothers. Or Con. If he couldn’t get hold of Eidolon soon, he was going to have to make a run for the Harrowgate in the daylight, slayers or no.
“Luc, we need to talk.”
“You’re sick. You need to rest.”
She struggled to sit up, and he leaped to his feet to help her. “Don’t touch me,” she said, but it was too late. He eased her into a sitting position and stepped back.
“Kar, you really need to rest. If this is SF—”
“If it’s SF,” she said quietly, “then what I need to do is talk.”
Well, that sobered him right up. She wanted to keep her mind off it, and he was a big bastard if he didn’t let her. “Okay, yeah. What do you want to talk about?”
She looked at him like he was an idiot. How females could manage that even when they had exhaustion circles under their eyes and fever rashes on their cheeks, he had no idea. “Are you still singing that same tune? I can name fewer things we don’t need to talk about than what we do.”
“Is this about the kid? Because I don’t see the big deal. You stay here, have it, and we raise it.”
Kar buried her face in her hands and shook her head. “How long has it been since you were human?”
He blinked at that. “I was twenty-four when I was bitten. That was in 1918.”
It was her turn to blink. “Wow. You’re old.”
“Thank you,” he muttered.
“How have you managed to not knock up anyone else in all that time?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Or do you have a bunch of puppies running around?”
He tossed another log onto the fire, even though it didn’t need it. “No, I don’t have any offspring.”
“Do you remember what it was like to be a kid? To have parents?”
The fire crackled and hissed as though taunting him to answer Kar’s idiotic questions. He grabbed up a poker and jabbed at the logs. “It was a long time ago.”
“That’s not what I asked,” she said quietly.
“The turn of the century wasn’t a good time to be the eighth son in a poor family.” Not at all. He’d been raised on a farm in the Midwest, had been introduced to backbreaking work before he was three. His parents were as good as they could have been, but when every daylight hour was taken up with work, either on the farm or in the kitchen, there wasn’t much time for play or hugs. At sixteen, he’d left home, joined the military, and never looked back.
Except… he had. The soldiers he’d fought with in France had become the tight-knit family he’d never had. At least, until they started dying in battle. A massacre had left him alone and injured, wandering through the woods in an attempt to escape the enemy. He’d been found, but not by a human foe.
A werewolf had attacked him. He’d managed to fight it off, but then he’d lain there, so mangled that when the human enemy did find him, they’d left him for dead.
He’d shifted into a werewolf that night, healing his wounds, and he’d awakened the next morning lying among the shredded remains of a dozen American soldiers.
Soldiers he’d killed.
Sickened, frightened, and confused, he’d gone AWOL. He barely remembered how he’d survived after that, running only on instinct and the desire to kill the monster who’d infected him. Three years later, his sire was dead, and Luc had returned to America.
“What happened?” Kar asked.
“I went to war, was bitten by a warg, and when I came home, I learned that four of my brothers and sisters, and my mother, had died of influenza. My oldest brother was killed in a farming accident. And my father was nursing what was left of his mind.”
Luc had tried to help, had chained himself in the barn on nights of the full moon, but in his third month, he’d broken free, killed livestock, and bit his youngest brother, Jeremiah. What happened next had pushed Luc over the edge and right into a solitary existence.
Jer had turned into a werewolf that next night, had killed their father and sister. When he woke up and realized what he’d done, he’d taken his own life.
Luc sank to the floor and leaned back against the couch cushions. “And because of me, because I bit my brother, I lost the rest of my family.”
“Hey,” Kar said gently, as she lay her hand on his shoulder. The intimate, comforting gesture startled Luc, made his throat close up a little. She had every reason to hate him, to use him for protection and nothing else, but she was still trying to make the best out of a shitty situation.
“What?” He pulled away, twisted around so he was facing her.
“I know you don’t want this. A baby wasn’t exactly on my to-do list, either.” She rubbed her belly, and a tiny smile crimped her mouth. “But I love the little tadpole now. I want it, and I’ll do anything to protect it. That means I’ll protect it from you, too.”
“You think I would harm my own kid?”
