Blackthorn [3] Blood Torn (19 page)

She should have taken a shower first, but she wasn’t ready to go back to his room. Aside from the more pressing hunger, the dehydration, a small part of her didn’t want to rid herself of Jask’s scent just yet.

She worked her way through the peach between generous gulps of water, casting her gaze to the darkness outside. The quadrant was as quiet as indoors, no doubt many of the lycans having headed into Blackthorn already.

She couldn’t help but wonder if Jask would do the same. She knew he wasn’t an every-night sight in Blackthorn, but he still ventured out of the compound regularly enough. Whether that was for business or pleasure was anyone’s guess.

The thought of the latter made her stomach coil.

A pack leader without a mate was free to take pleasure as he chose. And from Jask’s performance down in the cell, she knew she’d been naïve to mock him for inexperience – something he had clearly intended to prove to her. Because he had no other reason to take it as far as he did, aside from the pheromones, other than to prove himself stronger, more proficient, more experienced than her.

And he’d made his point – infallibly.

She sucked her peach stone dry and dropped it in her empty cup, popped a few raspberries before twisting the stalk on her apple. She took a bite just as she looked up to see a familiar pair of large grey eyes staring back at her from across the table.

Tuly was clutching a book to her chest, her small hand encompassing a collection of pencil crayons.

She smiled, flashing Sophia those canines again – the only thing that reminded her that the child staring back at her was far from human.

Tuly eased up onto the chair beside Sophia. Placing her belongings down, she opened the book up and flicked through some of the pages.

‘Does Solstice know you’re here?’ Sophia asked, noticing for the first time that Tuly’s nails were far too long for someone so young.

Tuly shrugged, already preoccupied with her book. ‘You smell like Jask.’

Sophia felt herself flush, struggled for a response.

‘Are you his new mate now?’ Tuly asked, glancing across at her.

The very prospect filled her with an alien sense of warmth she had no right feeling. ‘No. No, I’m not. You’re not supposed to talk to me,’ Sophia reminded her.

Tuly sent her a hint of a mischievous glance. ‘Do you do everything your mother tells you?’

Sophia couldn’t help but smile at the child’s belligerence, despite never having had a mother long enough to be able to answer.

Tuly looked back at her again. ‘You do have a mother, don’t you?’ She looked back down at her book. ‘Or is it different with serryns?’

‘Who told you I was a serryn?’

‘I heard. I listen all the time.’ Tuly turned another page and started to colour a half-finished picture. ‘Do you?’ she asked, looking back up at her. Only this time her gaze lingered as she awaited Sophia’s response.

‘Have a mother? Not anymore.’

‘Is she dead?’

Sophia nodded.

Tuly frowned, her eyes emanating more empathy than Sophia would have thought capable of one of her kind, let alone for her age. But then Sophia never spent any time around kids of any species. ‘How did she die?’

‘She was killed by a vampire.’

Tuly continued to colour as if Sophia had announced the death had been from a traffic accident or illness. The fact it was a vampire attack seemed as commonplace as any other way to die.

‘So are you on your own now?’ Tuly asked.

A wave of unease flooded through her. The questions seemed innocent enough, as did the stumbling across her in the communal area. But there was still that little niggle that she could have been sent there – an irresistible undercover spy.

‘Yes.’ The statement wasn’t completely untrue. She needed a diversion. She looked at the drawing of the male and female under the tree, the male pushing the child in the swing that hung from one of the branches. The sun was bright, a lake in the distance. The grass was littered with tiny pink and red flowers. ‘What’s this?’

‘Where we’re going to live,’ Tuly announced matter-of-factly.

Sophia didn’t have the heart not to play along. ‘You’re moving?’

‘One day,’ Tuly announced, a frown marking her brow from the sheer concentration of her colouring.

‘Somewhere like this?’ Sophia asked, placing her apple aside and resting her folded arms on the table as she indicated towards the drawing.

‘Summerton,’ Tuly declared.

A knot forged in her throat. ‘Summerton?’

Tuly nodded before swapping her blue pencil crayon for a pink one. ‘This is Corbin,’ she said, tapping the male figure with the end of her pencil, ‘and Solstice.’ And then she tapped the girl on the swing. ‘And this is me.’ Tuly stopped to look up at her. ‘You’ve heard of Summerton, haven’t you?’

