CHAPTER 12
Decan woke with a start, the dream having pulled him in instantly, bending him to the point where it threatened to break him once more.
How many nights would he dream of his time in the SIC? How many times would he relive the most horrific years of his life? Forever, was his answer. He would never forget and thus would never stop trying to take Ewen Mackey and his band of killers that called themselves the Ruling Cabinet down. They were not rulers. They were anything but because they cared about no one but themselves. Working with shifters to kill other shifters all in the name of keeping humans safe. But Decan knew there was much more to it than that. He knew it and so did Keller. Together they had to bring them down. There was no other way for the shifters to be safe, whether above or underground.
She wasn’t in the bed with him.
That was the next jolt that Decan’s system didn’t need.
He sat up looking around the dark space. They were still in the basement of the cabin that Blaez said they could use. Decan hadn’t bothered to ask the lycan how he knew of this place or who it belonged to. He’d only taken the directions and found the key in the location that had been given. They couldn’t go back to Oasis tonight because any one of them could have been followed. So they’d split up. Keller, Gold and Kyss were at a hotel while Jordin and Zion were at a campground that a group of protestors used when they weren’t walking back and forth in front of the Ruling Cabinet’s headquarters in downtown Houston. Those protestors knew more than the other humans gave them credit for. If anyone had truly decided to listen to them, they would know exactly where the majority of the Shadow Shifters were hiding and how to get to them. Luckily for the shifters, everyone thought the group of sixteen to twenty-somethings, were just troublemakers looking for attention instead of finding a job like the rest of the human world. The problem with that philosophy was that there weren’t many jobs to be had, unless one wanted to be a shifter hunter. Most large corporations and just about all of the small businesses had shut down years ago. The human’s economy was in shambles. Their homes, what was left of them after the months of hurricanes in certain areas, blizzards simultaneously in others, looting, fires…you name it, and this civilization had seen it.
It was a totally different world from the one Decan had been born into and even more different than anything Nisa could have imagined.
Tossing his legs over the side of the bed, Decan stood and inhaled deeply. He followed the scent which led him up the stairs and into the front room of the cabin. That’s where Nisa stood, off to the side as she peaked out the window. It was dark in the house and outside so if there were a human out there, they had no chance of seeing them. But Nisa could see out. So could Decan.
“I didn’t know it would be like this,” she said quietly.
He took another step toward her but thought better and stopped. If he got too close he’d want to touch her and no doubt take her again. The need to be inside her had not been satiated with one time. He’d known it wouldn’t.
“My father said if we came above ground without supervision we would be killed. He and Uncle Nick told me and Shya that every day of our lives.”
“They wanted you to be afraid,” he said. “Fear should have kept you obedient.”
She chuckled wryly.
“You don’t know me or Shya. We are the direct opposite of obedient.”
“But you’re smart,” Decan told her. “Because you never let your father see how disobedient you were being.”
“Why didn’t you tell him you knew I was going above ground?” she asked without turning to look at him.
“It wasn’t my place,” he answered.
“But you followed me. Why?”
“I’ve been taught to protect. In the military, my parents, my cat. Protect our kind, protect the innocent, protect my comp…everyone,” he finished and cleared his throat.
Decan knew what had happened between him and Nisa. He knew exactly what they were to each other now. He knew and he hadn’t decided how that was going to play out yet. So, for now, he wasn’t going to speak the word. Not that refusing to speak it would make it any less so.
“I’ve been taught to hide,” she told him. “To sit in an underground prison and hide.”
“You were tops in your tactical training. Eli Preston thinks you’re ready to be elevated to an enforcer.”
She shook her head.
“My father will never allow that. Just as he never allowed me to travel with any of the guard teams that went above ground in search of other shifters in trouble.”
“He’s been taught to protect what is his.” Decan couldn’t believe he was defending Roman Reynolds’ motives.
