The Dark-Hunters (685 page)

But that only pissed him off. Had Wren kept his ass with Maggie and away from Sanctuary, Fang wouldn’t be forced to abandon Aimee.

Damn that selfish bastard.

“We can help you, Wren,” Vane said calmly. “But you have to trust us.”

Wren sneered. “I’m not putting my faith or life in anyone’s hands. All that ever got me was screwed and my ass is currently sore from it.”

Fury curled his lip in repugnance. “Nice imagery there, tiger. Graphic. Ever think of writing children’s books?”

Fang popped his brother lightly in the back of his head.

“Ow!” Fury snapped, rubbing the spot where he’d been hit. He glared at Fang.

Fang looked at Vane. “Was I this annoying before my attack?”

Vane didn’t hesitate. “Yes, and you still are most of the time. And we have now gotten off topic.”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Wren said irritably. “You can’t keep me here forever, wolf. Putting me on a boat was a nice trick to keep them off my scent, but it won’t take them long to figure out where I am. All you’ve done is drag the Dark-Hunters into our fight and knowing Acheron, I’m sure he won’t be amused by this.”

Wren paused to let out a tired sigh. “They’ll be coming for me and we all know they won’t stop. I would rather face them on my own terms than have them attack me on theirs.”

Wren headed for the door.

As he passed by Jean-Luc, the Dark-Hunter grabbed him. Before Wren could react, the pirate tranked him.

Infuriated, he growled and changed, but before he could do anything more than that, he collapsed to the floor.

The human’s face blanched. “What did you do?”

“Tranked him.”

Fury scratched his head as he looked down at Wren’s unconscious tigard form. “He’s going to be seriously pissed off when he wakes up.”

“No doubt,” Jean-Luc concurred. “Therefore I suggest we keep him under at least for a day or two until he can heal and you can plan out what it is he needs to do.”

Vane looked less than convinced. “Yeah, but if he doesn’t listen—”

“Come up with your plan,” Maggie said, “and I’ll make sure he listens to it.”

Fury laughed at her. “Don’t be so cocky, human. Wren isn’t the kind of beast you manipulate.”

Aimee shook her head at him as she exchanged a knowing look with Fang. “No, Fury, you’re wrong. With her, Wren is different.”

Fury moved over and took Maggie’s hand into his. He turned it over to see her palm. “They’re not mates.”

Aimee looked at Fang and her heart pounded. She loved him with every part of herself. “You don’t have to be mated to care deeply for someone. I think Wren will listen to her.”

“All we can do is try.” Vane moved closer to Wren. “Lend us a hand, guys.”

Aimee pulled Maggie aside as the men picked Wren’s tigard form up and carried him down the narrow hallway to a lush bedroom.

“Do you really think there’s any way Wren can prove his innocence?” Maggie asked Vane as he covered Wren with a blanket.

“I don’t know. Hell, I’m not even sure he didn’t kill his parents. His cousin made one hell of an argument to the council.”

Aimee had to fight the urge to shove Fang’s hard-headed brother. Now she knew where Fang got it from. “He didn’t kill them. I was there when they brought him in. He was too traumatized by it. He sat in a corner for three weeks solid with his arms around himself, just rocking back and forth whenever he was in human form. As a tigard, leopard or tiger, he stayed coiled up.”

Vane frowned. “Was he wounded when he was brought to you?”

Aimee hesitated at the question. Vane wanted to know if he’d been in a fight with his parents. Honestly, he’d looked like hell. But she didn’t want them to know that because she knew in her heart and with her Aristos powers that Wren was completely innocent. “He was a little scuffed up.”

Vane looked skeptical. “A little or a lot?”

“Okay, a lot,” Aimee admitted reluctantly. “But had he been in a fight with two full-grown Katagaria, he would have been a lot more injured than what he was.”

“Unless he poisoned them,” Fury said. “Zack didn’t really say how he’d killed them.”

Maggie stepped forward. “I still don’t believe it. It’s not in him.”

Fury let out a mocking laugh. “Yeah, and you are delusional. Babe, news flash, with the exception of you and the pirate, we’re all animals here. And we all have a killer’s instinct.”

Yes, but they killed to protect and for food. They didn’t kill for profit.