Sophia nodded again, trying to ignore the discomfort in her stomach.

Tuly turned her attention back to her picture. ‘They have trees there – proper big ones with lots of leaves, and lakes, and hills, and flowers, all different colour flowers and bees that collect their honey from them and birds…’ she reeled off the list like she was reciting her Christmas present list. ‘And I’ll put food out every day for them so they can eat and have lots of baby birds and I’ll look after all of them.’

‘You like birds?’

Tuly put down her pencil crayon to flick back through the pages. She opened a double-page spread with loads of images of birds cut out and glued from magazines. ‘That’s a blackbird,’ she said, pointing to the central picture. ‘A woodpecker. A pied wagtail. A starling. One day I’m going to see them all.’

Sophia’s throat constricted, but she wouldn’t let Tuly see the impact her innocent hope had had. ‘Where did you get the pictures?’

‘In the attic. Sometimes I find things in shops – when I’m allowed to go out.’

Like her, Tuly would have been born after the regulations. Unlike her, she would never have seen green fields or breathed fresh air. She’d known nothing outside a dense world ruled by fear and control, on filthy streets with the dregs of opportunities. And still she sat there, the optimism shining through her that one day it would be better.

Tuly went back to the page she had been colouring. ‘There was a blackbird that lived here once. It used to sit on the top of the greenhouse. It used to sing at dusk and at dawn. I’d sneak bread out from the kitchen when no one was looking. Then, one day, I found it dead in the bushes. Nothing pretty ever lives long in Blackthorn.’

Sophia interlaced her fingers and held them against her mouth to fight back the threat of pending tears.

‘Tuly!’

The little lycan looked up at the same time as Sophia did to see Jask stood in the dining room doorway.

Her heart leapt at seeing him again, then sank as he looked to have been midway in conversation with the female he was facing – a female he just as quickly resumed conversing with as if Sophia wasn’t even there.

‘Uh-oh,’ Tuly said, closing her book and gathering up her pencils. ‘Trouble,’ she said, rolling her eyes. Eyes that looked far too playful and beyond her years not to make Sophia break a smile despite feeling like doing anything but.

It was a long shot but, just as Tuly eased down off the chair, Sophia had to ask. ‘Did you know Ellen?’

Tuly gathered up the last of her pencils as she shook her head. ‘She’s dead.’

‘That’s right. Do you know what happened to her?’

Tuly sent a wary glance at the door where Jask glanced across his shoulder at her again, his hands now on his hips as he continued to talk to the dark-haired female. Tuly clutched her book and pencil crayons to her chest in one hand before stretching up on tiptoes to reach Sophia’s ear. She cupped her hand over her mouth. ‘He killed her,’ she whispered.

Something inside her plummeted.

‘Who did?’

‘Jask,’ Tuly whispered. ‘Like I said – I’m always listening.’

Sophia snapped her attention back to the doorway where Tuly hurried to join Jask. He rubbed Tuly affectionately on the back of the head, saying something before tapping her playfully on the behind.

As Tuly skipped away, he glanced back at Sophia, his eyes locking on hers all too fleetingly before reverting his attention to his companion.

Sophia still stared at him open-mouthed with shock. Tuly had to have got it wrong. She had to have misheard. It wasn’t possible. Jask wouldn’t do that. Jask wasn’t capable of doing that.

But if that was what she had come to believe, then things weren’t just getting complicated – they were a mess.

And as he moved a couple of inches closer to his brunette companion, listening intently to whatever she was saying, her jealously told her the mess was intensifying. Especially when hurt and disappointment struck deep as, instead of coming to see her, he followed the brunette out of sight, his hand on the small of her back painfully intimate.

As she stared at the now vacant doorway, she knew she needed out of there. She had to forget about gaining information. She needed away from Jask. Away from the intensity, the confusion, the constant battle of wills that left her exhausted. She needed to distance herself from the strength of feelings evolving inside and give herself a sense of perspective again. Jask was the last thing she needed and she had no doubt she was most certainly the last thing
he
needed.

Her stomach jolted as she caught sight of Rone.