The Assembly Leader had chosen to hide and he’d made the entire species do the same. It was disgraceful. Keeping them locked underground as if they’d been the ones to start this war. Sure, Blaez had said that Rome had no other choice. That he was trying to keep them all from being hunted and brutally murdered, but none of Rome’s new regulations had been there to save Decan when he’d been captured. The one that saved him had been the one that set that fire at the SIC. That fire had changed Decan’s life forever and now, he wasn’t going to follow the leader as easily as he’d been taught. Because this time, the leader didn’t have a clue what it felt like to be tortured and taunted just because of who he’d been born to be.
“But I’m not his,” she said. “I belong to myself. So shouldn’t I have some say in what I will do with my life?”
She was right and she was wrong.
Nisa Reynolds did not belong to her father. She now belonged to Decan. He wisely did not say that to her. She was no more ready to accept their fate than he was.
“You don’t know what’s out there, Nisa. You have no idea how dangerous it is for shifters now.”
“It’s dangerous because we hide. We don’t know what’s up here because we’re stuck down there,” she said, her voice raising slightly as she finally turned to him.
Her eyes were glowing. The cat’s eyes. Her stance was confrontational, her scent…mesmerizing.
“It would be just as dangerous if you were above ground,” he told her because it was true. “My parents let me stay and continue my education. Then I decided to go into the military.”
“Why? You could have come to Oasis and begun your training there. But you wanted to stay above ground. You felt you were more needed here.”
Decan shook his head. “I felt it was beneficial for me to know everything I could, about both worlds. The shifters that stayed above ground had either been found and killed or knew how to hide in plain sight very well. I could hide better than anyone. It kept me alive.”
Until it almost killed him.
“How did you do it? Can you teach me?”
“Teaching you will not change your father’s mind.”
“Not teaching me will not stop me,” she countered.
And Decan knew she was right. He knew just as surely as the companheiro calor was now lingering between them, that Nisa was going to go above ground more and more. She felt she had a place here. That she could do some good. Was it so different from what Decan was doing? Could he really stand with the others who would hold her back?
On the other hand, could he stand losing her if something happened?
It wasn’t a matter of love. No, Decan didn’t think he was capable of that. But she was his companheiro. That was an unbreakable bond. Or so he’d heard.
“Let’s get some sleep,” he told her. “We’ll head back to Oasis in the morning and give Jace our report.”
“But you will not teach me? Once I’m back at Oasis, your job is done and you will walk away.”
She sounded so certain. Very irritated by her own words, but still sure that they were true.
Decan closed the space between them, lifting his hands to cup her face when he was close enough.
“I won’t be walking away from you, Nisa. Not tonight and definitely not tomorrow.”
Not forever.
Those two words lingered in his mind, but instead of speaking them Decan kissed her forehead. When she brought her hands up to circle his wrists, he kissed her temples. She tilted her face up to him and he kissed the tip of her nose.
“Open your eyes,” he whispered and she immediately did as he asked.
Her cat’s eyes were staring up at him. Decan blinked until his lion’s eyes could respond.
“I won’t walk away from you.”
She nodded slightly at the commitment he’d not only made to her as part man, but as the fierce beast that lived inside.
Coming up on her toes she kissed him this time. Touching her lips lightly to his and whispering, “Thank you,” before wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her body into his.
Decan held her close as they stood in front of the window. He wrapped his arms tightly around her and breathed in their now shared scent. On a ragged exhale he kissed the top of her head and was just about to lead them back downstairs when he sensed something beyond the window.
Turning his head ever so slightly and being careful to only open his eyes a slit so that the brightness of the lion’s eyes did not alert anyone to their presence, he looked out. His training on restraint came in handy because what Decan saw would have definitely frightened Nisa. She would have reacted to that fear defensively and been ready to go out and fight. But Decan knew this was different. The eyes staring directly back at him were not eyes he’d ever seen before. They weren’t the eyes of any Shadow cat, and they did not resemble the eyes of the wolf he’d seen tonight.
This was different.
And it was scary.
It was meant to be scary, he decided, because its next step was to kill.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Rome yelled after Jace’s excuse.
Jace didn’t cower. Instead, he stood tall—albeit a relatively safe distance from the Assembly Leader—and stared him in the eye.
The distance was only safe because Kalina had positioned herself so that Rome would have to push her out of the way to get to Jace. That was a shame because at the moment Rome wanted to wrap his hands around the neck of a man he’d called friend for the better part of thirty-five years.
