Chapter 4
four
It shouldn’t have happened.
They’d hunted upir before, of course, while Dad was alive. But the farm had burned, their sleeping shaman and alpha dead in the flames, and now they were on their own, scrabbling to survive. They had cut both Tribe and upir a wide berth ever since.
And Zach shouldn’t have followed her, but she smelled too good to be true. Brunette, yes. Human, a bleeder. Which was all right, even mildly appetizing when he was in the right mood.
But young, warm, female musk—and with an unbelievable, wonderful edge of moonlight and snow, cold and crystalline. Zach hadn’t smelled that in forever, and certainly not overlaid with the tantalizing aroma of something belonging to him, something he knew even if he’d never been near it before.
He’d leaned close, gotten a good lungful to confirm, and she had to be what he thought she was, which made it incredibly lucky, and just as incredibly—
But she’d flinched away, almost cowering as if she knew what he was, and headed off to search the inside of the nightclub as if she’d lost her purse. She hadn’t; he’d kept his fingers well away from the tiny bag, despite fleecing at least four people at the bar while watching her.
Pale skin and pale eyes. Nice hips, a glory of curling sandalwood hair, a pair of cute little steel-rimmed librarian glasses, and that ridiculous purse she kept elbow-clutched to her side.
She’d walked right out the front door while he was still cutting across the dance floor, harvesting another few wallets and emptying them by touch—almost too easy when you had the training and quicker-than-human reflexes.
The rest of them had been working the crowd, Julia concentrating on businessmen and Brenn sliding through knots of college boys with fat rolls to spend on killing their livers.
That cash would keep the Family fed and moving. But here, in an alley between bass-quivering nightclubs, the smell of blood drenched the air, plucking at the beast in his bones.
Zach yanked her back as the upir snarled. The emergency door flew open, smacking against brickwork so hard dust puffed free. His family arrived to aid one of their own, and also to hunt their most ancient enemy.
Kyle was first through, head up and nostrils flaring, the Change rippling under his skin. And he leaped for the upir without pausing.
Ohshit, don’t! Kyle shouldn’t be doing that, even if he was the alpha; he could get not just hurt but unzipped.
Little brother simply hesitated too much.
The woman fell as he let go of her arm. He promptly shelved her as safe for the moment, a problem to solve soon enough—and leapt, a fraction of a second slower than Kyle.
Who met the upir with a bone-shattering crunch, driving it sideways and down as it snarled. It had a loose white shirt on, skintight pants, a pair of well-polished Tony Lamas, and was probably rabid if the just-spilled blood painting its front was any indication.
Not that the bloodsuckers needed much inducement to get really savage. But if an upir was hunting here, going after healthy young prey under bright lights and in the middle of crowds, it was either a baby—which was all right—or too burnsick for Kyle to handle.
Snapping, growling, making a hell of a lot of noise, Kyle feinted and closed too swiftly, locking and rolling with the flexible, dangerous leech-thing.
Zach’s bones made crackling sounds as the Change hit, running lava-hot through his body.
The animal in him lifted its head, snarled, and flung itself forward to strike at the blindly rooting thing, the enemy who twisted like a snake and spat, slashing with blood-spattered hands turned to shovel-shaped claws.
If little brother could just hold it long enough, it would make a mistake and the rest of them could get it safely put down before it hurt anyone else.
And before it made any more noise to attract witnesses.
But Julia was suddenly there too, crowding her brothers aside as she let out a chilling glass-throated howl. The fight tipped and shifted, the upir kicking, slashing again. Kyle backhanded his sister, throwing her out of the way…
…and catching the claws meant for her, full across his temporarily unprotected belly.
A fresh hot gout of blood splashed high and wide. The smell of it, loaded with the terrible reek of a bad gutshot, smacked Zach across the face. He descended into the red welter of combat, the animal in him roaring, and didn’t fucking care that there would be witnesses.
The upir died, shredded and shrieking, the rot of its last exhale throttling the alleyway. Zach rose from its ruin, foul brackish liquid staining his fingers, and his bones crackled again as he looked for more to kill.
