The Heat (24 page)

He was gone.

She blinked, her brow furrowing. She looked down at herself and the covers. She was still naked and the sheets were wrinkled. She blinked as memories came rushing back to her.

Then she raised her fingers and brushed the sides of her neck. The wounds were obvious to the touch and still tender. But, as she felt them, she also felt her lips curl into a smile.

She took a deep, cleansing breath and sank back down onto the bed, wrapping her long legs around the blankets with the languid grace of a sated cat. “Daniel Kane, you’d better have a damned good reason for leaving my bed,” she muttered quietly, still smiling.

After a few luxuriously lazy moments in the bed, she stretched again and got up. She needed a shower. She could feel a stickiness between her legs and she wanted to clean the wounds on her neck.

She made her way to the guest closet. Luckily, she’d stashed a few changes of her own clothes in here long ago, so it was no problem to pick out an ensemble and take it with her to the bathroom.

Without reservation, she opened the door and walked, still completely unclothed, into the hallway beyond. For some reason, she simply knew that she was alone in the house. She heard no one else in there. No breathing. No heartbeats.

At that thought, she paused, stopping in her tracks.

No heartbeats? I can tell that there are no heartbeats.

She listened. She could hear the kids playing in the back yard across the street. They were talking with each other. No, they were
whispering
, and yet, she could hear them.

She could hear a man watering his lawn, using his fingers to spray the water from the nozzle of the hose. She recognized that method of watering and knew it was Mr. Broden, five houses down.

She could hear a humming sound, like the buzz of electricity. It ticked. Ticked again. And then switched and a higher-pitched buzzing starting up where the other had stopped. She knew, without having to check, that it was a traffic light. She’d heard them up close. She knew what they sounded like. But the nearest traffic light was a block away.

“Oh my God,” she muttered. She could hear
everything
.

And she could smell things, too. Someone in the neighborhood had put their trash out a day early. Tabitha’s neighbor was falling off of her non-smoking wagon. Tabitha’s other neighbor was burning scented candles. Some animal nearby had just given birth; she could actually smell the placenta. And the cherry blossoms a few houses down were ripe and in bloom.

She could even smell Daniel. On her own skin.

She flushed hot at the thought and a small part of her didn’t want to shower – didn’t want to wash him off. She felt somehow sultry. Like an animal in heat.

What was happening to her? Instinctively, she once more brought her fingers up to the marks on her neck. “He changed me,” she said, aloud. As if saying it out loud gave the verity of it real substance, she reeled from the shock and found herself against the wall, using it to help her remain upright.

“I’m a werewolf.” With that, she blinked a few times, pushed against the wall to straighten herself, and continued to walk, almost on auto-pilot, down the hall. She felt sort of numb, as if stuck in a kind of dream that she could never wake from. It had only been a few days ago that she’d even learned werewolves actually existed.

And now she
was
one! It would be enough to rattle anyone’s nerves.

At the same time, though she was overwhelmed by the unrealistic turn that real life had taken, she couldn’t deny she also felt…
good
. Like, r
eally
good. She felt stronger. She felt as if she could punch a hole through the wall if she wanted to. Or rip a door off of its hinges.

Lily rounded the corner of the hallway and walked into the living room. She would never admit this out loud, but the truth was, she also felt beautiful; the way a super model might feel. Or Wonder Woman. She felt sexy in that special way that usually only came in dreams, where no man could resist your charms and every guy wanted to ask you to dance.

She smiled a slow smile and shook her head. A note on the coffee table caught her attention. It was written in a man’s hand, printed in all-caps. It was definitely not the curly cursive that Lily had long associated with Tabitha’s writing.

Lily strode to the table and picked up the note, moving all of her clothes into one arm as she did so. She read the words slowly, a frown furrowing her brow by the time she was finished. She read it again.

Instantly, she felt sad. But not for herself. For Daniel.

“That’s quite a life you’ve made for yourself, Chief,” she spoke softly. Any kind of job that yanked you heartlessly, out of your lover’s bed and threw you directly into a murder scene was one hell of a vocation. She felt very sorry for him.