“You said finding Cole was our priority,” Jace continued.
“At the expense of my daughter’s safety? Are you really going to stand there and try to sell me that load of crap?”
“Rome,” Kalina said, placing a hand on his arm. “Let him speak.”
He didn’t reply. He didn’t give permission, nor did he deny it. He simply stood there trying to bite his tongue because words were quickly leaving his mind. In that instance the only thing left would be the physical and Jace Maybon was definitely not ready to receive what Rome had kept stored for anyone who dared to threaten his daughter’s life.
“She knows, Rome,” Jace stated. “She knew that someone broke into the files and obtained the confidential information on Jacques and Cole. She said it had to be someone with the access codes, meaning it had to be a shifter. She knows every shifter in that database. Not sending her up there to look for the culprit would have been unconscionably stupid.”
“No, Jace,” Rome said in as even a tone as he could manage. “You’re simply vying for the unconscious aspect. She’s my daughter and I expected you to keep her safe! Not send her into the arms of danger! That is not acceptable. None of this is.”
“What I think he’s trying to say, is, where is Nisa now, Jace?” Kalina asked.
Jace cleared his throat and admitted, “We don’t know.”
It was Nick who stepped in front of Rome this time, blocking the path to Jace. “You gotta come better than that, man. This is his only child.”
“She’s with Decan,” the guard that Rome recognized from being with Decan back at headquarters, said.
“Decan will keep her safe,” he continued.
“What’s your name?” Rome asked as he turned all his attention to the one that seemed to have some answers for him.
“Gold, sir,” the guard replied.
“Okay, Gold. Where is Decan?” Rome asked.
“I don’t know—” Gold began.
Rome was already shaking his head.
“I mean that I did not have the location to where he was going. Last night, that lycan said he had a place for Decan to go that would be safe. I figured Decan took the information,” Gold continued.
“But you haven’t heard from him since then?” Nick asked.
“No. But that’s not unusual. Decan knows better than to make too much outside contact. Especially above ground. We all knew to get back down here as soon as it was safe. For us,” he said looking toward a cheetah sitting in a chair with her legs propped on the conference room table.
“It was safe at first light because mostly everyone in the hotel was still asleep. We were able to get out undetected and we took two vehicles to get back to a doorway down here. We used the underwater entrance,” Gold said proudly.
Rome couldn’t bring himself to say that was smart. He was still too pissed off that his daughter wasn’t here to give any type of commendations for good work. Especially not to Jace.
“You sent them all up there and what did you get out of it? Nothing. They were run out of the gala without finding any more information about the murders or the shifter that betrayed us,” he told him.
“That’s not true.”
Every head swung to the door that had slid quietly open as Nisa stepped through.
“We received confirmation from Graham Parker that Ewen Mackey is working with a shifter. Why he would have that shifter killing for him? We don’t know, but at least now we are certain that a shifter is doing the killings,” she said looking directly at Rome.
Never in all his life did he think he would love so unconditionally and as deeply as he did his only child. She was, as Kalina had stated before, the best of both of them. She was also the future. Nisa was everything that Rome had worked for so hard to accomplish in these last twenty years.
Inside, he breathe a sigh of relief that she was alive and well. Outside, he was still pissed. The muscle in his jaw twitched and his gaze narrowed on his child. Her mother, however, was across the room in seconds, wrapping her arms around Nisa and pulling her into a hug that looked as if it might suffocate her.
“I’m fine,” Nisa whispered to her mother.
“I know,” Kalina said as she pulled back and looked in her daughter’s face. “You are capable and knowledgeable and you’re fine. But you are also my daughter, so allow me the time to fuss and assuage the worry.”
Nisa smiled into her mother’s hazel eyes. She’d never seen a female as beautiful as the woman standing in front of her at this moment. Everything that Nisa aspired to be was inspired by this person.
“Whatever you say, First Female,” Nisa said using the term that shifters not related to Kalina called her.
Her mother smiled and did that tilt of her head that had long since served as a warning to Nisa.