Aimee sighed as she looked wistfully at Wren’s unconscious form. “He did have a really hard time in puberty. He couldn’t maintain his forms and he did have extremely violent outbursts over minor things.”

Vane arched one brow. “Such as?”

“Well, the first night he was working in the kitchen, Dev startled him and Wren cut Dev’s throat with the knife he had in his hands. Luckily Dev pulled back fast enough that it was only a small wound, but had his reflexes been slower or if Dev had been human, it could have been fatal.”

Fang still knew the truth. Thanks to Thorn and his “gifts,” he had no doubt about what had happened. “That doesn’t mean he killed his parents.”

Jean-Luc made a noise of disagreement. “It’s rather damning. Normal people don’t do things like that.”

Maybe not in the pirate’s world, but Fang knew what it was like to be feral. It’d taken him a long time after Aimee had dragged him out of hell before he’d stopped having night terrors. Before he’d stopped striking out at people in a panicked frenzy. But for Aimee, he’d still be like that. “No, but someone who’s been severely attacked and who was powerless to stop it would do it.”

Fury shook his head. “I don’t know, brother. I think you’re projecting what happened to you onto Wren.”

No, he wasn’t, but he couldn’t tell them about his powers or the fact that he’d sold his soul.

Maggie looked at Aimee. “When was the last time Wren ever attacked anyone without them attacking him first?”

Aimee didn’t hesitate with her answer. “Just that one time with Dev, but like I said, he was scared and shaking when it happened.”

Maggie nodded. “That’s what I thought. Wren is innocent in this. He told me that his parents killed each other and I believe him. Now we just need to put our heads together and think of some way to prove it.”

But Fang knew that was easier said than done.

Leaving them alone to discuss the details, he pulled Aimee out of the room and into the narrow hallway.

“What have we done, Aim?”

Aimee reached up to brush his hair back from his face. She could cry over this night. How she wished she could turn back time and just be with Fang in her room again.

But she couldn’t.

“Let me go back and see if I can keep them from pursuing Wren.”

“I still say fuck them. Let’s leave.…”

Her family would hunt them down to the ends of the world.

Aimee touched her lips to his whiskered cheek as she placed her locket in his hand. “I will find a way to be with you, Fang. I swear it.”

Fang nodded, even though he didn’t believe a word she spoke. It had been hopeless before.

Now … this was good-bye forever and he knew it.

CHAPTER 24

Aimee took a deep breath as she entered the back door of Peltier House. This was the last place she wanted to be, but she knew full well why she had to return.

Her family would kill Fang and his entire clan if she didn’t.

Steeling herself for what was to come, she closed the door and headed for the stairs. She’d only gotten as far as the hall table when Dev came out of the door that led to the kitchen. She saw relief in his eyes a second before it was replaced with anger.

“So you’re back.”

Aimee shrugged. “It’s my home.”

He scoffed at her. “I would find another one, if I were you.”

She stiffened at the coldness of his tone that bit her all the way to her soul. “I’m being thrown out?”

“You’re being warned. You picked your side and it was the wrong one.”

“Leave us.”

Aimee looked up at her mother’s commanding tone. Maman was at the top of the stairs, glaring down at them. Dev shook his head at her before he headed back toward the kitchen.

She flashed herself up to her mother’s side. “Don’t even think about striking me, Maman. I’m not in the mood for it. And I will hit back this time.”

Her mother narrowed her eyes on her. “You would sacrifice all of us for a hybrid orphan without clan?”

Maman was talking about Wren and while he held Aimee’s loyalty as a friend, it was Fang’s life that mattered most to her. “Never. But I will not stand by and see an innocent condemned for nothing. Can you not see the lie that is being told, Maman? I know Wren. I talk to him. He’s no threat to anyone but himself.”

Still her mother’s face was angry and cold. Her family, and in particular her mother, wasn’t stupid. She had no doubt that her mother and father knew she’d left voluntarily with Fang. Given the way he’d been protecting her these months past, they had to know he would have never really harmed her.

“You betrayed us all.”

Aimee sighed. “If doing the right thing is betrayal, then yes, I suppose I did. So what are you going to do now, Maman? Kill me?”

Her mother growled ferociously at her, but Aimee stood her ground.