They pressed against him, those of his kind, and a thread of sweet soothing scent sought to cut through the reek of death and decay. A reminder—something he had to attend to, some problem his human side had to solve.
The animal didn’t care. It smelled food, blood, and suffering; it wanted revenge and hot meat, bones cracking sweet and marrow-full between its fangs.
“Zach…” someone said, a word that had no meaning.
He thumped back into himself as the Change receded. Julia was sobbing, openly and messily as a child; sirens pierced the night with diamond stitchery. There was other noise, too—people, normal bleeders, noticing something amiss.
The instinct of hiding among prey all his life prodded hard. The upir was dead, great, but he had to get his Family out of here before they were seen, or, God forbid, caught. A Carcajou couldn’t be held for long, but if other Tribe caught wind of their presence as a result, it could get ugly.
You mean uglier than it already is? The Change trembled inside his bones, spikes of sweet glassy pain.
“Zach?” Brenn whispered again. It was the sound of a child in a nightmare.
The upir’s body was already breaking down, a stinking sludge inside a sodden white ruffled shirt and the ragged remains of leather pants, the boots falling over and spilling nasty black liquid, a tide of corruption skoosh-splattering over Kyle’s half-Changed body.
Fur receded into his little brother’s skin, Kyle’s entrails a spill of tangled grayish-blue, the lake of blood from the wide-open abdominal aorta black as the upir’s leaking.
His corpse would be full bleeder—what parts of it the upir’s caustic sludge didn’t eat away, of course. Even in death, their kind hid from the teeming masses of human prey.
Another alpha, dead. Zach’s stomach cramped, hard. He hadn’t eaten yet tonight, and the smell was enough to make him glad. My fault again, I should have—
“Come on.” Eric yanked at his arm. “We have to go.”
Where is she? He glanced around, but the woman he’d followed was gone. A crowd of people had magically appeared—prey, his animal side whispered. The beast was now casting around for that thread of light brunette scent that he somehow knew.
She was nowhere in sight. He had to find her.
What the hell is going—
“Come on!” Eric yelled, wrenching at his eldest brother’s arm. Julia let out a keening wail like a jolt of fresh bloodscent, jarring Zach into full alertness.
He showed his teeth, still searching for the woman; he and his Family scrambled away, Julia catching a high-hung fire-escape ladder and bolting, Brenn right behind her, Eric using the full measure of his strength and speed to hop onto a dumpster’s top and land behind the knot of people who had somehow arrived to cluster in the alley’s bottleneck.
A roil of surprise echoed off the brick walls.
“Did you see—”
“Holy shit!”
“Jesus!”
Zach’s throat ached, denied another growl and the hunting cry. We are Carcajou, and you are our rightful prey—but not right now. Not when there’s likely another predator around.
He moved among them like a cold wind, quick fingers plucking, and grabbed a few more wallets for good measure.
They would see only a blur, anyway; the habitual necessity to take what he could was very close to the surface.
Along with other instincts—like the urge to rip through flesh instead of clothing, to spill blood instead of cash.
A few feet clear of the alley he paused, because he smelled her again, very close.
The animal locked in his bones snarled. Twin compulsions, possession and vengeance, forced the beast to turn in circles—and thankfully, gave him enough room to reassert control.
Goddammit, Kyle. You should have waited, we could have baited and trapped it, killed it together.
And kept Julia out of the way, for fuck’s sake.
The howling hit, Julia’s voice lifted in a paroxysm of grief, and he had to move.
She was likely to hurt herself or someone else, and he was the only one who could manage her when she got like this.
But he had to find that woman. She smelled like ice, like moonlight, like salvation.
She smelled, in fact, like a shaman potential.
The scent drifted across his sensitive nose once more. He glanced back—more people crowding, spilling out of the emergency exits, most with their phones out and lifted high.
A stupid, milling herd. He could probably scare them, scatter them like bleating sheep.
But the scent of her, close and warm and living, filled his head and took precedence. Zach drew in a deep lungful, loping easily.
Christ, Kyle, why didn’t you wait? But he knew why. His little brother had taken on the responsibility of an alpha—first into battle to defend his own.
And it was Zach’s fault.