CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Valdez
I rolled over in the four-poster bed, half conscious and aching. Her scent drifted to me, the taste of her strawberry lip gloss lingering on my lips. The last few hours danced through my mind. I stretched, the scratches on my forearms burning as the muscles contracted. That damn werewolf blood had clouded my judgment. I shouldn’t have come back. I remembered asking her to send me away, but she hadn’t. I hadn’t made it more than a step inside the house before I’d reached for her. So much of what we’d done was a blur.
I scrubbed my hand over my face, trying to clear my head. My new beard reminded me that I hadn’t shaved in nearly three days.
I tried to force myself to remember last night. I had wanted to devour her, but she had other requests. The feral side of me was more than willing to oblige her. I remembered bending her over the couch with her hands bound with my belt behind her back while I placed kisses up her spine--. Our bodies were slick with sweat from exertion and the heat of the fire by the time we were done.
Recalling how she looked lying on the couch while we caught our breath made me smile. The dying fire had made her hair glow like the sun setting on the snow. The blood had worn off. I wanted to remember her. Not drunk. Not half feral on wolf blood. I pulled her back on to my lap. I wanted to remember how she moved, how she tasted, and how my name sounded on those kiss swollen lips.
I reached for her now, but she was gone. Her side of the bed had cooled. How long had she been gone? The barest glow under the closed bedroom door told me we'd regained power. That was a small favor. I looked for my clothes, only to remember they'd been left tossed about the living room.
The old floor boards were cold beneath my feet. They creaked as I stepped, bed sheet wrapped around my waist. Strangled whimpers came from the hall, and panic set in. I couldn't even go for a weapon. I'd cleared them from the house.
I assumed the worst, but found her huddled on the stairs. She was wrapped in a quilt, rocking back and forth, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Can I join you?” My voice was the same tone I used to calm my dogs during a storm. Seeing her in that state, I felt empty. I wanted to make it right for her, whatever it was.
She turned her head away from me, wiping tears she didn't want me to see. I eased myself on to the landing beside her.
“Care to tell me what I did that has you crying in the hallway?”
“What you did?” She turned abruptly to face me, those pretty eyes bloodshot and puffy. I reached my hand out to wipe away a tear that trailed down her cheek with my thumb. It tore at my heart to see her like that.
“Yeah, me. Was I really that bad in bed?”
She gave a hitching laugh, and the slightest bit of a grin tugged at the corner of those pouty lips. “Not you. It was a nightmare.”
“Oh. I see.” I leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “Bad dreams burn away as the sun rises. Come back to bed. “
“Not just a dream, Dezi,” she said, burying her face in her hands. “Memories.”
“I've got more than a few of those.”
“Not like this, I'm sure,” she mumbled as she fought down a hiccup of disbelief.
“I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” I offered, brushing a stray hair behind her ear.
She shook her head. “You don’t need to share in my nightmare. “
“I've seen a lot, Ellie.” I slid her closer to me, wrapping my arm around her. “You don't get these sort of scars by living a charmed life.”
She leaned in to me, her hand coming to rest on my forearm. “You're definitely not the monster the barman grumbled about.”
“Yeah, well, don't go giving away my secret. I sorta like being the mongrel overlord of the town. People don't touch my shit.”
She genuinely laughed, her fingers stroking my skin. I’d reach out and give her the moon if I could hold on to the feeling that her touch gave me. I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her hair again.
“If you're so determined to not stay in Alaska,” I whispered in her hair, “leave something here at least.”
She reached to twist the silver ring on her finger before she spoke. “It's my job.”
“Your job is nightmare inducing?” Keeping the disbelief from my voice was a harder task than I had anticipated. I’d too often used it on Koda that it was almost second nature. “If that’s the case, I really think you need to stay in Alaska.”
“Eww, snow. No.” She crinkled her nose.
I kissed the tip of it.
“What could you possibly do that gives you nightmares, gorgeous?”
She shivered a bit. I rubbed her arm while she found her words.
“I work as an emergency dispatcher.”
I groaned as I held her tighter. No matter how bad things got hunting Others, it was nothing compared to what humans did to each other.
She turned my arm over in her lap, her fingers ghosting over my many scars. “I’m not ready. Tell me yours, Dez. What's your nightmare?”
I hadn't actually expected her to ask. No one ever had. Not Marie, not Willow, not my siblings. I took a deep breath and tried to sort my words. With the work I did, you'd expect the thing that haunted me the most would be a hunt gone wrong, some close call that had almost ended my life, or an accident at the mine. But it was nothing like that. I could have told her a lie, she'd never know, but I didn't have it in me to hide it anymore.
“I was sixteen, on my way home from a hunt. I came around a curve and watched a truck lose control and skid on some ice. It hit an SUV and pushed it over the edge of the road. SUV rolled as it went down the bank, hanging up on a tree. I pulled over and ran to try to help. The woman driving it was still conscious, but bleeding badly. All she wanted me to do was save her daughter in the back seat. The kid was passed out. While I fought to get the door open, the SUV kept shaking as the trees it was resting on started to snap. I barely got the little girl out before the tree snapped. The vehicle rolled the rest of the way down the sixty foot embankment. I don’t remember if she screamed on the way down, or if I did, but then there was just nothing. No sound from the vehicle. No sounds from her. There was no way to get to her. I barely managed to get back up to the road with the little girl. I put the girl in my truck to keep her safe and warm till help got there, but it was too late. The woman didn't—”
I stopped myself, rubbing my hand along my leg to try to calm myself. I didn't expect it to be so difficult still.