She was also worried. Was it always going to be like this? Baton Rouge wasn’t Chicago or Detroit or New York City, but it wasn’t Hanalei, Hawaii, either. It had its fair share of crime and a good amount of that was violent.

With a heart-felt sigh, Lily dropped the note back on the table and headed toward the bathroom and its shower.

Thirty minutes later, she was clean and dressed and she’d combed her long, gold hair out with her fingers. She pulled the toothbrush out of the drawer where she’d left it while she’d been visiting Tabitha and squeezed out a good-sized dollop of paste onto its bristles. Then she used her free hand to wipe the fog off of the mirror.

She dropped the toothbrush in the sink and stared at her reflection.

Her gold-flecked-brown eyes were no longer simply gold-flecked. They were full on gold and they were
glowing
.

Her heart rate sped up at once and her breathing quickened. Not a single flaw marred her skin, which also seemed to glow, as if lit from within. There was an ethereal shimmer to her honeyed hair, even while it was wet. Her teeth seemed even whiter than they had been before.

“
Holy mother…
” she whispered. No wonder she felt beautiful. She really
was
.

* * * *

Tabitha wasn’t sure how it had happened, and she almost didn’t care why, but she was more happy that she would care to admit that she was laying next to a man – a werewolf – as incredibly powerful and sexy as James Valentine. One of her arms was draped over his chest, and her head was propped up on his bicep. The fingers of his left hand lazily played with a lock of her blue-black hair.

Tabitha took a deep breath, enjoying the scent of him. And then she asked something that she’d been working up the nerve to ask ever since he’d made that phone call to his pack while they were on the plane to New Mexico.

“James…” She bit her lip. “Why were you workin’ for Cole?”

Valentine glanced down at Tabitha as she looked up at him and it looked as if he was considering the question carefully. Eventually, he hugged her closer to him and sighed. “I was born in a little town in Arizona in 1881. But my mate was born in 1933, in Mississippi. She was beautiful; a truly breathtaking Dormant. But she was born into the most unfortunate form possible for that place and time.” His expression took on a far-off look.

“She was black,” Tabitha guessed.

James nodded once and, as he continued, Tabitha could almost see the images flitting behind his molten silver eyes. She was growing acquainted with the waves of power that rolled off of the alpha werewolf at this point. Right now they were waves of sadness and an anger that would never fully go away.

“We met in 1955 and were in love at once. We mated and I changed her and she became pregnant.” He paused, his tone growing more quiet. “She was a very religious woman, despite the fact that I threw more than one curve ball into her philosophy with our supernatural existence.” At that, he smiled a small smile and Tabitha could hear the love in his voice. “But she was stubborn. She insisted we be married. There was no arguing with her; especially after her transition.”

He sighed. “So, we were married in a very private ceremony in the only church with a pastor that would see a white man and a black woman joined in holy matrimony. I had my reservations. We both did. We knew what people were saying. Hell, I could hear them a mile away.”

He shrugged beneath Tabitha’s head. “But we kept them to ourselves.” He stopped then and drew a deep, calming breath, as if steeling himself to go on. “They set fire to our home while I was away one morning. She was nine months pregnant; werewolves have the same gestation period as humans. She had had a hard night. Our son had been kicking her in the ribs.”

Tabitha could see the shadows cross his handsome face. His gray eyes took on a slight glow. “He never let her sleep….” He fell silent for several full minutes. Tabitha knew enough not to break that silence.

Finally, he cleared his throat and went on. “When I got home, the second floor was already caving in. Our neighbors begged me not to go inside. But I had to try.” He looked down at Tabitha then and gestured to the scar on his arm. Then the one on his cheek. “I found her on the first floor. She’d fallen through when the wooden beams of our bedroom gave out beneath her. They had--” He closed his eyes.

Tabitha held her breath.

“They had cut my son out of her and she hadn’t had a chance to heal completely before she and the baby were trapped in the fire.” He opened his eyes again and stared unseeing at the ceiling. “There was no heartbeat. Not from her. And not from him.”

