“Simon,” Lyra said, her tone warning. Jaden held up his hand, however, meeting Simon’s glare head-on.
“You’re right. Whoever he was, he seemed to be here for me. We don’t usually attack one another just for the hell of it, and he was set to kill if it hadn’t been for Lyra.”
Simon blinked, as though trying to process the fact that Jaden had agreed with him.
“Well… oh. Did you, ah, did you get a look at him? Someone you know?”
Jaden recalled a split-second vision of fangs bared in a triumphant grin, eyes blazing dark blue. He shook his head. “No. I didn’t get a very good look, but he was no one I know.” Then he added blandly, “Contrary to what you seem to think, we don’t actually all know one another.”
Lyra, her arms wrapped around herself, pinned him with an equally intense look, though the concern in her eyes made it far easier for him to take.
“Who would do this?”
Jaden shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable with his decision to keep his Ptolemy problems to himself. Still, what good would talking about it do? The prospect of assassins from an ancient and powerful vampire dynasty showing up here to take him out would only get him run off that much more quickly. And he needed to be sure that was the case before making his own decisions about the safety of being here—for him, and everyone else. He was no fan of werewolves, but he wasn’t interested in getting a bunch of them killed on his account either.
“I ran a lot of errands back when I was a servant of the Ptolemy. Some of those errands could be classified as dirty work, but I had no choice. It’s possible this is connected. But that could mean one of hundreds of things. I really don’t know.”
Lyra blew out a breath. “Well, that’s just great,” she said.
“No kidding. Whether this was intentional or not, you’re going to get blamed for this,” Simon warned him, his eyes cold. “We don’t like vamps on our territory. One unwelcome visitor is enough. Two is going to get the pack up in arms, and you’re going to hear about it if you’ve got the balls to stay here. Our kind hasn’t forgotten what yours is capable of, what they did to us. Dorien can’t protect you from everything… or everyone.”
Jaden gave him a small, humorless smile. “Now that I know there’s an issue, I can take perfectly good care of myself. You don’t need to play the victim card with me either. Wolves don’t have the corner on the market for subjugation. Trust me.”
“We’ll need to go back. Dad will know if someone’s picked up the trail again.” She looked at him more closely, and Jaden found himself wanting to open up, to tell everything to the woman who belonged to those fathomless, burning eyes.
“Are you sure you have no idea who this could be?”
Suddenly it was all too much. Even the open air became claustrophobic. He didn’t want questions, didn’t want to feel beholden to this woman who tied him up in knots. He wanted to sink his teeth into her, wanted to feed, to kiss and soothe and lose himself in her. And most of all, he wanted freedom from the Ptolemy, freedom to be able to live whatever sort of life he wanted without the threat of recapture or death hanging over his head. Impossible things.
“I don’t know who it is, but I’ll have a look around. Tell Dorien I’ll have a word with him about it when I get back.”
Simon’s eyes glittered in the dark. “Sure. Running off so soon?”
Jaden didn’t give a damn what Simon thought. He did, however, care what Lyra thought of him, though to feel that way was setting them both up for disappointment. She looked as vulnerable as he’d ever seen her, watching him get ready to run away from her. He wondered if she already regretted the kiss. Did she think he’d brought some plague of vampires to her pack’s sanctuary?
If she did… was she right?
“Are you coming back?” she asked. Such a simple question. A simple, loaded question. She tried to sound unconcerned, but he could already see through the cracks he’d made in her armor.
“I’ll be back before sunrise. I need to… take care of a few things. Don’t worry,” he added, offering a small smile, hoping he could tease her back into a version of Lyra he knew how to deal with. He’d started something that, for once, he had no idea how to finish.
“Whatever. I won’t.” Defensive. And a lie, but one he was glad for.
Jaden gave Lyra one last, lingering look, graced Simon with a small, mocking bow. Then he did the only thing he knew to do, the only thing he had ever done when the heat had gotten to be too much. He shifted into a sleek black cat, the form he often felt freer in than his own human skin.
And he ran.
Chapter TEN
LYRA HAD HOPED to wake up feeling better.
