The Shifters

Page 20

“We need a council meeting,” Caitlin said. “All the communities. Some of the vampires have been around for centuries. Someone must know how to stop them.”
Ryder was silent beside her.
“What?” she asked softly.
“I’m not used to working with anyone,” he admitted. “Much less a whole community.”
Caitlin thought of her parents, the dream they had of the communities working together, working for peace, and felt for the first time that she might understand it.
“It’s our best hope,” she said, and meant it. Ryder was silent, but she felt his arms tighten around her, and she was overwhelmed by the desire to stay there, always stay exactly as they were. Her heart hurt with it.
Ryder put his hand to her face suddenly and turned her head toward him, looking deep into her eyes. “Yes,” he said, and she had no time to wonder what he meant before he kissed her, and then she forgot everything else as her body rose to his.
When Caitlin woke again to soft daylight, Ryder was wrapped around her. She lay still, feeling the huge weight of him, the silky softness of his skin, the power in the bulging muscles in his arms and thighs, the enticingly flat plane of his stomach against her back.
She was sore all over, most especially inside. And she was dismayed to find the throbbing she felt between her legs was not just soreness but desire. She wanted more, wanted him again, wanted him to hold her down and take her, again and again and again, until she was begging him to stop….
Begging. Oh, she had begged, all right, but not for him to stop. She had begged him for more…and more and more.
Her face flamed, remembering. She felt exposed, vulnerable, owned, used, helpless. That was the worst. She felt dependent, weaker than she’d ever felt in her life. She needed him, craved him, and he could go away any second. He was a shifter; there was no way to trust him.
One inch, one breath at a time, she eased herself out of his arms until she was standing. She hadn’t woken him, but she felt cold, bereft, and longed to throw her self back into bed—back into his bed, because it didn’t even feel like her own bed anymore—back into his arms….
No.
She forced herself to back up quietly and slipped into the bathroom, where she showered in water as hot as she could make it, scrubbing herself raw, trying in vain to remove his touch from her skin.
Ryder woke luxuriously in a bed redolent with Caitlin’s perfume and the smell of sex. His erection was hot and hard and throbbing with wanting her, and he growled in his throat and reached for her…to find nothing, no one.
He sat up, blinking against a shaft of light from the windows. He could feel no sense of her in the room or anywhere else, and heard nothing, either, but a slow drip from the shower.
Caitlin sat in Fiona’s kitchen, dressed as austerely as she could manage in a black turtleneck and gray jeans, her hands wrapped around her third mug of coffee. She was wired and nervous as a cat, and every time she moved she could feel Ryder on top of her, and feel her face burn and her chest flush with heat.
Luckily Shauna was chattering on, filling the silence, but Caitlin had seen Fiona glance at her appraisingly several times already. No way to hide anything from her—ever.
Caitlin reached for a croissant and smothered it with raspberry jam. Her hands were shaking so much she could barely hold the knife.
The front door opened, and she jumped about a mile. All three sisters went still, listening, then relaxed as they heard male voices and then Jagger stepped through the kitchen door, followed by Ryder.
The shifter was freshly scoured, in a leather jack et and tight jeans, and Caitlin could smell the combination of leather and pheromones from where she sat. She felt her pulse jump and blood throb between her legs.
“Look what I found on the street,” Jagger announced to the sisters. Ryder glanced at Caitlin, and her heart was in her throat. Every detail of last night was in his eyes as he looked at her; they might have been naked in her bedroom right there, and she wouldn’t have stopped him if he took her on the kitchen table.
She looked away from him and gulped coffee.
“Excellent,” Fiona enthused. She pressed a mug of coffee into Ryder’s hands. “Can I make you an omelet? We have croissants and juice and pastries on the table.”
“Just this for now,” Ryder said, lifting the mug, and glanced innocently at Cait.
Shauna was already up, demanding of Jagger, “The autopsy?”
Jagger looked to the three sisters. “Some of the signs are there. Massive adrenaline spike. Heart failure.”
“But the chemicals are wrong,” Shauna finished for him. Jagger nodded silently. “So it was a walk-in. Possessing a were.” Shane scowled.
“Which means even the Others are at risk,” Fiona said tensely.
“Not just at risk,” Ryder said. “If the lead entity has been hiding in one body, it may be using the body of an Other.”
“It could be anyone, then,” Shauna said.
