Black Rook (4 page)

“What’s a trick? The necklace?” A blush stained her cheeks and her pulse jumped. “It was only meant for protection.”

“Protection from whom?” Father asked.

Her chest lifted higher as her breathing increased, her agitation rising to fear. She’d been caught in some sort of subterfuge and was fumbling to cover. As much as Rook wanted to calm her down and tell her she wouldn’t be hurt, he couldn’t speak up. Something about Brynn was
wrong
. Impossible, even. Protecting the run came miles ahead of comforting a woman he’d known for three minutes.

Father leaned slightly forward and planted his knuckles on the top of the desk, eyes hard. “Who sent you?”

“No one,” she said, the two words a plea. “I swear, I’m here on my own.”

“Why?”

She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, but didn’t speak. Fine tremors shook her arms and shoulders. Rook didn’t pretend to know a lot about women, but he knew a scared rabbit cornered by a wolf when he saw one. The very first time his band performed at a music festival for a cash prize, the bass player had looked just like that in the final few minutes before they went onstage.

“Knight,” Father said quietly.

Brynn lurched to the side, but had nowhere to run. She pressed her back against the bookshelf holding Father’s collection of vintage textbooks and primers, eyes wide and hands up in a stop gesture. “I didn’t do anything.”

“I won’t hurt you.” Knight moved to the center of the room. “I promise. I just want to help you calm down.”

She tilted her head and glared at him, hands close to her neck, twisting that ring again. “You’re the one scaring me right now.”

“Trust me.”

“Touch me and I’ll scream.”

“I don’t have to touch you, Ms. Jones.” Knight’s voice adopted the soothing tone he used when calling upon his gift. “Look at me, okay?”

She did, and the moment her eyes met Knight’s, her entire body stilled. Something in the air crackled with energy, like static electricity, as her Magus nature fought against the part of her responding instinctively to Knight’s call.

Knight was the rarest of all loup garou: a White Wolf. Loup populations were relatively small, and one in five hundred had a chance of being born White. White Wolves had the unique ability to calm other loup, to soothe tensions and prevent the primal, base nature of their inner beasts from taking over. Having a White Wolf in a run kept them civilized. For that reason, and because of the rarity of their births, White Wolves were often treated more like precious commodities than run members. Runs were not allowed to have more than one if another run was currently without. A majority vote from the thirteen run Alphas across the country could change a White Wolf’s life in an instant, and the loup in question would have no say.

Their mother, Andrea, had been a White Wolf and, according to the stories Rook had been told, was devastated to discover her second-born carried the mark of the White. Once Knight reached the age of four and shifted for the first time, he could have been sent to another run in need. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the point of view), their mother was killed when Knight was three, just a few months after Rook was born, in a skirmish with the volatile West Virginia run. Her death left them without a mother, but it also ensured the three brothers would never be separated.

Whatever magic existed in a White Wolf and allowed them to calm other loup had always worked on half-breeds in the past. The difference was that all known half-breeds were from a human and loup pairing. To Rook’s knowledge, no one had ever seen a loup-Magus offspring before. And until they got her story, this small girl was the biggest threat in the room.

“What are you doing?” Brynn asked, her voice pitched high with fear.

“Calming you, if you’ll allow me,” Knight said. “It’s painless, I promise.”

She blinked rapidly several times. “You’re a White Wolf, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Rook glanced at his father, who seemed just as surprised. The Magi were more educated in loup matters than Rook realized, and that worried him. If the Congress of Magi ever wanted to turn the loup against each other, targeting their White Wolves was the most effective way to create chaos within the runs. Rook didn’t like this stranger, attractive as she was, knowing his brother’s secret.

“I thought Whites could only calm other loup,” Brynn said. Her genuine fear and confusion, in both the pitch of her voice and the look on her face, slammed something home for Rook. Something that stunned his mind into stalling out for a few seconds.