“Not intentionally. You’d be protective and fierce and possessive. But Luc, if you can’t love it, if you can’t connect with it, you will harm it.”
Luc stared into the fire. The flames licked the logs, eating at the wood and putting out so much heat that surely it could melt the wall of ice inside him. Kar was right. The kid would probably be human—it needed parents who could love it.
Which was why he’d been so okay with having cubs with Ula—she’d been pricolici, so the offspring would have been raised in the harsher world of the warg, where the males existed to protect, not nurture. Luc could definitely protect.
Nurture? He closed his eyes, but they flew open when Kar took his hand and placed it on her belly.
“You can’t feel it yet. It’s not even a bump. But it’s there. Your baby.”
Something inside him cracked a little. But that tiny fissure felt like an earthquake in his soul. Your baby. What if he didn’t like it? What if he couldn’t love it? He jerked his hand away like the thing inside was a viper.
“I… ah…” He leaped to his feet, at a complete loss. Then he spun toward the door. “Do you hear that?”
Kar looked up, her expression filled with skepticism. No doubt she thought he was trying to weasel out of the conversation. “Hear what?”
“I don’t know. Could be a branch dropping from a tree.” The storm had died down, leaving only silence in its wake. He eased cautiously to the window, but he kept his back to the wall as he peered out.
Kar pushed to her feet. “Do you see anything?”
A glint of metal against the field of white brought his hackles up. “Stay down.”
Kar sank smoothly to her haunches, her Aegis training and warg instincts kicking in. “What is it?”
“I think the slayers have found you.”
“Damn them,” she breathed. “Where are your weapons?”
“You mean, besides the rifle and shotgun propped next to the door, the six other shotguns and pistols on the wall, and the crossbow in the corner stand?”
She gave him a dry look. “Yes, besides those.”
“I have a chest full of various blades in my bedroom, and in the metal chest downstairs, I have dynamite.”
“Seriously?” she asked, and when he grinned, she returned his smile. “Awesome.”
He nearly laughed, something he hadn’t done in a long time. But damn, how many females actually lit up like lanterns when you mentioned you had explosives in the house? “I need you to go downstairs and keep quiet. I’ll see if I can get them out of here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do it,” he barked. “The basement is concealed—they might suspect you’re h
ere, but even if they come in, which they won’t, they wouldn’t be able to find you.”
“Luc, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She eyed the weapons near the door. “I might be pregnant, but I’m not helpless.”
“This isn’t because you’re pregnant.” Humans treated pregnant women like they were made of glass, but even before he’d been turned, he’d known they were tougher than that—he’d seen his mother go through three pregnancies, working just as hard on the farm as his father had, right up until she went into labor. And warg mothers were even tougher than that, fighting and hunting until the day they gave birth.
“Then what?” Suddenly she stiffened, and a low, lethal growl rumbled in her chest.
“Kar? What is it?”
“Werewolves.” Her eyes flashed, and her lips peeled back from her teeth. “It’s not The Aegis. It’s wargs. I feel them. A lot of them.”
A block of ice dropped into the pit of Luc’s stomach. “Exterminators. The teams they send to destroy Feast wargs.” And then he felt it… a wave of violence crashing into him like a tsunami rising up out of hell. His blood thundered in his veins, his skin grew tight, and his joints stretched to the point of pain.
“Luc,” Kar gasped, and he spun to her. She doubled over, clutching her stomach. “I feel… a shift. It’s like I need to… kill.”
When too many wargs got together to fight, everyone shifted, no matter the time of month, the time of day. Kar definitely didn’t need to be out there killing with her venomous bite. “Get below!” His voice was distorted, mostly snarl, but she understood and crawled down to the basement. With long, claw-tipped hands, he slammed the hatch shut and rolled the rug over it.
Lurching, he threw open the door even as his body clenched, on the verge of contorting into his beast form.
The forest all around had come alive, was teeming with movement. On one side, varcolac, distinguishable from the born wargs by their varied sizes and colors of fur, and on the other side, pricolici, mostly dark, all massive, and ready to charge the others.