Wild Cat

Cassidy gave him a look that didn’t bode well for Eric’s future, but she subsided.

But the exchange gave Diego a little more insight into Eric. The laid-back Shifter act was just an act. Eric was a watcher, an assessor, who put together pieces while he pretended to laze. And then he struck. Diego decided he’d hate to be on the receiving end of his strike.

“Go,” Eric said.

Diego focused his pistol and quickly stepped through the thick mists, his foot landing on solid rock.

There was a guard with a crossbow pressed against the wall on the other side of the gate in the dark. Only one.

There didn’t need to be more, Diego’s mind hummed, because the opening led to a ledge about four feet wide that hung five hundred feet above… nothing.

In the split second that Diego saw this, the Fae tried to shoot him. Diego grabbed the Fae’s rotting arm and spun him away as the bolt left the crossbow. The dead man crumpled, then he and the crossbow bolt twirled into empty air and fell down, down, down, to a moonlit river far below.

Diego grabbed a dried tree root to steady himself and tried to duck back through the opening to the cave.

And found that he couldn’t. The rock had sealed up behind him, leaving Diego standing five hundred feet up a cliff face.

Moonlight flowed like water, lighting the rocks, the thin snake of river below, and a vertical wall that stretched upward above Diego’s head. Skeletal, metallic towers leaned over the gorge at intervals, none, of course, conveniently within reach.

Diego recognized where he was, and it wasn’t Faerie. He’d been here before, or at least somewhere around here, chasing a crazy suspect with Jobe, long before he’d manifested a watery terror of heights.

He was high above the Colorado River on the tip of the southern Nevada border, a mile or so below the Hoover Dam. And how he’d get down from this perch in the middle of nowhere, he hadn’t the faintest f**king idea.

“Holy crap.” Xavier jerked back as the rock wall solidified between himself and Diego.

Cassidy threw herself against it. “Diego!”

“What happened?” Reid pounded on the wall as Cassidy dug at it with her claws.

Peigi put her hand on it. “The magic’s gone.”

“Gone?” Reid demanded. “How can it be gone?”

Eric also touched the wall, too damn calm for Cassidy’s taste. “Part of the trap, maybe.”

“Why try to close it once someone’s inside Faerie?”

“Because it’s not Faerie,” Eric said. “Smell is wrong, too metallic. Those poor bastards probably died of iron poisoning stuck up there waiting.”

“I know where it is,” Cassidy said. The fact that Diego hadn’t actually been pulled into Faerie didn’t stem her panic. “I run up there, sometimes.”

“Where?” Xavier demanded.

“The Colorado River gorge. In the cliffs up there. I don’t know exactly where Diego is, but that’s the area.”

“Shit,” Xavier said. “Well, let’s go get him, then.”

Xavier strode out without another word, not looking back to see if any followed him. Cassidy ran after him. She heard Eric calling out for her, but too damn bad. This was Diego. This was her mate.

She climbed into Xavier’s truck as he started it up. Xavier deftly maneuvered the truck around to go back down the mountain. “I bet you’re going to tell me Diego’s not in a place that’s easily accessible,” he said.

“Maybe, if you’re a Shifter. Maybe not even then.”

“Damn it. I’ve been in those cliffs. Hell of a trap.”

Cassidy clutched the seat as Xavier rocketed the truck down the hill. “They made Reid think he’d found the gateway,” she said, thinking it through. “They put guards there to doubly fool him. They put the other side of the ‘gate’ in so remote a place that humans never see the guards, alive or dead. Probably even mountain goats don’t find them. If the guards don’t kill Reid when he steps through, he falls to his death. Or gets stuck on a cliff to die of exposure.” Cassidy swallowed, thinking of Diego clinging to the side of a cliff face. “Diego doesn’t like heights.”

“I know he doesn’t. Those meth-heads we arrested in Mexico did that to him. Diego was fearless before that.” Xavier thumped the steering wheel. “Damn him. He can’t stop being everyone’s older brother.”

Cassidy thought of the story Diego had told her about taking torture so that Xavier would be released by the gang leader. Her heart burned. Diego did that for people, went into danger so they didn’t have to.

Maybe that was the reason she loved him so much.

“This is going to take forever.” Xavier’s jaw clenched as they wound down the track, still a long way from paved roads.

Cassidy said nothing, because there was nothing to be said. They had to drive all the way down the mountain, back through the city, across the desert on the other side, and then to the roads around the dam.

No public roads led to those cliffs along the river. The area was patrolled, but probably not patrolled enough that anyone would notice Diego, in the dark, on the side of a cliff.

As soon as Xavier’s truck rocketed onto the highway, he had his cell phone out. He steered down the straight road with the hand of his splinted arm while he punched numbers on his cell with this other thumb.

“Hey, Sheila, this is Escobar. The younger one. Diego’s got himself into deep shit, and I need backup.”