He looked around warily before indicating for her to join him out in the lobby.

Shoving back her chair, she hurried as much as her tired, aching legs would allow, the muscles in her thighs already feeling overstretched.

‘I’ve been looking for you. Let’s talk,’ he said, wrapping his arm around her elbow, veering her past the stairs and shoving her inside the first room on the left.

Sophia glanced around the bare confines, shelved out as what she guessed had once been some kind of library, before looking back at Rone.

He was twitchy, anxious. ‘I might have a way I can get you out of here,’ Rone announced, keeping his voice low despite the closed door, despite his close proximity.

Her heart skipped a beat, the prospect irritatingly not filling her with as much relief as it should have, not least, she had no doubt, following her resolve to take Jask down before she did so. ‘Go on,’ she said, clutching the shelf behind her for support.

‘There’s a tunnel. It’s rarely used unless we need to get through Blackthorn unnoticed.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘I am literally risking my life exposing this to you. And you will owe me, do you understand?’

She nodded. But it was a risk – a huge risk, and one that made her uneasy in light of the fact he was sharing it with her nonetheless. If it wasn’t for recent events, she may have been more guarded. But if a lycan leader could kill his own mate, there was no wonder the youth was frightened of the potential of Jask learning he had lied. If she wanted evidence of Jask’s tyranny, it was in the youth’s actions now. Just as she saw in his frown, the subtle flaring of his nostrils, that he sensed Jask’s scent on her the same as Tuly had. Yet he said nothing, the threat of her intimacy with the leader no doubt adding weight to the youth wanting her out of there – fast.

‘Where is it?’ she asked.

‘I want your word,’ he said, his blue eyes wide and resolute.

‘You’ve got it.’

‘The Alliance are to have nothing to do with us. They leave this pack be. Understood?’

‘Fine.’

‘I mean it. I know your organisation went after Jake and Caleb Dehain. Anyone willing to go after them is crazy enough to come after this pack too. And if we lose Jask, we lose us all. We’re finished here. And I’ve no doubt your Alliance knows that, right?’

‘So why mess with us, Rone? Why get involved at all?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I was going to save you. I was going to make a deal with you to leave us be. Until I saw what you were and realised it wasn’t going to be that straightforward.’

‘And the vampires that were holding me? What were you going to do about them?’

He raised his eyebrows slightly, not needing to answer.

‘You were going to kill them? You were going to blow the truce with the vampires? No wonder you didn’t want Jask to know.’

‘We wouldn’t have had any choice.’

‘But what if they’d told someone you were meeting them there? They would have known you were involved.’

‘The whole thing was undercover. And they didn’t want whoever they were working for to know they were taking a backhander from us.’

‘Who
were
they working for?’

‘I don’t know.’

She’d overheard the vampires talking of getting the job done – of finding out, from her, everything they could about The Alliance: names, locations, future plans. It had panicked her enough at the time that they’d wanted more than just simple vengeance by torturing and killing her. But this was the terrifying confirmation she’d dreaded – it wasn’t just Marid and those two vampires who knew about The Alliance; the latter had been working for someone else – someone who was still out there. ‘You have no idea who it is? They said nothing?’

‘I didn’t ask,’ Rone said. ‘That’s your problem not mine. So if you get out of here, we’ve got a deal, right?’

He was taking a risk that she would keep to her word. But it seemed to be a risk he was desperate enough to take. And the very fact he
was
taking that risk sent a further laceration of panic through her. He was scared Jask would get the truth out of her. He believed Jask
would
get the truth out of her – eventually.

All the more reason for her to take whatever opportunity she could to get out of there as quickly as she could.

She nodded. ‘I told you – I give you my word.’

Whether she would keep it or not didn’t matter then.

‘Jask’s on duty at the main doors tonight,’ Rone explained. ‘He’ll be occupied for about five hours between nine and two. That’s your window. The tunnel entrance is in the greenhouse, second room in. It’s hidden under a mat. I’ll get the key and open it. You’ll have until midnight until I lock it again. I’ll leave a torch amidst the plants and the other things you need on the steps inside. You’ll see a door ahead. That’s the one you take, only lock it behind you. You can slide the key back under it.’