“Silas! Oh my goddess, Silas, I think it’s him.” Meredith pressed the headphones to her ears and squinted at the screen. Fuck, it was almost midnight. A man she thought was about Alex’s size, in jeans, athletic shoes, and a dark hoodie, looked both ways before entering the Copper Herald stairwell. Was that him? She needed Silas to confirm.

He must have dozed off. Meredith shook his shoulder. “Silas!” He shifted in his seat and blinked at the laptop screen. But if it had been Alex, he was already upstairs.

“I didn’t see his face, but he fit the description,” she said.

“Let’s go.” Silas unsnapped the thin strap that secured his gun inside his shoulder holster and shrugged into a Boston Red Sox jacket. Weapon concealed but with easy access. Smart.

“I loaded silver bullets,” she said, adjusting her gun in the small of her back. It was common knowledge that silver caused the most injury in werewolves, wood in vampires, and iron in anything fae. She had a little of everything in her bag, but she planned to travel light.

“Even silver won’t kill him. Not while he’s wearing the amulet. But they’ll slow him down.” Silas cracked his neck. “That’s what I have loaded.”

Meredith quietly slid the door open and climbed out of the van, tossing on her leather blazer to completely conceal her weapon. With a nod of her head, she confirmed she was ready. He led the way toward Copper Herald’s. This time, she allowed him to go up the stairs first, her hand on her gun, ready to back him up. The door to Copper Herald’s was partially open. Suspicious. She paused, a shiver traveling the length of her spine. She drew her gun. Silas gently pushed the door and slid in sideways through the opening. The office was dark, vacant. The door to the small bedroom was also cracked, a light on inside.

Every hair follicle on Meredith’s body tingled with her unease. “Silas…” she whispered. A dark shadow interrupted the steady glow from within.

Silas burst forward, kicking open the door. “Stop!” He chased the man in the dark hoodie through the window, down the fire escape, and into the alley. Was it Alex? The man was Alex’s height and weight and too fast to be human. But she couldn’t see his face, and he wasn’t using the amulet.

Meredith sprinted after them, crawling through the window and throwing her legs over the side of the fire escape rather than bothering with the stairs. She landed easily on the balls of her feet and chased Silas and the hooded man around the next corner.

“He went inside ZeroHour,” Silas said, the thumping bass of the nightclub reaching Meredith’s ears.

Damn. Humans. Just what they needed. She pulled her jacket tighter around herself and slipped inside, following Silas. The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd pulsated on the dance floor, the scent of humans burning in her nostrils and the volume of the music rendering her deaf.

A flash of black hoodie in the crowd drew her forward, and she nudged her way into the throng. Meredith swept past Silas, her smaller body weaving between the dancers faster. Among the gyrating bodies, she honed in on her target, her fox senses tracking him to the back of the club.

“Hey!” a girl yelled as Meredith shoved her aside. There was no time to apologize. She chased the hooded man up a set of stairs and into a private room near the back of the club. By the design of this building, there wasn’t a way out aside from the way in—no windows. Which meant either Alex was stupid or this was a trap. And she knew for a fact, Alex wasn’t stupid.

But Meredith forged ahead, suppressing her fears as she ducked inside and drew her weapon. “Hold it right there!” she yelled.

She heard Silas enter the room behind her, saw his weapon in her peripheral vision.

“Finally, someplace we can talk.” The voice wasn’t Alex’s. The lights came on, and the man pushed the hood from his shaved head. A vampire. Without a doubt. His fangs were fully extended, and his eyes were red-rimmed with the need for blood. There was a large tattoo of an ankh symbol on the side of his neck.

“Who are you?” Silas asked.

The man raised his hands, palms out. He was unarmed. Of course, with superhuman speed and razor-sharp teeth, he was absolutely lethal anyway. The bite of a shifted werewolf was deadly to vamps, but the other times of the month, vampires were stronger and faster. Meredith’s finger twitched on the trigger.

“I have a message for you, from Alex,” the vamp said to Silas, ignoring her.