“Yes, she’s fine,” Kalina stated. “Sassy as ever. And you?”
Kalina was looking at Decan who had remained close to Nisa as they’d entered. He’d remained close to her since lifting her into his arms last night. Nisa wasn’t complaining, but she wasn’t thinking too hard on that fact either. What it meant, what anything about last night between the two of them had meant for that matter. Now, just was not the time.
“I am fine, First Female. Things did get a little rough last night, but I can assure you and the Assembly Leader that once the situation was under control, I kept a close eye on Nisa. She was not injured in any way,” he told her.
His voice was stilted, almost as if he were nervous for some reason. Probably because her father’s jaguar eyes had appeared and a low angry grumble was coming from where he stood.
“Then I thank you,” Kalina said, ignoring her mate and approaching Decan. “For taking such good care of my daughter and of yourself. I know that the Assembly Leader thinks highly of your abilities.”
“As do I,” Jace interrupted. “So, if we can move to another conference room, I believe the leadership needs a debriefing from Decan.”
“That means they’re kicking us out,” Kyss said to Nisa.
She swept her legs from the table and stood. Today she wore a gray one piece outfit that molded over her slim curves and a waist length yellow jacket. Her yellow polka dot boots came to her knees and this time her hair was wrapped in a messy bun and piled atop her head. Nisa momentarily looked down at the dark blue jeans and fuchsia off the shoulder blouse she’d thrown on in the ten minutes Decan had given her to run to her room and change. They’d left that cabin as soon as Decan thought it was safe that morning, but he’d insisted they take a very long route to find another entrance into Oasis.
“I’m not leaving,” Nisa said and looked directly at her father who had yet to say anything to her. “I was a part of this mission. I should be present for any debriefing that takes place.”
Jace folded his arms over his chest and looked at Rome. Gold wisely remained silent while Kyss looked thoroughly entertained.
“Shya came with us,” Nick offered. “She’s in one of the guest rooms and I know she’s anxious to see you.”
Nisa gave him a knowing look. “Shya can wait until after the debriefing, Uncle Nick.”
“She does have information that could help,” Decan said and Nisa almost took a step back toward him.
It had been that way all morning. He kept close to her and she felt an overwhelming need to get even closer to him. It was weird and took a great deal of strength to resist as they stood in the room with so many people.
“We all have information that can help,” Kyss continued. “The guy that was all hands, groping me like a horny teenager, he told me that Ewen Mackey was there last night and that he’d had a meeting with his shifter friend that’s why he hadn’t been seen at the gala.”
Jace turned to Kyss. “So are we thinking that the shifter that’s working for the Ruling Cabinet—”
“Lial Johansen,” Decan injected. “I have it on good authority that Lial was working for the Ruling Cabinet. But that he is not officially working for them now. But Lial wasn’t there last night and neither was Dorian Wilson.”
“Good authority?” Rome asked. “Whose authority?”
Decan nodded and looked to Jace.
Nisa watched them both, wondering if Decan was going to share with all of them who the person with “good authority” was. She hadn’t had a moment last night to ask him where he’d been or how he’d known where she and Kyss were. They’d been talking about and doing other things. Now, it seemed imperative that she know the answer.
“Maybe it’s time we all sit down and get things straight,” Kalina suggested.
Her mother walked around the long table to take a seat next to the chair at the very head of the table. Jace had been standing next to that chair, but with a nod of his head to the First Female, he moved to take the seat across from her. Nick glanced at his companheiro and the Lead Curandero at Oasis, Ary, and then took the seat next to Jace. Ary followed her companheiro.
Nisa jumped as she felt Decan’s hand at her elbow. When she looked up at him, it was to see his stoic features. His eyes were clear today, his bearded jaw squared. That same face had looked softer last night and in the early morning hours. His beard was softer than she’d figured it would be and her body immediately warmed as she recalled how soft it was when it rubbed against the sensitive skin of her inner thigh.
Nisa sat next to her mother and Decan next to her. Gold and Kyss remained standing, along with the Assembly Leader who everyone now looked to.
