But . . . but she could reach through the fire, too.
“Are you like me?” he asked again, staring down at her. “If you die, Eve, will you rise again?”
She could only shake her head. I don’t know. She’d never known what she was. Maybe that was why she spent so much time looking for the truth about others.
I can’t find it for myself.
Cain said, “You can’t help me fight Wyatt. You’ll just slow me down.”
Well, crap, the guy sure wasn’t pulling any punches. But she had an ace up her sleeve. “Before you go tossing me into some safe house, there’s one thing you should know.”
“And what’s that?”
Eve offered him a smile that showed lots of teeth. “I wasn’t totally honest with the vampire.” So sue me. “Thanks to my little abduction last night, I know how to find Wyatt.” She kept her expression determined. “As soon as we rendezvous with Trace, I’ll tell you both everything I know.”
The wolf shifter wasn’t at the meeting point in Charlotte. Cain’s fingers tapped on the steering wheel. Eve was curiously still beside him. The woman had never been this quiet before, not for so long.
They’d been waiting twenty minutes already. There was no sign of the wolf.
Cain cranked the engine.
Her hand flew out, and her fingers wrapped around his. “We aren’t leaving,” she told him, her voice almost a growl.
He turned his head toward her. Met that bright blue stare. “Yeah, we are.” He was definite on this. The longer they stayed there, the more danger they could face.
She had to see the writing on the wall. She had to. Trace wasn’t meeting them because the wolf couldn’t meet them.
Eve hadn’t been the only one taken last night, but she had been the only one rescued.
Two vamp bars. Two traps. One missing wolf.
Cain frowned. He should have known that Wyatt would have a backup plan in place.
They’d picked the old park as a meeting point because it was isolated. Private. But it looked like the meeting wasn’t going to happen.
Cain eased the vehicle—another stolen ride—away from the curb.
“Take me to the bar,” Eve whispered.
From the corner of his eye, Cain saw her hands clench in her lap. He knew which bar she meant.
Thirty minutes later, they were in front of Bite—the vamp bar that Trace had visited the night before.
There wasn’t much left of the place. Charred bricks. Ash. The shell of a wall in the back. Humans—probably arson investigators—were combing through the wreckage and yellow lines of tape marked off the area, keeping the gawkers back.
Hell.
“Wyatt has him,” Eve said. There was no emotion in her voice.
Cain kept driving past the bar. Nice and slow. Their windows were tinted so no one would get a good look at him and Eve, and he sure wasn’t doing anything to attract attention to them, not yet.
He also didn’t respond to Eve’s comment. Wyatt could have the wolf shifter—
Or Trace could be dead. If the wolf had fought back, death was a strong possibility. Cain knew other paranormals who hadn’t been taken alive. Wyatt just burned their bodies and moved on to his next target.
“You said that you knew how to find Wyatt,” Cain said instead, trying to keep her focused and away from the wall of worry he could almost feel growing around her. As soon as he learned what she knew, he would be dropping Eve off with a supernatural who owed him more than a few favors. The guy would keep her safe—until Cain made sure Wyatt wasn’t coming after any of them ever again.
“He wasn’t supposed to take Trace.”
A red light flashed. He slowed the car. Glanced in the rearview mirror. No sign of a tail. Yet. “He did.” Maybe the words were too cold, but Cain didn’t know any other way to be.
He heard the sharp rasp of her breath, then she said, “Turn right.”
He did.
“Left.” The word was clipped. Eve was worried about her shifter, but she was holding herself together. The woman was strong. Far stronger than Cain had initially realized. “Head straight for two miles,” she told him, “then turn at the federal building.”
He followed her instructions without question, wondering what Eve had planned next.
She had him stop in front of a small tattoo shop called Death Ink. The lights were off, and the place looked abandoned.
“Last night, while I was fighting that guard who locked me in that room to burn”—she exhaled on a heavy breath—“I saw a tat on his arm.”