A Love Untamed (5 page)

A trip of sensual energy danced over Melisande's flesh, making her gasp, pulling her gaze to the threshold where Fox had disappeared a short time ago. He stood there again, some twenty feet away, one shoulder propped against the doorframe, a bottle of beer dangling from his fingers. That sky blue gaze caught hers, snaring her in a velvet grip, accelerating her heart rate. The barest of smiles lifted his mouth, a smile that stirred the traitorous attraction. A softness entered his eyes, wrapping around her, stroking over her flesh like a warm, gentle touch, igniting a longing she didn't understand.

And didn't want.

She wrenched her gaze away, once more breathless and unsettled, perspiring in a room gone suddenly too warm. Damn him!

“We'll be going,” Ariana said beside her, then shared a brief, tender kiss with Kougar, her mate.

Melisande ignored the mated pair, struggling to get her traitorous pulse under control even as she fought to keep from looking at the man who'd set it to flight in the first place.
Stars in heaven,
it had been so long since she'd felt anything like this, since she'd felt virtually anything at all. And she didn't want to be feeling now.

She liked who she was,
what
she was—a warrior capable of doing what must be done to protect her queen and her race. Some called her cold, even heartless, but she was fine with that. Better than fine. It was exactly what she wanted.

Feelings made a warrior soft, made her lose her edge. And that was something Melisande refused to allow.

F
ox watched Melisande disappear, misting out of the crowded Feral House foyer, leaving him feeling solar-plexed. Every time he came anywhere near her, he felt a buzz of desire unlike anything he'd ever experienced, a shadow of the pleasure she'd blasted him with the first time, perhaps, but incredible, all the same.

He'd been attracted to her from the moment he first saw her. She was so small, so . . . perfect. And he had to admit, that hard-ass attitude of hers turned him on, probably because no other woman had ever shoved such blatant stop signs in his face. She was a challenge, without a doubt. But she was more than that.

Each time their gazes met, he felt as if he were being sucked into a whirlpool. And he wondered if perhaps she felt the same, if some of her anger wasn't simply a determination to resist.

And just how long would she be able to resist? The question tantalized.

“Where are the new Ferals?” Hawke asked, hooking his arm around Falkyn's shoulders, pulling her close against his side, a look on his face that had all of them straightening. Tensing.

“Lepard is down in the gym with some of the others,” Paenther replied. “Grizz took off on foot into the woods a while ago.” He glanced at Tighe. “Rikkert?”

“Vhyper took him back to the dining room to settle him down.”

Hawke nodded. “We need to talk.”

“Lyon's office.” Paenther turned and started down the hall, Hawke, Falkyn, Kougar, and Tighe close behind. When Jag stepped forward, Fox hesitated. Technically, he was one of the new ones, if not one of the seventeen.

Jag glanced at him. “Come on, Foxylocks.”

Fox flipped him off, grinned, and followed. It was odd, and sometimes awkward, to be straddling the two camps. He might be a new Feral, but the animal spirit who'd marked him had been one of the nine never lost, never infected.

As they started back to Lyon's office, a shiver stole through him from out of nowhere. An odd shiver more of the mind than the body. A moment later two words formed in his head.

West Virginia.

Had his gut offered up a truth at last? Though what kind of truth West Virginia presented, he had no idea. Usually goose bumps preceded his intuitions, but he knew the nature of gifts tended to change after one was marked by the animal.

So, was his gut telling him to go to West Virginia? Was that where the Mage had taken Kara? The thought teased him, lifting his pulse with excitement, then dropping it just as fast. His intuition more often than not offered up relatively useless information. For all he knew, his gut was trying to tell him that West Virginia was the current location of his next car.

Hell, he didn't even know
where
in West Virginia.

Lyon, standing by the window rigid as stone, turned when they entered.

“Hawke has information.”

At the flare of hope in Lyon's eyes, Hawke held up his hand. “Not about Kara, Roar. I'm sorry.”

The Chief of the Ferals nodded, his body turning once more to marble.