“Did you know them?”
I nodded when I couldn't find my voice.
I wanted a drink as the images flashed in my head. I hadn't told that story in nearly twenty years, and it was still fresh as the last time. I saw that woman sitting in the driver's seat, broken and bleeding, pleading with me to not save her, but to save my sister. My mother knew her minutes were numbered when I’d made it to her.
Ellie squeezed my arm and met my eyes. She knew how I felt. She’d been on the other end of those calls. How many times had she sat on the other end of a phone and held it together while the caller experienced the unimaginable? How many times had she not let it break her from that smiling, laughing, gorgeous smile I had quickly become smitten with?
“I am so sorry.”
She knew there was nothing else to say. I shrugged, trying to brush it off like I always did.
I wished she’d been there for me all those years ago. I wished Ellie had been the voice on the other end of the line when I had dug out the phone and walked a half mile to get reception to finally be able to call in the accident while the other driver was still slumped over his steering wheel. I wished it had been Ellie and not Marie who I’d found comfort in. Maybe my life wouldn’t have gotten so out of hand.
She sniffed and wiped at her eyes before running her hands through her flame red hair. “It wasn’t a normal call. None of them are normal calls. But this one was different. No one answered the phone when I asked what their emergency was. I kept asking, trying to get an answer. I could hear someone breathing. I could hear things in the background—running, boots on the floor, doors slamming—but when I heard the glass breaking and that maniacal laughing of that man, I sent everyone to the address that had come up on my screen. Fire, police, ambulance. All of them. I knew something wasn’t right. I stayed on the line, hoping, praying that someone would pick up. I heard the screams. I heard the first of our people show up with sirens. Then I heard that laughing again as shots were fired at our people before the phone line went dead.”
What she made up in her mind was probably just as bad as knowing what actually happened. Whoever they were, she’d never known them personally, but she was forever connected to them in death. My eyes burned behind my closed eyelids as I sat there and held her in the dark.
I’d been that crazy laugh on a hunt more than once. It was the life I'd been born in to. My family were all killers. I couldn't keep from her what I did if she stayed, but I couldn't keep her safe if she went back to Oregon. She didn’t deserve more of those memories. No one did.
Ellie started to shake again. I pulled her on to my lap, moving so my back was against the wall while I held her. Her lavender shampoo drifted up to me, and I took a deep breath. Why did she have to smell so much like my past?
I kissed her temple. “Let it go. You did what you could.”
She shook her head, clutching at my arm.
“There’s more. The suspect was in custody, but they never made it back to the police station,” she mumbled.
“What?”
She shook her head again. “They didn’t make it back. The squad car ended up off the road and flipped. The officers both dead, their throats ripped out, just like the all the members of that weird cult. And the suspect had just disappeared.”
My stomach dropped. “Weird cult? Ellie, what are you talking about?”
She shivered against me. “The call came from inside a local estate that housed some local cult. I don’t even remember the name of it. I don't want to remember the name of it. The officers said there were weird symbols painted on the walls, all the windows blacked out, and the mirrors covered.”
I closed my eyes, resting my head on the wall behind us. It hadn’t been a human doing the killing. That estate would have housed a vampire nest. I’d bet my knife the call had come from a vampire thrall who had realized things weren’t just fun and games anymore. The vampire nest would have had no choice but to cover their tracks.
“The officers showed me photos. All of those in the compound had the same thing happen to them. Throats torn out. But there was no blood anywhere except from when the officers shot the suspect.”
“How long ago?”
“Three months.”
Sobs wracked her small frame as she reached for the ring again.
I wanted to fly down and hunt those vampires myself for doing that to her. I bundled her on my lap. “I’ve got you. You're safe.”
She tucked her head against my shoulder, the top of her head brushing my chin as I held her tight. I listened to her breathing settle as my head raced. I didn’t want to send her back there. That nest of vampires might not have her smell, but if they felt threatened, there was no telling what length they would go to. It had been three months, but three months was nothing to a vampire.
“Let's go back to bed,” I whispered against her hair.
I scooped her up off my lap as I stood, and she looped her arms around my neck. The blanket fell away, and she was naked and warm, pressed against my chest.
“Remind me again why I can't take you home?”
“No snow. Besides, I'd be bored and end up in trouble.”
“You? Trouble? Never.”
I caught a cast of green light around the edges of the curtain. “I want to show you something.”
“What’s that?”
I set her on her feet in front of the window. She was a foot shorter than me, and two years younger than Koda, but she set my soul on fire, werewolf blood in my system or not.
Peeking from the curtain of her red hair, I caught a glimpse of a tattoo. I tucked her red hair over her shoulder. Inked on her skin was a small tattoo of a black heart with a blue ribbon wrapped around it. I brushed my fingers across the initials and date inscribed in that ribbon on her skin. The date was three months ago. Ellie glanced back over her shoulder at my touch. The sad smile that crossed her lips broke my heart. She carried a reminder of her nightmare with her always. I leaned down and kissed her forehead. We all remembered our pain differently.
I reached over her and dramatically threw open the blinds to show her what I had taken for granted my entire life.
“Say hello to the fickle mistress we call the Northern Lights.”
“It’s gorgeous.”
She pressed herself against the cold glass to try to get a better view. I thought the same thing as I coaxed her back to bed.