“Where is Alex?” Silas asked.

“Alex warns you to stop looking for him. Laina was only the beginning. If you don’t stop, everyone you love will die a slow and painful death.”

“Where is he? Who’s helping him?” Silas took a step forward, aiming at the vamp’s head.

The vampire shivered violently. “Everyone helps him,” he mumbled. “We have to. All of us.” He took a step back, avoiding one of the cocktail tables. There was nowhere for him to go. No way out but the door he came in through.

“Who, vampires? Why? Why are you helping him?”

“Just stay away from him or Laina dies and Jason is next.” The vamp reached inside the zipper of his hoodie.

“Hands in the air!” Meredith yelled. But the threat went unheeded. The vamp pulled a stake from inside his sweatshirt and thrust it into his heart. Meredith’s gun discharged, although she didn’t consciously pull the trigger. The bullet passed through the vampire’s stake-holding hand, but it was too late. The stake retracted into the chest cavity, the vamp’s body shaking around it, vibrating harder and faster until one arm and then the other dropped and shattered on the floor. The vamp’s legs followed, crumbling to dust and causing the head and torso to collapse. A shower of sparks sprayed forth as the remaining pieces of the vampire decomposed into ash right in front of her.

She stepped forward, her gun still trained on the pile of soot even though not a single bone remained. She kicked the gray dust with the toe of her boot.

“Fucking bastard. Some guys would rather implode than tell the honest truth.”

“We learned what we needed to learn,” Silas said.

“Yeah?”

“We’re getting closer. Alex wouldn’t have bothered with this”—Silas pointed at the mound of dust—“unless he felt threatened.”

* * *

Silas could barely keep his eyes open. By the time he’d confirmed, with Meredith’s help, that the small bedroom at Copper Herald’s had been completely cleaned out while they were chasing the vampire, a soul-sapping exhaustion settled over him. Alex had been staying there. The vampire was a decoy. And now both were gone.

The hollow gong of defeat accompanied him through his front door. Even the wag of Maggie’s stubby tail didn’t serve to lighten his mood. He locked up and flopped onto his bed, fully clothed. What if he wasn’t strong enough to catch Alex? Or cunning enough? The pack was counting on their alpha. Laina might pay for his ineptitude with her life.

He closed his eyes and groaned. He could use a drink, but he was old enough to know that this type of self-loathing didn’t mix well with alcohol. He wasn’t above drowning his sorrows, but he understood when he was flirting with dependence. He had no intention of going down that road. Too many people were counting on him. Or maybe he was too tired to lift a bottle even if he had one. He closed his eyes and let himself slip away.

Too soon, bright sunlight filtered through the cracks beneath his lids and warmed his face. Morning already? He rubbed his eyes and opened them slowly. The light was blinding, his view of the room coming together from the edges as his vision adjusted. And then she was there. Soleil, blinking at him from the center of the glow, her hair down in loose waves around her golden shoulders.

“I’m sorry to wake you,” she said softly. “I heard about Laina and needed to see for myself that you were okay.”

He pushed himself up on an elbow, shading his eyes with one cupped hand.

Her light dimmed. “Better?” she asked.

“Better.” He hadn’t told Soleil a thing about the case in days. He still thought he trusted her, but after what Logan had said about her date with a demon, he’d decided to be careful. She might be benevolent, but the wrong secret passed between lovers could ruin him.

“How is she?”

“Still in a coma. It was Alex. For sure. He’s threatening me because I’m getting closer.”

She covered her mouth with her hand. “Will she be all right?”

“I don’t know. Grateful is working on a spell to counteract the dark magic she was infected with when he stabbed her.”

“Goddess help her.”

He nodded. “What else is going on here, Soleil?”

“What do you mean?”

“You hear my sister was hospitalized, and instead of calling, you come over on a whim. It’s been a long time since we had the type of relationship where you could just pop over in the middle of the night.”

“Morning. It’s almost six.”

“You haven’t let yourself in since we were seeing each other,” Silas said more firmly. “It’s been over a year.”

