Chapter 4 #2
“I don’t know, Emma. Maybe nothing. But the hunters are after you and they also stole the Eye, so stopping them solves two problems. It could be the hunters have sought anyone tied to Rosenhaven, and you’re only the current target in their sights. Can you blame them after what Margot did?”
“Then we need to get to the bottom of their motives, and the only place I can think to start is the place where they attacked me. So let’s head there first thing. I don’t suppose their corpses are around anywhere?”
“Incinerated, as per protocol once our allies in the police department ran their identities,” he replied.
“Do we know who they were?”
“No one important. No one we could trace back to any sort of anti-vampire organization.”
“Right, and I’m sure you would have volunteered the information if you guys did determine anything.”
“Emma—”
She cut him off with a sharp hand gesture and twisted to face the window again. Tension mixed with pain rolled off her body in hostile waves, each pulse a chiseled strike into his chest.
How little she trusted him. The worst part about it, was that he couldn’t even blame her when he’d spent the last eight months pushing her out of his life and keeping her at arm’s length. Now she had to rely on him to work alongside her or face certain death.
The silence remained until they reached Dartmouth hours later. Adrian pulled the car up along the curb a few feet from where he’d found Emma after the attack. A thin layer of snow covered the sidewalk, thanks to the white puffs falling from the sky in huge, nickel-sized clumps.
“You sure you want to do this tonight?” Adrian asked.
“Let’s get it over with. They want me to work on my gift, so what do I do? The whole time I’ve had it, I always let it do what it wants to do.”
It wasn’t the wisest course of action, but he bit his tongue. Putting himself on Emma’s bad side wouldn’t benefit their mission. “Tell me what happens when you get your hunches.”
“Nothing special. I was walking from the hotel, and it hit me out of nowhere. The feelings come and go on a whim.”
“Then you’re going to have to learn to control it instead of letting it control you. I want you to go to the same spot, and I want you to focus.”
“Fine,” she grumbled. “Keep the heater going.”
The frigid night air brought an immediate flush to her cheeks.
Emmaleigh tugged her knitted cap farther down over her ears and tucked her hands into her coat pockets.
Her heeled boots clicked against the pavement as she made her way down the sidewalk to the point where she’d been ambushed. Not a single trace of blood remained.
“Right,” she muttered to herself. “Focus. Focus on what exactly?”
She tried to bring back the mood of that night, thinking back on her time at work and what she’d been doing during her walk. Texting. Planning a movie night.
Nothing world shattering or important.
Agitated steps carried her up and down the sidewalk, back and forth, as she tried to imagine herself seeing something. Anything. She had no idea how visions worked.
“Why can’t this be easy, like in the mutant movies?” she muttered under her breath. “Then again, I’d rather move things with my mind or read thoughts.”
Maybe then she’d get to the truth about Adrian. Or he’d man up and confess that he’d used her. Then she could continue to disregard him and excise him from her life like the ghost he’d become to her dreams, always haunting them whenever she wanted a peaceful day’s sleep.
After circling around the scene of her attack, she paused on the sidewalk and resorted to meditating in the frigid Massachusetts night. She focused on her slow heartbeat and timed her breaths to match her pulse. Nothing happened.
Emma threw her hands up and turned to stalk back to the vehicle, only to pause when she saw movement ahead of her on the sidewalk. Strange, since she didn’t smell anyone.
A familiar face emerged from the shadows and passed beneath the flickering street lamp, a slim body clothed in a cream sweater beneath a leather jacket with knit cuffs.
She saw herself approaching, the ghostly image playing across her vision like a semi-translucent overlay merged with her true surroundings. Glancing to the left, she saw a man moving into position, and another in the distance far behind her emerging from their getaway vehicle.
To the right, one waited with his assault rifle trained on her, prepared to strike from the shadows of the driveway between the real estate agency and post office. He’d crouched behind a trio of trash cans. Wide-eyed, Emma watched until the moment her gift intervened.
From beginning to end, everything played out exactly as she remembered, but none of it gave her any new information.
Before she could rush to the sedan to share her moment of psychic clarity with Adrian, movement from the shop rooftop across Seaward Lane caught her eye.
While her past-self fed on the last attacker, Emmaleigh watched a figure clad in the same dark body armor climb down from the roof and duck down the street.
She followed him to an inconspicuous gray sedan, though the further she moved from the snowy field, the grainier the vision became until it was a nebulous, wispy image.
47C… She strained to see, cursing at herself.
Was that an S or a 5 in the next digit? An Alabama license plate.
Whatever it was, the vision vanished like smoke in the breeze.
“Emma?”
Adrian stood at the end of the alley. She shook off the fog in her head and crossed back toward him.
“Why didn’t you answer me?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“I’ve been calling you since you left the sidewalk.”
“I didn’t hear you, but I saw something. Did your men do a sweep over here?”
He shook his head. “We cleaned up the bodies and nothing else. Why?”
“There was a sixth man, on the roof. He watched the entire thing. Let me slaughter his men. Then he went to his car and left. I think I have enough of the plate to get us a lead.”
Adrian took the digits down without questioning the advancement of her gift, also without uttering a word of praise. It drove her insane how he could be cool and apathetic one moment, then a warm, concerned mentor in the next.
Emma glanced over a shoulder to see him texting on his phone. “Adrian?”
“What?” He glanced up when he reached the driver’s side door.