Rome moved slowly to take the seat at the head of the table. He rested his elbows on the edge of the table and clasped his fingers together. “Tell me everything that happened last night. What we now know. What we still need to find out. And what our end game is going to be,” he said in his deep rumbling voice.
They’d told the Assembly Leader everything, Decan thought as he walked out of the conference room.
Everything except where Keller and Gold had been while Nisa and Kyss were with Graham Parker. That was a private conversation, one Decan was going to have the moment he returned to his room.
“Don’t you ever scare me like that again,” the Assembly Leader was saying as he held Nisa in his arms.
They were standing in the hallway now. The First Female smiling at her companheiro and her daughter as they embraced.
“I didn’t meant to frighten you, Daddy,” Nisa said in a tone Decan had never heard her use before.
Small pangs of jealously speared into him as he saw how Nisa looked up at her father. There was nothing but love and adoration in her eyes. Decan wanted that same type of look for himself. It was silly, he knew. He’d never planned on taking a mate. But here they were and their scent…it was beyond obvious. Gold had arched a brow when they’d walked in and Kyss had smiled knowingly. If the others recognized it, they hadn’t spoken a word. For that, Decan was glad.
“Let’s have lunch,” Kalina said. “We’ll get Shya, Nick and Ary and all head to the main dining room for something to eat. You must be starving since you’ve been traveling all morning.”
Decan continued to eavesdrop, not feeling one ounce of shame for doing so. Nisa was a part of him whether he liked it or not, which meant what she did and when she did it was his business. Case closed.
She must have felt the same way, at least a little, because she immediately looked over to where he stood. No, she wasn’t asking his permission to have lunch with her parents, but she was wondering what he was going to do. Where he would be while she was with them? She had no idea, he thought. No idea, how hard it was going to be for them to be away from each other now that they shared the calor.
Neither of them spoke, mainly because Decan didn’t know what to say. Was he really supposed to tell the Assembly Leader that Nisa wasn’t going anywhere without him? No, that probably wasn’t going to go over too well. Besides that, he had to meet with Keller and Gold. Her parents keeping her busy would actually be a favor to him.
Rome turned, glaring at Decan. The Assembly Leader hadn’t asked to speak to him alone yet, but Decan knew a private meeting was coming. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but recognized that these were all steps to his future. Even the jagged little edges that pulled him away from the straight path he’d created for himself. Everything was leading to his own personal end game, one that he deserved.
“Let’s go,” the Assembly Leader said and kept his arm around Nisa’s waist.
He moved until Nisa had no choice but to look away from Decan and walk with her father. The First Female, however, stood in place a second or so longer. She looked at Decan with golden specks highlighting her light eyes. Her arms folded slowly across her chest as she tilted her head slightly and continued to stare.
“Have a good lunch, ma’am,” Decan finally said because his legs threatened to buckle under the intense scrutiny.
It was one thing to stand strong like any other soldier against their commanding officer, because that was not the time or place to show any weakness. The Assembly Leader expected that of him. But as for Kalina Reynolds, being in her line of fire was not something Decan had ever expected, nor did he believe would be as easy to handle.
When the edge of her mouth tilted in a slow smile, he almost breathed a sigh of relief. But it wasn’t until she’d turned and walked away that he let out the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.
“Bravo,” Kyss said and clapped from behind him.
Decan turned his head to look at the cheetah that was now coming to stand in front of him.
“You managed to make it through the first round.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked her.
“Oh come on, Decan. You can stop the act with me. Your scent is acrid and has been burning my sensitive nostrils since the moment you and Nisa walked through that door. And if you think her parents didn’t sniff out the fact that you’d slept with their daughter…no, you mated their daughter, then you aren’t as smart as they give you credit for.”
Decan’s hands briefly clenched and he rolled his head on his shoulders before speaking. He was not in the mood for her candor.
“Don’t you have something else to do?”
She shook her head and grinned. “Nope. I’m stuck here for the time being but nobody really trusts me enough to give me an assignment or invite me to lunch. So, after I finish razzing you about your new mate and her father who may just pummel you for daring to touch his child, then I’ll probably head down to the pool for a while.”