“You haven’t changed the locks.”

“I didn’t think I needed to. Why are you here?”

She’d been sitting on the side of the bed, one leg curled under her, but now she rose up onto her knee and crawled toward him like something out of an erotic dream. Her short white summer dress lifted on her thighs. “I miss you, Silas. I wanted to see you.” Her warm hand came to rest on his forearm. “Don’t’ you miss me?”

He’d always been fascinated by her fingers. She had tiny, delicate hands, with long tapered fingers that ended in perfectly manicured nails. Everything about Soleil was decidedly feminine. Soft. Warm. Sensual. The delicate oval of her face and angle of her nose reminded him of a Botticelli painting. As she played with the thick dark hair of his arm, he remembered what it was like to touch her, to make her purr until light poured out of her skin.

But his wolf recoiled. She wasn’t what he hungered for. Not anymore. An image of red hair and brown eyes flashed through his brain. He pushed the unwelcome thought aside.

“I think you should go,” he said.

“Is this about the monogamy?” Her features contorted painfully, the corners of her mouth tugging downward. “You know I can’t. It’s not in my nature.”

He scowled. “What is that even supposed to mean?”

“Wolves mate for life. But many planets revolve around a sun,” she said.

“So you’re a slave to your nature?” he said cynically. “Give me a break.”

She moved closer, the heat she was putting off raising the temperature in the room. Although he was tempted to remove his shirt to cool off, he didn’t. He wouldn’t risk giving her the wrong idea.

“I am what I am, Silas. You knew I was a madam the day you met me. Why do you want to change me?” She leaned toward him on the bed, her breasts mounding over the neckline of her dress. She was tantalizingly close. “Darling, don’t you think we’ve played this game long enough? Can’t we take things back to how they used to be?” She’d taste like a fresh-picked peach, and she never said no. He could have her ten different ways a night if he’d let himself. And maybe he could. Maybe he could lose himself in her buttery flesh one more time.

Only, he wasn’t interested. He respected her. He cared for her, but anything more than that was long over.

He met her intense blue stare. “I didn’t want to change you, Soleil. I wanted you to want to change. I wanted you to want something better for yourself. Something real and permanent. To have a family. Be loved… not just fucked.” He was careful to use the past tense. At this point, this was ancient history.

She scrambled off the bed as if he’d insulted her deeply. “Is that what our relationship was to you? Fucking?”

He tossed back the comforter, bounded from the bed, and pointed a finger at her chest. “No Soleil. That’s my point. We’d always been more than sex. And we couldn’t go back, because for me, going back meant there was no way forward.” He shook his head. “Fuck. Why are we even having this conversation?”

“Because I don’t want you to give up on us,” she whispered.

He lowered his gaze to the floor. “Us? There is no us. Besides, I heard you’re seeing someone else.”

“It would be inappropriate for me to discuss.”

“Why?”

“Would you like to think I spoke about you with him?”

“I’d like to think you wouldn’t let yourself into my house and tell me not to give up on us if you were seeing someone else.”

Her gaze flicked toward the door. It was a long time before she spoke again. Or maybe it was only seconds, but those seconds felt long, like time was giving them the benefit of the doubt. Something was supposed to be said. The universe wanted closure.

“I should get back to work,” she said.

“Yeah. Me too. Alex is still out there.”

“Is there anything else I can do to help?”

He narrowed his eyes for a moment. “Do you know of anything that can be used to control vampires? Like control their minds?”

“Only a sire bond.”

“No, I mean for someone who is not a vampire to control a vampire.”

She shook her head. “No. Why?”

“Just curious. Something I heard. Don’t worry about it.”

She smiled and drifted toward the door.

“Good-bye, Soleil.”

She gave one last beaming smile as she slipped out the front door. “Don’t say good-bye, Silas. It sounds too final.”

Good-bye did sound final, but the three-ton weight on his chest told him that was exactly what this was. He watched her slip into the early morning light and wasn’t sorry to see her go.

He needed to call Logan. It was time to change the locks.