When all eight were pressed into Lyon's office, Paenther closed the door and turned to Hawke expectantly.

The hawk shifter lifted one steepled brow. “We've been acting under the assumption that the new Ferals were marked by accident, that the dark magic hampered the animal spirits' abilities to mark the best of the line, leaving the ones marked a random selection. We were wrong.”

Grunts and groans peppered the small room.

“The dark magic,” Hawke continued, “was designed to force the spirits to choose the morally weakest—the most evil—of each animal line. The falcon spirit fought hard against that dictate and managed to choose the one she wanted. Others probably did, too. But we already know Maxim was pure evil, so some of the animal spirits failed. Bottom line, there were no accidental markings. The new Ferals are each either the best or worst of their respective animal lines.”

“How do we know which is which?” Lyon demanded.

Hawke shook his head. “We don't know.” He glanced at Jag. “As we've seen, you can't always judge a man's soul by his actions.”

Jag gave a rueful shrug. From what Fox had been able to piece together, Jag had been the resident bad boy, driving his Feral brothers to murderous intent on a regular basis, until he met Olivia.

“Then we have no choice.” Kougar's voice was cool as ice. “We collect all seventeen in the prisons.”

Hawke's hold on his mate tightened.

Kougar's gaze slid to the female Feral, a cutie with dark, blue-tipped hair and a killer smile. “Sixteen. Not Falkyn.” Though Falkyn was one of the newly marked seventeen, she was soon to be Hawke's mate, and there was no doubt in any of their minds that she was the one meant to be marked.

Kougar turned to the others, meeting each man's gaze, one after the other, ending with his chief's. “Then we start over.”

Start over.
Kill them.

Falkyn wrenched free of Hawke's protective hold. “Grizz fought the darkness to help you. You voted to trust him.”

Jag grunted. “That was before Rikkert accused him of murder.”

Three heads jerked toward Jag, then Paenther as he explained the altercation in front of the house a short time ago and how Grizz hadn't lifted a hand against his attacker.

Hawke frowned. “What makes a man take a beating like that without defending himself?”

“Guilt,” Jag, Fox, and Kougar said simultaneously.

Hawke nodded. “The evil don't feel guilt. Not like that. Only those with a fully functioning conscience. We've seen his anger-management issues. It's probably no surprise that he's caused trouble before. But we've seen evidence of honor in the male.”

“Are you willing to stake her life on it?” Kougar's gaze flicked to Falkyn. “And ours. Because if we make one mistake, if we allow one evil Feral to remain within our ranks, we're compromised. Inir will find a way to use him to destroy us. And if we go down, the Daemons rise, and the world as we know it will be over. Everything we've fought for will be lost.”

Lyon lifted his hand, drawing all attention back to him. “We can't start over until all seventeen are accounted for.”

Jag snorted. “As soon as word gets out that the new Ferals are all dead men, none will come near this place, good or bad.”

“Then word can't get out,” Lyon said.

Not for the first time, Fox thanked the goddess that he wasn't one of the seventeen. The return of the lost animal spirits should have been a godsend. Instead, thanks to the Mage, it was turning into a nightmare.

Fox opened his mouth to tell him about his gut instinct, but Lyon began to lay out a plan, and Fox remained silent. What good was
West Virginia
? The last thing they needed right now was a wild-goose chase courtesy of the newbie. If only his gut would offer him something useful.

“W
here's Lyon?” Grizz demanded as he strode into the foyer, eyeing one of the Ferals' brides. Tall and attractive with a gun strapped at her waist, her name began with a D. Delaney.

“His office, I think,” she said. “I heard voices in there a moment ago.”

With a brief nod, Grizz headed toward the closed office door. After the run-in with Rikkert, he'd started toward the rocky falls, then forced himself to return to Feral House. The situation was fucking impossible now. He'd lay it all out for Lyon, let the Feral chief decide how he wanted to handle it.

It was too fucking bad that there was no unmarking a Feral Warrior once he was marked because he'd do it in a pig's breath. He wasn't a team player and never had been. He didn't want this fucking job.