Decan frowned. “Don’t get comfortable here,” he told her. “Until you can produce some documents confirming your family and their whereabouts, you’re still an unlisted shifter. Most unlisted shifters are rogues. So if you want to keep playing with this team, you’d better come up with some proof that you belong here.”
She stepped closer to him, planting her palms on his chest. When he flinched slightly, because her touch wasn’t Nisa’s, Kyss had the audacity to smile broadly.
“I belong wherever I am,” she told Decan. “You should probably start thinking that way instead of constantly searching for your place in this world. It was in the military. Then it was in the SIC. Now you’re here. Make the best of it and move the hell on. Your bitterness smells almost as bad as that damned calor.”
She’d pushed away from him before Decan could do the honors and sashayed her hips down the hallway leaving him to stand there alone. And pissed off because her words had been too close to the truth.
“You’re way off script,” Keller told Decan the moment they were standing in the back of one of the storage rooms.
“Let’s just talk about what went wrong last night,” Decan said.
He wasn’t in the mood to talk about what he knew Keller was referring to. Especially not after is run in with Kyss half an hour ago.
Gold had been leaning against the back wall, one foot flat on the wall, hands at his sides. While Keller had stood with his legs spread, hands on his hips the moment Decan approached. They’d used the secure comlink Keller had provided to schedule this private meeting. So far, after Keller’s check of the Central Headquarters bunker, he’d found that this was the only place in the entire facility that had no camera coverage. That was most likely because the only doors down here were magnetically sealed and code and key operated. So the Shadows didn’t fear anyone would break into the storage rooms, nor did they think any shifters would come down here to meet and plan what was sure to be seen as the biggest betrayal to Roman Reynolds and his reign in all of shifter history.
“We had a lead on Mackey,” Gold stated. “Keller called me and I went to back him up.”
“You left Nisa and Kyss,” Decan told him.
“They weren’t his assignment,” Keller cut in.
Decan looked at the cougar with narrowed eyes. “I have a cover here and thanks to me, so does Gold. You’re the outsider, Keller. They don’t even know you’re back from the sea voyage.”
“That proves how dedicated I am to this mission. They’ll know what I want them to know about me, when I want them to know it,” Keller said evenly.
“Nisa’s going to figure out how you got into her system and when she does, she’s immediately going to zero in on you as a possible culprit in the break-in of those classified docks on her holodeck. So don’t get too cocky,” Decan said in a tone that was as irritated as he felt.
His shoulders were aching and for a moment while he’d walked down here he’d thought it might be related to carrying Nisa last night. Of course he’d frowned on that thought because there was no way a six-foot five-inch shifter who weighted two hundred and forty-seven pounds and could lift double that amount, should have had any problem lifting a female who weighed no more than one hundred and thirty pounds. Besides, the pain would have begun sooner if it were because of carrying her. It had just begun as he’d left his room and headed this way.
“And she’ll be wrong,” Keller replied nonchalantly. “Still, by the time she does all that, we’ll have achieved our revenge and the Assembly Leader will be so beholden to us he wouldn’t dare think of punishing me,” Keller said confidently.
Gold smirked and said, “Mackey was on his phone when we caught up with him on the first floor of the building last night.”
If there were one thing Decan knew about his friend, it was that he was goal-oriented. Once Gold set his mind to something, there was no going back. Killing Ewen Mackey and bringing down the Ruling Cabinet for what they’d done to his parents, was something Gold had worked toward all his adult life. Decan was happy to be totally on board with helping his friend and exorcising his own demons at the same time.
“And what happened next?” Decan asked, turning his attention completely to Gold.
“The bastard was on the phone planning the next murder,” Keller interrupted again. “He never paused in his conversation or even turned to see us as we came up behind him. I could have attacked him right then and ended this!”
And Decan knew that’s precisely what Keller wanted to do. Hell, if he walked up on Ewen Mackey he’d want to kill first and deal with consequences later too. Ewen Mackey and his sadistic friends ran the SICs throughout the world. They trapped, caught and caged shifters and then tortured them to get whatever information from them they could before finally killing them. That fire that broke out a year ago, sending everyone in the camps into a chaotic state, was the best thing to ever happen to Decan. It was also the scariest.