The air around them sizzled an instant before something shattered in Wren’s room.

Aimee followed her mother who rushed to the door and slung it open. She half-expected to find Wren there even though they’d told him to stay away until this was settled. She could tell by the scent that it was a tiger, all right, but the blond man searching the room wasn’t Wren.

“What are you doing here, Zack?” her mother asked.

The tiger curled his lips as he opened a drawer. “The bastard escaped us. I need something with his scent on it to disseminate to the Strati who seek him.”

Aimee arched a brow at that. The Strati were elite Katagaria soldiers who were carefully trained to hunt and to kill. Her brothers Zar and Dev, along with her father, were technically Strati warriors even though they shouldn’t have been. But the Peltier clan was all about keeping up appearances.

“You need nothing of his,” her mother said to her utter shock as she defended Wren. “Get out of my house.”

Zack didn’t listen. He moved to open another drawer.

Her mother used her powers to slam it shut. “I said for you to leave.”

The tiger turned to confront her. “Don’t screw with me, bear. You have as much to lose by this as I do.”

“What do you mean?”

But Aimee already knew. Her powers painted a perfect image of what was going on here. “You’re the one who spoke out against Wren at the Omegrion … you lied.”

Her mother jerked her head to look at her. “Do not be foolish, cub. I would have smelled a lie.”

Aimee shook her head. “Not if the animal makes a habit of lying. He could easily mask his scent.”

Zack took a step toward her only to find his path blocked by her mother.

“Is Aimee telling the truth?”

Zack answered with a question of his own. “Were
you?
” He arched a brow at her mother. “Do you really think Wren’s gone mad? Honestly? You just wanted him out of here and you seized on any excuse to expel him. Admit it, Lo. You don’t want anyone here but your family and it galls you to have to play nice with the rest of us.”

Her mother growled low in her throat.

It wasn’t the truth. Her mother would protect most of them with her life, but there were those like Wren her mother didn’t trust at all. And those, he was right, Nicolette hated having here under her roof. Thanks to Josef.

Her family was too scarred by the past. By the one they’d trusted who had killed her brothers. And for that, she couldn’t blame her mother at all.

Zack narrowed his gaze. “If Savitar ever learns the truth, he’ll come for you and all your cubs. There won’t be a brick left of your precious Sanctuary.”

Her mother seized him and threw him against the wall. He landed with his back against it, but it didn’t appear to faze him at all.

Zack actually laughed at her. “What happened to the rules of Sanctuary, Nicolette?”

Aimee caught her mother before she could attack the tiger again.

“Get out, tiger,” Aimee snarled. “If I let go of my mother, there won’t be enough left of you to worry about Savitar or anything else.”

Zack pushed himself away from the wall. He glared at them both. “You have even more to lose than I do. Give me what I need to cover both our asses.”

Now it was her mother who laughed. “Are you completely stupid? Wren has never left his scent on anything. Look around you, idiot. There is no personal item here. As soon as an article of clothing comes off his body, he has always washed it or destroyed it. He even keeps a monkey here so that its scent camouflages his own. You will never be able to track him. Face it, Zack, the cub has more intelligence than you and your father combined.”

Aimee was suddenly impressed by her mother. Her mother had known that and still she’d allowed Wren to keep Marvin. How unlike her. And it caused a new wave of respect to fill her heart.

Zack’s nostrils flared in anger. “This isn’t over.”

“
Oui,
but it is. You come here again and, code or no code, I will see you dead.”

Growling, Zack vanished.

The tension in the air eased considerably.

Maman let out a slow breath as she turned toward her. “Aimee, call your wolf and warn him what has happened. I am sure he knows where Wren is and he can warn them that the tiger is cornered and desperate. In his position, Zack is capable of anything.”

She frowned at her mother’s sudden reversal. “I don’t understand. Why are you being unbelievably understanding? No offense, Maman, it scares me.”

Her mother gave her a harsh stare. “I have no love of Wren, this you know. But I respect the predator within him and I do not appreciate being manipulated by another. Nor do I relish being made a fool.” Her mother shook her head. “I should have questioned why Zack and his father continually called to check on Wren after he was sent here. I allowed them to plant seeds of doubt in my mind and I saw in him what they wanted me to see. I can’t believe I was so foolish.”