As he reached for the knob to Lyon's closed office door, voices carried to him, low but audible. His hand froze.

“Rikkert will be easy to take down. He hasn't come into his animal. Grizz is going to be the problem. How in the hell are we supposed to get a monster grizzly into the prison without losing limbs? He's not about to go willingly.”

What the fuck?
Grizz pulled his hand away from the knob, his head beginning to pound. He was
not
hearing this.

“He won't go easily, that's for damn sure. Lepard might. He allowed himself to be captured once. He might again.”

A grunt. “Not if he figures out he won't come out of the prisons alive.”

Grizz's blood ran cold.

“He might. They're all the best or the worst of their lines. If we can just figure out how to identify those who were meant to be marked, we won't have to kill them. Not the good ones.”

The best or . . .
the worst?
And what was he? Not the best. Definitely not the best. But the worst? Hells balls.

“You do realize that it could be months before we can round up . . . or at least account for . . . all seventeen.”

“What choice do we have?”

“We'll have to lure Grizz down there first. He can't be warned. If he shifts, we're grizzly food.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

Grizz had heard enough. He turned away from the door and strode down the hall to the foyer, his footfalls silent despite his size, his head pounding. The fuckers were going to kill the new Ferals! Wipe them all out. And dammit to hell, he'd been afraid of this because it was exactly what he'd do in their position. Kill the infected ones and hope the next lot were the ones meant to be marked. Especially now when they'd figured out that some were the worst of their line and might be true evil.

He entered the foyer and headed for the door, veering at the last minute toward the hall table and the wooden bowl where he'd seen some of the Ferals drop their car keys. He'd get nowhere on foot, not with Hawke and Falkyn hunting him from the air.

He grabbed a set of keys with a tag marked
FORD ESCAPE
and was five strides from the front door when a sound caught his ear and he turned to find Lepard coming out of the basement, his face flushed with sweat, his short, newly white hair plastered to his scalp. Another of the newly marked seventeen, Lepard had been ensnared in the dark magic and had followed the evil Feral, Maxim, to Poland where he'd been forced to help in some kind of ritual to aid Satanan and his Daemon horde's efforts to rise. But he'd fought the darkness, allowing the good Ferals to capture him. He wasn't the worst of his line, Grizz would bet money on it. Would he bet his life on it? Yeah, maybe he would.

“Come with me,” he told the snow leopard.

Lepard looked at him with confusion. “Where are you going?”

“I said . . . come.” He'd grab Rikkert, too, if he thought there was any chance the male would come with him willingly without trying to kill him. There wasn't.

Lepard glanced down at himself. “I'm a little . . .”

Grizz said nothing, just stared at the man, conveying . . . hell, he didn't know what he was conveying, but Lepard seemed to hear it anyway.

“I guess I could use some air.”

Yeah. Air. And survival. Something the snow leopard might not get if he stayed. Grizz led the way out the front door, spying the Ford in the wide, circular drive amid the impressive collection of other, far more expensive, vehicles.

Where he was going or what he was going to do, he had no idea. Something. Overheard words replayed in his head.
If we can just figure out how to identify those who were meant to be marked . . .

That was the key. Even if he knew he wasn't one of them.

Maybe, just maybe, something good could come out of his fucked-up life. Even if it turned out to be the last thing he did.

W
hen the meeting ended, as they left Lyon's office, Fox caught up with Paenther. “May I have a word?”

The black-haired male nodded, led him into the empty war room, and closed the door.

“This is probably as useless as a chocolate teapot,” Fox began. “But I've always been a bit of an intuitive, and my gut's offered me a truth.”

Paenther's eyes sharpened, making Fox feel pressure to give him a gem. If only he had one. “West Virginia,” he blurted. “That's it. Nothing more specific.”

The male stared at him, his eyes narrowing. “The Cub, your predecessor, had almost the same intuition, only with him it was the mountains of western Virginia. He led me straight into Mage captivity.”

Feck.

“He also led me straight to Vhyper, whom we'd been searching for.”