“We have to do it the right way,” Decan insisted. “It’ll be quicker if we had the entire Ruling Cabinet together.”
“How are we going to do that? They’ve no doubt been on guard since their family members were targeted. And after last night, I’m almost positive they won’t be leaving the comfort of their homes for a while,” Gold said.
Decan shook his head. “No. Ewen Mackey is an arrogant bastard. I heard him too many times in the SIC taunting the shifters and giving orders for unspeakable things to be done to anyone who dared disobey him. He’s evil and twisted and of all the people and different species on this earth, he’s the one not fit to live.”
Which is why Decan was going to kill him.
And he was going to do it in the same heartless way that Mackey had killed Marlee—a knife through his back. Or in Decan’s case, the large incisors of his lion piercing through the bastard’s spine.
“He’s going to continue on as if nothing happened last night. Sure, he’s going to up patrols and pick up anyone they even remotely believe is a shifter and throw them into another SIC or kill them right there on the street. But, he’s also going to demand his cabinet members come out and continue their own specific brands of torture and disrespect to humans and shifters alike,” just to prove his point.
“So when do we strike?” Keller asked. “Full moon’s in three nights.”
“We’re not wolves, we don’t need the full moon,” Gold stated.
“No. He’s right,” Decan said. “Ever since that supermoon nineteen years ago, the world has literally been out of whack. The weather, the other beings now surfacing—”
“Yeah, like that big ass black wolf that broke through the window last night. Who the hell was that and how did he know we were there?” Gold asked.
Decan didn’t want to say too much about Blaez Trekas, not even to his two closest friends. He felt like he could trust the lycan, but if what Blaez had told him was true and he’d been helping Cole Linden to hunt humans and save shifters since the Unveiling, then there had to be something in that for the lycan. The fact that Cole had disappeared once again in an explosion in Sedona was suspicious. The lycan thought so too.
“The full moon can strengthen some creatures and weaken others,” Decan said. “That’s what we learned in school.”
“They did not teach supernatural shit in the human public school system,” Gold quipped.
“No,” Decan told him. “That was the class taught by the old shaman in the Serfin complex near San Antonio. He taught me all about other species in this world and in other realms. Most people in the class with me thought it was all a myth, and at first I’d considered it might be. But then I saw that big ass black wolf last night and realized that everything the shaman had said was true.”
Gold nodded. “So what now?”
“Now, we go above ground the night of the full moon. We corner Mackey and make him assemble his band of killers and then we get rid of them all. It’s that simple,” Keller stated.
“And that dangerous,” Decan announced. “He’s going to be expecting an attack.”
“Not if we send him some entertainment first,” Gold suggested.
Decan was immediately shaking his head. “Out of the question. We don’t know who the hell Kyss is or why she’s really here.”
“She said she’s here to help,” Gold said.
Keller laughed. “She helped you get off over and over again, that’s about all.”
“Shut up!” Gold yelled. “You would have accepted her favors if she’d offered them to you.”
“But she didn’t,” Keller said. “Because she knew she wasn’t my type.”
“Nobody’s your type, that’s the problem,” Gold continued. “You just toy with all these females, never taking any of them to your bed. It’s cruel and unusual punishment.”
“It’s the way of the world,” Keller continued.
“If we’re finished,” Decan said. “Find out who Kyss really is. I want to know everything about her before we consider bringing her in to this. We’ll stay here until the full moon and then we’ll take care of this once and for all.”
“And then what?” Keller asked Decan. “You think you and your companheiro are going to live happily ever after?”
Decan did not respond, but sent a death glare Keller’s way insisted.
“Think again buddy. That royal beauty is going to kick your ass so far to the curb when she finds out you not only lied to her, but you betrayed her father and his legacy at the same time. Calor or not.”
Decan ignored Keller’s final words and left the two shifters in the storage room. He was finished with that meeting and finished with hearing input on what was going on between him and Nisa. It was nobody’s business but his. This plan had been in place since the moment he’d been helped from beneath the rubble of that collapsed building during the fire. He wasn’t about to change it now, not even for a female who caused him physical pain when she wasn’t near.