Knight broke eye contact and looked at their father. From his spot behind Knight, Rook couldn’t see Knight’s face, but he imagined it mirrored Bishop’s and his own. Shocked. Confused. No one spoke. They didn’t have to: either she was an excellent actress, or she had no idea that she had loup garou blood.

***

Brynn was a hair’s breadth from screaming, and not just because she was trapped in a room with four brawny loup garou males, or because they seemed to be having trouble deciding how to handle her. She didn’t really care that she’d given away a Magi secret by revealing her knowledge of the White Wolf’s ability to calm other loup; she didn’t understand why he was trying it on her, or why she’d felt him in her mind, attempting to soothe her fraying nerves, when he shouldn’t have been able to do so.

No, she was quietly melting down because she’d failed to diffuse the situation immediately by revealing her purpose in Cornerstone. Her cover had been seen through too easily, and as she’d stepped into the office, she had realized that she’d failed in her self-imposed reconnaissance mission. Her hesitation and nervousness, caused in no small part by the four large and powerful men crowding her, only made her look like a threat to their kind. And until she prevented Rook from murdering her father, then by Avesta she
was
a threat.

The moment she’d seen Rook up close, as punkish and charming in person as he’d been in his band photos, Brynn had faltered. While she’d stared at him with hostility, he’d gazed at her with interest. Genuine, open interest from an attractive male. Something she hadn’t had in a long time. Because of her status as a second daughter, she’d grown up knowing she would never be as powerful as her father, nor accepted as a member of the Congress. Her weak, inconsistent seer abilities impressed no one, especially not the courtship of male Magi her own age. The one time her teenage self had forgotten her place and put her hope into the affections of a boy, he’d broken her heart and spirit in one cruel blow.

No, as much as she craved attention, she would not fail her father because of a loup garou’s wide-eyed appraisal. Or his good looks and perfectly toned body. She had more sense than that. And she was now ninety-nine percent certain that Thomas McQueen was Alpha of the Cornerstone run. And she could not bluntly accuse the son of the Alpha of murder without consequences for the Congress—especially now that they’d identified her as a Magus.

She had to talk her way out of this. The loup garou had keen enough senses to figure out if she was lying through her teeth, and she wasn’t a very good liar anyway. She never had been, even when it came to self-preservation. The truth was her only viable option.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Coming here was a mistake.”

Her statement earned the attention of all four men, and of the four, the suspicious glare coming from Rook unnerved her the most. Knight backed up a few steps, and she felt more able to breathe in the extra space between them. Until Thomas stepped out from behind his desk and overtook the spot in front of her, a large obstacle she had no hope of defeating. He was not a man she wanted as an enemy. He could snap her neck with one hand. Brynn dropped her own hands down, keenly aware of the ring on her finger and the lethal dose of poison hiding inside of it. The last thing she needed was his attention on that ring.

“Why did you come here?” Thomas asked. “The truth, if you don’t mind.”

“I really am here on my own. No one sent me. No other Magus knows I’m even here.”

“All right, I believe you. But you must know this is a sanctuary town, and I imagine there are plenty of auctions elsewhere that you could attend. So why mine?”

Sink or swim time, foolish girl.

She turned her head and caught Rook’s gaze. Even from a few feet away, bright flecks of copper glinted in dark brown eyes that watched from an expressionless face, and she was struck by the irrational urge to make him smile. Or at least to stop looking at her as if she’d been scraped from the bottom of his shoe. “I wanted to meet you,” she said to him.

“Me?” Rook gave her a disdainful look that made her want to melt into the floor. “Don’t tell me you’re a band groupie.”

She nearly laughed, and that amusement buoyed her waning confidence. “Hardly. I didn’t even know who you were until a few days ago, much less that you’re a musician.”

His frown deepened, and if a man could physically bristle, he managed it. “Then why me? I’m positive I don’t know you.”

“You don’t.”

“What do you want with Rook?” Thomas asked, his tone protective. Deadly.

Brynn kept her gaze steadily trained on Rook, too nervous to look away and see the suspicion and accusation coming from the loup surrounding her. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, determined to tell as much of the truth as she could. “I’m here because I want to look into the eyes of the man who kills my father.”