Instead, she’d opened her eyes earlier this afternoon feeling like something someone scraped off the bottom of a shoe. Her dreams had been plagued with visions of herself and Jaden, back in the park. Except in her fantasies, they hadn’t stopped at heated kisses. But no matter how he touched her, how he made her moan, some part of her had known it wasn’t real. She’d known it would be so much better if she would just go to him and—
“Bullshit,” Lyra muttered, glaring at the amber-colored bottle in front of her and ignoring all the music and pleasant chatter that surrounded her. Stupid damned vampire, she thought. Why couldn’t he have just kept his hands—and that amazing mouth of his—to himself?
Of course, it might have helped if she hadn’t been such a willing participant in his little cross-species experiment, testing the laws of attraction. But how could she spar with someone whose clothes she wanted to rip off?
Lyra trailed a finger down the condensation on the outside of the bottle, watching the water drip slowly onto the bar. At least she knew he’d come back last night. She’d checked. A couple times… or ten. When she’d headed here around dinnertime, Jaden was asleep and peaceful and obnoxiously carefree in her pitch-black basement. She’d never even heard him come in just before sunrise.
Not that she’d been upstairs waiting or anything.
Lyra propped her elbows on the bar and sighed heavily. She knew she was wallowing, and she planned to enjoy it for a while before she had to figure out what to do. She took a small sip of the beer she’d been nursing for the past half hour and managed to smile at Beth, the bartender, even though there was a nasty headache brewing at the periphery of her temples, beginning to throb with a distant but noticeably achy drumbeat.
“I still can’t believe your father’s letting him stay. And at your house,” Simon said for what was possibly the hundredth time. His green hazel eyes were growing heavy lidded and bloodshot, and his wavy brown hair was standing up oddly in the places where he’d run his fingers through. After years of being the sweet, adorable boy-next-door without an enemy in the world, Simon had finally found a proper nemesis in Jaden. And all he could seem to think about was going full metal werewolf on his ass.
“You’re making a big deal out of nothing, Simon,” she muttered, which earned her a derisive snort. It bothered her to think all this overemotional posturing was on her behalf. This possessive/protective thing Simon had going on lately was both weird and unwelcome. She loved their friendship just the way it was. Why did he have to try to put kinks in it?
“Like he’s so special,” Simon continued, choosing to pretend he hadn’t heard her. “He won’t seem so special when this place is overrun with bloodsuckers. Vampire ambassador, my ass. I don’t even know what that is.”
Lyra sucked in a breath and scanned the area around them to see whether anyone was paying attention to her drunken friend. That a vampire had wandered onto their territory last night was now common knowledge—word traveled fast. But that it had attacked Jaden was supposed to stay between the four of them. Dorien didn’t want the pack unnecessarily on edge.
Of course, it didn’t seem to bother him that his only daughter was about as on edge as it got at the moment.
“Volume control, Simon,” she growled softly, then assumed a more normal tone. “I told you why he’s here. The Lilim’s leader is so new she doesn’t have all the usual vamp/wolf baggage. She’s interested in knowing more about us, and I guess wanted to make a good impression, so… Jaden’s here checking us out.”
He looked at her balefully. “I noticed.”
Lyra smacked Simon in the stomach with the back of her hand, making him grunt. “Shut up, Simon. I told you, it’s not like that.”
Fortunately, he didn’t seem to want to discuss it any more than she did, but she did wonder just how much he really suspected about last night.
“Whatever. So what do we get out of this again? Besides ‘not attacked by cat vamps offended that we killed their stupid ambassador’? Because the good impression thing isn’t really working out so far, and I can’t see that any of us are getting much out of this.”
Lyra shrugged and took a sip of her beer. “He’s only been here a couple of days. Maybe things will turn around and we’ll get an actual alliance. You never know.”
It was complete BS, of course, but Lyra found herself wishing that part was true. The thought of added protection for her pack from such a powerful source had a lot of appeal. It always had, actually, for Alphas going way back before her time. The problem was the wolves’ overtures toward the vampires had generally ended in bad blood and slaughter. Even if the Lilim’s hand was extended, Lyra wasn’t sure the members of her pack wouldn’t just bite it off.
Simon rolled his eyes, unwittingly backing up her concerns.
“Oh, right. These vamps are just so different. They’re probably scoping Silver Falls out for the Lilim’s summer home or something. Maybe if we’re lucky they’ll let us stay and serve them drinks. Fan them with palms. The usual things they think they deserve. We’re supposed to feel special because a dynasty is finally paying attention to us? They’re either desperate or stupid.” He paused. “I guess I’m a little curious about which, but not enough to want the cat vamp to stick around.”