Tabitha felt the tears gather in her eyes. Her guts clenched tight as she gently raised her hand to touch his cheek. She could not imagine how hellish it would have been for him – finding his wife’s beautiful body, tortured and burnt into an unrecognizable form. And then finding his murdered child. The pain that she could not imagine was still unbearable. She didn’t need to tell him that she was sorry. He already knew. But she said it anyway. “James… My God –” She broke off, swallowed hard, and finished, “I’m so sorry.”

James took a minute to compose himself and then continued, this part of his story quite obviously a lot less painful than the first part. “A few weeks later, a man with green eyes approached me. I could smell that he was a werewolf. So, when he asked me for a minute of my time, I agreed. I had nothing left to lose.”

“Cole?”

James nodded. “He told me that he could find the men who had killed my wife. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew, but I didn’t care. He tracked them down and I took their lives.” He paused again, letting the memories slide through his mind. “I worked for him on and off from that day forward. I figured I owed him.”

Tabitha waited a good long while before asking her next question. When she did, she framed it as carefully as she could. “Did he kill all of those people?”

James, in turn, took a while in answering. Finally, he said simply, “No.”

Tabitha frowned. “How do you know?”

“For a long time, I didn’t. I thought there was a chance he
was
the murderer. He was always disappearing at odd times – right off the radar. And it always turned out that those times coincided exactly with the times of the most publicized, most vicious murders. Serial killings. Things like that.”

“But?”

James smiled a small smile. “But once, just after he did one of his disappearing acts, I went looking for him. I found him, too. He appeared out of thin air, breathing hard and covered in blood. He was sobbing.” He paused and seemed to consider something. “In that moment, I knew. I knew he was involved somehow – but that he wasn’t guilty. Not for the deaths of the innocent.”

Tabitha had nothing to say to that. It was an answer that bred more questions.

“He saved Lily from the fire in New Mexico,” James went on. “And then he let her go… It was so unlike the image of him that werewolves have built up in our minds over the decades. It was much more like the Malcolm Cole that helped me track down my wife’s killers fifty years ago.”

Tabitha thought about this in stoic silence. Then resolutely she pulled the covers back up over them both and closed her eyes as he wrapped his strong arms around her.

Chapter Seventeen: Good Cop, Bad Cop

Lily nervously adjusted the small silk scarf she’d tied around her neck. She felt so much like Sookie Stackhouse in True Blood that it was plain ridiculous. How obvious could a person be?

She had to remind herself that vampires didn’t really exist and that practically no one realized werewolves existed either and that anyone noticing the scarf would simply assume she was making a fashion statement. Besides – it
was
kind of cute. Kelly, the Starbucks barista, was always very honest with her and she’d told her as much. And the color matched her hair.

Christ, I’m giddy
, Lily thought to herself.
I sound like a teenager.

She sighed and sat back in the black lounge chair beside one of the several outdoor tables they’d set up around the perimeter of the coffee shop. The sun had only risen on the horizon a few short minutes ago. She was never up this early in the morning. She was a night person, by nature. But there was so much going on inside of her and around her that there had been no way in hell she could have stayed home.

She’d lost her own cell phone somewhere between Tabitha’s house and Daniel’s, but Tabitha had a landline for her computer, so she’d used that phone to try reaching Tabitha’s cell. It had gone straight to voice mail. Lily smiled.
Three guesses as to that one
, she thought. And she didn’t want to bother Daniel. He had innocent lives in his hands at the moment.

The next number she’d dialed was for the taxi service. She’d taken a taxi to her own apartment, retrieved some cash and her license and a few other necessities, crammed them into a purse, and then driven her own car to Bluebonnet. She was growing quite familiar with that particular street again.

Now Lily took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She could smell the coffee out here, the exhaust from the street, the rain from last night, the fresh earth from a garden somewhere nearby. She could hear people talking inside. She had to fight not to eaves drop. She could hear their heartbeats.