Chapter Three

“Huh?” The grunted word wasn’t Rook’s most intelligent response ever, but it was about all he could manage.
The man who kills my father
swirled through his mind like a sixteen-measure chorus, spoken by Brynn with the conviction of someone who’d already witnessed the crime. But he didn’t know Brynn or her father, and he sure as hell had never killed anyone.

His father growled—a low tone that he used as a message of warning when his run members were testing his patience. “That’s a very serious allegation,” he said. “Accusing someone of murder.”

Brynn’s entire body was trembling, and she looked as though she wanted to climb inside the bookcase and hide. She stood there, though, head up. “I didn’t say it was murder.”

“You said ‘kills’,” Knight said. “As in future, right?”

She glanced at him, nodded. “Yes.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I saw it in a vision last week. Him”—she pointed at Rook—“standing over my father’s mangled body with blood all over his hands.”

Rook’s guts tightened with disgust. Being accused of killing someone was bad enough, but she made it sound as though he’d ripped the man apart with his bare hands. And while beating a man to death was, as a Black Wolf, theoretically possible, he couldn’t ever imagine a scenario in which he’d actually do it.

No, that wasn’t completely true. He could imagine killing a man in defense of his family or his run’s safety. Hypothetically and in self-defense. Not murder.

“And you interpreted this vision to mean that Rook kills him?” Father asked.

“No one else was in the vision. He was covered in my father’s blood. How would you have interpreted it?”

“You don’t know me,” Rook snapped, finding his voice again. “But because I’m loup garou you assume I’m a killer? Or is it just the tattoos?” In the band, the markings and piercings had made him cool, made him part of the scene. At home in Cornerstone, it made him scary and different, especially when he shifted and the gauges remained in his ears.

Brynn flinched, and her façade of confidence cracked. “I assume you’re a killer because of what I saw.”

“These visions,” Father said. “Do you see futures that
will
happen, or futures that
may
happen unless a course is altered?” Perfect redirect of the conversation.

She gave her attention back to him. “I see what
will
happen, but the ability isn’t well-defined, and I can’t control it. Sometimes I see things months in advance. Other times, I see things that happen seconds later, so there’s no possibility of trying to change them.”

“Not well-defined?” Bishop asked with a derisive snort. “I call shenanigans. I’ve yet to hear any Magus admit to being in less than perfect control of his or her power.”

The furious expression Brynn leveled at Bishop made him take a half step backward. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“Just making an observation.”

“If your father is the supposed victim,” Father said, “why are you here, and not him?”

“Because he refuses to believe I’ve had this vision, much less that it will come true,” Brynn said. “He cannot foresee himself in the middle of the woods, much less allowing himself to become the victim of a loup garou.” She seemed about to add more, then thought better of it.

The phone on his father’s desk buzzed, and then Amber’s voice came over. “Thomas? We’re starting in five minutes.”

He reached across the desk and pressed the intercom button on the phone. “I’ll be down shortly, thank you.” He turned back to Brynn. “I hope you understand that this conversation isn’t over, but I do have a business to run.”

“Which means?” she asked.

“It means that Bishop, Knight, and I need to get downstairs. For now, you’ll remain here with Rook.”

“What?”

“Sir?” Rook asked. The last thing he wanted to do was spend the entire auction stuck in his father’s office with a Magus who thought him a murderer, based solely on visions she admitted weren’t under her control.

Father crowded him to the other side of the office, and Rook didn’t protest. “Talk to her,” Father said in a low voice. “Get her to describe the vision in detail, especially where it happens. Anything she says could be helpful.”

Rook squashed the impulse to protest babysitting the Magus. Father was putting a huge amount of trust in him to both keep an eye on her and to get answers. Besides, Rook was the one that Brynn had come to see. Maybe she’d talk to him more openly without the others around.

He wasn’t the subtlest of people or the best listener, but he’d give it a try. “All right,” Rook said. “I’ll do my best.”