“Hiding in plain sight,” Ryder said, underlining the possibility.
“We need the Council to meet tonight,” Caitlin said. “We can’t wait.”
“Yes,” Jagger said.
The five of them looked around at each other, and Fiona suddenly stood up from the table. “Then let’s do it.”
Caitlin saw Ryder meet Jagger’s eyes, glance to ward the door. Neither of her sisters saw it, she realized.
Jagger stepped over to Fiona. “I have a full day—is there anything you need from me?”
“Go,” Fiona said. “I’ll call Armand, and we’ll send out a summons. All you have to do is show up.”
As Fiona started to walk Jagger to the door, Ryder looked toward Shauna and asked casually, “Bathroom?”
Shauna pointed. “First door to the left.”
Caitlin pretended not to watch as Ryder walked casually out. She started clearing the table and then slipped out after him.
She hurried into the hall just in time to see Ryder shift.
She’d seen Case and Danny shift before, but as accustomed as she was to weirdness in her role as a Keeper, to other facets of reality, witnessing a shift was always unnerving. She wasn’t sure if other, less attuned people would experience it in the same way, but for herself, she felt a queasy sense of not just the shifter but all of reality shifting around her, a momentary dissolving of anything concrete and tangible, while the shifter’s body rearranged its molecules into something else entirely.
It happened now, and the nausea was instantaneous and racking as Ryder…melted, which was as close as her rational brain could come to describing it, and then there was a raven there in his place, a huge black bird, and he was flying out the open French doors and over the courtyard.
The room slowed its shimmering and returned to something resembling normal.
Caitlin held on to the wall and gagged from the dizziness, the overwhelming feeling of vertigo….
Then she forced herself to straighten and bolted toward the stairs after him.
Jagger waited on the outside of the compound wall, beside the gate. He turned at the rustle of wings as the raven landed on the gate, and then the air shimmered and Ryder stood in front of him.
The men regarded each other warily.
Jagger was the first to speak.
“I gather you don’t think much of this plan.”
Ryder shrugged. “Too many cooks.”
Jagger’s face tightened. “That’s the way this city works. The communities work together. That’s how we keep the peace: coexistence.”
“Yes, yes, very high-minded of you all, and I’m just a lone gunman. But the only thing I think this meeting is useful for is to see if a walk-in shows up in the body of one of your friends.”
Slipping through the front door, Caitlin willed her feet to step lightly and ran at her most silent across the courtyard, coming to an abrupt halt just behind the wall, with the fountain providing cover so she could listen to the two men standing just outside the gate.
Ryder looked to the vampire and kept his voice level. “Do what you have to do, it’s your city. But you have to know this. It’s the Keepers who are the most vulnerable here.”
He saw Jagger tense with suspicion as well as with worry, and felt a stab of satisfaction as he continued inexorably. “And not just Caitlin but all three of them. The lead entity is already aware of Caitlin, has directly threatened her twice, and I’d be shocked if it doesn’t know of all of them. So do what you need to do, bring others into it, have your Council meeting, but know that every second we don’t take action is giving these things an opening, and your woman is in the direct line of fire—just like mine.”
Behind the fountain, Caitlin’s heart leaped at his words. His woman? Is it true? Is that how he thinks of me? She eased closer to the wall to make sure she heard everything.
“Your woman?” Jagger was saying contemptuously. “Don’t tell me you intend to stick around town after you’ve done what you came to do.”
Ryder was silent, and Caitlin’s heart plummeted. Finally he muttered, “What I do, where I stay, is none of your business, vampire.”
“It is my business if it has to do with Cait,” Jagger said coldly. “She’s family now, my sister.”
Caitlin felt a strange disorientation, a burning in her chest. His sister? Me?
Jagger continued. “You may have no conception of family, but make no mistake, shifter, I’ll kill anyone who even thinks of hurting her.”
Ryder was surprisingly and uncharacteristically silent. Behind the wall, Caitlin held her breath, hoping for him to jump in, to say something, anything….
Nothing but silence and the soft rustling of the wind in the trees.
Jagger snorted contemptuously. “As I suspected. So I’m telling you now. If your intentions aren’t honorable, back off from Caitlin. Leave her free to find her own happiness. She deserves that.”
Caitlin felt hot tears in her eyes, but what was making her cry, she couldn’t have said. Jagger’s words…or Ryder’s silence? She only knew she felt torn up inside.