Taken

Chapter 4

It shouldn’t have happened.

They’d hunted upir before, of course, while the old alpha was alive. But the farm had burned, their sleeping shaman and alpha dead in the flames, and now they were on their own, scrabbling to survive. They had cut both Tribe and upir a wide berth since.

And Zach shouldn’t have followed her, but she smelled too good to be true. Brunette, yes. Human, which was all right but not exactly appetizing. But young, female, warm—and with an edge of moonlight and snow, something cold and crystalline. Zach hadn’t smelled that in forever, and certainly not with the tantalizing musk of something that belonged to him overlaying it.

He’d leaned close and gotten a good lungful, and she was probably what he thought she was, which made it incredibly lucky, and incredibly—

But she’d flinched away as if she knew what he was, and searched the inside of the nightclub as if she’d lost her purse. She hadn’t; he’d kept his fingers well away from it, despite fleecing at least four people at the bar while he watched her. Pale skin and pale eyes. Nice hips, a glory of curling sandalwood hair, a pair of cute little steel-rimmed librarian glasses, and that ridiculous purse she kept clutching. She’d walked right out the front door while he was still cutting across the dance floor, harvesting another few wallets and emptying them by touch. It was almost too easy when you had the training and quicker-than-human reflexes. The rest of them had been working the crowd, Julia concentrating on businessmen and Brun sliding through knots of college boys with fat rolls to spend on killing their livers. Those fat rolls would keep the Family fed and moving.

But here, in the alley behind the nightclub, the smell of blood drenched the air, plucking at the beast in his bones. Zach yanked her back as the upir snarled, and the emergency door flew open, smacking against the brickwork so hard dust puffed out. Kyle was first through, his head up and nostrils flared, the Change rippling under his skin, and he leaped for the upir without pausing.

Oh, holy shit, no! Kyle shouldn’t be doing that, even if he was the alpha; he could get not just hurt but unzipped.

Kyle just hesitated too much.

The woman fell as he let go of her. He promptly shelved her as a problem to solve later and leaped, a fraction of a second slower than Kyle—who met the upir with a bone-shattering crunch, driving it sideways and down as it twisted and snarled. It had a white, loose shirt on, and was probably rabid if the just-spilled blood painting its front was any indication.

Not that the bloodsuckers needed much inducement to get really savage. But if an upir was hunting here, going after all the healthy young ones under bright lights and in the middle of crowds, it was either a baby, which was all right—or too burnsick for them to handle.

Snapping, growling, making a hell of a lot of noise, Kyle feinted and Zach’s bones made crackling sounds as the Change touched him, too, running through his body like fire. The animal in him snarled, lifted its head, and clawed at the blind-root thing in front of it, the enemy who twisted like a snake and spat, slashing with hands turned to shovel-shaped claws. If he could just hold it long enough, it would make a mistake and he would get it safely put down before it hurt any of the others. And before it made any more noise to attract witnesses.

But Julia was suddenly there, too, crowding her brothers aside as she let out a chilling glass-throated howl. The fight tipped and shifted, the upir kicked and slashed again. Kyle backhanded his sister, throwing her out of the way—and catching the claws meant for her, full across his unprotected belly.

Blood burst again. The smell of it, loaded with the terrible reek of a gutshot, smacked Zach across the face. He descended into the red welter of combat, the animal in him roaring, and didn’t care that there would be witnesses. The upir died, shredded and shrieking, the rot of its last exhale throttling the alleyway. Zach landed, foul liquid staining his fingers, and his bones crackled again as he looked for more to kill.

They pressed against him, those of his kind, and a thread of scent tried to cut through the reek of death and decay. It was a reminder, something he had to attend to, some problem his human side had to solve.

The animal didn’t care. It smelled food, and blood, and suffering, and it wanted revenge and hot meat, bones cracking between its teeth.

“Zach—” someone said, a word that had no meaning.

He thumped back into himself as the Change receded. Julia was sobbing, as openly and messily as a child, and sirens pierced the night with diamond stitchery. There was other noise, too—people, crowding around.

The instinct of hiding among prey all his life prodded him. The upir was dead, and he had to get his Family out of here before they were seen, or, God forbid, caught. A Carcajou couldn’t be held for long, but if other Tribes caught wind of their presence after this, it could get ugly.

You mean uglier than this? The Change trembled inside his bones, spikes of pain.

“Zach,” Brun whispered again. It was the sound of a child in a nightmare. The upir’s body was already just a stinking sludge inside a sodden white shirt and the ragged remains of a pair of leather pants, a pair of boots full of nasty black liquid falling over, skooshing out in a tide of corruption over Kyle’s half-Changed body. Fur receded into his little brother’s skin, his entrails a mass of grayish-blue tangled in a spill, the jet of blood from the abdominal aorta’s cutting black as the upir’s leaking.

His corpse would be fully human—what parts of it the upir’s caustic sludge didn’t eat away.

Another alpha, dead. Zach’s stomach cramped. He hadn’t eaten yet tonight, and the smell was enough to make him glad. My fault again, I should have—

“Come on.” Eric pulled at his arm. “We have to go.”

Where is she? He glanced around, but the woman he’d followed here was gone. A crowd of people had magically appeared—prey, his animal side whispered, casting around for that thread of light brunette scent that he somehow knew.

She was nowhere in sight. He had to find her.

What the hell is going—

“Come on!” Eric yelled, and dragged at his arm. Julia let out a keening sound, and it was like a jolt of fresh bloodscent, jarring him into alertness. He showed his teeth, still searching for the woman, and he and his Family leaped, Julia catching a high-hung fire-escape ladder and bolting, Brun right behind her, Eric using the full measure of his strength and speed to hop onto a Dumpster’s top and land behind the knot of people who had somehow clustered in the bottleneck of the alley. Their surprise echoed off the brick walls.

“Did you see—”

“Holy shit!”

“Jesus!”

Zach’s throat ached, denied another growl and the hunting cry. We are Carcajou, and you are our prey. But not right now. Not when there’s likely another predator around.

He moved among them like a cold wind, quick fingers plucking, and grabbed a few more wallets as he did. They would see only a blur, and the instinct to grab what he could was very close to the surface. Along with other instincts—like the urge to rip through flesh instead of clothing, to spill blood instead of cash.

A few feet clear of the alley he paused, because he smelled her again, very close.

The animal in him snarled. Two drives, possession and revenge, were forcing it to run in circles—and thankfully, giving him enough room to reassert control. Kyle. Goddammit, why? You should have waited, we could have baited and trapped it, and we could have killed it together. And kept Julia out of it. The howling hit, Julia’s voice lifted in a paroxysm of grief, and he had to go. She was likely to hurt herself or someone else, and he was the only one who could control her when she got like this.

But he had to find that woman. She smelled like ice and moonlight, like salvation.

She smelled like a shaman potential.

The scent drifted across his sensitive nose again. He glanced down the alley again—more people were crowding, spilling out of the emergency exits and pressing into the confined space, most with cell phones out.

Stupid herd animals. He could probably scare them, scatter them like the bleating sheep they were.

But the scent of her, close and sweating, filled his nose. He drew in a deep lungful and took off at a lope.

Christ, Kyle, why didn’t you wait? But he knew why. His little brother had taken on the responsibility of an alpha—first into battle to defend his own.

And it was Zach’s fault.