“Why did you really show up that night?” She stopped on the curb and stared at him across the car’s roof. Snowflakes clung to her lashes and dotted the fur collar of her coat in white fluff.
He slipped his phone away and shrugged. “You know why. You panicked, and I sensed you were in danger. Your blood is still in my system, so we have a minor connection.”
“But why? Why did you give a damn about me being in trouble? Because the way I see it, you haven’t cared a thing about me all these months.”
“Is that what you think?”
“It’s what you’ve shown, so yeah.”
“Get in the damn car.” His natural accent crept into his voice, making his words rumble in the delicious way she’d loved during their single night together. He’d made her weak in the knees with lust then, but instead of turning her legs to jelly, his orders restored the steel to her spine.
Emma straightened and raised her chin. “No. You can’t boss me around like one of the neophytes. Does the truth hurt? It bothers you that much to work alongside me?”
Adrian rounded the car too fast for her to count the steps, a blur of hot man in leather and denim. He edged her against the passenger door, cool metal behind her and his lean body molded against her front.
Holy hell.
Without warning, he seized her face between his hands and slanted his lips over her mouth. Torn between the instinct to slam her knee between his legs and the desire to draw him in closer, Emma gradually relaxed beneath the dominating strokes of his tongue.
He tasted like spice and sweet coffee, as well as the underlying flavor that was pure Adrian, undeniably masculine and perfect. Before she could return the kiss in earnest, he pulled back and gazed into her eyes.
“Do you understand the position they put me in, Emmaleigh? Your success or failure will not only determine your fate, but mine as well. I have to keep both of us safe somehow while leading you on a suicide mission to track hunters.”
“Suicide mission? So you don’t have any faith in me?” she asked, hating the breathy note in her voice. Listening to her internal doubts had been one thing, but she’d hoped Adrian would talk sense and hope into her before they embarked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what are you saying?” she demanded.
His thumb stroked across her cheek. “I believe they’ve given you a task beyond your capabilities. Hell, beyond mine. Even Brennan would balk at this assignment. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve killed hunters before, but this thing we’re going to retrieve is probably with their leader.”
“They didn’t say anything about fighting the hunters,” she pointed out. “Maybe we can get in and out. They’re not shifters who can smell us coming a literal mile away. They’re mortal men.”
“Mortal men who may have a fallen angel in their possession, Emma. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I don’t have a choice,” she whispered. “If I don’t do this, they’ll kill me.”
“I know.”
“What do we do now?” He hadn’t moved away, and their close proximity placed every hard line of his body against hers. Unable to fight her own temptation, she leaned up on tiptoe and skimmed her nose down his throat, obeying the call for his blood and inhaling the sweet scent.
Adrian’s backward step shattered the moment. “We go on a suicide mission.”
“I’m not talking about the artifact. Us. What do we do now?”
“Nothing,” he said in a low voice. “Emma, we have to do nothing.”
“Why?” she demanded.
He crossed to the driver’s door and slipped into the car. She joined him, fuming, and stared out the windshield without speaking again. His back and forth pissed her off, cold one moment, hot the next, and then ice all over again.
A heavy silence fell between them, but the car didn’t budge. Adrian sat behind the wheel with his fingers raking through his rust-colored hair. Despite all her anger, there was a tortured expression on his face that she loathed.
“Fraternization between masters and untitled vampires is expressly forbidden, Em. The rule is there for a reason, no matter how much I dislike it.”
“Then what was that during the day shift? Feeling rebellious?”
“Hell if I know.” He leaned back against the seat. “I assigned you to that watch because I wanted to be alone with you. I knew better, but I did it anyway, hoping we could both have what we wanted and let it go.”
She bristled. “If you think I’m some one-night bimbo—”
He silenced her with another kiss; short, brief, and finished too soon.
“That’s not what I meant, and I’d never disrespect you that way.
I didn’t plan for things to go so far, but you got under my skin, Em, and you’re stuck there—not because of the blood bond, either—but it can’t go any further.
Best-case scenario, if they found out, we’d each get a reprimand. ”
“And the worst case?”
“You’re off to Seattle or another country for the foreseeable future.”
“And you?”
He shrugged. “They strip me of my title, position, and everything else I’ve earned for the past two centuries…
then ship me off somewhere else as well—on the opposite side of the world from you.
Then I don’t get to brush by you in passing again or catch you smiling, because no matter how much you claim to hate teaching the neophytes, you love knowing they look up to you.
I don’t get to watch you relaxing at the spa when you think no one is watching, or see how much that girl admires you for taking her under your wing.
And I won’t see the joy on your face while you read the evening surveys, because they’ll separate us out of spite. Because they’re that petty, Em.”
Her heart missed a beat, cold fingers of dread squeezing it before the pleasure his words brought could bloom. “It’s a stupid rule.”
“Maybe so,” he said, “but it’s an old rule, and the elders like their traditions. And there’s nothing either of us can do to change it. We’re minions to them. It’s the sacrifice we make for getting to live forever.”
“We could leave the coven.”
“You know as well as I do that the vampires outside of even the smallest covens don’t last long without permission. They’re hunted down by the Overseers.”
He was powerful, but she didn’t think even he could stand up against an Overseer. The thought of them harming Adrian anchored a cold, lead weight in the pit of her stomach. “What about the bond?”
Adrian hesitated. “We’re lucky it’s one-sided and the council didn’t call me out for it. It’ll fade,” he assured her.
But from the mournful look in his silver eyes, Emma was willing to bet he didn’t want it to end.